The Development of Early Sunnite Hadith Criticism

Abstract

Hadith is a uniquely Islamic discipline and of the utmost importance not only to Islamic thought, but also to Islamic culture and civilization. It is in this vein that `Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said that isnad (chain of transmission) is a part of the religion. While most studies on Hadith literature in western scholarship focus on the issue of authenticity, the hadith scholars’ method of determining what is a basis for belief and practice, as well as that method’s historical development, have been regretfully overlooked. The author’s The Development of Early Sunnite Hadith Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abi Hatim al- Razi (240/854-327/938) proposes to fill in some of those gaps. Chapter 1, “Hadith in the Time of Ibn Abi Hatim,” provides the setting for Ibn Abi Hatim’s career. The two main factions of Islamic thought in the third Islamic century were the adherents of hadith (ahl al-hadith) and their rivals (ahl al-ra’y). Dickinson introduces two approaches to hadith: the commentator (ahl al-ra’y) and the critic (ahl al-hadith). The commentator accepted the canon as it was and treated it as though it were closed. Any contradictions were dealt with through interpretation. The critic, however, manipulated the canon’s boundaries and removed any objectionable material (p. 7) by using the “objective criteria of hadith criticism” (p. 1) ...