Hadith Notes

The nightly majalis of the Mamluk Sultan Qanisawh al-Ghawrī (d. 1516) were intellectually lively and unusually well documented. These sessions have been studied in depth by Mauder. In this exchange the Sultan himself responds directly to a question. Some of the discussions are remarkably wide-ranging and unexpected. They reveal a great deal about late Mamluk intellectual and social life, especially of the Ulama, Qadis, poets, and other literati.

Sh. Mustafa al Azami’s "silent" comparison of Surah Isra' via Quranic manuscripts across centuries to show textual fidelity is stunning. A side benefit is that reading each iteration alongside the Madani text helps to improve Quranic manuscript literacy.

Here Suyuti lists 35 issues where he exercises his own personal ijtihad on various fiqh questions. The point about praying Isha at the time of Maghrib is something I don’t recall coming across before.

Taqi al-Din Subki’s response on students studying mantiq is on point. He treats logic as an accessory discipline, much like math. It can come with intellectual baggage and unspoken assumptions, but at its core it sharpens thinking. More importantly (I believe), it allows students to become fluent in the language that many premodern scholars were already using in their works. Even more interesting is how relevant this framing is today. It maps neatly onto the study of modern philosophy and historiography, especially debates about “origins” in the academy. These too function as accessory fields. When approached carefully, and only after a solid grounding in a traditional curriculum, they can be genuinely useful. When handled poorly, they can be quite counterproductive.

Maulana Abdul Hayy Hasani outlines what was regarded as the most common criticisms of the Dars-i Nizami by the early 1900s. Debates of this nature were, and remain, quite common among the ʿulama themselves. Of the six points he identifies, most appear to have been addressed over time, with the notable exception of the final one: history, iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, and geography (that is, the commonly termed “general sciences”) remain relatively under-studied. As for logic and philosophy, the pendulum has arguably swung to the opposite extreme, with their near total absence in many madrasas. The observation that Dars-i Nizami tends to furnish students with broad general learning rather than clear disciplinary specialization is particularly worth emphasizing. Mohsin Ali's recent post on this is extremely insightful.

Ibn Hajar notes that hadith scholars tend to fall into three broad types: 1) those who focus almost entirely on the technical details of transmission; 2) those who approach hadith with strong attention to fiqh and legal meaning; 3) A small group who truly mastered both, combining rigorous isnad analysis with deep juristic insight, such as Tahawi and Bayhaqi and later 'Iraqi.

An interesting discussion on the ḥadīth concerning the embryonic stages of a fetus. Jamil Farid advances an argument for tarjīḥ between certain transmission routes from al-Aʿmash over others based on established scientific considerations rather than in the standing of the transmitters alone. While this approach is certainly open to debate, it's still an argument. Reading his book some years ago encouraged me to think about ḥadīth transmission in terms of madārs and individual transmitters, rather than primarily in terms of ḥadīth compilations. So, the comparison becomes one between the riwāyah of X via al-Zuhrī over that of Y, rather than between a report found in Musnad Aḥmad and one in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. I hope to expand on this further at a later time, in shāʾ Allāh.

The Moroccan philosopher and thinker Taha Abdur Rahman discusses the influence (and limitations) of al-Ghazālī on his intellectual development, as well as the areas in which Ibn Taymiyya excels.

It is understandably difficult to quantify the exact number of ḥadīths due to differences in selection criteria and the loss of early sources. For the sake of convenience, I use the approximate figure of 28,500 mentioned here, as it is derived from the fourteen major ḥadīth collections and a coherent set of inclusion criteria. This number is not definitive, but serves as a practical point of reference.

Here Jamal al-Din al-Mizzi compares two preeminent scholars. I always find it important to distinguish between expertise and mushāraka (active participation in a field). Doing so helps prevent inflated expectations and allows for a more balanced assessment of scholars. One may be authoritative in a discipline such as fiqh while possessing only moderate standing in another, such as hadith.