Rethinking Hadith Methodology

In the early centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars developed countless scientific disciplines in attempting to classify, investigate, and utilise the hadiths and the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. As none of these sciences evolved into a fully-fledged hadith science, scholars began to implement the methodology of fiqh in examining the hadiths. After Imam al Shafii in the ninth century, hadiths were almost exclusively confined to the realm of legal studies. This new legalistic and literalist approach to the hadith created serious problems, primarily for two reasons, the Prophet did not intend that each of his words and utterances should form the basis of a legal system, and unlike the Quran, the Prophets statements were transmitted over generations and not always verbatim and therefore recorded hadiths could not be treated as immutable legal documents. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the necessity of creating a new hadith science.