Categories of Hadith
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hadith Ḥadīth ( or ; ar, حديث, , , , , , , literally "talk" or "discourse") or Athar ( ar, أثر, , literally "remnant"/"effect") refers to what the majority of Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval ...
(sayings attributed to the
Islamic prophet Prophets in Islam ( ar, الأنبياء في الإسلام, translit=al-ʾAnbiyāʾ fī al-ʾIslām) are individuals in Islam who are believed to spread God in Islam, God's message on Earth and to serve as models of ideal human behaviour. So ...
Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد;  570 – 8 June 632 Common Era, CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Muhammad in Islam, Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet Divine inspiration, di ...
) have been used by various scholars. Experts in
hadith studies Hadith studies ( ar, علم الحديث ''ʻilm al-ḥadīth'' "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism) consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in th ...
generally use two terms - ''taqrīr'' for tacit approvals, and ''khabar'' for sayings and acts ascribed to Muhammad. The term taqrīr implies that, in the presence of Muhammad, a believer did something, which Muhammad noticed but did not disapprove or condemn. Thus, the act done by a believer acquired tacit approval from Muhammad. It is commonly acknowledged that a khabar can be true or false. The scholars of the science of hadith criticism hold that a khabar and, therefore, a hadith can be a true report or a concoction. It is on the basis of this premise that the
Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...
scholars hold that a hadith offers a ''ẓannī'' (inconclusive/probably true) evidence. It is as though a hadith may have many possibilities on the plane of reliability.{{cite book, last=Islahi, first=Amin Ahsan, title=Mabadi Tadabbur-i-Hadith, trans-title=Fundamentals of Hadith Interpretation, orig-year=original Urdu edition: 1989 , year=2009, publisher=Al-Mawrid, location=Lahore, url=http://www.monthly-renaissance.com/DownloadContainer.aspx?id=71, author-link=Amin Ahsan Islahi, access-date=27 January 2015


Categorization based on reliability

* '' Ṣaḥīḥ'' - transmitted through an unbroken chain of narrators all of whom are of sound character and memory. Such a hadith should not clash with a more reliable report and must not suffer from any other hidden defect. * '' Ḥasan'' - transmitted through an unbroken chain of narrators all of whom are of sound character but weak memory. This hadith should not clash with a more reliable report and must not suffer from any other hidden defect. * '' Ḍaʻīf'' - which cannot gain the status of hasan because it lacks one or more elements of a hasan hadith. (For example, if the narrator is not of sound memory and sound character, or if there is a hidden fault in the narrative or if the chain of narrators is broken). * ''
Mawḍūʻ Hadith terminology ( ar, مصطلح الحديث, muṣṭalaḥu l-ḥadīth) is the body of terminology in Islam which specifies the acceptability of the sayings (''hadith'') attributed to the Prophets in Islam, Islamic prophet Muhammad by othe ...
'' - fabricated and wrongly ascribed to Muhammad.Mahmūd Tahhān, ''Taysīr Mustalih al-Hadīth'', (Lahore: Islamic Publishing House, n.d.), 89. * ''Maqlūb'' - It is that hadith, in two different narrations of which the names of narrators have been changed.


Categorization based on number of narrators

* ''Khabar-i
mutawatir Hadith terminology ( ar, مصطلح الحديث, 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 f ...
'' - A mutawatir hadith is reported by such a large number of narrators that cannot be perceived to have jointly forged and narrated a tradition about an issue without a compelling force.''al-Kifāyah fī ‘ilm al-Riwāyah'', Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi In the opinion of
Amin Ahsan Islahi Amin Ahsan Islahi ( ur, مولانا امین احسن اصلاحی; 1904 – 15 December 1997), was a Pakistani Muslim scholar best known for his Urdu exegesis of the Quran, ''Tadabbur-i-Quran'' "Pondering on the Quran", which he based o ...
, all such narratives which are usually termed as khabar-i mutawatir should be thoroughly investigated. Islahi is not considered an authority on Hadith within the recognized scholarship of Islam. * ''Khabar-i wāhid'' (pl.: ''akhbār-i āhād'')- signifies a historical narrative that falls short of yielding certain knowledge. Even if more than one person reports the narrative, that does not make it certain and conclusive truth except when the number of narrators reporting it grows to the level that the possibility of their consensus on forging a lie is perfectly removed.


Classification by epistemic value

In one of the major works in the science of hadith,
Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn Thābit ibn Aḥmad ibn Māhdī al-Shāfiʿī, commonly known as al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī ( ar, الخطيب البغدادي) or "the lecturer from Baghdad" (10 May 1002 – 5 September 1071; 392 AH-463 AH), wa ...
has divided the individual narratives in the following categories, according to their epistemic value: * Ahaadith which are clearly genuine and acceptable :#The narratives that contain reports testified by the "human intellect" (''mimmā tadullu al-‘uqūl ‘alā mūjabihī'') and that which are aligned with common sense. :#The narratives that are a corollary of the
Quran The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Classical Arabic, Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation in Islam, revelation from God in Islam, ...
ic text and the ''
Sunnah In Islam, , also spelled ( ar, سنة), are the traditions and practices of the Islamic prophet Muhammad that constitute a model for Muslims to follow. The sunnah is what all the Muslims of Muhammad's time evidently saw and followed and passed ...
''. :#The narratives that have been received as acceptable by the ''
ummah ' (; ar, أمة ) is an Arabic word meaning "community". It is distinguished from ' ( ), which means a nation with common ancestry or geography. Thus, it can be said to be a supra-national community with a common history. It is a synonym for ' ...
'' as a whole. * Ahaadith which are clear fabrications :#The narratives that offend reason. :#The narratives that contradict the Quran and the Sunnah. :#The narratives that discuss issues of prime importance in the religion which require absolute certainty. :#The individual narratives regarding issues which, by their very nature, demand that they should have been reported by a large number of people are also not acceptable. ::According to the ''
Hanafi The Hanafi school ( ar, حَنَفِية, translit=Ḥanafiyah; also called Hanafite in English), Hanafism, or the Hanafi fiqh, is the oldest and one of the four traditional major Sunni schools ( maddhab) of Islamic Law (Fiqh). It is named aft ...
'' jurists, in the issues of ''‘umūm-i balwā'' (issues which by nature attract attention of the entire community. For example, the number and form of the
Prayer Prayer is an invocation or act that seeks to activate a rapport with an object of worship through deliberate communication. In the narrow sense, the term refers to an act of supplication or intercession directed towards a deity or a deified a ...
by its position in the religion requires that it should be received, practiced and communicated by the entire generation. Such issues are not left on the choice of few individuals.), the individual narratives carry no weight. In such issues they prefer
qiyas In Islamic jurisprudence, qiyas ( ar, قياس , "analogy") is the process of deductive analogy in which the teachings of the hadith are compared and contrasted with those of the Quran, in order to apply a known injunction ('' nass'') to a new ...
and
ijtihad ''Ijtihad'' ( ; ar, اجتهاد ', ; lit. physical or mental ''effort'') is an Islamic legal term referring to independent reasoning by an expert in Islamic law, or the thorough exertion of a jurist's mental faculty in finding a solution to a le ...
over these type of individual narratives. * A hadith whose status is not clear :#Narratives that give contradicting directives on a single issue and make it difficult to determine the final command in that regard form the third category. While deciding on the applicability of the directives contained in these type of ahadith, only such narratives should be accepted as valid which correspond to and accord with the wording of the collated narratives, textual evidence from the Quran and the Sunnah.


See also

*
History of hadith Ḥadīth ( or ; ar, حديث, , , , , , , literally "talk" or "discourse") or Athar ( ar, أثر, , literally "remnant"/"effect") refers to what the majority of Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval ...
*
Hadith terminology Hadith terminology ( ar, مصطلح الحديث, 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 fig ...
*
Hadith studies Hadith studies ( ar, علم الحديث ''ʻilm al-ḥadīth'' "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism) consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in th ...
*
Biographical evaluation Biographical evaluation ( ar, عِلْمُ الرِّجال, ʿilm al-rijāl; literally meaning'' 'Knowledge of Men' , ''but more commonly understood as the ''Science of Narrators)'' refers to a discipline of Islamic religious studies within ha ...


References

Hadith Islam-related lists