Criticism of ḥadīth or hadith criticism is the critique of ḥadīth—the genre of canonized Islamic literature made up of attributed reports of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
In mainstream Islam, the Sunnah (the teachings and practices of Muhammad) is regarded as an authoritative source of guidance, and many detailed rulings of Sharia (Islamic law) are derived from Hadith literature in addition to the Quran. However, Quranists reject the authority of the hadiths, viewing them as un-Quranic; they believe that obedience to Muhammad means obedience to the Quran; some further claim that most hadiths are fabrications (pseudepigrapha) created in the 8th and 9th century AD, and which are falsely attributed to Muhammad.Aisha Y. Musa, The Qur'anists, Florida International University, accessed May 22, 2013.Neal Robinson (2013), Islam: A Concise Introduction, Routledge, , Chapter 7, pp. 85-89 Historically, some sects of the Kharijites also rejected the hadiths, while Mu'tazilites rejected the hadiths as the basis for Islamic law, while at the same time accepting the Sunnah and Ijma.
Criticism of ḥadīth has taken several forms. The classical Islamic science of ḥadīth studies was developed to weed out fraudulent accounts and establish a "core" of authentic (i.e., "sound" or ṣaḥīḥ) ḥadīth compiled in classical ḥadīth collections. But some Muslim thinkers and schools of Islam contend that these efforts did not go far enough. Among their complaints is that there was a suspiciously large growth in the number of ḥadīth with each early generation;Ibn Rawandi, "Origins of Islam", 2000: p.117 that large numbers of ḥadīth contradicted each other; and that the genre's status as a primary source of Islamic law has motivated the creation of fraudulent ḥadīth.
These critics range from those who accept the techniques of ḥadīth studies but believe a more "rigorous application" is needed (Salafi Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi) in preparation for updating and re-establishing Sharia law; to those who believe it is important to follow the Sunnah but that the only handful of ḥadīth (mutawātir ḥadīth) are of sufficiently reliable basis to accept (19th-century modernist Sayyid Ahmad Khan); to "deniers of hadith" or "Hadith rejectors" who believe that the ḥadīth are not part of the Sunnah and that what Muslims are required to obey is contained entirely in the Quran (20th-century Quranist Aslam Jairajpuri). The term "Hadithist" is a term of reference or depiction, used by Hadith-rejecting Muslims to describe those who adhere to the Hadith.
Emergence of hadith
Background The earliest schools and scholars of Islamic law—starting around a century and a half after the death of Muhammad—did not all agree on the importance of Prophetic sunnah and its basis, being hadith ultimately attributed to Muhammad. Opinion ranged from prophetic hadith being one source of law among others (such as caliphal tradition or reports going back to Muhammad's followers), as was held by the ahl al-raʿy to outright rejection of hadith on the basis of their potentially tenuous historicity, as was held by the ahl al-kalām (referred to by some as "speculative theologians").
Al-Shafi'i and the canonization of hadith A sizable shift in practice in favor of the tradition of prophetic hadith and its basis for Islamic law (fiqh) came with al-Shāfiʿī (767–820 CE), founder of the Shafi'i school of law. According to this school of thought, prophetic hadith override all other hadith. It is unlikely that consensus yet existed for this view at this time as Shafi'i would come to spend great effort on establishing and promulgating his views over other ones. For those who criticized the reliability of hadith on the basis of their long phase of oral transmission, al-Shafi'i responded by arguing that God's wish for people to follow Muhammad's example would result in God ensuring the preservation of the tradition. Sunnah became a source of divine revelation (wahy) and the basis of classical Islamic law (Sharia), especially in consideration of the brevity dedicated to the subject of law in the Quran (which, for example, does not comment in detail on ritual like Ghusl or Wudu,An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.203 or salat, the correct forms of salutations,An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.168 and the importance of benevolence to slaves.An-Nawawi, Riyadh As-Salihin, 1975: p.229) Al Shafi'is advocacy played a decisive role in elevating the status of hadith although some skepticism along that of earlier lines would continue.
Hadith sciences
Once (authentic) hadith had attained their elevated status among the group inspired by al-Shafi'i who sought to establish Islamic practice on the basis of the Sunnah (Muhammad's deeds and sayings), the focus shifted amongst advocates of this group (who were called the ahl al-sunnah, or the "People of the Sunnah") to delineating between reliable or "sound" (ṣaḥīḥ) with unreliable hadith. The field that arose to meet this need came to be known as the hadith sciences (ʻilm al-ḥadīth), and this practice had entered into a mature stage by the 3rd century of Islam. The hadith sciences helped undergird the triumph of Al-Shafi'is prioritization of prophetic hadith which became the primary sources of Islamic law and also became "ideological" tools in political/theological conflicts.
A challenge the hadith sciences had to confront was the massive scale of hadith forgery, with Muhammad al-Bukhari claiming that only ~7,400 narrations of 600,000 he investigated met his criteria for inclusion. Even among those 7,400, a large fraction were variants of the same report, but with a different chain of transmitters (isnad). The criteria for establishing the authenticity (sihha) of hadith came down to corroboration of the same report but from different transmitters, assessing the reliability and character of the transmitters listed in the chain (although Muhammad's companions, the sahaba, were excluded from this as their association with Muhammad immediately guaranteed their character and competence), and the lack of gaps in the chain. By implication, defects in hadith might assumed to be associated with the lack of character (ʿadāla) or competence (ḍābiṯ) of its transmitters. It was also thought that such faulty transmitters could be identified and that the isnad was a direct reflection of the history of transmission of a tradition. Evaluation rarely looked at the content (matn) of a narration as opposed to its isnad. Ultimately, evaluations of hadith remained haphazard between authors until the practice of the hadith sciences was standardized by Ibn al-Salah in the 13th century. It is through the lenses of this framework, supplemented by some additional work from Al-Dhahabi in the 14th century and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in the 15th century, that Muslim scholars since understood the discipline.
The first collections to be accepted as authoritative among Sunnis by the tenth century CE were the Sahihayn, referring to Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Even as the set of canonical texts grew, the Sahihayn remained the core of the canon, with Sahih al-Bukhari typically being viewed as the most pre-eminent of the two. The tenth century CE also saw the inclusion of another two collections to form a Four-Book canon, including the Sunan Abi Dawud and Sunan al-Nasa'i. This grew into a Five-Book canon in the twelfth century, when Sunan al-Tirmidhi was added. In the same century, the modern Six-Book canon, known as the Kutub al-Sittah, emerged. Depending on the list, the sixth canonical book was the Sunan ibn Majah, the Sunan of Al-Daraqutni, or the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas.
History of Muslim criticism Historically, some sects of the Kharijites rejected the Hadith. There were some who opposed even the writing down of the Hadith itself for fear that it would compete, or even replace the Qur'an. Mu'tazilites also rejected the hadiths as the basis for Islamic law, while at the same time accepting the Sunnah and ijma. Under the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), the adherents of Kalam were favoured and the supporters of Hadith were treated harshly. Al-Ma'mun was inclined towards rational inquiry in religious matters, supported the proponents of Kalam and persecuted the adherents of Hadith. His two immediate successors, Al-Mu'tasim (r. 833-842) and Al-Wathiq (r. 842-847), followed his policies. Unlike his three predecessors, Al-Mutawakkil (r. 847-861) was not inclined to rational inquiry in religious matters, and strove to bolster the Hadith as a necessary source of the Sunnah.
Similarly, critics of collection and/or use of hadith in Islam can be found in the early era when the classical consensus of al-Shafiʿi was being developed and established (particularly by the ahl-i-kalam and Muʿtazilites) and many centuries later in the modern era when Islamic reformists (such as the ahl-i-Quran and thinkers such as Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal) sought to revitalize Islam.
Although scholars and critics of the Hadith such as Aslam Jairajpuri and Ghulam Ahmed Perwez) have "never attracted a large following", they and others who propose limitations on usage of ḥadīth literature outside of the mainstream include both early Muslims (Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, Ibrahim an-Nazzam) and later reformers (Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal). Both modernist Muslims and Quranists believe that the problems in the Islamic world come partly from the traditional elements of the hadith and seek to reject those teachings.
Medieval criticism
Sunnis Whether al-Bukhari and other traditional hadith scholars were successful in narrowing down hadith to its authentic "core" is disputed among Sunni Muslim scholars, especially prior to the early modern era. Al-Nawawi wrote that "a number of scholars discovered many hadiths" in the two most authentic hadith collections known as the Sahihayn—Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim—"which do not fulfill the conditions of verification assumed" by the collectors of those works. Al-Ghazali addresses questions from an unnamed "questioner" about a number of problems the questioner sees in several hadith,Tamer, Islam and Rationality, 2015: p.98-100 such as "Satan runs in the blood vessels of one of you";Tamer, Islam and Rationality, 2015: p.99 "satans nourish themselves from manure and bones"; and "Paradise is as wide as heaven and earth", yet it must be "contained somewhere within the bounds of those two?"Tamer, Islam and Rationality, 2015: p.100
In the fifteenth century, when Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani encountered the hadith When `God created Adam, and he was sixty arms tall,' and that, after Adam fell, 'mankind has continued to shrink since that time.' he noted that the ancient inhabitants of houses carved out of cliffs he had seen must have been about the same size humans of his day, simply "admitted frankly that 'to this day, I have not found how to resolve this problem, without doubting the hadith's authenticity. However, with the rise of natural sciences and technology of the West, some Muslims came to a different conclusion. Critics also complained of hadith that sound less like what a prophet would say than someone in the post-Shafiʿi era justifying fabricating hadith. Such as '[Sayings attributed to me] which agree with the Koran, go back to me, whether I actually said them or not', and 'Whatever good sayings there are, I said them.'Goldziher, I., "Muhammedanische Studien", 2 volumes, 1889-1890, ii 49, from Jahiz and Ibn Maja
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.
While criticism of the authenticity of any hadith in the Sahihayn ceased during the early modern era, it has been revived again by the Salafi movement, a prominent example of this being Al-Albani.
Kalam theologians