Hadith Notes

Abū al-Qāsim al-Suhayli (d. 581 AH) is described by Ṣafadī as someone who combined "riwāyah and dirāyah," transmission alongside analytical depth - even though he lost his sight at the age of 17. That combination is what sets certain scholars apart from their peers. Think Shāh Waliullāh and ʿAbdul Ḥayy Laknawī. When you read their work, you can immediately tell they’re adding something meaningful to the discussion. Among contemporary scholars, you notice this same quality in the writings of Sh Ḥamzah Bakrī and Sh Ḥātim ʿAwnī, no matter the topic.

Shaykh Zahid al-Kawthari clearly stands out for his eloquent writing style; even his critics acknowledge that. Compared to Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa Sabri, Kawthari is in a different league. I always wondered how his diction became so refined. Here, he explains that his father forced him to correspond with him exclusively in Arabic throughout his life, and that’s how he developed it to the point that Turkish and Arabic were both the same for him.

A student in Dhaka memorized Sahih al-Bukhari in just forty-three days! I’ve met scholars who’ve memorized the Sahih (and even other hadith collections), but I’ve never heard of anyone doing it that fast.

An often overlooked body of scholarship has been emerging from Turkish academia, particularly in hadith studies. Many have remained unaware of it, whether due to language barriers or simple underestimation. This is beginning to change as more of this research is translated and made accessible. In my own work on Bukhari manuscripts and their transmission, I have benefited from the work of several Turkish scholars. Dr. Fatma Kizil touches on this in her chapter to Modern Hadith Studies. This is apart from their important contributions to Hanafi fiqh, kalam, and manuscript editing.

Students reading the rijāl works may not realize that brief comments like “the hadiths of Maʿmar from Basra have mistakes” are based on an extensive study and comparison of his narrations. What’s more impressive is that these pronouncements are “scientific” and “falsifiable,” meaning that if someone were to objectively conduct their own study on Maʿmar, they would be able to verify this claim. This was excellently demonstrated by Ml. Iftikhar Zaman in his dissertation on the hadiths of Saʿd.

One will notice that the chapter and section headings do not appear in the main text but rather in the margins. The absence of subject-based chapters (abwab) is tied to Imām Muslim’s method of highlighting ʿilal through the comparison of different transmission routes. Here's a paper on this topic for those interested.

The earliest extant manuscript of Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, which has a reading certificate dated 486 AH. A facsimile of it was recently published by scholars in Canada. We just read through the last chapter and compared it with the ʿĀmirah edition. It amazes me how stable a handwritten hadith manuscript can be, even though it’s been nearly a millennium since it was copied.

A partial manuscript of Sahih al-Bukhari with a reading certificate dated 472 AH (Riwayah of Kushani/Kushmihani via Farabri), making it one of the earliest extant copies. We read through the last section (juz’) a few hours ago and compared it with the Yuniniyya for textual variants. Nothing noticeably different, reinforcing the notion of the textual stability of the Sahih.

Statements like this from Shuʿba (d. 160 AH) show that hadith scholars, already by the turn of the first century AH, were well aware of the back-growth of isnads. They were not blind to this phenomenon, contrary to Schacht, and what some contemporary writers continue to claim. [Al-Raffāʿ refers to someone who habitually turns a mawquf report into a marfu' one, or a mursal report into a musnad.]

Sh. Ahmad Snobar did an extensive study on how politics affected the spread of hadith. As the diagram shows, hadiths on virtues (faḍāʾil) are the most relevant to questions of siyāsah, yet they largely remained unaffected. For example, hadith on the virtues of ʿAli spread widely, while the virtues of Muʿāwiyah and al-ʿAbbās did not see similar circulation during their respective reigns.