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Hadith Authenticity Level Information
If I hear a hadith, with Bukhari or Muslim reference for example, how to find out if it meets the “sahih” or “hasan” level? Where do I find this information as I believe it is not given in Bukhari or Muslim.
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9 Replies
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Hadith Authenticity Level Information
updated 2 years, 5 months ago
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In order to study ‘Sanad‘ of any narration and it’s authenticity, one has to refer to books of ‘Rijal‘ which are written separately by Muhaddeseen in addition to Hadith Books.
In order to study content and context of any narration, a scholar has to evaluate each Hadith separately to see whether it is in light with Quran, Sunnah and established facts derived from knowledge and reason.
Please refer to the Principles of Understanding Hadith, which explain in detail how to approach Hadith Corpus:
It is very difficult for a common muslim to go through all this trouble to evaluate each Hadith separately, therefore, Scholars have been doing this since the day ‘ilm-e-Hadith‘ came into being.
This fact must be reiterated that it is not duty of a common muslim to go through this trouble anyway. Ahadith do not add or remove anything from the religion.
Please refer to the following thread in order to understand the placement of Hadith in the overall framework of religion:
What should a common Muslim should do in case he encounters an apparently disturbing hadith, please refer to the following response by Ghamidi Sahab:
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Thanks Umar for your reply. Do the “books of Rijal” give sanad levels for all ahadees? Is there a one book that gives the sanad levels of all ahadees for all books of ahadees (e.g., Bukhari, Muslim, etc)? Can you please give me the references (names, authors) of those books? For example, hadith number “xyz” from Bukhari has sanad of “hasan” or “sabih”, or “daeef” or “maudu” …
I am aware of the ”principles of understanding hadith” and the “placement of hadith in the overall framework of religion” – thanks to Mr. Ghamidi’s lectures on his book Mizan.
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All such books are in Arabic which contain the character and life of narrators.
Bukhari wrote three works discussing narrators of hadith with respect to their ability in conveying their material:
Al-Tarikh al-Kabir: He compiled the names and biographies of many of those who narrated hadith from the time of the Companions until his time. The total number of biographies included is close to 40 thousand, including both men and women, reliable and unreliable narrators.
Bukhari also authored two other books of history, al-Tarikh al-Awsat (The Medium History) and al-Tarikh al-Saghir (The Small History).
Another work, al-Kuna, is on patronymics: identifying people who are commonly known as “Father of so-and-so“. Then there is a brief work on weak narrators: al-Ḍuafa al-Ṣaghir.
I cannot give you an example as I do not have access to such material and studying this material requires lifetime of a scholar after which he/she can reach some conclusion in this regard. Studying ‘Rijal‘ is a very extensive work.
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Biographical histories of the narrators only does not completely fulfill the requirements of categorizing a hadees as sahih or hasan,..
So, what I understand is that there is no work or a combination of work from different scholars throughout the history that has been done to accomplish this task for all ahadees? Just wanted to make sure on this.
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That is correct. The application of studying the ‘Matan‘ of any Hadith i.e. studying content and context (also known as ‘illat‘ and ‘shuyuz‘) is not something that can documented so easily. Muhaddeseen have applied this as per their understanding of the religion and categorized them as Sahih, Hassan or Daef. And this has been a continuous process since day one because it involves a lot of subjectivity in it’s application.
Also there is subjectivity invloved in the first part as well i.e. when studying the life of narrators to establish credibility of ‘Sanad‘.
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Thanks Umer.
I know that Al-Mawrid is working on a hadees project. Would you please give some details (objective/goal, status, etc.) of this work?
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Thanks, jazakallah
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