A Bibliography on the Origins of Hadith

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 1: Recap of early Islamic history

[@27:06] PART 2: Basic Hadith Concepts

[@27:08] Definitions

[@27:48] Isnad and Matn

[@29:41] Types and Genres

[@33:46] Duplicates and Versions

[@36:59] Summary

[@39:05] PART 3: The Traditional Narrative(s) of the Origins and Development of Hadith

[@40:07] PART 3.1a: Sunnī Narratives – Part 1: Šāfiʿī-Ḥanbalī

[@40:12] The Prophet (d. 632 CE)

[@41:59] The Companions (7th C. CE)

[@45:00] The Followers (c. 700 CE)

[@48:00] The Followers of the Followers (early-to-mid 8th C. CE)

[@49:07] The Abbasid-Era Literary Boom (750 CE ff.)

[@53:54] The Rise of the People of Hadith (late 8th C. CE ff.)

[@56:00] The Rise of Hadith Criticism (late 8th C. CE ff.)

[@59:50] The Rise of Prophetical Collections (early 9th C. CE ff.)

[@1:01:25] The Sunnī Hadith Canon (late 9th C. CE ff.)

[@1:04:11] Summary

[@1:05:01] PART 3.1b: Sunnī Narratives – Part 2: Ḥanafī-Mālikī

[@1:05:42] Introduction to the regional traditions (7th-8th C. CE)

[@1:10:26] The Legal and Exegetical Tradition of Makkah

[@1:10:58] The Legal Tradition of Madinah

[@1:12:16] The Biographical Tradition of Madinah

[@1:14:00] The Legal Tradition of Basrah

[@1:14:50] The Exegetical Tradition of Basrah

[@1:15:47] The Legal Tradition of Kufah

[@1:17:12] The Exegetical Tradition of Kufah

[@1:17:49] The Legal Tradition of Syria

[@1:18:25] The Exegetical Tradition of the East

[@1:19:31] The Eclipse of Regionalism (9th C. CE ff.)

[@1:20:49] PART 3.2: Šīʿī Narratives

[@1:21:12] The Common Šīʿī Narrative

[@1:22:20] The Zaydī Narrative

[@1:24:10] The ʾImāmī/Twelver Narrative

[@1:26:22] The ʾIsmāʿīlī Narrative

[@1:29:22] PART 3.3: The ʾIbāḍī Narrative

[@1:31:56] PART 3.4: Rationalist Perspectives

[@1:32:00] Early Islamic Rationalism

[@1:34:17] The Rationalist Approach to Hadith

[@1:37:35] Summary

[@1:39:00] THE ORIGINS OF HADITH, PART 2: CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND ALTERNATIVE MODELS

[@1:39:24] PART 1: Critical Scholarship

[@1:49:36] PART 2: Problems with Hadith

[@1:49:52] #1: Prior probability of mass-fabrication

[@1:50:22] #2: Reports of mass-fabrication

[@1:51:01] #3: Lateness of extant sources

[@1:51:19] #4: Bias

[@1:52:15] #5: Propaganda

[@1:53:05] #6: Anachronisms

[@1:53:17] #7: Miracles / supernatural

[@1:53:22] #8: Implausible scenarios

[@1:53:45] #9: Internal contradictions

[@1:54:33] #10: External contradictions

[@1:54:45] #11: Implausible transmission

[@1:55:28] #12: Lateness of isnads

[@1:56:40] #13: Inconsistency with archaic Sunnah

[@2:01:24] #14: Initial absence; belated appearance; numerical growth

[@2:01:58] #15: Widespread raising and retrojection

[@2:03:30] #16: Products of debates and developments

[@2:04:06] #17: Regional bottlenecks in transmission

[@2:05:09] #18: Mode of transmission (oral + paraphrastic + atomistic + in fast-changing conditions)

[@2:06:53] #19: Growth and elaboration

[@2:07:07] #20: Distortion and mutation

[@2:07:46] #21: Artificial narrative structures

[@2:09:43] #22: Storyteller construction

[@2:10:52] #23: Exegesis in disguise

[@2:11:57] #24: Amnesia and discontinuity

[@2:14:45] #25: No effective countermeasures [i.e., ineffectualness of Hadith criticism]

[@2:23:21] Consequent skepticism in modern scholarship

[@2:24:35] Some Solutions to the Problems

[@2:28:15] PART 3: The Revisionist Model(s) of the Origins and Development of Hadith

[@2:30:18] The Era of the Prophet (c. 610-632 CE)

[@2:34:04] The Conquest Era (mid-7th C. CE)

[@2:38:11] Early-to-Mid Umayyad Period (c. 690-720 CE)

[@2:40:22] Mid-to-Late Umayyad Period (c. 720-750 CE)

[@2:42:59] Early Abbasid Period (c. 750-800 CE)

[@2:48:12] The Development of Hadith Criticism

[@2:54:17] Outcome (9th C. CE ff.)

[@2:58:05] Some Similarities and Differences in the Historical Reconstructions

What follows is a bibliography for this presentation, providing sources and citations for the various topics and issues discussed therein.

* * *

[@6:16] THE ORIGINS OF HADITH, PART 1: TRADITIONAL NARRATIVES

[@6:17] PART 1: Recap of early Islamic history

For some general introductions to or overviews of early Islamic political and sectarian history, see:

• Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983).
• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2010).
• Wilferd Madelung, The succession to Muḥammad: A study of the early Caliphate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1981).
• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
• Patricia Crone, “The Early Islamic World”, in Kurt A. Raaflaub & ‎Nathan S. Rosenstein (eds.), War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 309-318.
• R. Stephen Humphreys, Muʿawiya ibn Abi Sufyan: From Arabia to Empire (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2006).
• Gerald R. Hawting, The first dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750, 2nd ed. (London, UK: Routledge, 2000).
• Chase F. Robinson, ʿAbd al-Malik (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2005).
• Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997).
• Hugh N. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 3rd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routedge, 2015).
• Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

[@27:06] PART 2: Basic Hadith Concepts

For some introductions to Hadith, see:

• Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2018) [which is generally regarded as the best introduction to Hadith].
• ʿAlī Nāṣirī (trans. Mansoor Limba), An Introduction to Ḥadīth: History and Sources (London, UK: MIU Press, 2013).
• Muhammad Z. Siddiqi (ed. Abd al-Hakim Murad), Ḥadīth Literature: Its Origin, Development and Special Features (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
• ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Walī Allāh al-Dihlawī (trans. Akram Nadwi & Aisha Bewley), The Garden of the Ḥadīth Scholars: Bustān al-Muḥaddiṯīn, 2nd ed. (London, UK: Turath Publishing, 2018).
• Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971).
• Alfred Guillaume, The Traditions of Islam: An Introduction to the Study of the Hadith Literature (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1924).
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• John Burton, An Introduction to the Ḥadīth (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1994).
• Aisha Y. Musa, “Ḥadīth Studies”, in Clinton Bennett (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013).

[@33:46] “Duplicates and Versions”

Muḥammad b. ʾAḥmad al-Ḏahabī (ed. Šuʿayb al-ʾArnaʾūṭ et al.), Siyar ʾAʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, vol. 11, 2nd ed. (Beirut, Lebanon: Muʾassasat al-Risālah, 1982), p. 187:

“And [it was transmitted] from ʾAḥmad al-Dawraqī, from ʾAbū ʿAbd Allāh [ʾAḥmad b. Ḥanbal], who said: ‘We used to write down Hadith from six or seven paths of transmission without our grasping it, so how can someone who writes it down from [only] a single path of transmission grasp it?!’

ʿAbd Allāh b. ʾAḥmad said: ‘ʾAbū Zurʿah said to me: “Your father memorised 1,000,000 hadiths.” Then it was said to him: “And what do you know?” He said: “I studied with him, then I learned it from him, topic-by-topic.”’

This is a sound report concerning the extent of ʾAbū ʿAbd Allāh [ʾAḥmad b. Ḥanbal]’s knowledge. However, they [included in their] counting thereof repetitions, and [Companion] reports, and the legal opinions of the Follower[s], and what was explained [by later figures], and [other things] like that. By contrast, texts that are solidly attributed to the Prophet do not exceed 10,000 of the [total count].”

[@39:05] PART 3: The Traditional Narrative(s) of the Origins and Development of Hadith

[@40:07] PART 3.1a: Sunnī Narratives – Part 1: Šāfiʿī-Ḥanbalī

For some traditional Sunnī—and Sunnī traditionalist—accounts of the history of Hadith up until the emergence of the Sunnī Hadith canon, see:

• Muhammad Z. Siddiqi (ed. Abd al-Hakim Murad), Ḥadīth Literature: Its Origin, Development and Special Features (Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1993 [originally published in 1961]).
• Muhammad M. Azami, Studies in Early Ḥadīth Literature, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, USA: American Trust Publications, 1978 [originally published in 1968]),
• Muhammad M. al-Azami, Studies in Ḥadīth Methodology and Literature, revised ed. (Indianapolis, USA: American Trust Publications, 1977).
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2018), ch. 2.
• Scott C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Ḥadīth Literature, and the Articulation of Sunnī Islam: The Legacy of the Generation of Ibn Saʿd, Ibn Maʿīn, and Ibn Ḥanbal (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2004). [Note: Lucas is not himself a Sunnī, but here summarises Sunnī narratives.]

[@48:00] “The Followers of the Followers”

For the “big six” and those who came after them, see ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī (ed. Muḥammad Muṣṭafá al-ʾAʿẓamī), al-ʿIlal, 2nd ed. (Beirut, Lebanon: al-Maktab al-ʾIslāmiyy, n. d.), pp. 36-40:

“I looked [at the Hadith corpus], and lo! [I discovered that] the isnad revolves around six [people]:

Of the People of Madinah:

[1.1] Ibn Šihāb, who is Muḥammad b. Muslim b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Šihāb, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Bakr. He died in the year 124 [i.e., 741-742 CE].

And of the People of Makkah:

[1.2] ʿAmr b. Dīnār, a client of the Jumaḥ, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Muḥammad. He died in the year 126 [i.e., 743-744 CE].

And of the People of Basrah:

[1.3] Qatādah b. Diʿāmah al-Sadūsī, whose teknonym was ʾAbū al-Ḵaṭṭāb. He died in the year 117 [i.e., 735 CE].

[1.4] And Yaḥyá b. ʾabī Kaṯīr, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Naṣr. He died in the year 132 [i.e., 749-750], in [the central Arabian region of] al-Yamāmah.

And of the People of Kufah:

[1.5] ʾAbū ʾIsḥāq, whose name was ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUbayd, and who died in the year 129 [i.e., 746-747 CE].

[1.6] And Sulaymān b. Mihrān [al-ʾAʿmaš], a client of the Banū Kāhil of the Banū ʾAsad, whose teknonym ʾAbū Muḥammad. He died in the year 148 [i.e., 765-766 CE], and he good [in terms of looks or character] (jamīl).

Then the knowledge of these six passed to authors who composed systematic written collections (ʾaṣḥāb al-ʾaṣnāf mimman ṣannafa):

Of the People of Madinah:

[2.1] Mālik b. ʾAnas b. ʾabī ʿĀmir al-ʾAṣbaḥī, who is counted amongst the Banū Taym Allāh. He died in the year 179 [i.e., 795 CE]. He heard from Ibn Šihāb.

[2.2] And Muḥammad b. ʾIsḥāq b. Yasār, a client of the Banū Maḵramah, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Bakr. He died in the year [1]52 [i.e., 769 CE]. He heard from Ibn Šihāb and al-ʾAʿmaš.

And of the People of Makkah:

[2.3] ʿAbd al-Malik b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Jurayj, a client of the Qurayš, whose teknonym was ʾAbū al-Walīd. He died in the year 151 [i.e., 768 CE].

[2.4] And Sufyān b. ʿUyaynah b. Maymūn, a client of Muḥammad b. Muzāḥim, the brother of brother of al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. Muzāḥim al-Hilālī, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Muḥammad. He died in the year 198 [i.e., 813-814 CE]. Sufyān met Ibn Šihāb, ʿAmr b. Dīnār, ʾAbū ʾIsḥāq, and al-ʾAʿmaš.

And amongst the People of Basrah:

[2.5] Saʿīd b. ʾabī ʿArūbah, a client of the Banū ʿAdī b. Yaškur. He was Saʿīd b. Mihrān, and his teknonym was ʾAbū al-Naḍr. He died in the year [15]8 or 159 [i.e., 774-776 CE].

[2.6] And Ḥammād b. Salamah. I believe that he was a client of the Banū Sulaymān. His teknonym was ʾAbū Salamah. He died in the year 168 [i.e., 784-785 CE].

[2.7] And ʾAbū ʿAwānah, whose name was al-Waḍḍāḥ; a client of Yazīd b. ʿAṭāʾ al-Wāsiṭī. He died in the year 175 [i.e., 791-792 CE].

[2.8] And Šuʿbah b. al-Ḥajjāj, ʾAbū Bisṭām, a client of the ʾAšāfir. He died in the year 160 [i.e., 776-777 CE].

[2.9] And Maʿmar b. Rāšid, whose teknonym was ʾAbū ʿUrwah; a client of al-Ḥuddānī. He died in Yemen in the year 154 [i.e., 770-771 CE]. He heard from Ibn Šihāb, ʿAmr b. Dīnār, and Qatādah; and from Yaḥyá b. ʾabī Kaṯīr; and from ʾAbū ʾIsḥāq.

And from the People of Kufah:

[2.10] Sufyān b. Saʿīd al-Ṯawrī, whose teknonym was ʾAbū ʿAbd Allāh, and who died in the year 161 [i.e., 777-778 CE].

And from the People of Syria:

[2.11] ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAmr al-ʾAwzāʿī, whose teknonym was ʾAbū ʿAmr. He died in the year 151 [i.e., 768 CE].

And from the People of Wāsiṭ:

[2.12] Hušaym b. Bašīr, a client of the Banū Sulaym, whose teknonym was ʾAbū Muʿāwiyah. He died in the year 183 [i.e., 799-800 CE]. ʾIbrāhīm al-Harawī related to us: ‘Hušaym b. Bašīr [b.] al-Qāsim b. Dīnār, a client of Ḵuzaymah b. Ḵāzim, related to us; [he was] the Commander of Believers who are Hadith scholars; his teknonym was ʾAbū Muʿāwiyah.’

Then the knowledge of these three [i.e., Sufyan al-Ṯawrī, al-ʾAwzāʿī, and Hušaym] ended up amongst the People of Basrah, and the knowledge of [all] twelve [i.e., Mālik, Ibn ʾIsḥāq, Ibn Jurayj, Sufyān b. ʿUyaynah, Ibn ʾabī ʿArūbah, Ḥammād, ʾAbū ʿAwānah, Šuʿbah, Maʿmar, Sufyan al-Ṯawrī, al-ʾAwzāʿī, and Hušaym] made its way to six [people], to:

[3.1] Yaḥyá b. Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān [of Basrah], whose teknonym was ʾAbū Saʿīd; he was a client of the Banū Taym, and he died in the year 198 [i.e., 813 CE], during [the month of] Ṣafar.

[3.2] And Yaḥyá b. Zakariyyāʾ b. ʾabī Zāʾidah [of Kufah], whose teknonym was ʾAbū Saʿīd; a client of the Hamdān; he died in the year 182 [i.e., 798-799 CE].

[3.3] And Wakīʿ b. al-Jarrāḥ b. Mulayḥ b. ʿAdī b. Faras [of Kufah], whose teknonym was ʾAbū Sufyān. He died in the year 199 [i.e., 814-815 CE].

[It also passed] to:

[3.4] ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Mubārak [of Marw], who was a Ḥanẓalī, and whose teknonym was ʾAbū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān; he died in the year 181 [i.e., 797-798 CE], in [the Iraqi city of] Hīt.

[3.5] And ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Mahdī al-ʾAsadī [of Basrah], whose teknonym was ʾAbū Saʿīd. He died in the year 198 [i.e., 813-814 CE].

[3.6] And Yaḥyá b. ʾÂdam [of Kufah], whose teknonym was ʾAbū Zakariyyāʾ. He was a client of Ḵālid b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʾUsayd, in my opinion. He died in the year 203 [i.e., 818-819 CE].”

[@49:08] “The Abbasid-Era Literary Boom”

For some traditional accounts of the rise of Prophetical biography, see:

• Muḥammad b. Saʿd al-Baṣrī (ed. Ziyād Muḥammad Manṣūr), al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrá: al-Qism al-Mutammim li-Tābiʿī ʾAhl al-Madīnah wa-man baʿda-hum, 2nd ed. (Madinah, KSA: Maktabat al-ʿUlūm wa-al-Ḥikam, 1987), p. 401.
• ʾAḥmad b. ʾabī Yaʿqūb al-Yaʿqūbī (ed. Maḍyūf al-Farrā), Kitāb Mušākalat al-Nās li-Zamāni-him wa-mā yaḡlibu ʿalay-him fī kull ʿaṣr, in Majallat Markaz al-Buḥūṯ al-Tarbawiyyah (Doha, Qatar: University of Qatar, 1993), p. 204.
• al-Zubayr b. Bakkār (ed. Sāmī Makkī al-ʿĀnī), al-ʾAḵbār al-Muwaffaqiyyāt (Beirut, Lebanon: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1996), pp. 124-125
• ʿAbd-al-ʿAzīz ad-Dūrī (trans. Lawrence I. Conrad), The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 1.
• Ṭaha ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Saʿd, “al-Ruwwād min Kuttāb al-Sīrah”, in ʿAbd al-Malik b. Hisam (ed. Ṭaha ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Saʿd), al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah, vol. 1 (Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Jīl, n. d.), pp. 23 ff.

On the first systematic written collections, see Ḏahabī, Taʾrīḵ, IX, p. 13:

“And in this time [i.e., the year 143/760-761], the scholars of Islam commenced the writing down of Hadith, jurisprudence, and [Quranic] exegesis. Thus, Ibn Jurayj composed works in Makkah; and Saʿīd b. ʾabī ʿArūbah, Ḥammād b. Salamah, and others composed in Basrah; and al-ʾAwzāʿī composed in Syria; and Mālik composed the Muwaṭṭaʾ in Madinah, [whilst] Ibn ʾIsḥāq composed the Maḡāzī; and Maʿmar composed in Yemen; and ʾAbū Ḥanīfah and others composed [works of] jurisprudence and legal opinion in Kufah, [whilst] Sufyān al-Ṯawrī composed the Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ. Following after this, Hušaym composed his books; and al-Layṯ composed in Egypt, as did Ibn Lahīʿah. Thereafter, Ibn al-Mubārak, ʾAbū Yūsuf, and Ibn Wahb. The writing down and division of knowledge proliferated, and books of Arabic, linguistics, general history, and pre-Islamic Arabian history were written. Before this time, most scholars spoke from memory or transmitted knowledge based on accurate but disorganised notes. Then—praise be to God—it became easy to grasp hold of knowledge, and memorisation began to diminish. This matter is entirely God’s [prerogative].”

[@51:22] On the rise of travelling in search of knowledge/Hadith, see: Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 66 ff., and the citations therein.

• Regarding Maʿmar b. Rāšid (Basro-Yemeni; d. 152-154/769-771), see: ʾAḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Ḵaṭīb al-Baḡdādī (ed. Nūr al-Dīn ʿItr), al-Riḥlah fī Ṭalab al-Ḥadīṯ (Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 1975), p. 94: “‘He travelled in [search of] Hadith to Yemen. He was the first of those who travelled [for Hadith].’ Then ʾAbū Jaʿfar said to him: ‘And [he also went to] Syria?’ Then he said: ‘No, [to] al-Jazīrah [i.e., Northern Mesopotamia].’”
• Regarding ʿUṯmān b. ʿAtīq (Egyptian; d. 180-184/790s), see: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʾAḥmad b. Yūnus al-Miṣrī, Taʾrīḵ Ibn Yūnus al-Miṣriyy, vol. 1 (Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 1421 AH), p. 339: “And he was the first of those [Egyptians] who travelled to Iraq in search of knowledge and Hadith.”

[@53:55] “The Rise of the People of Hadith”

For more on the People of Hadith, see:

• Ignáz Goldziher (trans. Wolfgang Behn), The Ẓāhirīs: Their Doctrine and Their History: A Contribution to the History of Islamic Theology (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1971), chs. 1-2.
• Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971), passim, esp. ch. 2.
• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), passim, e.g., pp. 16 (incl. n. 1), 53 ff., 66-67, 128 ff., 253 ff.
• Joseph F. Schacht, “Ahl al-Ḥadīth”, in Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Johannes H. Kramers, Évariste Lévi-Provençal, Joseph F. Schacht, Bernard Lewis, & Charles Pellat (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume 1: A-B (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1960), pp. 258-259.
• Joseph F. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 6.
• Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1997), passim, e.g., ch. 1.
• Christipher Melchert, “Traditionist-Jurisprudents and the Framing of Islamic Law”, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2001), pp. 383-406.
• Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), ch. 11.
• Christopher Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2006), pp. 59-66.

[@56:00] “The Rise of Hadith Criticism”

For early Sunnī Hadith criticism, see the following articles, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “A Summary of Early Sunni Hadith Criticism”, Islamic Origins blog (15^th/Nov/2022): https://islamicorigins.com/a-summary-of-early-sunni-hadith-criticism/
• Joshua J. Little, “The Genealogy of Early Sunni Hadith Criticism”, Islamic Origins blog (2^nd/Dec/2022): https://islamicorigins.com/the-genealogy-of-early-sunni-hadith-criticism/
• Joshua J. Little, “The Origins of Early Sunni Hadith Criticism, Part 1: The Traditional Narratives”, Islamic Origins blog (12^th/Dec/2022): https://islamicorigins.com/the-origins-of-early-sunni-hadith-criticism-part-1-the-traditional-narratives/

[@59:50] “The Rise of Prophetical Collections”

[@1:01:25] “The Sunnī Hadith Canon”

For the development of the Sunnī Hadith literature and canon, see:

• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 21 ff.
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2018), pp. 26 ff.
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007).
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, “The Canonization of Ibn Mâjah: Authenticity vs. Utility in the Formation of the Sunni Ḥadîth Canon”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, No. 129 (2011), pp. 169-181.
• Aisha Y. Musa, “Ḥadīth Studies”, in Clinton Bennett (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Islamic Studies (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), pp. 79 ff.
• ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Walī Allāh al-Dihlawī (trans. Akram Nadwi & Aisha Bewley), The Garden of the Ḥadīth Scholars: Bustān al-Muḥaddiṯīn, 2nd ed. (London, UK: Turath Publishing, 2018).

[@1:05:01] PART 3.1b: Sunnī Narratives – Part 2: Ḥanafī-Mālikī

[@1:05:42] “Introduction to the regional traditions”

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAmr al-ʾAwzāʿī (Syrian; d. 151/768 or 156-157/772-774), cited in ʾAḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī (ed. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Turkī), al-Sunan al-Kubrá, vol. 21 (Cairo, Egypt: Dār al-Hajar, 2011), p. 99:

“Rejected [are the following]: amongst the doctrines of the People of Makkah, [their views on] temporary marriage (al-muʿtah) and the sale of currency (al-ṣarf); amongst the doctrines of the People of Madinah, [their views on] listening [to music] (al-samāʿ) and [the permissibility of] anal sex with women (ʾityān al-nisāʾ fī ʾadbāri-hinna); amongst the doctrines of the People of Syria, [their views on] determinism (al-jabr) and obedience [to tyrants] (al-ṭāʿah); and amongst the doctrines of the People of Kufah, [the permissibility of alcoholic] date wine (al-nabīḏ) and [their view on] the pre-dawn meal [during Ramadan] (al-saḥūr).”

For various discussions on regionalism in early Hadith, including the early regional schools or traditions of Islamic jurisprudence, see:

• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), passim.
• Joseph F. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 6.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 39 ff., 71.
• Patricia Crone, “Jāhilī and Jewish law: the qasāma”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 4 (1984), pp. 153-201.
• Michael A. Cook, “Magian Cheese: An Archaic Problem in Islamic Law”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (1984), pp. 449-467, esp. 461.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 2.
• Harald Motzki (trans. Marion H. Katz), The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2002), passim.
• Michael A. Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in early Islam”, Arabica, Tome 44, Issue 4 (1997), pp. 437-530.
• Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1997), passim.
• Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), pp. 10-11, 18, 214 ff.
• Ulrike Mitter, “Origin and Development of the Islamic Patronate”, in Monique Bernards & John Nawas (eds.), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2005), pp. 81-82.
• Behnam Sadeghi, “The Traveling Tradition Test: A Method for Dating Traditions”, Der Islam, Vol. 85, Issue 1 (2008), pp. 203-242.
• Najam I. Haider, “The Geography of the Isnād: Possibilities for the Reconstruction of Local Ritual Practice in the 2nd/8th Century”, Der Islam, Vol. 90, Issue 2 (2013), 306-346.
• Christopher Melchert, “Basra and Kufa as the Earliest Centers of Islamic Legal Controversy”, in Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein, & Robert G. Hoyland (eds.), Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2015), pp. 173-194.
• Sohail Hanif, “A Tale of Two Kufans: Abū Yūsuf’s Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā and Schacht’s Ancient Schools”, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 25, Issue 3 (2018), pp. 173-211.
• Sohail Hanif, “Al-Ḥadīth al-Mashhūr: A Ḥanafī Reference to Kufan Practice?”, in Sohaira Z. M. Siddiqui, Locating the Sharīʿa: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2019), pp. 89-110.
• Christopher Melchert, “Sufyān al-Thawrī and the Kufans”, Journal of Abbasid Studies, Vol. 9 (2022), 183-209.
• Joshua J. Little, “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), pp. 145-178, esp. 155 ff. [available here].
• al-Dodomi, “Proving the Authenticity of Imami Law: A Case Study”, Shiitic Studies blog (5^th/Nov/2024): https://shiiticstudies.com/2024/11/05/proving-the-authenticity-of-imami-law-a-case-study/

• On the notion of early regional schools of jurisprudence, cf. Nimrod Hurvitz, “Schools of Law and Historical Context: Re-examining the Formation of the Ḥanbalī madhhab,” Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 7 (2000), pp. 37-64, and Wael B. Hallaq, “From Regional to Personal Schools of Law? A Reevaluation”, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 8 (2001), pp. 1-26; but cf. in turn Melchert and Hanif, cited above. See also Schacht, Introduction, p. 28, for certain caveats regarding his use of a term like “school” in this context.
• On the notion of early regional schools of history, cf. Albrecht Noth & Lawrence I. Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-critical Study, 2nd ed. (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994), pp. 4 ff., and Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 10-11, 13; but cf. in turn Donner, cited above.
• For the early Madinan biographical tradition in particular, see: Gregor Schoeler (ed. James E. Montgomery & trans. Uwe Vagelpohl), The Biography of Muḥammad: Nature and Authenticity (New York, USA: Routledge, 2011), ch. 1.

[@1:19:31] The Eclipse of Regionalism

See variously:

• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), e.g., pp. 75-76.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 2, esp. p. 25.
• Joshua J. Little, “Introduction to Hadith”, Bottled Petrichor (24^th/March/2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P83dlFSgSG0 [@48:18].
• See also Richard Bulliet, “Turning Point in Middle East History” (7^th/April/2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZUiijOP1c [@34:28]: “One of the striking things about the collections of [sound Prophetical] Hadith was that they were organized so that you could not tell where they were collected from. If you did a careful study of isnads, you might be able to deduce something; but ordinarily you simply learn the content. One of the reasons to have them lose any geographical specificity was to defeat the idea that Islam in Iran was different from Islam in Iraq; or that Islam in one city in Iran was different from Islam in some other city in Iran. In other words, in the initial expansion of Islam, you had a great deal of localism, and the growth of a normativized form of Islam had as one of its objectives to destroy vestiges of that localism and to project, in historical writings, essentially, a myth saying that Islam was always one thing that has been basic and unchanging.”
  • However, against Bulliet, cf. Eerik Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite Ḥadīth Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (240/854-327/938) (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), ch. 1, for a kind of reverse way of seeing this process.

[@1:20:49] PART 3.2: Šīʿī Narratives

For Šīʿī Hadith, see:

• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 20-21.
• Hossein Modarressi, Tradition and Survival: A Bibliographical Survey of Early Shīʿite Literature, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2003).
• Andrew J. Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shīʿism: Ḥadīth as Discourse Between Qum and Baghdad (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010), although cf. anon., “Did al-Kulayni get influenced by the Rationalists of Baghdad?”, Al-Hadith Journal blog (n. d.): https://sites.google.com/site/hadithjournal/general/did-al-kulayni-get-influenced-by-the-rationalists-of-baghdad
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2018), ch. 4.
• Najam I. Haider, “The Geography of the Isnād: Possibilities for the Reconstruction of Local Ritual Practice in the 2nd/8th Century”, Der Islam, Vol. 90, Issue 2 (2013), 306-346.

[@1:29:22] PART 3.3: The ʾIbāḍī Narrative

For ʾIbāḍī Hadith, see:

• John C. Wilkinson, “Ibāḍī Ḥadīth: An Essay on Normalization”, Geschichte und Kultur des Islamischen Orients, Vol. 62 (1985), pp. 231-259.
• Martin Custers, Al-Ibāḍiyya: A Bibliography, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 2015).
• Ersilia Francesca, “The Concept of sunna in the Ibāḍī School”, in Adis Duderija (ed.), The Sunna and Its Status in Islamic Law: The Search for a Sound Hadith (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 97-115.
• Adam Gaiser, “Ballaghanā ʿan an-Nabī: Early Basran and Omani Ibāḍī understandings of sunna and siyar, āthār and nasab”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 83, No. 3 (2020), pp. 437-448.

[@1:31:56] PART 3.4: Rationalist Perspectives

For early Islamic rationalism and Hadith, see:

• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), passim, esp. pp. 40 ff., 88, 128, 259 ff.
• Josef van Ess, “L’autorité de la tradition prophétique dans la théologie muʿtazilite”, in George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, & Janine Sourdel-Thomine (organisers), La notion d’autorité au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982), pp. 213 ff.
• Michael A. Cook, “ʿAnan and Islam: The Origins of Karaite Scripturalism”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 9 (1987), pp. 166-169.
• Josef van Ess (trans. John O’Kane & Gwendolin Goldbloom), Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra: A History of Religious Thought in Early Islam, 3 vols. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2017-2018), passim, e.g., II, pp. 461 ff, and III, pp. 415 ff.
• Eerik Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite Ḥadīth Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abī Ḥātim al-Rāzī (240/854-327/938) (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), ch. 1.
• Christopher Melchert, “The Imāmīs between Rationalism and Traditionalism”, in Lynda Clarke (ed.), Shīʿite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions (Binghamton, USA: Global Publications, 2001), pp. 273-283.
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2018), ch. 3.
• Racha el-Omari, “Accommodation and Resistance: Classical Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 71, No. 2 (2012), pp. 231-256.
• Sean W. Anthony, “Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh. By Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr al-Ghaṭafānī”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 76, No. 1 (2017), pp. 199-203.
• Christopher Melchert, “The Theory and Practice of Hadith Criticism in the Mid-Ninth Century”, in Petra M. Sijpesteijn & Camilla Adang (eds.), Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2020), pp. 74-102.

[@1:39:00] THE ORIGINS OF HADITH, PART 2: CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND ALTERNATIVE MODELS

[@1:39:24] PART 1: Critical Scholarship

For some histories of secular, critical scholarship on Hadith and early Islamic history more broadly, see:

• Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, Mohammedanism: Lectures on Its Origin, Its Religious and Political Growth, and Its Present State (New York, USA: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), pp. 19 ff.
• Arthur Jeffery, “The Quest of the Historical Mohammed”, The Moslem World, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1926), pp. 327-348.
• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 1.
• Harald Motzki (trans. Marion H. Katz), The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2002), ch. 1.
• Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), intro.
• Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), ch. 2.
• Harald Motzki, “Introduction”, in Harald Motzki (ed.), Ḥadīth: Origins and Development (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 2004), pp. xiii-lxiii.
• Harald Motzki, “Dating Muslim Traditions: A Survey”, Arabica, Vol. 52, Issue 2 (2005), pp. 204-253.
• Robert G. Hoyland, “Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions”, History Compass, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007), pp. 581-602.
• Stephen J. Shoemaker, “In Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra: Some Methodological Issues in the Quest for “Authenticity” in the Life of Muḥammad”, Der Islam, Vol. 85 (2011), pp. 257-344.
• Pavel Pavlovitch, The Formation of the Islamic Understanding of Kalāla in the Second Century AH (718–816 CE): Between Scripture and Canon (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2015), pp. 22 ff.
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023), ch. 1: https://islamicorigins.com/the-unabridged-version-of-my-phd-thesis/

[@1:49:36] PART 2: Problems with Hadith

For various summaries of problems with Hadith, see:

• Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971), passim.
• William M. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1953), intro.
• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 1.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 2.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 9.
• Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), intro.
• Francis E. Peters, “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3. (1991), pp. 291-315.
• Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), ch. 2.
• Robert G. Hoyland, “Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions”, History Compass, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007), pp. 581-602.
• Stephen J. Shoemaker, “In Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra: Some Methodological Issues in the Quest for “Authenticity” in the Life of Muḥammad”, Der Islam, Vol. 85 (2011), pp. 257-344.
• Joshua J. Little, “Patricia Crone and the ‘Secular Tradition’ of Early Islamic Historiography: An Exegesis”, History Compass, Vol. 20, Issue 9 (2022), e12747: http://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12747
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023), ch. 1: https://islamicorigins.com/the-unabridged-version-of-my-phd-thesis/
• Joshua J. Little, “Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith”, Islamic Origins blog (17^th/August/2023): https://islamicorigins.com/explaining-contradictions-in-exegetical-hadith/
• Joshua J. Little, “Oxford Scholar Dr. Joshua Little Gives 21 REASONS Why Historians are SKEPTICAL of Hadith”, The Impactful Scholar (29^th/Jan/2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4vMUUxhag
• Joshua J. Little, “Did Muhammad Exist?: An Academic Response to a Popular Question”, Sképsislamica (28^th/Oct/2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm9QU5uB3To

[@1:49:52] #1: Prior probability of mass-fabrication

• For the ubiquity of false ascription in early pagan, Jewish, and Christian contexts, see Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), pp. 214 ff.
• For the application of this prior probability to an Islamic context (specifically, early Islamic epistles), see Michael A. Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-critical Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 51.
• See also Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], p. 22.

[@1:50:22] #2: Reports of mass-fabrication

• See the references cited in Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], p. 77, n. 267, along with the examples cited at pp. 68 ff., 77 ff.

[@1:51:01] #3: Lateness of extant sources

For some discussions of the lateness of the sources, see:

• Aloys Sprenger, The Life of Mohammad from Original Sources (Allahabad, India: Printed at the Presbyterian Mission Press under Joseph Warren, 1851), pp. 66-68.
• Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 61-63.
• Gerald R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 7-8.
• Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2020), p. 7.

[@1:51:19] #4: Bias

For some discussions of bias in a Hadith context, see:

• Aloys Sprenger, The Life of Mohammad from Original Sources (Allahabad, India: Printed at the Presbyterian Mission Press under Joseph Warren, 1851), p. 68.
• William M. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. xiii-xvi.
• Dale F. Eickelman, “Musaylima: An Approach to the Social Anthropology of Seventh Century Arabia”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1967), pp. 19-21.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 230.

[@1:52:15] #5: Propaganda

• In general, see Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971), passim; and Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), ch. 1.
• For some examples of broadly pro-Islamic propaganda in particular, see Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The life of Muḥammad as viewed by the early Muslims: A Textual Analysis (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1995).
• For some examples of political and sectarian propaganda, see Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 212, n. 96.
• For some examples of tribal propaganda in particular, see Ehsan Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore: A Literary Approach to the Sīra’s Narratives of Political Assassinations”, Der Islam, Vol. 98, Issue 2 (2021), pp. 425-472; Ehsan Roohi, “A Form-Critical Analysis of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Stories: Tribal, Ideological, and Legal Incentives behind the Transmission of the Prophet’s Biography”, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, Vol. 30 (2022), pp. 267-338.

[@1:53:05] #6: Anachronisms

For some examples and comments thereon, see:

• Albrecht Noth & Lawrence I. Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-critical Study, 2nd ed. (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994), pp. 12, 56-57, 72, 79-80, 84.
• Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), ch. 1.
• Jonathan A. C. Brown, “How We Know Early Ḥadīth Critics Did Matn Criticism and Why It’s So Hard to Find”, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 15 (2008), p. 182 (though cf. Brown’s more recent statements, e.g., here).
• Compare also the significance attributed to pre-Islamic Makkah in the later Islamic tradition with Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 134-137.
• For a more contentious example, regarding the belated rise of “Muslim” and “Islam” as primary terms of religious self-designation, see Patricia Crone & Michael A. Cook, Hagarism: The making of the Islamic world (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 8-9; Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2010), passim; Ilkka Lindstedt, “Muhājirūn as a Name for the First/Seventh Century Muslims”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2015), pp. 67-73; Fred M. Donner, “Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire”, al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, Vol. 23 (2015), p. 137; Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ch. 4; Ilkka Lindstedt, “The Makings of Early Islamic Identity”, Freedom to Think! HCAS blog (9^th/October/2019): https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hcasblog/2019/10/09/the-makings-of-early-islamic-identity/

[@1:53:17] #7: Miracles / supernatural

• There is no dedicated study of miracles in Hadith per se, but numerous examples are cited in Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The life of Muḥammad as viewed by the early Muslims: A Textual Analysis (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1995). Also see Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), pp. 70, 287-288, 452-453, 483-484, 496, 649-650; the Bāb ʿAlamāt al-Nubuwwah fī al-ʾIslām within the Kitāb al-Manāqib of al-Buḵārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ; the Bāb fī Muʿjizāt al-Nabiyy within the Kitāb al-Faḍāʾil of Muslim’s Ṣaḥīḥ; and so on.
• For the extreme improbability of supernatural occurrences as the explanation for reports of supernatural occurrences, see Richard C. Carrier, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2012), 114 ff.; Arif Ahmed, “Hume and the Independent Witnesses”, Mind, Vol. 124, Issue 496 (2015), 1013-1044; id. & Richard C. Carrier, “Miracles: Atheism”, in Joseph W. Koterski & Graham Oppy (eds.), Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy (Farmington Hills, USA: Macmillan Reference USA, 2019), 211-226.

[@1:53:22] #8: Implausible scenarios

For some examples, see:

• Robert B. Serjeant, “Early Arabic Prose”, Alfred F. L. Beeston, Thomas M. Johnstone, John D. Latham, Robert B. Serjeant, & Gerald R. Smith (eds.), Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 141.
• Christopher Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2006), p. 27.
• Christian Cannuyer, “Mariya, la concubine copte de Mohammed: réalité ou mythe?”, Solidarité-Orient, Bulletin 253 (2010), pp. 18-25, esp. 20-22.
• Ehsan Roohi, “The Murder of the Jewish Chieftain Ka‘b b. al-Ashraf: A Re-examination”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 31, Issue 1 (2021), pp. 103-124.
• For similar problems in the New Testament, see Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), pp. 31, 329, 363, 370, 381, 394, 411, 414, 435.

[@1:53:45] #9: Internal contradictions

For various contradictions across the Hadith corpus, see the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], p. 22, n. 57.
• Joshua J. Little, “Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith”, Islamic Origins blog (17^th/August/2023): https://islamicorigins.com/explaining-contradictions-in-exegetical-hadith/
• Joshua J. Little, “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), pp. 170-171 [available here].

[@1:54:33] #10: External contradictions

For miscellaneous examples of contradictions between later Islamic reports, on the one hand, and earlier non-Muslim sources, Arabian inscriptions, etc., see:

• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 18, 188.
• Patricia Crone & Michael A. Cook, Hagarism: The making of the Islamic world (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), part I (including the endnotes), although cf. Neal Robinson, Discovering the Qurʾan: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text, 2nd ed. (London, UK: SCM Press, 2003), ch. 3, for an attempt to explain some of these away.
• Patricia Crone, “K̲h̲ālid b. al-Walīd”, in Emeri J. van Donzel, Bernard Lewis, Charles Pellat, & Clifford E. Bosworth (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume 4: Iran-Kha (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1978), p. 929.

• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 15-16, 203-204 (n. 30), 214 (n. 103).
• Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 73-76.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 198, n. 131.
• Lawrence I. Conrad, “Abraha and Muḥammad: Some Observations Apropos of Chronology and Literary “topoi” in the Early Arabic Historical Tradition”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (1987), pp. 225-240.
• Patricia Crone, “Muhammad and the origins of Islam. By F. E. Peters”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (1995), p. 272.
• Clifford E. Bosworth, in Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (trans. Clifford E. Bosworth), The History of al-Ṭabarī, Volume 5: The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen (Albany, USA: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 229-230, n. 563.
• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 209-211.
• James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 380-383, 386.
• Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian–Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (London, UK: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2008), pp. 168-170, although cf. Touraj Daryaee, “The Fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Arab Muslims”, Journal of Persianate Studies, Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 248-249.
• Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki, & Gregor Schoeler, “First Century Sources for the Life of Muḥammad? A Debate”, Der Islam, Vol. 89, No. 2 (2012), p. 3.
• Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), passim.
• Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 38-39.
• Ilkka Lindstedt, “Muhājirūn as a Name for the First/Seventh Century Muslims”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2015), pp. 67-73.
• Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 43-45, 55-56 (n. 26).
• Ilkka Lindstedt, “The Makings of Early Islamic Identity”, Freedom to Think! HCAS blog (9^th/October/2019): https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hcasblog/2019/10/09/the-makings-of-early-islamic-identity/
• Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2020), ch. 2.
• Stephen J. Shoemaker, A Prophet has appeared: The rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish eyes (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2021), passim.
• Christian J. Robin, “The Judaism of the Ancient Kingdom of Ḥimyar in Arabia: A Discreet Conversion”, in Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, & Daniel S. B. Ezra (eds.), Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 166.
• See also the forthcoming work of Ahmad al-Jallad—e.g., with Hythem Sidky, “A Paleo-Arabic inscription on a route north of Ṭāʾif”, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Vol. 33 (2022), pp. 202-215.

[@1:54:45] #11: Implausible transmission

• E.g., Harald Motzki, Reconstruction of a Source of Ibn Isḥāq’s Life of the Prophet and Early Qurʾān Exegesis: A Study of Early Ibn ʿAbbās Traditions (Piscataway, USA: Gorgias Press, 2017), pp. 124 ff.
• For another example, involving an omniscient narrator who somehow has access to each character’s intentions, experiences, and conversations, jumping from one character to the next, see: Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 354 ff.

[@1:55:28] #12: Lateness of isnads

• See the references cited in Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], p. 141, and id., “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), pp. 166-167 [available here].
• See also Elon Harvey, “When did transmitters start asking about isnāds?”, Elon Harvey blog (last updated: April/2023): https://sites.google.com/site/elonharvey/random-musings/isnad-mukhtar?authuser=0

[@1:56:40] #13: Inconsistency with archaic Sunnah

For the debate over the development of sunnah and archaic notions of sunnah, and the inconsistency of Hadith therewith, see:

• Ignaz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971), ch. 1.
• David S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of Mohammedanism: Lectures delivered in the University of London, May and June, 1913 (London, UK: Williams & Norgate, 1914), ch. 5.
• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), part 1, ch. 7.
• Fazlur Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History (Islamabad, Pakistan: Islamic Research Institute, 1965).
• Muhammad M. Azami, Studies in Early Ḥadīth Literature, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, USA: American Trust Publications, 1978), ch. 7.
• Meïr M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam: Studies in Ancient Arab Concepts (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1972), ch. 3.
• Zafar Ishaq Ansari, “Islamic Juristic Terminology before Šāfiʿī: A Semantic Analysis with Special Reference to Kūfa”, Arabica, Tome 19, Fasc. 3 (1972), pp. 255-300, esp. 259 ff.
• Muhammad M. Azami, Studies in Ḥadīth Methodology and Literature (Indianapolis, USA: American Trust Publications, 1977), pp. 3 ff.
• Michael A. Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-critical Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim, esp. ch. 3.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 1.
• Muhammad M. Azami, On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammad Jurisprudence (Lahore, Pakistan: Suhail Academy, 2004), part 2.
• Patricia Crone & Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious authority in the first centuries of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 5.

• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “Some new ideas on the development of sunna as a technical term in early Islam”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 10 (1987), pp. 98-118.
• Harald Motzki (trans. Marion H. Katz), The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2002), pp. 126-127.
• Adis Duderija (ed.), The Sunna and Its Status in Islamic Law: The Search for a Sound Hadith (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
• Steven C. Judd, ‘Abd al-Rahman b. ‘Amr al-Awza’i (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Academic, 2019), pp. 70-71, 85.
• Adam Gaiser, “Ballaghanā ʿan an-Nabī: Early Basran and Omani Ibāḍī understandings of sunna and siyar, āthār and nasab”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 83, No. 3 (2020), pp. 437-448.
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 23-24, 27 ff., 37-38.

Priority should be given in the foregoing to Crone & Hinds, since their analysis actually explains all the evidence and does so with recourse to the Criterion of Dissimilarity and a parsimonious evolutionary model. The more recent research on early Ibadism serves as striking confirmation therefor.

[@2:01:24] #14: Initial absence; belated appearance; numerical growth

For more on the initial absence, belated appearance, and numerical growth of Hadith in general and Prophetical Hadith in particular, see variously:

• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), passim, esp. part II.
• Michael A. Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-critical Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim, esp. ch. 3.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 1.
• Patricia Crone & Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious authority in the first centuries of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 5.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 33.
• Herbert Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās in ʿAbbāsid-Era Tafsīr”, in James E. Montgomery (ed.), ʿAbbasid Studies: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishers & Department of Oriental Studies, 2004), pp. 135, 139.
• Claude Gilliot, “ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbbās”, in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, & Everett Rowson (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, online edition).
• Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 137.
• Harald Motzki, Reconstruction of a Source of Ibn Isḥāq’s Life of the Prophet and Early Qurʾān Exegesis: A Study of Early Ibn ʿAbbās Traditions (Piscataway, USA: Gorgias Press, 2017), intro.
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 27-38, 77 (n. 269).

[@2:01:58] #15: Widespread raising and retrojection

• See Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 27-30, 68-69, 132, and the references cited therein, along with the examples documented across ch. 2.

[@2:03:30] #16: Products of debates and developments [i.e., products of a specific secondary point in a dialectic]

For examples, see:

• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), part II, ch. 3.
• Michael A. Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in early Islam”, Arabica, Tome 44, Issue 4 (1997), pp. 437-530.
• Christopher Melchert, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2006), p. 28.
• Pavel Pavlovitch, The Formation of the Islamic Understanding of Kalāla in the Second Century AH (718–816 CE): Between Scripture and Canon (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2015), passim (documenting various “counter-traditions”, “counter-narratives”, and “counter-ascriptions”).
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 38-40.

[@2:04:06] #17: Regional bottlenecks in transmission

• For a related point (about an early storyteller bottleneck), see Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 222, 225-226.
• For the massive influence of ʿUrwah, al-Zuhrī, and Ibn ʾIsḥāq in particular on the Sīrah, see Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998), ch. 10; Gregor Schoeler (ed. James E. Montgomery & trans. Uwe Vagelpohl), The Biography of Muḥammad: Nature and Authenticity (New York, USA: Routledge, 2011), ch. 1; Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 102-103; Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2020), part II.
• For a common, related problem in Šīʿī Hadith, see Michael A. Cook, “Magian Cheese: An Archaic Problem in Islamic Law”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3 (1984), p. 461.

[@2:05:09] #18: Mode of transmission (oral + paraphrastic + atomistic + in fast-changing conditions)

In general, see:

• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 1.
• Joshua J. Little, “Patricia Crone and the ‘Secular Tradition’ of Early Islamic Historiography: An Exegesis”, History Compass, Vol. 20, Issue 9 (2022), e12747: http://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12747
• Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (San Francisco, USA: HarperOne, 2016).

For the belated rise of writing in the transmission of Hadith, see the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 127 ff., 400.
• Joshua J. Little, “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), pp. 164-165, incl. n. 87 [available here].

[@2:06:53] #19: Growth and elaboration

See variously:

• Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 63-64, 66-67.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), 223-224.
• Robert M. Speight, “A Look at Variant Readings in the ḥadīth”, Der Islam, Vol. 77, Issue 1 (2000), pp. 169-179.
• Michael Lecker, “al-Zuhrī”, in Peri J. Bearman, Thierry Bianquis, Clifford E. Bosworth, Emeri J. van Donzel, & Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume 11: V-Z (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2002), p. 565, col. 2.
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 131-132 (incl. n. 443), 400-401.

[@2:07:07] #20: Distortion and mutation

See the references cited in the following:

• Joshua J. Little, “Patricia Crone and the ‘Secular Tradition’ of Early Islamic Historiography: An Exegesis”, History Compass, Vol. 20, Issue 9 (2022), e12747: http://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12747
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 3-4, 23, 129, 145-146.
• Joshua J. Little, “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), passim [available here].

[@2:07:46] #21: Artificial narrative structures

For discussions and examples of tropes, motifs, archetypes, etc., in Hadith, including Biblical templates, see:

• Hans von Mžik, “Die Gideon-Saul-Legende und die Überliferung der Schalacht bei Badr: Ein Beiträge zur ältesten Geschichte des Islam”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vol. 29 (1915), pp. 371-383.
• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 156.
• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), e.g., pp. 9, 12, 14-15, 205-206, nn. 47, 49.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), passim.
• Lawrence I. Conrad, “Abraha and Muḥammad: Some Observations Apropos of Chronology and Literary ‘topoi’ in the Early Arabic Historical Tradition”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (1987), pp. 225-240.
• Albrecht Noth & Lawrence I. Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-critical Study, 2nd ed. (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994), passim.
• Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The life of Muḥammad as viewed by the early Muslims: A Textual Analysis (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1995), passim.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “Early Islamic society as reflected in its use of isnāds”, Le Muséon, Vol. 107 (1994), p. 190.
• Gregor Schoeler (ed. James E. Montgomery & trans. Uwe Vagelpohl), The Biography of Muḥammad: Nature and Authenticity (New York, USA: Routledge, 2011), passim.
• Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), p. 17 (summarising the research of Eckart Stetter).
• Chase F. Robinson, “The Conquest of Khūzistān: A Historiographical Reassessment”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2004), pp. 14-39.
• Robert G. Hoyland, “History, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of Islam”, in Julia Bray (ed.), Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim horizons (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), pp. 16-46.
• Ze’ev Maghen, “Davidic motifs in the biography of Muḥammad”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 35 (2008), pp. 91-139.
• Elton L. Daniel, “The Islamic East”, in Chase F. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 449.
• Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 51-52, 244.
• Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 103-104, 114-116.
• David S. Powers, Zayd (Philadelphia, USA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), passim.
• Pavel Pavlovitch, The Formation of the Islamic Understanding of Kalāla in the Second Century AH (718–816 CE): Between Scripture and Canon (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2015), pp. 49-52.
• Andreas Görke, “Between History and Exegesis: The Origins and Transformation of the Story of Muḥammad and Zaynab bt Ǧaḥš”, Arabica, Vol. 65, Issues 1-2 (2018), pp. 36-37 (incl. n. 18), 39, 49, 62.
• Ehsan Roohi, “Between History and Ancestral Lore: A Literary Approach to the Sīra’s Narratives of Political Assassinations”, Der Islam, Vol. 98, Issue 2 (2021), pp. 425-472.
• Ehsan Roohi, “A Form-Critical Analysis of the al-Rajīʿ and Biʾr Maʿūna Stories: Tribal, Ideological, and Legal Incentives behind the Transmission of the Prophet’s Biography”, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, Vol. 30 (2022), 267-338.
• On the inherently distorting effect of such artificial narrative structures (which has been contested by some), see Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), e.g., p. 90; Stijn Aerts, “‘Pray with Your Leader’: A Proto-Sunni Quietist Tradition”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 136, Issue 1 (2016),p.41; Zeba A. Crook, “Collective Memory Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus”, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Vol. 11 (2013), p. 74.

[@2:09:43] #22: Storyteller construction

See the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “Patricia Crone and the ‘Secular Tradition’ of Early Islamic Historiography: An Exegesis”, History Compass, Vol. 20, Issue 9 (2022), e12747: http://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12747
• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], p. 25, incl. n. 66.
• Joshua J. Little, “Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith”, Islamic Origins blog (17^th/August/2023): https://islamicorigins.com/explaining-contradictions-in-exegetical-hadith/

[@2:10:52] #23: Exegesis in disguise

See the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith”, Islamic Origins blog (17^th/August/2023): https://islamicorigins.com/explaining-contradictions-in-exegetical-hadith/

[@2:11:57] #24: Amnesia and discontinuity

See the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “Explaining Contradictions in Exegetical Hadith”, Islamic Origins blog (17^th/August/2023): https://islamicorigins.com/explaining-contradictions-in-exegetical-hadith/

[@2:14:45] #25: No effective countermeasures [i.e., ineffectualness of Hadith criticism]

See the following, and the references cited therein:

• Joshua J. Little, “The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: A Study in the Evolution of Early Islamic Historical Memory”, PhD dissertation (University of Oxford, 2023) [unabridged version available here], pp. 62-63, 80-82, 107-108, 488, 504-505.
• Joshua J. Little, “‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’ An Analysis of Some Hadiths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script”, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 35, Issue 2 (2024), p. 163 [available here].
• See also the following Twitter thread by Elon Harvey, which makes some relevant points: https://x.com/hadithworks/status/1830958726649651656

[@2:28:15] PART 3: The Revisionist Model(s) of the Origins and Development of Hadith

For some modern critical reconstructions of the origins and development of (1) the Hadith corpus as a whole, and/or (2) some of its sub-corpora, and/or (3) early Islamic scholarship more broadly, see:

• Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971).
• Ignáz Goldziher (trans. Andras Hamori & Ruth Hamori), Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1981).
• Josef Horovitz (ed. Lawrence I. Conrad), The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 2002).
• Joseph F. Schacht, “A Revaluation of Islamic Traditions”, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 2 (1949), pp. 143-154.
• Joseph F. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1950).
• Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 1.
• Joseph F. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982).
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Muslim tradition: Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Patricia Crone & Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious authority in the first centuries of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. chs. 4-5.
• Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 9.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 2.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “The role of muʿammarūn in the early development of the isnād”, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vol. 81 (1991), pp. 155-175.
• Harald Motzki (trans. Marion H. Katz), The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2002).
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “Some notes on Islam’s first fuqahāʾ distilled from early ḥadīth literature”, Arabica, Tome 39, Fasc. 3 (1992), pp. 288-314.
• Albrecht Noth & Lawrence I. Conrad (trans. Michael Bonner), The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-critical Study, 2nd ed. (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994).
• Patricia Crone, “Patricia Crone, ‘Two legal problems bearing on the early history of the Qurʾān”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1994), pp. 13-20.
• Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “Early Islamic society as reflected in its use of isnāds”, Le Muséon, Vol. 107 (1994), pp. 151-194.
• Gregor Schoeler (ed. James E. Montgomery & trans. Uwe Vagelpohl), The Biography of Muḥammad: Nature and Authenticity (New York, USA: Routledge, 2011).
• Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, USA: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1998).
• Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Maʾmūn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 1.
• Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Andreas Görke & Gregor Schoeler, The Earliest Writings on the Life of Muḥammad: The ʿUrwa Corpus and the Non-Muslim Sources (Berlin, Germany: Gerlach Press, 2024).
• Harald Motzki, “The Origins of Muslim Exegesis: A Debate”, in Harald Motzki, Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī Ḥadīth (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010), pp. 231-303.
• Andreas Görke, “Authorship in the Sīra literature”, in Lale Behzadi & Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (eds.), Concepts of Authorship in Pre-Modern Arabic Texts (Bamberg, Germany: University of Bamberg Press, 2015), pp. 63-92.
• Jonathan E. Brockopp, Muhammad’s Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622–950 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• Harald Motzki, Reconstruction of a Source of Ibn Isḥāq’s Life of the Prophet and Early Qurʾān Exegesis: A Study of Early Ibn ʿAbbās Traditions (Piscataway, USA: Gorgias Press, 2017).
• Hiroyuki Yanagihashi, Studies in Legal Hadith (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2019).
• Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam (Oakland, USA: University of California Press, 2020).
• See also the references for the rise of the isnad, early rapid mutation, storytellers, etc., given above.

More generally, see also:

• Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (San Francisco, USA: HarperOne, 2016).
• Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 2018).

[@2:54:17] Outcome (9th C. CE ff.)

For the victory of Hadith and Prophetical Hadith in particular (i.e., their eventual widespread acceptance and adoption by all parties), see:

• Ignáz Goldziher (ed. Samuel M. Stern and trans. Christa R. Barber & Samuel M. Stern), Muslim Studies, Volume 2 (Albany, USA: State University Press of New York, 1971), e.g., p. 82.
• John C. Wilkinson, “Ibāḍī Ḥadīth: An Essay on Normalization”, Geschichte und Kultur des Islamischen Orients, Vol. 62 (1985), pp. 231-259.
• Patricia Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law: The origins of the Islamic patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 2.
• Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1997), passim.
• Aisha Y. Musa, “The Sunnification of Ḥadīth and the Ḥadīthification of Sunna”, in Adis Duderija (ed.), The Sunna and Its Status in Islamic Law: The Search for a Sound Hadith (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 75-95.
• Ersilia Francesca, “The Concept of sunna in the Ibāḍī School”, in Adis Duderija (ed.), The Sunna and Its Status in Islamic Law: The Search for a Sound Hadith (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. pp. 110-111.

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Addenda and Errata:

[@1:14:00] I ought to have mentioned ʿUṯmān al-Battī (d. 143/760-761) as the leading jurist of Basrah in the middle of the 8th C. CE, and perhaps also Sawwār b. ʿAbd Allāh (d. 156/773), per Melchert, Formation, p. 41.

[@2:48:12] I ought to have included the criterion of piety, for establishing the reliability of tradents, amongst the primitive or nascent forms of Hadith criticism. I will elaborate on this in future work, but for now, some reports embodying this primitive approach are cited here: https://islamicorigins.com/the-origins-of-early-sunni-hadith-criticism-part-2-the-modern-debate/

[@2:54:17] I ought to have mentioned the enduring influence of rationalism, in the form of a semi-rationalist synthesis, at the expense of the original doctrinal methodology of the People of Hadith, as well. See the references cited here thereon: https://islamicorigins.com/a-summary-of-early-sunni-hadith-criticism/

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