hadith

Hadith is the Arabic word for a 'report' or an 'account [of an event]' and refers to the Islamic oral tradition of anecdotes containing the purported words, actions, and the silent approvals of the Islamic prophet Muhammad or his immediate circle (companions in Sunni Islam, Ahl al-Bayt in Shia).

After being compiled in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Hadiths began to be imposed by socio-political and spiritual authorities as the original words of Muhammad from the 14th century onward. For many Muslim sects, hadith was a reliable source for religious and moral guidance known as sunnah, which ranks second to that of the Quran in authority, widely respected in mainstream Islamic thought, so that the majority of Sharia rules derived from hadith rather than the Quran. However, in the early Islamic society the use of hadith as it is understood today (documentation, isnads, etc.) came gradually. Sunnah originally meant a tradition that did not contain the definition of good and bad. Later, "good traditions" began to be referred to as sunnah and the concept of "Muhammad's sunnah" was established. Muhammad's sunnah gave way to the "hadiths of Muhammad" which were being transmitted orally, then recorded in the corpuses that continued to be collected, classified and purified according to various criteria in the following centuries. Scholars have categorized hadith based on their reliability, sorting them into classifications such as sahih ('authentic'), hasan ('good'), and ''da'if'' ('weak'). This classification is subjective to the person doing this study and differences in classification have led to variations in practices among the different Islamic schools and branches. The study of hadith is a central discipline in Islam, known as the hadith sciences, and is also examined in the contemporary historiographical field of hadith studies.