The Development of Early Sunnite Hadith Criticism

Hadith is a uniquely Islamic discipline and of the utmost importance not onlyto Islamic thought, but also to Islamic culture and civilization. It is in this veinthat `Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said that isnad (chain of transmission) is a partof the religion. While most studies on Hadith literature in western scholarshipfocus on the issue of authenticity, the hadith scholars’ method of determiningwhat is a basis for belief and practice, as well as that method’s historicaldevelopment, have been regretfully overlooked. The author’s The Developmentof Early Sunnite Hadith Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi (240/854-327/938) proposes to fill in some of those gaps.Chapter 1, “Hadith in the Time of Ibn Abi Hatim,” provides the settingfor Ibn Abi Hatim’s career. The two main factions of Islamic thought in thethird Islamic century were the adherents of hadith (ahl al-hadith) and theirrivals (ahl al-ra’y). Dickinson introduces two approaches to hadith: thecommentator (ahl al-ra’y) and the critic (ahl al-hadith). The commentatoraccepted the canon as it was and treated it as though it were closed. Any contradictionswere dealt with through interpretation. The critic, however, manipulatedthe canon’s boundaries and removed any objectionable material(p. 7) by using the “objective criteria of hadith criticism” (p. 1) ...