hadith

The Arabic word حديث (ḥadīth) comes from the root ح-د-ث, which carries the sense of newness, occurrence, and speech. In pre-Islamic Arabic, ḥadīth meant simply a story or a report, something said or something that happened. After Muhammad's death in 632 CE, his followers began collecting and transmitting accounts of what he had said and done, calling each account a ḥadīth. These reports circulated orally at first, passed from companion to companion across the early Islamic world from Arabia to Persia to Egypt.

Within a century of Muhammad's death, scholars recognized that not every report attributed to him was authentic. The science of isnād (chain of transmission) developed: each ḥadīth had to carry a named chain of reliable narrators leading back to an eyewitness. Muhammad al-Bukhari, born in Bukhara in 810 CE, spent sixteen years traveling across the Islamic world and examining over 600,000 reports before accepting 7,397 as sound in his collection, Sahih al-Bukhari, completed around 846. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj produced a competing collection, Sahih Muslim, in the same century, and together these two texts became the most authoritative hadith compilations in Sunni Islam.

Once collected and authenticated, hadith formed the foundation of Islamic jurisprudence alongside the Quran. Legal scholars of the 9th and 10th centuries used hadith to resolve questions the Quran left open: how to perform daily prayer, how to conduct a marriage contract, what foods were permitted. The four major Sunni legal schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali) each developed different criteria for evaluating hadith authenticity and weight. In Shia Islam, the canonical collections differ, centered on reports transmitted through the Prophet's family and the line of Imams rather than the broader community of companions.

The word hadith entered scholarly English in the nineteenth century as European philologists and colonial administrators studied Islamic law and theology. It appears in Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, the first volume of which came out in 1863, and became standard in academic writing about Islam by 1900. Today hadith appears in English journalism, legal commentary, and religious studies without translation, having passed from technical term to loanword. The singular and plural in English are both hadith, though ahadith (the Arabic broken plural) appears in more specialized Islamic scholarship.