Hadith
The word hadith comes from the Arabic word root word HA DA THA that is to report or narrate. In the context of Islam a Hadith is any kind of action, word, sayings, approval, disapproval or report from the Prophet and/or from the companions of the Prophet.
Hadiths are considered secondary sources of information after the Holy Qur’an and Islamic Scholars accept hadith for use in daily life. Hadiths are used to guide Muslims into performing daily actions correctly, from the moment we wake up, using the toilet, making abolution (wudu) , praying, fasting etc.
Hadiths are graded by the soundness of authenticity, and the science of hadith has proven how valuable information can be when we look at the reporters and the chain of reporters, who were they, did they die as Muslim, did they meet the Prophet and so on. Once we see the narrators of a hadith Scholars (muhadith – knowledgeable of hadith) can class a hadith of authenticity, the grades are below:
- Fabricated (Mawdu)
- Weak (Da’if )
- Sound/ good (Hasan)
- Authentic (Sahih)
Daily Hadith uses hadiths collected from Imam Bukhari, in his book Sahih Bukhari. Imam Bukhari’s collection have unanimously (by numerous Islamic Scholars) classed as the most authentic book after the Holy Qur’an. One may ask but Bukhari died in 256 AH , more than a century after the Prophet, he compiled his hadiths from trustworthy & reliable Islamic scholars who were known for their memorisation & scholarly understanding of Islam and hadith. The names of the scholars who transmitted the hadiths to each other up until Imam Bukhari are mentioned in each hadith in his book, if we take hadith 481 for example, Bukhari mentions the narrators in his book
Khallad ibn Yahya told us,
saying: Sufyan told us,
on the authority of Abu Burda ibn Abdullah ibn Abi Burda,
on the authority of his grandfather, who met Abu Musa (a companion of the Prophet (صَلَّى ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِۦ وَسَلَّمَ) that narrated the hadith to him.
Due to the complexity of the chain of narrators in every hadith, Daily Hadith have excluded the chain and simplified the hadith to just the original reporter of the hadith. In Imam Bukhari’s collection, all of the 7500 hadiths are authentic (Sahih), that is all of the narrators in the chain of the hadith are considered most reliable and trustworthy.
If we look at the other end of the authenticity spectrum, an example of a fabricated hadith, Shaykh Al-Bani reported in his book Da’if Al Jaami the hadith ,
“Seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China, for seeking knowledge is a duty on every Muslim”.
In this fabricated hadith, the narrator and wordings of the hadith cannot be attributed to the Prophet or a companion of the Prophet because the chain of narrator(s) are considered not reliable, unknown or fabricated.
Having mentioned all of the above, if one still doubts the Qur’an is not the word of God, then we say that millions of Muslims have memorised the Qur’an scholar or not, and the Qur’an is muwatir meaning since the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet it has been transmitted and memorised to the next generation by so many Muslims that its authenticity is beyond Sahih (authentic), and we believe this is the miracle of Allah, as Allah says in his holy book:
It is We Who have sent down the remembrance (i.e. the Quran) and surely, We will guard it from corruption. Qur’an 15:9
We ask Allah to preserve the knowledge among the Muslims and that we all benefit from the Qur’an and authentic hadiths.
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