Criticism of hadith
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. Muslim criticism of the hadith has taken various forms and spans from early Islamic history to the modern era. Non-Muslim scholars, particularly in modern Western academia, have also engaged in significant criticism of the hadith.
Mainstream Islam, such as Sunnism and Shi'ism, holds that the hadiths are part of the Sunnah. For Hadith-followers, the "great bulk" of the rules of Sharia are derived from the hadith rather than the Qur'an. However, even within mainstream Sunni scholarship, major hadith collectors and scholars like Al-Daraqutni acknowledged that some hadiths, even in supposedly "sound" collections like Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, had issues or did not meet the compilers' own strict criteria. Historically, Ahl al-Kalam and some sects of the Kharijites 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. Under the Abbasid caliph Al-Ma'mun, who was inclined towards rational inquiry in religious matters, the adherents of Kalam were favoured and the supporters of Hadith were persecuted. His two immediate successors, Al-Mu'tasim and Al-Wathiq, followed his policies. Among Muslim polymaths, Al-Biruni rejected sahih hadiths based on established scientific facts.
Muslim critics of the hadith include those who accept the techniques of hadith studies but believe a more "rigorous application" is needed in preparation for updating and re-establishing Sharia law; those who believe it is important to follow the Sunnah but that the only handful of hadith are of sufficiently reliable basis to accept ; and "deniers of hadith" who believe that the hadith are not part of the Sunnah and that what Muslims are required to obey is contained entirely in the Qur'an. In contemporary times, Quranists reject the authority of the hadiths; they believe that obedience to Muhammad means obedience to the Qur'an; some further claim that most hadiths are fabrications created in the 8th and 9th century AD, and which are falsely attributed to Muhammad. Similarly, some modernist Muslims have applied historical-critical methods which incorporate external evidence like Islamic archaeology and established scientific facts to critique the hadiths.
In the West, the academic study of hadith began with Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht , who both criticised traditional hadith sciences. The general sentiment among Western academics has been that the hadith do not constitute a reliable corpus of sources that go back to the historical Muhammad. This includes the body of legal hadith, which was hard to trace back to a time before the end of the first century after the death of Muhammad.
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, 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.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 came with al-Shāfiʿī, 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 and the basis of classical Islamic law, especially in consideration of the brevity dedicated to the subject of law in the Quran 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 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, the focus shifted amongst advocates of this group to delineating between reliable or "sound" with unreliable hadith. The field that arose to meet this need came to be known as the hadith sciences, 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. The criteria for establishing the authenticity 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, and the lack of gaps in the chain. By implication, defects in hadith might assumed to be associated with the lack of character or competence 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 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, 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 and Al-Wathiq, followed his policies. Unlike his three predecessors, Al-Mutawakkil 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 and many centuries later in the modern era when Islamic reformists 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 and later reformers. 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, such as "Satan runs in the blood vessels of one of you"; "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?"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.'
- ' 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.'
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.