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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Yaḥyá b. Saʿīd al-Qaṭṭān (d. 198/813) was an important early Hadith scholar in Basrah and one of the founders of proto-Sunnī Hadith criticism, the movement or methodology that ultimately produced the Sunnī Hadith canon. For example, the Syrian Sunnī Hadith scholar Muḥammad b. ʾAḥmad al-Ḏahabī (d. 748/1348) summarised the history of Hadith criticism as follows: … [Read more…]
Ignaz Goldziher famously argued that Hadith largely reflect not the life and times of the Prophet and his contemporaries, but rather, the historical contexts and interests of later generations of Muslims: Closer acquaintance with the vast stock of ḥadīths induces sceptical caution rather than optimistic trust regarding the material brought together in the carefully compiled … [Read more…]
In his ʾAnsāb al-ʾAšrāf, the Baghdadian litterateur and genealogist ʾAḥmad b. Yaḥyá al-Balāḏurī (d. post-270/883-884) recorded the following concerning the birth of the Islamic prophet Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib (d. 11/632): As for Quṯam b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib: his mother was Ṣafiyyah bt. Jundub, the mother of al-Ḥāriṯ b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, and he … [Read more…]
In his al-ʾItqān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾân, the famous Egyptian Sunnī Hadith scholar al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) mentioned the following hadith: Al-Ṭabarānī cited [a hadith] in [his al-Muʿjam] al-Kabīr, from the transmission-path of al-Walīd b. Muslim, from ʿUfayr b. Maʿdān, from Ibn ʿĀmir, from ʾAbū ʾUmāmah, who said: “The Messenger of God said: “The Quran was revealed … [Read more…]