Date Posted: Thursday, October 09, 2003

One million or more hadiths were in circulation by the end of the second century A.H. The task of collecting, classifying, and appraising them were formidable. However, Muslim scholars worked on them with diligence. Often they had to travel thousands of miles in order to ascertain the probability of one link in the chain of reporters, or the veracity of one word or expression in the text of a hadith. But they were more than willing to pay the price, for the matter concerned their religion and their Prophet. The study took several generations to complete, and resulted in universal acceptance of six collections as authoritative. These are the works of al Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, al Nasa’i, al Tirmidhi, and Ibn Majah. Two other collections were regarded by some Muslims as equally authoritative: those of Malik ibn Anas and Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Beyond these, there were many other collections which scholars classified as untrustworthy because their authors were lax in applying the criteria of the disciplines. These untrustworthy collections included some true hadiths as well as those that were weak, problematic, or doubtful. Other collections were notorious for their sectarianism and prejudice.

As for the six authoritative collections, some scholars have recognized that the collection of Ibn Majah was not as critical as the other five; and they have therefore replaced it with those of Malik and Ibn Hanbal, thus making the authoritative collections seven in number in their categorization. Among these, the collections of al Bukhari and Muslim are especially trustworthy and stand apart above the others. Between the collections of these two scholars, that of al Bukhari takes precedence in reliability and authority. A still higher level of authority belongs to those hadith reported by both al Bukhari and Muslim.

The number of hadiths considered and passed as valid shed much light on the validity of the collections. Ibn Hanbal examined 750,000 hadiths from which he selected 40,000 as valid. Al Bukhari examined 300,000 reported by 1,000 authorities and selected only 7,275 as valid. Among the valid accepted by al Bukhari, there were numerous repetitions that, if eliminated, would bring the number of his accepted hadiths to 2,602. If the same criteria were applied to the collection of Muslim, we would find that that author accepted about 4,000 hadiths as valid. Those hadiths judged authentic by both al Bukhari and Muslim numbered about 1,500.

As regards validity or authenticity, hadith scholars have classified the hadith into four main categories: Sahih, or authentic; Hasan, or good, likely to be authentic; Da`if, weak, or likely to be inauthentic; and Mawdu' or forged and hence not a hadith. Laws derived from the first two are binding to all Muslims; laws derived from da'if are not binding but are recommended for observance.

The qualities that justify classifying a hadith in the Sahih category, the highest in authenticity, are the following: (1) musnad, meaning that it was reported by an unbroken chain of qualified reporters going back to the Prophet, every member of which had heard it personally from the next link in the chain (hearing being the most reliable form of transmission); (2) mutawatir, or universally related by at least four, but sometimes as many as 310 different reporters in exactly the same form or meaning, without contradiction by any; (3) absolutely free of any defect arising out of historical context, or in relation to other hadith, and satisfying every demand of rationality, coherence, correspondence with historical fact, and conformance to acceptable language and style; and (4) all links in the chain of reporters fulfill all requisites, and thus constitute an unchangeable chain, whose members cannot rationally be assumed to have agreed on falsehood, forgery, or an innocent mistake.

The hadith qualifying for the second category, Hasan, fulfilled the same requirements as the Sahih but one, namely, precision. Some reports of it showed imprecision in reportage. The Da'if examples are the most complex. They fall into as many kinds and classes as there are points contributing to their weakness. Most books of hadith count about twenty such categories, and some go as high as seventy-five kinds or grades of weakness.

In their absolute honesty in matters of religion, the scholars of Islam dared not destroy the hadith which their tests had proven to be weak or forged. They kept them and classified, recorded, and published them in special collections. They gave the causes or evidence of their judgments and even assigned degrees of inauthenticity to them, from the avowedly forged hadith to those including words or ideas simply unbecoming of the Prophet.