Hadith Studies - History

History

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his sayings were preserved in both written and memorized form. Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph, began to collect all the hadiths together into one unified volume. He, however, chose to give up the endeavor in order to have the Muslim nation concentrate its efforts more on the Quran.

The Umayyad caliph, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz also started an effort to collect all the hadiths. Teaching and collecting hadiths was part of a plan of his to renew the moral fiber of the Muslim community. He supported teachers of fiqh, sent educators to ignorant Bedouin tribes, ordered weekly hadith lectures in the Hejaz, and sent our scholars of hadith to Egypt and North Africa.

Umar also ordered the great scholar of Madinah, Abu Bakr ibn Hazm to write down all the hadiths of the Prophet and Umar ibn al-Khattab, particularly those narrated by Aisha. He had these hadiths collected in books which were circulated around the Umayyad Empire. Although these books are lost today, commentaries on them by Ibn al-Nadim reveals that they are organized like books of fiqh, such as the Muwatta of Imam Malik, the first large compilation of hadiths. Imam Malik himself probably followed the general plan of the early books of hadith ordered by Umar.

The classification of Hadith into sahih, sound or authentic; hasan, good; and da'if, weak, was utilized early in hadith scholarship by Ali ibn al-Madini (161–234 AH). Later, al-Madini's student Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870) authored a collection, now known as Sahih Bukhari, commonly accepted by Sunni scholars to be the most authentic collection of hadith, followed by that of his student Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Al-Bukhari's methods of testing hadiths and isnads are seen as exemplary of the developing methodology of hadith scholarship.