The city of Medina in Western Arabia is best known as the sanctuary of the exiled Meccan prophet Muḥammad, were he founded the religious polity that would go on to become both the Arab empire and the religion of Islam. The city was originally called Yaṯrib, but from the time of Muḥammad onward it was … [Read more…]
Abstract: This blog article revisits a topic covered in one of my previous blog articles: a hadith that appears to have been created in response to the ʿĪsawiyyah, a Jewish messianic movement that erupted in Isfahan during the middle of the 8th Century CE. The present article incorporates some Hadith material that was not covered … [Read more…]
I recently appeared on the History Valley podcast to give a talk on the origins of Hadith, covering both the traditional Sunnī, Šīʿī, and ʾIbāḍī narratives thereon, and also the perspectives of modern critical scholarship. The talk covers the following topics: [@0:00] Preliminary comments [@6:16] THE ORIGINS OF HADITH, PART 1: TRADITIONAL NARRATIVES [@6:17] PART … [Read more…]
On January the 27th and 28th, 2024, Georgetown University and Charles Sturt University jointly hosted the “Isnād-Cum-Matn Analysis (ICMA) as a Method in Contemporary Hadith Studies” Conference. As both a speaker at the conference and someone with a keen interest in the ICMA and the state of the field, I thought it might be of … [Read more…]
In a recent thread on the website formerly known as Twitter, a user named D1mashqi criticised one of the points I outlined in my podcast discussion with Javad Hashmi regarding some of the problems with the authenticity of Hadith. The point in question concerns the unreliability of exegetical Hadith in particular, which I summarised on … [Read more…]
My PhD thesis, entitled “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, is now publicly available. The full unabridged version can be accessed here: I originally submitted both an abridged and unabridged version of my thesis for examination, and my examiners advocated for the unabridged version to … [Read more…]
Since the publication of Javad Hashmi’s article regarding my DPhil research, some readers have quite understandably asked for more details. The full DPhil thesis should be available soon (and will be made available on this blog), but in the meantime, I can at least offer a summary thereof to give a better idea of the … [Read more…]
The hypothesis that early Islam—from the time of the Prophet to at least the second fitnah—constituted some kind of pan-Abrahamic or pan-Abrahamitic movement or coalition is widespread in recent secular, critical scholarship.[1] The earliest iteration of this hypothesis—which posited that proto-Islam was some kind of Judaeo-Arab alliance or coalition—can be found in Patricia Crone and … [Read more…]
In an ongoing series of articles, I have been exploring the much-debated question of the origins of proto-Sunnī Hadith criticism: in Part 1 (here), I summarised the relevant lists and reports recorded in the traditional Sunnī sources; in Part 2 (here), I summarised the last century or so of secular scholarship thereon, canvasing all of … [Read more…]
In Part 1 of this series on the origins of proto-Sunnī Hadith criticism (here), I outlined the traditional narratives on this issue, which are plagued by numerous contradictions and cannot be relied upon alone to resolve the historical question of exactly when and where the Hadith-critical method emerged. Now, in Part 2, I survey the … [Read more…]