Hadith — the Prophetic Tradition

A hadith is a report of what the Prophet ﷺ said, did or approved; the science of hadith is the discipline that gathers, transmits and grades these reports.

At a glance

Second only to the Qurʾān as a source of Islamic guidance, the hadith preserve the example (sunna) of the Prophet ﷺ. Each report has two parts: the matn, the text of what is reported, and the isnād, the chain of narrators through whom it was transmitted — “A heard from B, who heard from C,” back to an eyewitness. Because so much depended on the reliability of these chains, evaluating the isnād became the heart of the discipline.

As the community spread and the eyewitness generation passed, scholars travelled widely to collect reports, developed a whole science (ʿilm al-ḥadīth) to scrutinise them, and compiled the results. They built a biographical science of the narrators (ʿilm al-rijāl), classified reports by the strength of their chains — ṣaḥīḥ (sound), ḥasan (good), ḍaʿīf (weak) — and gathered the soundest into authoritative collections. Sunni Islam came to recognise six canonical books, headed by the Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim; the Twelver Shiʿi tradition assembled its own, headed by al-Kāfī of al-Kulaynī.

Hadith did not become a formal legal proof without argument. In the early second Islamic century the schools of Iraq leaned on reasoned opinion (ahl al-raʾy) while the scholars of Medina and the traditionists (ahl al-ḥadīth) pressed the authority of transmitted reports, and it was al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820) who set out the framework that prevailed for most Sunnis, placing sound hadith second only to the Qurʾān as a source of law. Even then the consensus was procedural rather than literalist: scholars disagreed about which reports were sound, and a jurist who accepted the principle retained considerable latitude over which hadith to cite. The reports were further sorted by breadth of transmission — mutawātir, reported by so many independent chains that collusion is implausible, against āḥād, carried by few — and the sheer volume in circulation, along with the political value of a well-placed saying, made forgery a standing danger that the narrator sciences existed to check.

The authenticity and interpretation of hadith have been debated within the tradition and studied critically by modern Western scholarship; questions of transmission, dating and reliability remain active. Ignaz Goldziher and later Joseph Schacht argued that much of the corpus reflects the concerns of later generations projected backwards, a position Muslim scholars have contested at length and which subsequent Western work — notably the joint analysis of chains and texts — has itself substantially qualified. A small modern current rejects hadith altogether in favour of the Qurʾān alone; the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Sunni and Shiʿi, regard the sunna transmitted through hadith as indispensable to understanding it. Chronicle holds the graded corpus, the narrator biographies and the isnād graph in its Hadith and Narrators sections.

Related in Chronicle

Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.