Criticism of hadith

This article is about the critique of the classical Islamic consensus on the collection and use of hadith. For the religious science of the collection and use of hadith, see Hadith studies.

A manuscript copy of al-Bukhari, Mamluk era, 13th century, Egypt. Adilnor Collection, Sweden.

The criticism of hadith refers to the critique directed towards collections of hadith. Hadith are collections of reports of the sunnah of the Islamic prophet Muhammad — i.e. his words, actions, and the silent approval of on any matter. In other words, something that is attributed to Muhammad but is not found in the Quran. Criticism of hadith takes several forms.

Within traditional Islamic hadith studies the focus is on evaluating the authenticity of particular hadith reports and whether they are attributable to Muhammad. Key elements that are examined are whether there are "other identical reports from other transmitters"; the reliability of the transmitters of the report; and "the continuity of the chain of transmission".

Another question is the extent to which hadith should be relied upon as a source for Islamic law. Muslim critics of hadith and classical hadith studies include Islamic revivalists who strongly believe hadith are part of Islam but wish to reexamine hadith by their matn (content) in preparation for revising sharia law to make it more practical so that it may be enforced in Muslim society; those who believe only the small number of mutawatir hadith are reliable enough to be followed; and “deniers” of hadith who contend that Muslims should follow the Quran alone as Muslims still can not be certain of the authenticity of even the most highly rated (sahih or "sound") hadith notwithstanding the great efforts by scholars of the science of hadith studies to validate hadith. "Deniers" question whether the hadith can provide rulings on legal and religious matters when the Quran has already declared itself "complete", "clear", "fully detailed" and "perfected".

In addition to questions from within the Islamic community, scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht have offered criticisms of the hadith since the 19th century.

Arguments for existence of false hadith

Among the scholars who believe that even sahih hadith suffer from corruption or who proposed limitations on usage of hadith include early Muslims Al-Nazzam (775–845), Ibn Sa'd (784–845), Al-Nawawi (1233–1277), Ibn Hajar (1372–1449), later reformers Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898), Muhammad Iqbal(1877–1938); and scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, and G.H.A. Juynboll. According to Bernard Lewis, "in the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet." This gave strong incentive to fabricate hadith. Perhaps the most famous collector of hadith, Muhammad al-Bukhari, reportedly devoted 16 years to sifting nearly 600,000 narrations, and arrived at approximately 7400 authentic hadith. (Experts, in general, have estimated the number of full-isnad narration at 7,397; eliminating those hadith with the same or only slightly different content, but with different chains of narrators, reduces the number to approximately 2,602.)

According to Daniel W. Brown citing Syed Ahmed Khan and Shibli Nomani, the major causes of corruption of even the ṣaḥīḥ hadith of Bukhari and Muslim are:

1. political conflicts,
2. sectarian prejudice, and
3. the desire to translate the underlying meaning, rather than the original words verbatim.

Other criticisms made of hadith include:

• that the primary tool of orthodox ʻilm al-ḥadīth (Hadith studies) to verify the authenticity of hadith is the hadith's isnad (chain) of transmitters. But in the oldest collections of hadith (which have had less opportunity to be corrupted by faulty memory or manipulation) isnad are "rudimentary", while the isnads found in later "classical" collections of hadith are usually "perfect".
• That whatever the motive, there are indisputable contradictions in hadith, meaning some sahih hadith must be wrong.
• That hadith are a major source of Islamic law that involve the honor, property and lives of Muslims, and that although sahih hadith are defined as "authentic"—rated above hasan (good) and daif (weak) hadith—this class of hadith do not provide "certainty of knowledge" needed for law making. Mutawatir hadith (meaning reports from "a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable") do meet that criterion, but their extreme scarcity limits their use in development of Islamic law.

Contradictions between hadith

One of the earliest Muslim scholars to recount contradictory ḥadīth as an argument against their use was Mu'tazilite Ibrahim an-Nazzam (c. 775 – c. 845) (although this was probably before development of sahih hadith).

Indian journalist, activist and Islamic scholar Maulana Mohammad Akram Khan (1868–1969) noted contradictions in sahih hadith, although a requirement of this class of hadith—in addition to be transmitted by trustworthy transmitters with good memories, etc.—is supposed to be freedom from irregularity, i.e. not contradicting another hadith already accepted as reliable. Mohammed Amin and Mohammad Omar Farooq have cited Mohammad Akram Khan's work, giving examples of these hadith.

Akram Khan found different "sound" (sahih) hadith indicate different ages for Muhammad at his death -- 60, 63 and 65 years old respectively. Two Sahih al-Bukhari hadith (4:56:747 and 4:56:748) state Muhammad's mission started at 40 years of age, and that he lived in Medina for 10 years and in Mecca for 10 -- adding up to a life span of 60. But according to another couple of sound hadith (Sahih al-Bukhari 5:58:242 and 5:59:742) he must have been 63 (these have him living in Mecca for 13 years); and based on yet another sound hadith — this one from Sahih Muslim — Muhammad lived in Mecca for fifteen and so died at the age of 65.

Amin cites several hadith describing the sale of a camel to Muhammad by a companion—one Jabir b. 'Abdullah. Though five hadith quoted by Amin each mention the same sale, each gives a different price for the camel. Muslim 010:3886 – one uqiya (about 28.6 grams of silver); Muslim 010:3891 – five uqiyas; Muslim 010:3893 – two uqiyas and a dirham (2.975 grams of silver) or two dirhams; Muslim 010:3895 – five dinars.

Farooq complains that if these hadith can't agree on basic facts such as numbers, what kinds of problems might arise in hadiths "conveying concepts and understanding, often not in exact words of the Prophet, but paraphrasing by the reporters?"

Joseph Schacht argues that the very large number of contradictory hadith are very likely the result of hadith fabricated "polemically with a view to rebutting a contrary doctrine or practice" supported by another hadith.

Influence of other religions

Mahmud Abu Rayya (d. 1970), a friend and fellow disciple of Rashid Rida, argued in a 1958 book entitled "Lights on Muhammad's Sunna" (Adwa' 'al al-sunna al-muhammadiyya) that "many supposedly authentic Hadiths were actually Jewish lore that had been attributed to Muhammad".

The earliest Western scholar to note a relation between the hadith and Jewish influences was the French Orientalist Barthélemy d'Herbelot (d. 1695), who "claimed that most of the six books" (i.e. the collections of Sunni sahih or sound hadith) "and many parts of the hadith literature were appropriated from the Talmud" (the Talmud being recorded in Jerusalem at least a century before the birth of Muhammad -- between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE -- and later in what is now Iraq). Later many others orientalists, like Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893), Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921), etc. continued criticism in that direction.

A more elaborated study was "Al‐Bukhārī and the Aggadah" by W.R. Taylor, who "appropriated some of these hadiths from al‐Sahih of al‐Bukhārī and some haggadic texts from the Talmud and Midrash. Taylor compared these hadiths with the texts, and concluded that these hadiths were appropriated from the Talmud and Midrash. Afterwards, he also said that there were many narratives in the hadith literature in general, especially in al‐Bukhārī, that were taken from haggadic literature. He then studied the ways of and how these narrations were transmitted to hadith literature. According to Taylor’s opinion, a large amount of the oral information, narrations, stories, and folkloric information entered in Islamic literature in general, and hadith literature, in particular, during the transcription of the Talmud and Mishnah and after the formation of hadiths via the Jews living in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the church fathers and Christian community." Other scholars have different opinions on the same subject: Franz Buhl connects the hadith with a more Iranian/Zoroastrian background, David Samuel Margoliouth with Biblical apocrypha and Alfred Guillaume puts more stress on a generic Christian influence.

Orthodox response

Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the work of hadith scholars, these false hadith have been largely eliminated. al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that “sunna” should be made up exclusively of specific precedents set by Muhammad passed down as hadith, argued that "having commanded believers to obey the Prophet", (in Quranic verse Al-Ahzab 33: 21: "In God's messenger you have indeed a good example for everyone who looks forward with hope to God and the Last Day, and remembers God unceasingly.") "God must certainly have provided the means to do so."

One defense of orthodox hadith studies, The Evolution of a Hadith by Iftikhar Zaman, according to one supporter (Bilal Ali) asserts that "the method of hadith criticism that has been implemented by the muhaddithin [orthodox hadith evaluators] for the past thousand years, ... is far more scientific and exact than modern orientalist approaches." Traditional Islamic scholars who have endeavored to refute the Western criticism of hadith include Mustafa al-Siba'i and Muhammad Mustafa Al-A'zami.

Some Western academics have also been critical of this "revisionist" approach as a whole, for instance Harald Motzki, (who according to Jonathan Brown demonstrates "convincingly" that studies of early hadith and law by Joseph Schacht and the late G. H. A. Juynboll "used only a small and selective body of sources", "based on sceptical assumptions which, taken together, often asked the reader to believe a set of coincidences far more unlikely than the possibility that a hadith might actually date from the genesis of the Islamic community.")

One prominent conservative fatwa website, The Salafi site IslamQA, supervised by Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, states that one who "persists in denying and rejecting" a hadith is exposing themselves to "grave danger" unless they

• find a "complete contradiction" that is "clear and unambiguous in meaning and not abrogated" between substance of the hadith they reject and what is mentioned in a Qur’anic text,

• see "a weakness in one of the links of the isnad" in the hadith "that could have led to the mistake mentioned in the text",

• and state that their rejection of the hadith is "a personal view ... which may be right or wrong".

Hadith as source of Islamic law

The legitimacy of Hadith is of considerable importance in Islam because the "great bulk" of the rules of Sharia (Islamic law) are derived from hadith -- based on Quranic injunctions for Muslims to obey the instructions of Muhammad and imitate his behavior (in verses such as 24:54, 33:21). While the age of the prophet at death may be of little relevance for Islamic law, other hadith have considerable relevance.

Hadith form the basis of law for riba al-fadl, ruling whether gold may be legally be bartered for silver. Sahih al-Bukhari 3:34:344 states gold cannot be bartered for silver “except if it is from hand to hand and equal in amount,” while Sahih al-Bukhari 3:34:388 says the Islamic prophet Muhammad "allowed us to sell gold for silver and vice versa as we wished."

More relevant to Muslims everyday lives are hadith calling for women to not pray in mosques (Sahih al-Bukhari, 1:12:828; Sunan Abu Dawood, Vol. I, #570), to not participate in leadership (Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:88:219), and Islamic fiqh based on hadith that put a mother 11th in seniority (behind male step-cousins) as guardian of a minor—(a hadith with no reference). These which are contradicted by "numerous hadiths/reports that women used to participate in mosques regularly and in large numbers"; in the second case by the transmitter (Abu Bakra, not to be confused with Rashidun Abu Bakr), being known for receiving punishment for false testimony; and in the third the hadith was quoted without any reference.

Modernist reevaluation

Because hadith is "the basis for most" Islamic laws and codes "at the detailed level", which pertain "to people’s life, honour and property", and because many (especially revivalist and conservative Muslims) consider these not just inspirational or informational but laws "sacrosanct or immutable Shari'ah" to be enforced, and because to others (especially modernist and liberal Muslims) the laws thus developed are "contrary to the intent and spirit of the Qur'an and Islam's fundamental commitment to justice and fairness", the "problem of the authenticity of the Sunnah" or hadith has become an issue for those (especially modernist and liberal Muslims) who believe there is a conflict between the "intent and spirit of the Qur'an" and "centuries-old" hadith-based jurisprudence.

Use of limited set of mutawatir hadith

According to M.O. Farooq, despite the widespread belief that sahih hadith are authentic hadith and thus provides "certainty of knowledge" of what Muhammad said, in fact it is only the much rarer subset of sahih -- mutawatir hadith—that provide certain knowledge. Mutawatir means the report "of a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable. This condition must be met in the entire chain from the origin of the report to the very end."

However, according to Wael Hallaq, "the bulk of hadith with which the traditionists dealt, and on the basis of which the Jurists derived the law" were known as ahad—i.e. non-mutawatir hadith; Hadith without "textually identical channels of transmission which are sufficiently numerous as to preclude any possibility of collaboration on a forgery" Jurists disagreed on how many channels of transmission there had to be for a hadith to be mutawatir. Since "the qadi in a court of law must deliberate on the testimony of four witnesses (as well as investigate their moral rectitude) before he renders his verdict," some thought at least five, but others set the number at "12, 20, 40, 70 or 313, each number being justified by a Qur'anic verse or some religious account".

Farooq quotes a number of sources speaking highly of Mutawatir:

• In the view of Muslim scholars any hadith which has been transmitted by tawatur and whose reporters based their reports on direct, unambiguous, perception unmixed with rationalization would produce knowledge with certainty.
• A mutawatir tradition is one which has been transmitted throughout the first three generations of Muslims by such a large number of narrators that the possibility of fabrication must be entirely discarded.
• [T]he mutawatir hadith stands on the same footing as the Qur'an itself."
• According to the majority of Ulama, the authority of a mutawatir hadith is equivalent to that of the Qur'an. Universal continuous testimony (tawatur) engenders certainty (yaqin) and the knowledge that it creates is equivalent to knowledge that is acquired through sense-perception.
• A great majority of Muslim legal theoreticians (usuuliyyun) espoused the view that the mutawatir yields necessary or immediate knowledge (daruri), whereas a minority thought that the information contained in such reports can be known through mediate or acquired knowledge (muktasab or nazari).

However, orthodox hadith scholars find non-mutawatir hadith adequate. "According to the majority of the ulama of the four Sunni schools, acting upon ahad is obligatory even if ahad fails to engender positive knowledge. Thus, in practical legal matters," but not in "matters of belief", "a preferable zann [meaning, speculative] "is sufficient as a basis of obligation." Ibn al-Salah ( (d. 643/1245), "one of the most distinguished traditionists of the muta'akhkhirun", argues (according to Farooq), that because mutawatir type hadith is rare, "for much of Islamic praxis, certainty of knowledge is neither feasible nor required. Rather, probable or reasonable knowledge is adequate" for determining the gamut of Islamic practices.

Complete rejection of hadith as a basis for Islamic law

The Ahl al-Kalam of the time of Al-Shafii rejected the Hadith on theological grounds—although they also questioned its authenticity. Their basic argument was that the Quran was an explanation of everything (16:89). They contended that obedience to the Prophet was contained in obeying only the Qur'an that God has sent down to him, and that when the Qur'an mentioned the Book together with Wisdom, the Wisdom was the specific rulings of the Book." Daniel Brown notes that one of the arguments of Ahl al-Kalam was that "the corpus of Hadith is filled with contradictory, blasphemous, and absurd traditions."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt wrote an article titled 'al-Islam huwa ul-Qur'an Wahdahu' ('Islam is the Qur'an Alone) that appeared in the Egyptian journal al-Manar, which argues that the Quran is sufficient as guidance: "what is obligatory for man does not go beyond God's Book. ... If anything other than the Qur'an had been necessary for religion," Sidqi notes, "the Prophet would have commanded its registration in writing, and God would have guaranteed its preservation."

History of Muslim criticism of hadith

Criticism of the collection and/or the use of hadith in Islam are found both early and late in Islamic history. First by the ahl-i-kalam and Muʿtazila during the early years of the Abbasid Caliphate when the classical consensus of al-Shafi'i was being developed and established. Later in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Islamic reformists such as the ahl-i-Quran and thinkers such as Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal.

Early criticism

According to Daniel Brown questioning the authenticity of the Hadith goes back to the time of Al-Shafii when a group known as Ahl al-Kalam, who argued that "first and foremost" the Prophetic example "has to be found ... in following the Qur'an", rather than hadith. Later, a similar group, the Mu'tazilites, also viewed the transmission of the Prophetic sunnah as not sufficiently reliable. The Hadith, according to them, was mere guesswork and conjecture, while the Quran was complete and perfect, and did not require the Hadith or any other book to supplement or complement it."

According to Racha El Omari, early Mutazilites believed that hadith were susceptible to "abuse as a polemical ideological tool"; that the matn (content) of the hadith—not just the isnad—ought to be scrutinized for doctrine and clarity; that hadith "supported by some form of tawātur", i.e. by a large number of isnād strands, each beginning with a different Companion, were valid.

In writing about mutawatir (transmitted via numerous chains of narrators) and ahad (any hadith that is not mutawatir) and its importance from the legal theoretician's point of view, Wael Hallaq notes the medieval scholar Al-Nawawi argued that any non-mutawatir hadith is only probable and can not reach the level of certainty that a mutawatir hadith can. However scholars like Ibn al-Salah (d. 1245 CE), al-Ansari (d. 1707 CE), and Ibn ‘Abd al-Shakur (d. 1810 CE) found "no more than eight or nine" hadiths that fell into the mutawatir category.

Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ (700–748 CE, by many accounts a founder of the Mutazilite school of thought), held that there was evidence for the veracity of a report when it had four independent transmitters. His assumption was that there could be no agreement between all transmitters in fabricating a report. Wāṣil's acceptance of tawātur seems to have been inspired by the juridical notion of witnesses as proof that an event did indeed take place. Hence, the existence of a certain number of witnesses precluded the possibility that they were able to agree on a lie, as opposed to the single report which was witnessed by one person only, its very name meaning the “report of one individual” (khabar al-wāḥid). Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. 227/841) continued this verification of reports through tawātur, but proposed that the number of witnesses required for veracity be twenty, with the additional requirement that at least one of the transmitters be a believer.

A Mu'tazilite who expressed the strongest statement of skepticism of any source of knowledge outside of reason and the Qurʾān was Ibrahim an-Nazzam (c. 775 – c. 845). For him, both the single and the mutawātir reports could not be trusted to yield knowledge. He recounted contradictory ḥadīth and examined their divergent content (matn) to show why they should be rejected: they relied on both faulty human memory and bias, neither of which could be trusted to transmit what is true. Al-Naẓẓām bolstered his strong refutation of the trustworthiness of ḥadīth within the larger claim that ḥadīth circulated and thrived to support polemical causes of various theological sects and jurists, and that no single transmitter could by himself be held above suspicion of altering the content of a single report. Al-Naẓẓām's skepticism involved far more than excluding the possible verification of a report, be it single or mutawātir. His stance also excluded the trustworthiness of consensus, which proved pivotal to classical Muʿtazilite criteria devised for verifying the single report (see below). Indeed, his shunning of both consensus and tawātur earned him a special mention for the depth and extent of his skepticism, even among fellow Muʿtazilites.

Modern era

Later, in nineteenth century British Raj, Syed Ahmed Khan "questioned the historicity and authenticity of many, if not most, traditions, much as the noted scholars Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht would later do." His student, Chiragh Ali, went further, suggesting nearly all the Hadith were fabrications. Although Muhammad Iqbal never rejected the hadith wholesale, he proposed limitations on its usage by arguing that it should be taken contextually and circumstantially. Ghulam Ahmed Pervez, a disciple of Iqbal, also asks why, if hadith were divine revelation (wahy), were they "neither written down, nor memorized, nor systematically collected or preserved", as Muhammad and/or his immediate followers made sure the Quran was.

Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt "held that nothing of the Hadith was recorded until after enough time had elapsed to allow the infiltration of numerous absurd or corrupt traditions."

According to Jonathan A.C. Brown, "by far the most influential Modernist critique" of Sunni hadith tradition came from a disciple of Egyptian Rashid Rida named Mahmoud Abu Rayya. Abu Rayya wrote Lights on the Muhammadan Sunna (Adwa` `ala al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya) which argued that the basis of Islam was intended to be only "the Quran, reason and unquestionably reliable mutawatir accounts of the Prophet's legacy". In particular Abu Rayya undermined the credibility of "the single most prolific" transmitter of hadiths from among the Companions, one Abu Hurairah. Abu Rayya used reports of transmitter criticism to characterize Abu Hurayra as a "dishonest opportunist". Having joined the Muslim community only three years before the Prophet’s death, it is highly unlikely he heard the thousands of hadiths he claimed to transmitted, nor did he learn the details of ritual and law to avoid mangling the meanings of hadiths on these issues he reported. Abu Hurayra was also known to be obsessed with isr’iliyyat, i.e. tales from Jewish lore about earlier prophets.

According to author Israr Ahmed Khan, traditional methods used to establish authenticity of hadith rely almost entirely on the personal characters of the reported narrators, and fail to pay enough attention to the actual content of the hadith being evaluated. Among the problems he sees in the traditional hadith analysis are: the inability of some narrators to maintain preciseness of the report, textual conflicts among reports, ignoring textual analysis when the hadith was reported by a narrator of good character, and probability of fabrication of hadith.

Western scholarship

Western scholars have had some of the same "specific concerns" about hadith as Muslim Islamic scholars, but have "only occasionally" had any "direct impact" on debates by Muslims over the issues.

Between 1890 and 1950 the era of "Orientalist" studies of hadith began with Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902-1969) and their "two influential and founding works", (according to Mohammed Salem Al-Shehri). Goldziher "inaugurated the critical study" of the hadith's authenticity and concluded that the "great majority of the Prophetic hadith constitute evidence not of the Prophet's time which they claim to belong, but rather of much later periods", according to Wael B. Hallaq. Schacht later refined Goldziher's critical study.

John Esposito notes that "Modern Western scholarship has seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith", maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later." According to Esposito, Schacht "found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which Schacht concluded that "the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of the Prophet, but apocryphal material" dating from later. According to Wael B. Hallaq, as of 1999 scholarly attitude in the West towards the authenticity of hadith has taken three approaches:

since Schacht published his monumental work in 1950, scholarly discourse on this matter (i.e., the issue of authenticity) has proliferated. Three camps of scholars may be identified: one attempting to reconfirm his conclusions, and at times going beyond them; another endeavoring to refute them and a third seeking to create a middle, perhaps synthesized, position between the two. Among others, John Wansbrough, and Michael Cook belong to the first camp, while Nabia Abbott, F. Sezgin, M. Azami, Gregor Schoeler and Johann Fück belong to the second. Motzki, D. Santillana, G.H. Juynboll, Fazlur Rahman and James Robson take the middle position.

Henry Preserved Smith and Ignác Goldziher also challenged the reliability of the hadith, Smith stating that "forgery or invention of traditions began very early" and "many traditions, even if well authenticated to external appearance, bear internal evidence of forgery." Goldziher writes that "European critics hold that only a very small part of the ḥadith can be regarded as an actual record of Islam during the time of Mohammed and his immediate followers." In his Mohammedan Studies, Goldziher states: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".

Also throwing doubt on the doctrine that common use of hadith of Muhammad goes back to the generations immediately following the death of the prophet is historian Robert G. Hoyland, who quotes acolytes of two of the earliest Islamic scholars:

• "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (d.693, son of the second Caliph, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
• "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

Bernard Lewis writes that "the creation of new hadiths designed to serve some political purpose has continued even to our own time." In the buildup to the first Gulf War a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar on December 15, 1990, "and described as `currently in wide circulation`" It "quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return".

Isnads

Reza Aslan quotes Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition`, which he (Aslan) calls "whimsical but accurate".

According to G.H.A. Juynboll, "the institution of the isnad came into existence roughly three quarters of a century after the prophet's death" and before that hadith and "qisas (mostly legendary stories) were transmitted in a haphazard fashion if at all, and mostly anonymously. Since the isnad came into being, names of older authorities were supplied where the new isnad precepts required such. Often the names of well-known historical personalities were chosen but more often the names of fictitious persons were offered to fill the names in isnads which were as yet far from perfect. ..."

Patricia Crone agrees, noting that early traditionalists were still developing the practice of detailing chains of narration (isnads) of their hadith that by later standards were sketchy/deficient, even though these early scholars were closer to the historical material. Later hadith possessed impeccable isnad, but were more likely to be fabricated. She argues it is not possible to narrow down a "core" of authentic hadith because we do not know when the fabrication of them started.

Bukhari [d.870] is said to have examined a total of 600,000 traditions attributed to the Prophet; he preserved some 7000 (including repetitions), or in other words dismissed some 593,000 as inauthentic. If Ibn Hanbal [d.855] examined a similar number of traditions, he must have rejected about 570,000, his collection containing some 30,000 (again including repetitions). Of Ibn Hanbal's traditions 1,710 (including repetitions) are transmitted by the companion Ibn Abbas [d.687]. Yet less than fifty years earlier one scholar had estimated that Ibn Abbas had only heard nine traditions from the Prophet, while another thought that the correct figure might be ten. If Ibn Abbas had heard ten traditions from the Prophet in the years around 800, but over a thousand by about 850 CE, how many had he heard in 700 or 632? Even if we accept that ten of Ibn Abbas' traditions are authentic, how do we identify them in the pool of 1,710?

Joseph Schacht states that the "whole technical criticism of traditions ... is mainly based on criticism of isnads", which he (and others) believe to be ineffective in eliminating fraudulent hadith. as they were subject to "growth, back-formation, and lateral spread" over decades.

Isnad and not Matn

If critics found fault with the traditionists examination of isnads, they were even less complementary of their evaluation (or failure to) of matn -- i.e. the substance of the hadith, what the Prophet did/said/approved of.

Critics argue that a serious weakness of the study of hadith by classical Muslim scholars was that the gist/matn of the hadith could not be examined for "making sense, being logical", as the matn were considered "the substance of divine revelation and therefore not susceptible of any form of legal or historical criticism". N.L. Coulson "points out that, although the Muslim scholars were aware of the possibility of Hadith forgeries, their test for authenticity was confined to a careful examination of the chain of transmitters who narrated the report. 'Provided the chain was uninterrupted and its individual links deemed trustworthy persons, the Hadith was accepted as binding law. There could, by the terms of the religious faith itself, be no questioning of the content of the report: for this was the substance of divine revelation and therefore not susceptible of any form of legal or historical criticism.

Schacht quotes Shafi'i asserting that hadith from the Prophet have to be accepted without questioning and reasoning: `If a tradition is authenticated as coming from the Prophet, we have to resign ourselves to it, and your talk and the talk of others about why and how, is a mistake ..."

Goldziher also casts aspersions on isnads, saying, "judgement of the value of the contents depends on the judgement of the correctness of the isnad. ... Muslim critics have no feeling for even the crudest anachronisms provide that the isnad is correct ... Traditions are only investigated in respect of their outward form".

European and non-Muslim scholars deemed this traditional type of critique inadequate. The Hadith was to be tested by its content and by the place its terms occupied in the development of legal though and institutions ...'"

Biographical evaluation

Another criticism of isnads was of the efficacy of the traditional Hadith studies field known as biographical evaluations (ʿilm al-rijāl) -- evaluating the moral and mental capacity of transmitters/narrators. John Wansbrough argues that the isnads are should not be accepted, because of their "internal contradiction, anonymity, and arbitrary nature": specifically the lack of any information about many of the transmitters of the hadith other than found in these biographical evaluations, thus putting into question whether they are "pseudohistorical projections", i.e. names made up by later transmitters.

References

Books and journal articles

• Amin, Mohammed (14 February 2015). "How reliable are Hadith? Some are contradictory". mohammedamin.com. Retrieved 29 March 2018.
• Brown, Daniel W. (1996). Rethinking tradition in modern Islamic thought. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521570778. Retrieved 10 May 2018.
• Farooq, Mohammad Omar (June 2006). "Islamic Law and the Use and Abuse of Hadith". zaharuddin.net. Retrieved 29 March 2018.