Throughout history, no nation has been as careful with the words of its prophet as the Islamic nation has been in preserving the hadith of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), until the hadith became an elaborate system of narration and transmission, fenced by strict rules of authentication and scrutiny, and backed by men who were recognized for their honesty, justice, and memorization.
The Journey of Hadith Transcription
As the second source of legislation after the Holy Qur'an, the Hadith has been shaped over the centuries as an exceptional cognitive and spiritual treasure.
The process of collecting and codifying it went through a difficult journey, fraught with challenges and twists and turns, reflecting the great care that the Islamic nation took to preserve the legacy of the Prophet (peace be upon him), to protect it from falsification, and to purify the Sunnah of the Prophet from any blemish:
First: Oral stage
In the Prophet's time, the hadith was not widely written down. Oral narration dominated the transmission of the Sunnah, for various reasons, including the nature of Arab society based on memorization and rote learning, and caution against mixing the hadith with the Quran when it was compiled into a single Quran.
It is reported that some of the companions, such as Abdullah ibn 'Amr ibn al-'As (may Allah be pleased with him), used to write down what they heard from the Messenger of Allah (may Allah be pleased with him) with his explicit permission.
Abu Hurairah, Zayd ibn Thabit, Jabir ibn Abdullah ibn Abdullah, and others were also active in partially recording some hadiths.
As Islam spread and expanded, the scope of hadith transmission expanded, and educational circles emerged in which hadiths were recited, and students received them orally and acknowledged their authenticity from their elders, in an elaborate scientific tradition.
Second: The stage of followers
This generation was the first to face serious challenges, chief among them being the emergence of lying on the Prophet's lips for political, sectarian, or sectarian purposes.
It was here that the first features of the science of “Al-Jarh and Al-Ta'dīdīl” crystallized, as muhaddithīs began to test the justice of narrators, judge the texts of hadiths, and control the times of hearing, the councils of Hadīth, and the layers of narrators.
In this context, terms such as “trustworthy”, ”weak”, ”disconnected”, ”disconnected”, ”mursal”, and "mawdal" emerged, which are the foundations of the science of hadith terminology.
III: The beginning of formal blogging
At the beginning of the second century AH, official codification began to take shape. The Umayyad Caliph Umar bin Abdul Aziz issued a historic directive to collect and codify hadith, fearing that the Sunnah would be lost with the death of the scholars.
This decision marked the beginning of the systematic codification of the Sunnah, albeit not in the form of organized compilations, but rather more akin to hadith collections.
A number of senior followers and followers of the followers participated in this stage, most notably Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, who was one of the first to write down hadith by official order, and is considered a pioneer in this section.
IV: The Age of the Great Works
Beginning in the middle of the second century AH, the science of hadith reached its peak of maturity in the journey of codifying hadith, and hadith works began to appear successively, in the form of “mawtasat”, ”musanid”, ”sunnah”, and ”universities”.
Imam Malik ibn Anas was one of the first to write a comprehensive book in hadith and jurisprudence, the Muta“, which was characterized by its thematic arrangement, its combination of hadith and opinion, and was an exemplary model for scientific codification.
Then came Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal with his great work, the Musnad, which he arranged by the names of the companions and included more than thirty thousand hadiths, making it one of the most widely distributed and circulated books of hadith.
With the third century AH, Bukhari and Muslim emerged as the authors of the two most authentic books after the Book of Allah, namely: “Bukhari's al-Jami al-Sahih and Muslim's Sahih.
The scrutiny in these two books reached the peak of methodological rigor. Al-Bukhari required meeting, contemporaneity and full trust, so his book was an example of control and investigation, while Muslim was more concerned with the integrity and continuity of the attribution, and his book was more orderly and less repetitive.
V: Hadith schools
With the flourishing of codification, hadith schools began to differentiate according to the regions. The Hijaz school was more inclined to practical documentation of texts, preservation of the statements of the companions, and a tendency to precaution, as manifested in the approach of Imam Malik.
On the other hand, the school of Iraq was characterized by the abundance of narration and its openness to the differences of narrators, which prompted its scholars to tighten the rules of jarh and ta'adeel, as did Yahya ibn Ma'in, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and Ali ibn al-Mudaini.
As for the Levantine school, it was prominent in monitoring political narratives and chronological criticism of the datum, and had an active role in resisting the artificial political situation in hadith, and Khorasan, Maru, and Samarkand were active hadith centers that produced such notables as Bukhari, Muslim, al-Tirmidhi, and al-Na'i.
VI: Men's Science and Hadith Terminology
What is impressive about the journey of codifying the hadith is the long-standing scientific journey and the subtle sub-sciences it generated to safeguard the Sunnah from plagiarism and falsification.
The science of men emerged, which was concerned with the biographies of the narrators, their justice, their accuracy, the origins of their journeys, their councils of knowledge, and their temporal discipline in narrating.
The science of hadith terminology emerged, which strictly defines what is accepted and rejected according to strict criteria in terms of continuity and discontinuity, fairness of narrators, conflict of traditions, and so on.
Hadith scholars have written hundreds of books in this field, such as Ibn al-Salah's introduction, al-Suyuti's training of the narrator, and Ibn Hajar's Nazhat al-Nadr.
The place of the Sunnah in Islam
The codification of the hadith was not just an archival scientific activity, but an expression of a very deep emotional and spiritual relationship between the nation and its Holy Prophet. Muslims sensed that the Sunnah is the complementary light of the Quran, the practical manifestation of its rulings, and the practical embodiment of its values.
This is why memorizing hadith is not only the task of scholars, but has become an honor for the entire nation, with which the breasts of men are supported, the fortresses of jurisprudence are built, and educational, moral, and social meanings are inspired by it.
Dar al-Zaman Library to delve into the journey of hadith codification
The Dar al-Zaman It is a pivotal station for anyone who seeks to understand the historical and scientific depth of the process of codification of the Prophet's Hadith; it is not limited to presenting the well-known books of Hadith, but contains works that were codified at critical stages of the development of the science of Hadith.
From the first newspapers in which the companions collected the sayings of the Prophet (peace be upon him), to the great codes that established the rules of jarh and ta'dhil, takhrij, and musanid.
Therefore, the library is a comprehensive reference documenting the journey of science and highlighting the tremendous efforts made to preserve and transmit the Sunnah in the most accurate scientific methods.
The genius of the Islamic nation in transforming the revelation into a scientific method, which does not know courtesy, and does not accept claims without evidence, is evident in the codification of the Hadith, which was the cornerstone of the construction of a balanced Islamic mentality.
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