The Science of Hadith

( The Science of Hadith )

As for the hadith men: most of them do not understand, and have no ambition either for the knowledge of hadith or for making a religion of it; rather the sound (ṣaḥīḥ) and the forged (mawḍūʻ) stand with them at one and the same rate. Their whole ambition is in audition (samāʻ) from ignorant shaykhs, and in swelling the tally of fascicles and transmissions. They do not school themselves in the manners of hadith, nor do they come to their senses out of the drunkenness of audition. Now he hears the fascicle, and already his soul is telling him: when shall I transmit it — after fifty years! Woe to you, how long is your expectation and how evil your work. Sufyān al-Thawrī is to be excused when he says — in what Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Taghlibī transmitted: Khālid ibn Khidāsh related to us, Ḥammād ibn Zayd related to us, Sufyān al-Thawrī said: “Had hadith been a good thing, it would have passed away as the good has passed away.” He spoke the truth, by God. And what good is there in a hadith whose sound matter is mixed with its feeble, when you neither grasp it, nor look into its transmitters, (1) nor make a religion of it before God Most High. As for today, in our own time, the seeking and the audition do not yield to the hadith man the very object of hadith, which is to make a religion of it; rather the use of audition is that he may transmit — and this, by God, is for other than God Most High. My address is to you, O hadith man, not to him who hears and does not understand, who does not keep up the prayers, nor shun the enormities, nor the chewing of narcotic herbs, and does not know how to give alms properly. So you there: do not be a criminal and a sower of discord, the most ill-starred of the ill-starred.

The seeker of hadith today ought first to copy out The Collation of the Two Ṣaḥīḥs, and the Aḥkām of ʻAbd al-Ḥaqq, and that of al-Ḍiyāʼ, (1) and to be unremitting in the study of them, and to acquire much of al-Bayhaqī's compositions, for they are profitable — and, at the least, an epitome such as al-Ilmām, and to study it under a teacher. (1) For what good is audition from ignorant old shaykhs who sleep, while the boys and the young men chatter and joke, and many of them doze and then brazen it out, and the reader misreads his consonants, all his precision consisting in multiplying “or words to that effect”, and the nurslings set up their thunder? (2) For God's sake, let us alone: we have become a laughing-stock to men of sense, who look at us and say, “These are the people of hadith.” Yes — and what harm does it do! If nothing were left but the repeating of the blessing upon the Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace, that would be better than those idle sayings which set themselves against religion, and drive off faith and certainty, and cast a man down into the lowest of the low. But you are to be excused: you have not caught so much as the scent of Islam, nor have you seen the people of hadith. For their first generation had a shaykh of exalted chain of transmission (isnād): between him and God Most High stood one only, an infallible from an infallible — the lord of mankind, from Jibrīl, from God, mighty and majestic. And his students were such men as Abū Bakr, ʻUmar, Ibn Masʻūd, Abū Hurayrah the memorizer (ḥāfiẓ), Ibn ʻAbbās, and those chiefs of men whose lives were long and whose chains stood high and who set themselves up for the lofty transmission. From them such men as Masrūq, Ibn al-Musayyab, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, al-Shaʻbī and ʻUrwah carried it, and their like among the people of hadith, the masters of transmission and of understanding, of truthfulness and worship, of exactness and abstinence — those whose students were such men as al-Zuhrī, Qatādah, al-Aʻmash, Ibn Juḥādah, Ayyūb and Ibn ʻAwn; and those were the masters from whom al-Awzāʻī and al-Thawrī and Maʻmar and the two Ḥammāds and Zāʼidah and Mālik and al-Layth took it, and a host besides them among the shaykhs of Ibn al-Mubārak, Yaḥyā ibn al-Qaṭṭān, Ibn Mahdī, Yaḥyā ibn Ādam, al-Shāfiʻī and al-Qaʻnabī; and a number of the luminaries of hadith whom such men as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, Isḥāq, Ibn al-Madīnī, Yaḥyā ibn Maʻīn, Abū Khaythamah, Ibn Numayr, Abū Kurayb and Bundār succeeded; and after them those who come next, among the shaykhs of al-Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, al-Nasāʼī, Abū Zurʻah, Abū Ḥātim, Muḥammad ibn Naṣr, Ṣāliḥ Jazarah and Ibn Khuzaymah, and multitudes in a single age, among whom were thousands of memorizers and carriers of the noble science. Then this business dwindled in the fourth century by comparison with the third, and it has not ceased to dwindle down to this day; so that the best of the hadith men of our own time, few as they are, is the counterpart of the least of those who lived in that age, many as they were. And how many a man renowned in the old time for jurisprudence and for legal reasoning (raʼy) is better in hadith than the moderns; and how many a man of the ancient theologians (mutakallimūn) knows the transmitted report (athar) better than the shaykhs of our own day. Of the people of hadith we caught only a small company, such as the judge of the lands of Egypt and its scholar, Taqī al-Dīn ibn Daqīq al-ʻĪd; and the memorizer and authority (ḥujjah) Sharaf al-Dīn al-Dimyāṭī; and the memorizer Jamāl al-Dīn ibn al-Ẓāhirī; and the shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Faraḥ (al-Ishbīlī); and their like. And of the lees of the students we caught Shihāb al-Dīn ibn al-Daqūqī, Najm al-Dīn ibn al-Jabbāz, and the shaykh ʻAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ. And we praise God Most High that there are in this present time men who understand this business and give their care to the transmitted report, such as al-Mizzī, Ibn Taymīyah, al-Birzālī, Ibn Sayyid al-Nās, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Ḥalabī, Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī, the judge Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥanbalī, the son of the chief judge Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamāʻah, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn ibn al-ʻAlāʼī, Fakhr al-Dīn ibn al-Fakhr, Amīn al-Dīn ibn al-Wānī, the son of the prayer-leader of (Umm al-Malik) al-Ṣāliḥ, Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Maqdisī, my master ʻAbd Allāh ibn Khalīl, and a company

— Notes —

[6] (1) Bare transmission is of little use in the later ages. Indeed they have said: hadith is two halves, one of them the knowledge of the states of its transmitters as they truly are, the other the knowledge of its meanings as they stand with those who have understanding in religion; so whoever falls short in either of the two has fallen short in hadith to that extent, even if he delivered what he heard exactly as he heard it. Few are they who meet the condition in all the generations, and to join the two halves is hard of attainment save for the rare individuals among men. Ibn Ṭūlūn transmitted in his book al-Falak al-mashḥūn, from the imam al-Shāfiʻī, may God be pleased with him, that he said to one of his companions: “Do you wish to combine jurisprudence and hadith? Far from it!” Indeed you will often see him himself, in al-Umm, transmit a hadith and then say: “and this I adopt if it prove sound”, or “if it be established”, and the like, committing himself to nothing on either side, denial or affirmation. This is the utmost of deliberateness and of scruple in the religion of God. So do not be deluded by those whose fatwā outruns the asking, though they come nowhere near the sandals of those imams, the jurists.

[7] (1) As for The Collation of the Two Ṣaḥīḥs, it is by al-Ḥumaydī al-Andalusī (d. 488). He gathered in it the hadiths of the two Ṣaḥīḥs, and did it well. He arranged them by the musnads of the Companions in five classes: he began with the musnad of Abū Bakr and went through the whole of the ten who received the good tidings; then those given precedence after the ten; then those of many traditions; then those of few; then the women. He struck out the chains of transmission except for the Successor's report from the Companion, and marked the places where the two shaykhs agree and the places where each stands alone, in the texts and not in the transmitters. To this he added a few items he had noticed from the books of al-Dāraquṭnī, especially al-Istidrākāt wa-al-tatabbuʻ, and from the Mustakhraj of al-Ismāʻīlī upon al-Bukhārī, and the Mustakhraj of Abū Bakr al-Khuwārizmī al-Barqānī upon the two Ṣaḥīḥs, and the Aṭrāf al-Ṣaḥīḥayn of Abū Masʻūd al-Dimashqī, and the books of others among the memorizers who concerned themselves with what pertains to the two works: the pointing out of a purpose, or the completing of something omitted, or an addition to an explanation, or the clarifying of a name or a lineage, or a discussion of a chain, or the tracking down of an error made by one or another of the authors of glosses in reporting from them, and the like. And he distinguished from the original whatever he added from the books named. This al-Ḥumaydī was one of those who heard from Ibn ʻAbd al-Barr and kept close to Ibn Ḥazm; and when he was put to trial along with his shaykh over the Ẓāhirī school, he fled to

[8] the East, and thereafter made no open show of his school until he died at Baghdād. Had he arranged his book by chapters it would have been of more use and easier of access for those occupied with the hadiths of legal rulings. As for the book al-Aḥkām, it is by the memorizer ʻAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ishbīlī (d. 581): his al-Aḥkām al-kubrā is a work of elegant arrangement and much profit, ordered by chapters. He culled its hadiths from the Muwaṭṭaʼ, the Five Books, Ibn Abī Shaybah and elsewhere. Most of them are hadiths of legal rulings, and there are in them exhortation and warning, supplications and litanies, sections on the trials of the last days, and a few pieces of exegesis. He speaks now upon the hadiths and now upon the transmitters, out of the Kāmil of Ibn ʻAdī, the ʻIlal of al-Dāraquṭnī and his Sunan, and the ʻIlal of Ibn Abī Ḥātim. For all that, it is not free of slips, which Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qaṭṭān al-Fāsī (d. 628) criticized in his book al-Wahm wa-al-īhām fī Kitāb al-Aḥkām — and he did it well, for all the wilfulness known of him in the criticism of men. As for the book of al-Ḍiyāʼ, it is the book al-Aḥādīth al-mukhtārah of al-Ḍiyāʼ al-Maqdisī (d. 643). He extracted them from what is not in the two Ṣaḥīḥs with a connected chain, and he may mention hadiths with good chains which have a defect that is noted, and he refutes the defect. Al-Ḍiyāʼ's pronouncement of soundness is reckoned close to al-Tirmidhī's. It would be well to confine that to the hadiths of jurisprudence, of the lawful and the forbidden, for out of his saturation with the views of his fellows he may be easy-going in pronouncing sound such a hadith as that of Ḥammād ibn Salamah ( “… he brought the tip of his little finger out over his thumb, and the mountain sank away” ). He arranged his book by the musnads of the Companions and gave the chains up to them at length, and began with the hadiths of the ten who received the good tidings, then mentioned the rest of the Companions in the alphabetical order of their names, and did not observe al-Ḥumaydī's classes — though he composed his book taking guidance from his words: “Were one of them to give himself to tracking the sound hadith outside the two Ṣaḥīḥs, it would be a good thing.” His book is as a completion of al-Ḥumaydī's; had he gathered it by chapters, it would have been nearer to profit.

[9] (1) Al-Bayhaqī's books are a delight in the matter of transmission, above all Maʻrifat al-sunan wa-al-āthār: nothing like it has been gathered for the Shāfiʻīs in the vindication of the school — save that they are not free of slips, and of a turning aside from the straight road into partisanship, so that one needs along with them al-Jawhar al-naqī and its like to straighten out their crookedness. Seldom does God Most High gather in one man both abundance and good criticism in the reports. As for al-Ilmām fī aḥādīth al-aḥkām of Ibn Daqīq al-ʻĪd, it is a profitable epitome, but for what occurs in it of attributing a hadith to other than the one who brought it out, and the like. Al-Quṭb ʻAbd al-Karīm al-Ḥalabī did well in abridging it and setting it right in his book al-Ihtimām bi-talkhīṣ al-Ilmām. So one who copies out those books needs to study them under an exacting shaykh who joins transmission to understanding, lest he take up the very things that have been held against them, and so be led into error.

[9] (2) Those throngs at the sessions of audition, in the author's age and before it and after it, were for nothing but the registering of their names in the audition-certificates — nurslings and boys, youths and men of middle age, men and women — as having been present at, or having heard, such-and-such a book. Then whoever of them lived on transmits that book, after an age has passed, from this shaykh who made them hear it, relying on the registering of his name in those certificates, without having kept the shaykh's wording and without any recollection of the reader's reading — and do not ask about the laxity in the licences (ijāzāt) — and so on. So the men in the exalted chains turn out to have been decrepit and confused when they made others hear, and, for the most part, nurslings or boys at the time of receiving and hearing; and it is by this road that their chains rise high. The author said in the Mīzān: “Had I opened upon myself the softening of this chapter” — he means of those who came after the year three hundred — “only a few would have come through safe with me, since the greater part

[10] do not know what they transmit and have no acquaintance with this business; they merely heard in childhood, and in old age their exalted chain was in demand.” End. And in our book ʻAtb al-mughtarrīn bi-dajājilat al-muʻammarīn you will see wonders and strange things.