Hadith sciences in the context of Muhammad

The historiography of early Islam is the secular scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first purported revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661, and arguably throughout the 8th century and the duration of the Umayyad Caliphate, terminating in the incipient Islamic Golden Age around the beginning of the 9th century.

Muslims developed methodologies such as the "science of biography" and the "science of hadith" to evaluate the reliability of these narratives, while prominent figures like Ibn Khaldun introduced critical historiographical methods, emphasizing the importance of context and the systematic evaluation of historical data.

In the Islamic study of hadith, an isnād (chain of transmitters, or literally "supporting"; Arabic: اِسْناد) refers to a list of people who passed on a tradition, from the original authority to whom the tradition is attributed to, to the present person reciting or compiling that tradition. The tradition an isnad is associated with is called the matn. Isnads are an important feature of the genre of Islamic literature known as hadith and are prioritized in the process that seeks to determine if the tradition in question is authentic or inauthentic.

According to the traditional Islamic view, the tradition of the hadith sciences has succeeded in the use of isnads to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic traditions going back to Muhammad and his companions. The contemporary view in modern hadith studies, however, is that isnads were commonly susceptible to forgery and so had to be scrutinized before being used to guarantee the transmission of a tradition.

Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, a literature typically thought in Islamic religion to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators.

A major area of interest in hadith studies has been the degree to which hadith can be used as a reliable source for reconstructing the biography of Muhammad, in parallel to the Islamic discipline of the hadith sciences. Since the pioneering work of Ignaz Goldziher, the sentiment has been that hadith are a more faithful source for understanding the religious, historical, and social developments in the first two centuries of Islam than they are a reliable record of Muhammad's life, especially concerning the formation of Islamic law, theology, and piety during the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras.

Hadith terminology (Arabic: مصطلح الحديث, romanized: muṣṭalaḥu l-ḥadīth) is the body of terminology in Islam which specifies the acceptability of the sayings (hadith) attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad by other early Islamic figures of significance such as the companions and followers/successors. Individual terms distinguish between those hadith considered rightfully attributed to their source or detail the faults of those of dubious provenance. Formally, it has been defined by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani as: "knowledge of the principles by which the condition of the narrator and the narrated are determined." This page comprises the primary terminology used within hadith sciences.

Hadith is the Arabic word for a 'report' or an 'account [of an event]' and refers to the Islamic oral tradition of anecdotes containing the purported words, actions, and the silent approvals of the Islamic prophet Muhammad or his immediate circle (companions in Sunni Islam, Ahl al-Bayt in Shiite Islam).

After being compiled in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Hadiths began to be imposed by socio-political and spiritual authorities as the original words of Muhammad from the 14th century onwards. For many Muslim sects, hadith was a reliable source for religious and moral guidance known as sunnah, which ranks second to that of the Quran in authority, widely respected in mainstream Islamic thought, so that the majority of Sharia rules derived from hadith rather than the Quran. However, in the early Islamic society the use of hadith as it is understood today (documentation, isnads, etc.) came gradually. Sunnah originally meant a tradition that did not contain the definition of good and bad. Later, "good traditions" began to be referred to as sunnah and the concept of "Muhammad's sunnah" was established. Muhammad's sunnah gave way to the "hadiths of Muhammad" which were being transmitted orally, then recorded in the corpuses that continued to be collected, classified and purified according to various criteria in the following centuries. Scholars have categorized hadith based on their reliability, sorting them into classifications such as sahih ('authentic'), hasan ('good'), and da'if ('weak'). This classification is subjective to the person doing this study and differences in classification have led to variations in practices among the different Islamic schools and branches. The study of hadith is a central discipline in Islam, known as the hadith sciences, and is also examined in the contemporary historiographical field of hadith studies.