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Literature and history.com. Hello and welcome to Literature and History, episode 123 an introduction to the Hadiths in this program we will explore the hadiths, or in Arabic, a hadith of Islam, one of the core parts of the religion. The hadiths are short narratives about the Prophet Muhammad, the things that he said, and the things that he did. They are instructive accounts about Muhammad and his generation, detailing episodes from his busy, eventful life, during which his unique insight as the messenger of God, together with his natural intelligence and experience as a man of the world, helped enlighten those around him. The hadiths are eloquent, wise, practical, detailed, and often folksy, witty and endearing. They are also sometimes bafflingly dense, cryptic, and at loggerheads with one another. Above all, the hadiths are important over much of the world today. For over a thousand years, Sunnis have been carefully studying asana, or the way or path of Muhammad, who was for many of us, the one true prophet of God, whose every word and deed reflected his transcendent knowledge of the divine. The hadiths, as complex a source material as they are, are the best thing we have to understand who Muhammad actually was. If you are new to Islam, you might expect the Quran itself to be a comprehensive sourcebook on all the rules and regulations meant to govern Muslim life. And indeed, the Quran does contain a significant amount of timeless advice for living and rules and regulations for Islamic society. As we learned a number of episodes ago, however, the Quran is also a fairly short text and one that has most often been augmented by additional sacred material in Islamic history. The core of this material for almost a thousand and a half years has been the Hadiths again, sayings, collections and short narratives about Muhammad and his companions and successors, texts that answer questions and offer lessons supplementary to what is in the Quran. As the early Hadith chronicler Ayub Asaktiani observed in the first half of the 700 the Quran needs the Sunnah more than the Sana needs the Quran, with sana once again meaning the way or path of Muhammad as reflected in the Hadiths even more emphatically around the same time, the historian Yahya IBN Abi Kathir observed, quote, the Sunnah came to rule over the Quran. It is not the Quran that rules over the Sunnah. These statements are hyperboles, more than precise statements of fact. The Quran in Islam is the peerless and beloved book that everyone knows. Still, the hadiths capturing asana, or the way or path of Muhammad elucidate events in Muslim life not given very much or any detail in the Quran from forming an outer halo of reference material around the Quran that, while it has evolved, has always been a part of Islam. A special set of hadiths are called al ahadith, al Qudsiya, or the sacred hadiths. These are hadiths in which Muhammad presents a revelation of God's word not found in the Quran, giving the al ahadith, al Qudsiya a revered status just below the Quran itself, but above ordinary hadiths. And while some hadiths capture soaring philosophical truths, others are far more applied. One hadith explains what to do when a fly lands on your cup. Another tells you how to clean your backside correctly after a bowel movement. Considering all of human life, from the earthy and detailed to the profound and complex, the hadiths are one of earth's great extant genres of printed material, even though those of us outside of Islam rarely hear anything about them. Hearing about the hadiths which capture the Sunnah or the way of Muhammad, we might at first suppose the hadiths are preserved in one or two standard editions, perhaps half a dozen volumes, to be found adjacent to the Quran in a typical mosque or Islamic theological library. The hadiths, however, are not so concise as this. There are both Sunni and Shia canons of hadith literature, and the literature itself is oceanic, with hundreds of thousands of short narratives having been preserved about Muhammad, his companions and his family. There are standard texts within the Hadith literature, six major compilations in Sunnism and four in Shi'. Ism. But the very shortest of these major compilations contains 4,4341 Hadiths. That's again the shortest, and others contain more than twice that amount. And so one of the simplest things to understand about the hadiths is that they encompass a colossal amount of material, bookcases and even libraries worth of material, rather than a shelf or two. Beyond the fact that the hadiths are narratives about Muhammad, and that there are quite a few of them, there is a third and final basic fact about the hadiths that we need to get into our heads before going any further. The major Sunni and Shia hadith collections that I mentioned a moment ago were compiled centuries after Muhammad lived, mostly in the 800-00 and-900s. Remember that Muhammad lived from 570 to 632. Given that Muhammad himself never wrote anything down, and that what we know about his life and teachings survived in a scattershot array of sources prior to being compiled, two centuries after he passed away in the two centuries between 632 and 832, as the Rashidun Caliphate gave way to the Umayyad Caliphate, which in turn gave way to the Abbasid caliphate. It is exceedingly likely that some hadith literature is the pious fiction of later centuries, rather than accurate reportage about Muhammad and his work. And in fact, a major part of Islamic intellectual history has been devoted to analyzing which hadiths are very likely true, which ones are nice but probably not true, and which ones are somewhere in between. A central component of every hadith is something called an isnad, a very fascinating part of early Islamic history, unlike anything we've encountered before. In our podcast, and a mandatory vocabulary word for the present episode, I'm going to make up an isnad. Now we work in an office together. You tell me that the conference room is getting a new whiteboard. I ask you how you know. You say, our co worker Omar told you. I say, how does Omar know? You say, well, Omar heard it from Layla, who heard it from Zara, who heard it from Ali, and Ali works in accounting, and he saw this quarter's expense report, and that was an isnad. The word isnad literally means support, and in hadith studies, it is usually translated as a chain of transmitters. In other words, x said that, Y said that, Z said that, the Prophet Muhammad said a, B, or C. Isnads in hadith literature have always been taken very seriously, and in the words of scholar Jonathan, it was the presence of full iznads leading back to the Prophet and transmitting his legacy that defined the core of hadith literature. So every hadith has an iznad, or chain of transmitters. The motivation behind isnads is an academic one. By tracing sources all the way back to the age of Muhammad himself, Muslims who originally compiled the hadiths were able to have some degree of certainty that the narratives they were passing on had come from reliable sources. So those are the very basic facts about the hadiths, that they are illustrative anecdotes about the Prophet Muhammad, that they were generally compiled a couple of centuries after he lived, that there are a great many of them, and that their iznads, or chains of transmitters, record how each narrative came down through various generations of tellers. In the remainder of this episode, we'll discuss the hadiths in a lot more detail. They are a complex subject to cover in a podcast episode, and so I think the best way to explore the hadiths will be to do so in a chronological fashion, beginning, of course, with Muhammad himself. And the efforts that his companions and family members made to preserve his great many teachings. Later in this program, we will discuss some of the complexities of the hadiths, including their historicity and some of the debates about them in Islam. For now, though, I'd like to begin by giving a traditional, mostly Sunni overview of the hadiths and how they came to be. In other words, the way that hundreds of millions of us today understand that these prophetic traditions came together and got passed down to us. As we learned earlier in this season, the Prophet Muhammad was a very busy person, especially during the last decades of his life. A religious luminary during his later years, he was also effectively a head of state, a judge, a diplomat, a military leader, a counselor, and a neighbor within the diverse population of Medina. And just as Muhammad shared the Quran with his followers, he also inspired them with advice, legal rulings, astute deductions, and no small amount of practical common sense. In previous episodes, we learned about how the Quran is generally understood to have been codified and set down such that by the mid-640s, by the caliphate of Uthman, the book had assumed its present form. The hadiths too, underwent a process of formalization and codification, beginning as firsthand narratives about Muhammad from those friends and family who knew him directly. Let's talk about those friends and family. The people who interacted with Muhammad and by virtue of daily interaction with the Prophet in remembering and passing on the things that he said and did, became the wellsprings of hadith literature in later Islamic history. We have met a number of the family and companions of the Prophet Muhammad in this season, including his wife Aisha, the caliphs Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman. When we come to the subject of the hadiths, however, and how they were recorded, we shift our attention to a different group of figures, converts and the children of converts a generation younger than Muhammad, who became the first chroniclers of his life and times. Of all the early narrators of hadiths, the most prolific and famous is Abu Hurairah. Abu Hurairah, born in about 603 CE, was a generation younger than Muhammad, and he came from a different region of the Hijaz, arriving in Medina toward the end of the Prophet's life. In addition to having a notoriously impeccable memory and being the fountainhead of a great deal of hadiths, Abu Harira has one of the most adorable names in world history. History Abu Harayra is said to have found a stray kitten and put the little animal in his sleeve to protect it and take care of it. And thus he became known as Abu or the father of Hurairah the kitten. Abu Hurairah, the father of the kitten, was also the father of over 5,000 Hadiths, together with isnads. Again chains of transmission. After Muhammad died in 632, Abu Harira, who had only known Muhammad for a few years, spent a great deal of time talking to those who had known the Prophet, the Caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar, Muhammad's widow Aisha and more. Abu Harira, together with numerous others, made himself into a living library of hadiths, passing these prophetic traditions down to his own students. Abu Harayra was one of a number of chroniclers who lived during Muhammad's children's generation. Others included Abdallah IBN Omar, the son of the caliph Omar Abdallah IBN Abbas, also one of the all time most important commentators on the Quran, Anas IBN Malik, who had been Muhammad's servant, and finally the Prophet's young wife Aisha, also the source of a great many important hadiths. Within the study of the hadiths, the chroniclers I have just mentioned are some of what are called the Mukthirun or the Increasers, the foremost transmitters of hadiths, born very roughly around the year 600, old enough to have known Muhammad and his generation, but young enough to have survived into the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates. Between them, just these five were instrumental in the transmission of more than 14,000 hadiths. In considering the very first preservers of the hadiths, we should make two important notes. First, these youngsters who knew Muhammad did not leave any written hadith compilations behind that have made it down to us today. Their histories of the Prophet were collections of oral anecdotes. One of the earliest gatherers of hadiths, Abdallah IBN Amr IBN Al, as is said to have written down a large collection of traditions about Muhammad in a book called Asahifa as Sadiqah or the Truthful Script. But this collection has not survived. Thus again, the first thing to know about the earliest gatherers of hadiths is that they preserved prophetic traditions through memorization and oral instruction. The second thing to know about the very early history of the hadiths is as generally, when early compilers recorded prophetic traditions, they did not offer their own eyewitness accounts. The commentator Ibn Abbas, for instance, whom I mentioned briefly a moment ago, passed down around 1700 Hadiths, but of these only 40 are his own eyewitness testimonies of Things that the Prophet said and did. The rest were second hand and third hand accounts using those isnads or chains of transmission about Muhammad. The same was the case with other early collectors of hadiths. Younger Muslims, though they had met Muhammad toward the end of his career, talked to the people who had known and worked with Muhammad for decades, and diligently worked to preserve everything that they had learned. Muhammad's wife Aisha is an exception to this general rule. Though significantly younger than the Prophet, she lived with him for nearly a decade prior to his death in 632. And so naturally she knew him quite well and offered posterity a wealth of first hand observations about her husband's life and personal routine. Let's return to the subject of how the earliest hadiths were recorded. In other words, the way that hadiths were preserved during the 630s, 640s, 650s and 660s, when the first chroniclers were going around and talking to those who had known Muhammad well, and also recording the first fairly short transmission chains to establish precisely where each prophetic tradition had come from. As I mentioned a moment ago, we do not today possess any manuscripts of hadith collections from this very early period. While we don't possess any of them, several manuscripts are reported to have existed. Some of Muhammad's companions are thought to have kept sahifas, essentially small papyrus or parchment codices, where they maintained written records of things the Prophet had said. Abu Harayra, the aforementioned father of the kitten, and the Prophet's cousin and son in law Ali, among a number of others, are recorded as having kept these sahifas. As this very first generation of Muslim luminaries and chroniclers gave way to a second, naturally their notes were passed down onto their students. And just as an isnad might tell us that narrator X said that narrator Y said that Muhammad had said Z, there are actually isnads of sahifas telling us that chronicler A's sahifa went to chronicler B, who passed the notebook down to chronicler C. The subject of writing down hadiths brings us to a very fundamental question about them. This question is what Muhammad himself may have thought about his words and deeds being recorded in writing and moreover the status and state of writing in 7th century Arabia. Let's talk about this for a moment. A very famous and endearing hadith survives about Muhammad happening upon some farmers working to graft some date palms. The Prophet gave the farmers some advice, but the advice didn't help. Afterward, Muhammad in the hadith said, if There is any use in my advice, then they should do it, for it was just a personal opinion of mine. And do not go after my personal opinion. But when I say to you anything on behalf of Allah, then do accept it, for I do not attribute lie to Allah. The exalted and glorious Muhammad in this hadith admits that some of the recommendations and counsel he offers is just his opinion as a person. And a foundational question in hadith studies then is whether or not Muhammad wanted his companions and followers to write down the things that he did and said as part of his daily life. There is actually some evidence that Muhammad did not. One of the most famous of all hadiths comes from a compiler named Abu Said Al Hudri. About two generations younger than Muhammad, who knew the Prophet in Medina. This chronicler recorded Muhammad as saying, do not take down anything from me and he who took down anything from me except the Quran, he should efface that and narrate from me. This seems like a pretty clear directive, although ironically it is a directive that has itself been written down and preserved as a hadith, thus being something like a billboard that says that billboards are wrong. The same hadith from Al Hudri continues on to depict Muhammad stating, he who attributed any falsehood to me, he should in fact find his abode in hellfire. Although other chroniclers recorded the statement as he who attributed any falsehood to me deliberately, he should in fact find his abode in hellfire. This hadith seems again to prohibit hadiths. And the earlier hadith we heard regarding grafting palm trees in which Muhammad stated that he didn't pretend to be infallible in everyday matters when he was expressing his personal opinion also appears to suggest that the Prophet didn't want every tidbit of his daily life and speech set down for all posterity. There are other hadiths, however, that seem to sanction the writing of hadiths. The chronicler Abdallah IBN Amr IBN Al, as the author of the first, although now lost hadith collection, recorded this story. Remembering that while Muhammad was alive, I used to write down everything which I heard from the messenger of Allah. I intended by it to memorize it. The Quraysh tribe in Mecca prohibited me saying, do you write everything that you hear from him? While the messenger of Allah is a human being, he speaks in anger and pleasure. So I stopped writing and mentioned it to the messenger of Allah. He signaled with his finger to his mouth and said, right by him in whose hand my soul lies, only right comes out of it. So there we have a hadith also from a young person who had known Muhammad, stating that Muhammad actually did want everything that he said to be written down, in stark contrast to the other hadith from around the same time, which records Muhammad as saying that he wanted followers to take teachings directly from him, rather than writing those teachings down. The question of whether or not Muhammad wanted followers to write down his non Quranic teachings and injunctions may actually have more to do with the nature of writing itself in 7th century Arabia than anything else. The Arabic script during the 620s was still in development. Some letters that were written the same way were only comprehensible within context. Writing was essentially a stencil intended to aid what was mainly memorized, a tool for an oral culture rather than an autonomous and standardized medium. With minimal vowels and a small handful of consonants, written Arabic of Muhammad's lifetime could not possibly match the precision and subtlety of spoken Arabic. And so the Prophet may have simply been reluctant to have his teachings approximated in writing, only to potentially be misinterpreted later due to the limitations of the Arabic script as that time. It's interesting to note that during exactly the same years that Muhammad and his followers were figuring out how to best preserve his teachings and how to preserve the Quran itself, over in the Visigothic kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula, Isidore of Seville, or Seville, was writing about how to standardize punctuation, spelling, accents and typography in his encyclopedia, the Etymologies. The transition from oral to written culture is not a toggle switch that is pushed in half a generation, but instead a process that takes a long time. And in the 7th century, in Spain as well as Arabia, writing itself was still a tool in development. Accordingly, those sahifas, or notebooks that I mentioned earlier, although they were extant and in circulation by the first half of the seventh century, were not autonomous tools, but instead more like a lecturer's notes, such that the sahifa had to be passed down with accompanying oral details. As the 600 led to the 700s, though, and the first two caliphates burgeoned in size, the utility of writing for the transmission of information became increasingly indispensable. During the Umayyad caliphate, which endured from 661 to 750, Hadith scholars continued the old traditions of oral transmission and oral transmission aided by notes. But the growth and the administrative challenges of the Umayyad empire also created legal and moral conundrums for its caliphs and governors. Some of these leaders wanted hadiths and a lot of hadiths to help them do their jobs. What had Muhammad said about governmental administration of a territory? Had the Prophet made any detailed formal proclamations on taxation? During the 7 10s, the 8th Umayyad Caliph reached out to hadith specialists looking for specific kinds of information, anything that the Prophet had said a century earlier to help them govern according to Islam. There was then a state level desire for and funding for hadith collections. This governmental need for hadiths, along with more generally the Arab aristocracy's funding. Research about the teachings of Muhammad meant that narratives about the Prophet were a cherished commodity. As the early decades of the 700s went by, and as the 700s passed and the Umayyad Caliphate gave way to the Abbasid Caliphate, the great intellectual engine of Islam began running at full capacity. One of its principal fuels were the hadiths. The year 722 CE marked a century since the hijra of the earliest Muslims. From Mecca to Medina, generations had gone by. Muhammad's sahaba, or companions, had passed away, prominent figures among them having recorded hundreds and in cases, thousands of hadiths, and a subsequent generation known as the tabiyun, or followers or successors, in other words, those who had followed the companions who had known Muhammad. This successor generation was passing as well. The generation that came next, those born in the early 1700s and would have a vast impact on the future of Islam. Let's consider one figure from the 7 hundreds to get a sense of the intellectual and theological history of Islam during the 8th century. The scholar Malik ibn Anas lived from 711 to 795. A resident of Medina, Malik ibn Anas lived a long and productive life, first as a student and then a teacher, staying in the epicenter of Islam and diligently working to preserve the best and most reliable hadiths. Even as Umayyad and Abbasid history moved with bewildering speed elsewhere. Across the 700s, Muslims with theological or legal questions about their religion would go to prominent scholars like Malik IBN Anas for counsel. With a combination of prodigious memory and written materials, and likely some friendly Arabian hospitality, the religious luminaries of various regions of the caliphates and took in those who came to them with questions, offering them answers and, if they sought it, extensive tutelage. By the time of Malik Ibn Anas generation, Islamic scholars weren't just collecting hadiths and bundling them together at random. A body of works was coming into existence, called the musanfs, or topically organized books, which sorted hadiths into category by speaker and subject. This form of organization made each Musannef a reference manual for Muslims of all echelons looking for information about specific subjects, much as the Babylonian Talmud had been organized into tract dates and orders earlier on during late antiquity. The earliest surviving Musannaf is that of Malik ibn Anas. The version extant today contains 1,720 narratives subdivided into 527 hadiths from Muhammad, 613 pronouncements from Muhammad's companions, 285 statements from successors from Malik ibn Anas own generation, with the remaining 300 or so being rulings and deductions from Malik ibn Anas himself. The Musannaf of Malik ibn Anas is important for two major reasons. The first is that Malik ibn Anas was considered particularly reliable by later Hadith scholars. Malik IBN Anas had been taught by a scholar named Nafiyeh Mawlah IBN Omar, who had been taught by Ibn Omar, the son of the Caliph. Omar and Ibn Omar had grown up around Muhammad and his closest companions, so the dude knew what he was talking about. This chain of narration, first generation, second generation, third generation Nafiyya Mawlah Ibn Umar, fourth generation Malik IBN Anas. This specific chain of narrators has been called the Sil silat Azahab or the golden chain of narrators, and has long been held as especially reliable in hadith studies. So Malik ibn Anas, that Medinan scholar who lived from 711 to 795, was first of all an extremely important transmitter of hadiths. Malik IBN Anas was also at the epicenter of three generations of jurists and theologists, theologians who would have a great impact on the future of Islam. If you look at a map of Muslim majority countries today, the map can be subdivided into different regions according to which school of Islamic law is most prevalent there. The majority of these schools of Islamic law have roots in and around the generation of Malik IBN Anas. And the river of hadiths that was coming downstream through history as the 600s gave way to the 700s was the primary source of these schools of Islamic law. One of Malik IBN Anas teachers was the Medinan scholar Ja' Far as Sadiq, the sixth Imam of Shiism, who became the namesake of the Jafari school of Islamic law, which today dominates the madrasas of Iran, Azerbaijan and much of Iraq. Malik IBN Anas studied alongside another scholar and theologian named Abu Hanifa, the namesake of the Hanafi school of Islamic law, the largest school of Islamic jurisprudence and today pervasive in Central and South Asia, Turkey and the Levant. Malik IBN Anas himself, due to his scholarly strength and pedagogical lineage, became the father of the Maliki school of Islamic law, today prevalent in almost all of North Africa. The next two generations of scholars produced the heads of the other major schools of Islamic law, and these luminaries had direct ties to Malik IBN Anas. The jurist Ashafi' I devoured and memorized Malik IBN Anas writings and studied with Malik IBN Anas in Medina, eventually writing his own elegantly organized works on Islamic law, and in turn being the founder of the Shafi' I school of Islamic jurisprudence, present throughout the modern Islamic world, but with particular concentrations in Malaysia and Indonesia. And finally, Al Shafi' I student Ahmad IBN Hanbel, influenced by the scope, erudition and clarity of Al Shafi' I's works, became a major hadith scholar and the founder of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, today pervasive in most of Saudi Arabia. This is all very basic Islamic history, but if you're new to it, it's a flurry of names and schools of law that's easy to get lost in. So let's zoom out a bit and review what we've learned so far. The hadiths are sacred traditions about the Prophet Muhammad and, to a lesser extent, his companions. The things that they said and the things that they did. The initial wellspring of the hadiths were the people of Muhammad's children and grandchildren's generation, who, while he was alive, but especially after he d preserved many stories about him, often writing these narratives down in unofficial notebooks. The young sahaba, or companions then gave way to the tabiyun, or followers. As the 600s came to a close and as the 700s opened, a fourth generation of chroniclers came to the forefront. While this fourth generation of scholars, that of Malik Ibn Anas, the guy we were just talking about. While this fourth generation of scholars were removed from Muhammad by a century, they also had methods, methodological rigor, approaching hadiths systematically and chronicling them into topically organized books. During the first half of the seven hundreds, these musanfs, or topically organized books, included hadiths as well as the legal disquisitions of individual scholars. And out of this energetic admixture of prophetic tradition and legal work, there arose most of the main schools of Islamic law still extant today and that affect billions of people today. As fitnahs, or civil wars, rocked the Umayyad caliphate and the Abbasid revolution shook the Islamic empire, in 750, the scholarly traditions of Islam counteractively created a trans regional scholarly class who were often able to share and learn from one another's work. Their sharing and pedagogy were still limited. The caliphates were gigantic. And so inevitably, some parts of some scholarly traditions evolved in isolation from one another. And Mecca, Basra, Kufa, Alexandria and Damascus sometimes preserve traditions absent in other regions. But in the main, as Muhammad's extra Quranic teachings were safeguarded and transmitted from a second generation to a third and then a fourth, and then fifth and sixth, a scholarly class came into being, one that first studied the Quran and hadiths, and then the Quran and hadiths together with earlier works of theology and legal scholarship. We have been talking about the hadiths for a while in this episode and now have a good overall sense of how they were preserved over the first four generations of Islamic history. We have not, however, reached the period of the canonical hadith collections, in other words, the actual compilations that are widely used in Sunnism today. Because while the seven hundreds saw hadiths becoming an integral part of Islamic scholarship and the careers of many of Islam's most prominent legal scholars, it was the eight hundreds that gave birth to the most important hadith collections in Sunnism today. This is a very strange factoid if you think about it for just a moment. Why would prophetic traditions from a later period be more influential and widely referenced than prophetic traditions from an earlier period? Didn't we just learn that Malik Ibn Anas and others in his generation, only a century removed from Muhammad were creating topically organized hadith collections for all posterity? Didn't we just learn that Malik IBN Anas and others of his generation had well documented ties to those who had actually known Muhammad? What need was there for hadith scholars of the 800s to exist at all? There are two answers to this question. First, as the first century of the Abbasid caliphate passed, a new generation of scholars like Malik IBN Anas student Idris Al Shafi' I increasingly decided that they wanted hadiths from Muhammad himself, not sayings from his companions, and not the freestyling of later scholars. Connectedly strong isnads, or again chains of transmitters became more and more mandatory components of any given had hadith. Like modern academics, Abbasid period Hadith scholars wanted all sources cited to return a final time to Malik ibn Anas, that heavyweight Medinan scholar of the 700s, just three generations removed from Muhammad. Malik's book of hadiths often contains the scholars own opinions and rulings without any prophetic citations. Even more notably, in his hadith collection, Malagibin Anas cites hadiths from Muhammad 61 times without offering any isnad at all, simply telling the reader that Muhammad said x, y, or z. In the half century between 750 and 800, this less formal, less academic style slowly fell into disfavor. The first generations of Abbasid readers wanted their hadiths to come from Muhammad himself, and they wanted those prophetic hadiths have impeccable isnads. To be clear, Malik IBN Anas himself and his book are both still very much revered, and there is naturally some specific esteem given to earlier sources over later sources. Nonetheless, though, Malik IBN Anas students and their students became increasingly academically minded, appreciating the rigor of a reliable is nod as much as they did the contents of the hadith itself. In summation, then, up to the end of the umayyad Caliphate in 750, a Hadith compiler could put together a topically organized bundle of prophetic narratives, some of which related stories about companions rather than Muhammad, many of which had isnads, but some of which did not, trusting that his own relative chronological proximity to Muhammad and pedagogical pedigree were enough to legitimize the occasional editorializing on a subject. By contrast, though, during the first century of the Abbasid caliphate, In other words 750 to 850, a Hadith collection was increasingly expected to concentrate almost exclusively on Muhammad, and each hadith needed to have a full iznad. Because of the heightened interest in iPad, around 800 a new form of hadith literature came into being called the musna. A musnad is a collection of hadiths organized by isnad. In other words, this group of hadiths is narrator A, who heard this from narrator B, who heard it from narrator C, who heard it from Muhammad. And there might be an entire section of the book that is devoted to the A B C Muhammad chain of narrators. This the musnad proved an ideal form for academic purposes, as it organized hadiths according to reliability and citation structure. The aforementioned scholar Ibn Hanbal, who lived from 780 to 855, has the stature of Aquinas in Islam. Ibn Hanbal set down a musnad that contained a staggering 27,700 hadiths, which he himself set had been distilled from 750,000 that he had reviewed. Ibn Hanbel's collection survives to this day, and it demonstrates the extent to which early Abbasid Scholarship was invested in the production and warehousing of hadiths at an enormous scale. Ibn Hanbal's collection was vast, and its thoroughness and academic organization were part of what made it useful. But the book also presented hadiths that Ibn Hanbal admitted had unreliable isnads included as worthy of discussion in spite of their sometimes dubious progeny. The vastness of Ibn Hanbal's collection, a product of the first half of the 800s, presented the logical apex of what a hadith collection could do. 27,700 hadiths organized by chains of narrator, are laid out in the collection across thousands of pages, forming a gold mine for later Abbasid scholars as well as today's specialists. But Ibn Hanbal's musnad, and again a musnad is a hadith collection organized by chains of narrators, ultimately proved less popular than what came next in Sunni Islam. Over the middle part of the 800s, a new type of hadith collection came along that would soon be called the sahih, which means authentic. The Sahih hadith collection was a 9th century innovation, and all of the major Sunni hadiths today exist in sahih compendiums. The idea behind the sahih was simple. The Musannaf of Malik ibn Anas generation around, say 750 was very conveniently organized by topic. The Musnad of Ibn Hanbal's generation around say 820, was very conveniently organized by isnad, and it mainly concentrated on prophetic hadiths. Around 8:50, the most famous hadith compilers who would ever live decided to utilize the best traditions that had come before them. They organized books topically, they focused on prophetic hadiths, and they only included hadiths that had good solid isnads. The sahih, again authentic like Sunni hadith collections, almost entirely the creations of the half century between 750 and 800 became the most useful repositories of narratives about the Prophet. They were organized, they were vetted by professionals, and again they focused on Muhammad. Though undertaken more than two centuries after Muhammad's death, the sahih books, and there are six major ones in Sunnism, became cherished parts of Islamic history history. So let's go on to Al Qutub Asita, or the six authentic hadith books, which have been central to Sunni Islam for more than a thousand years. Almost two centuries after the hijra of Muhammad and his followers in 622, a pair of scholars were born. Over the course of the middle part of the 800s these two scholars would write two Hadith collections that are together called the Sahihain, or the two authentic Hadith collections, and are understood in Sunnism to be the most sacred books next to the Quran itself. These two scholars were the pupils of Ibn Hanbal, who had written a hadith collection with more than 27,000 narratives. And while the two scholars were about to meet revered their teacher's erudition, they also shared a sense that quality was more important than quantity and that hadiths with authentic isnads were the ones that most deserved scholarly attention and reverence by the pious laity. The first of these two scholars, and really the most important hadith scholar in all Sunni Islam, was Muhammad Al Buhari. When you come across a Sunni hadith, there's a good chance you'll see beneath it the words Sahih al Bukhari adjacent to a book and a hadith number. When you walk into the library of a Sunni madrasa or the home of a Sunni imam, you will see Sahih Bukhari on a bookshelf spanning nine volumes and 4,000 pages, a pretty long brick of text, but one that was nonetheless effectively distilled from something much larger. Al Buhari was born in what is today Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and he had Persian ancestry. Entranced by hadiths at an early age, Al Bukhari is alleged to have spent 16 years going through 600,000 hadiths. What he did with these 600,000 hadiths was as impressive as it was useful to posterity. Al Buhari wanted to create a compilation of authentic hadiths, and so, studying the isnads of hundreds of thousands of narratives, he selected around 7,400 for presentation in his compendium. These 7,400 hadiths were organized into 98 topically organized chapters. Chapter 70, for instance, contains hadiths having to do with food and meals, and Chapter 23 is home to hadiths related to funerals. These chapters are further organized into subchapters to make them more easily navigable, and the subchapter headings often contain notes useful to the interpretation of the hadiths that follow them. Al Buhari, then hard at work between the 820s and the 840s, completed his compilation around the time he reached middle middle age, and he spent his later years refining his collection and traveling around the Abbasid empire reciting the traditions that he had selected. Now a pillar of Sunnism in his own time, Al Buhari represented the most advanced and academic approach yet taken toward hadith scholarship. One in which the muhadith himself or hadith scholar removed the inauthentic hadiths ahead of time and organized hadiths for readers as well. Well, Muhammad Al Bukhari had a scholarly contemporary who wrote the second most famous hadith collection. This contemporary was named Moslem Ibn Al Hajjaj, or just Muslim today in scholarship. Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj spent his life and career in the northeast of what is today Iran, in the Khorasan province of the Abbasid Empire. Muslims collection had around the same total number of hadiths as Al Bukhari's. Al Bukhari's has about 77,400 and Muslims contains about 7,750. Moslem's collection has fewer topical chapter divisions 54 in comparison to Al Bukhari's 98 and it omits the legal discussions included by Al Buhari. And in order to understand the final major difference between Al Buhari and Muslim again the most famous two Sunni hadith scholars whose works are found in millions of homes and institutions of study across the world world, we need to make a simple observation about the 15,000 Hadiths that these two scholars selected for preservation. Put simply, within the Sahihain, or the two most famous hadith collections by Al Bukhari and Muslim, there are many repeated hadiths. Out of the roughly 7,400 Hadiths in Al Buhari, just 2600 are distinct, and they're repeated in variations by different narrators sufficiently to bring the total number up to 7,400. There are also many repeated hadiths in Muslims hadith collection, although Muslim compacts all variations of the same hadith together in one section, whereas Al Buhari does not. Muslim's organization means that his collection is sometimes especially useful in comparing different versions of the same hadith or different versions of a chain of transmitters. And just as Al Bukhari and Muslim individually contain repetitions of the same hadith, the two scholars also have in common 2,326 Hadiths. Thus, while Sunni hadith literature is indeed incredibly vast, it has an inner core of six authentic compilations, and the core of that core four is the body of hadiths shared by the two most revered compilations of all, the Sahih Al Bukhari and the Sahih Muslim. Al Buhari and Muslim proved to be the vanguard of a major movement in 9th century Islamic scholarship, a movement focused on making hadith collections grounded in excellent scholarship and organized for the purposes of reference and usability. Al Buhari and Muslims. Contemporary Abu Daoud Asijestani, a third pupil of the great Ibn Hanbel, wrote the third of Sunnism's six authentic hadith books, including about 5,300 narrations. Al Buhari's own student, Muhammad Ibn Isa at Tirmidi, wrote the fourth of the six authentic books, which included 4,300, and another of Al Buhari's students, Ahmad Ibn Shuaib Anasai, wrote the fifth, which compiled about 5,800 hadiths. The sixth and final author of the authentic six Sunni hadith books was Muhammad Ibn Yazid Ibn Majah, whose text included 4,890 hadiths. Those names and numbers are surely a lot to take in in podcast form, so let me make some general statements about the two most famous Hadith scholars and their successors. Between 840 and 900, two generations of scrupulous theological historians came to the forefront of Islamic intellectual history. Interestingly, all of them were from the northeast of the Abbasid empire, every single one born east of the Zagros Mountains, and collectively they hailed from modern day Uzbekistan and the seam between Iran and Afghanistan, with only one of them Ibn Majah from central rather than eastern Iran. The authors of the six authentic Hadith books took their efforts as curators very seriously. They saw machismo and hubris in past generations of Hadith scholars who simply tried to gather together as many prophetic narratives as possible. The point was not the length of the mixtape, so to speak, but the excellency of the contents therein and the accessibility of its overall organization. When Al Buhari's generation and the generation of his students passed away, the most influential hadith collections that would ever be written were complete. There would be a great deal more work on hadiths in Islamic history after the year 900, but a lot of it would be rooted in the work of the six authentic Sunni Hadith collections, collections themselves the result of a very laudable human instinct to write history accurately and to make books useful and well organized for those who need them. With the six authentic Hadith books of Sunnism complete around the year 900, we might wonder what else was left to be undertaken in Hadith scholarship. Hadn't Muhammad Al Bukhari and Muslim Ibn Hajjaj and the other four revered compilers basically accomplished the mission? Hadn't they reviewed the chains of narrators, separated the wheat from the chaff, and organized everything for all posthum austerity? Wasn't it time for high fives and baklava? The answer to these questions is no Al Bukhari and the other heavyweights of the eight hundreds were comprehensive and intellectually responsible. They were not, however, immediately given the authoritative status that they now have today. As of the year 900, not everyone wanted hadiths to be rigorously parsed into authentic and inauthentic. Thus, in spite of the now revered work of Al Buhari's generation, as theological debates factionalized Abbasid society, comprehensiveness and academic trustworthiness were often less important than polemic aim. And more broadly, Al Buhari and the other authors of the six main Sunni hadith collections had created massive slabs of text, and massiveness is, especially prior to the printing press, is not ideal for popularity and wide circulation. As the 900s dawned, new generations of hadith compilations came into being that might be thought of as genre compilations. The ZUD was a hadith anthology that focused on narratives having to do with asceticism and piety, focusing on moments of surpassing devoutness by Muhammad and some of his contemporaries. Other topical hadith collections focused on correct Muslim manners, on the punishments of hell and rewards of heaven, on correct formularies for prayers and righteous deportment during eating, drinking, traveling, and, more generally, etiquette. These smaller, focused compilations were useful in pious households where literate parents might not have the money or time for a 4000 page anthology but still wanted to have some hadiths in their home. And while some shorter hadith collections were topically focused, others were intentionally polemic. Abbasid period intellectual history, as scholars synthesized Greek and Persian traditions with Islamic ones, could be theologically progressive. During the Abbasid period, some theologians, broadly known as the Mutazilites, were emphasizing the use of reason and speculation in order to understand God God counteractively. Some hadith books from the 800s onward were compiled that specifically emphasized dogma over speculation and received teachings over new ones following the sana, the ways of Muhammad. This was the righteous path and not fraternizing with heterodox philosophy. Ironically, though, polemic hadith collections as focused on the past as they were were often less concerned with correct isnads than Al Buhari and his generation had been against Shiites and those Muslim rationalists called the mutazilites. Some Sunni compilers marshaled whatever stories they could in order to make their case, sacrificing academic responsibility for argumentative value. From the second half of the nine hundreds onward, though, the sheer variety of hadith texts began to necessitate some sort of agreed on canon. Beginning with the work of an Egyptian scholar Around 950, we begin to hear lists of just a few hadith books that are understood as having surpassing excellency and accuracy. These lists sometimes included four books, and sometimes five, and increasingly six. And the names most commonly mentioned over the 900s, 1000s, 1100s and 1200s are Al Bukhari, Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj, Abu Daoud, Atirmidi, Anasai, and Ibn Majah. These are again called Al Qutub Asita, the six authentic books, with about 19,600 unique hadiths among them. For more than a thousand years, these books have been at the heart of Sunnism. Hadith production, in spite of the growing centrality of the Qutuba, Sitta, proceeded throughout the 1900s, with numerous compilers returning to the tradition of quantity over quality. One compiler produced a collection so gigantic that today it's published as a 28 volume set, and other compilers produced even longer anthologies. But the six volumes of the Qutub as Sitta, the most revered of which were the collections of Al Buhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj, ultimately stood the test of time. I want to tell you now pretty briefly about the next thousand years of history of Sunni hadith production. Hadith scholarship after the 10th century paid very close attention to iznads, again, chains of transmission and the credentials of any given transmitter. If you were a hadith scholar and you could say that you had heard this or that hadith from this or that revered specialist, then in terms of genealogy, you placed yourself a bit closer to Muhammad and his companions. Connectedly, if you were a hadith scholar, you might receive ijaza, or permission for transmission from your teacher, which would give you license to pass on hadiths. You heard from that teacher, then, fortified with isnads that linked you to the earliest Muslims and armed with permissions from specific instructors, as a hadith scholar, you had extra heft, and in all likelihood you really did have a higher chance of understanding prophetic traditions. Theological and academic pedigree, then, were important in the history of hadith scholarship in much the same way that modern academics were might proudly list professors under whom they've studied on their resumes. Medieval Muslims, like intellectuals of any generation, understood that while you can read someone else's book, there is also no substitution for personal, precise instruction. By making himself a part of a distinguished isnad, then a hadith transmitter could elevate himself among his peers. One way to seek distinction was for students to attend schools with excellent teachers and to travel widely and seek permission to retransmit sacred narratives. Another, though, was to look for what became called ali or elevated iznads, in other words, isnads that were shorter, that placed scholars a bit closer to Muhammad's generation. If the narrative you were passing on had 15 transmitters associated with it, it was much more subject to the telephone game of history. If it had fewer, though, it belonged to you a bit more. Rather than being the property of a whole population of tellers, scholars looking for elevated isnad sought out rare prophetic narratives, esoteric stories that, whether or not they were true, allowed transmitters the prerogative of a short train of transmission. A chronicler with a small sheaf of hadiths with unique and short isnads, then, was a specialist who had made a niche for himself in the crowded field of hadith study. Again, his narratives might not be accurate across the board, but they were unique and based on at least some form of reliable precedent. Hadith scholars then were interested in one another's credentials, sometimes as much as they were the prophetic traditions themselves. Part of hadith scholarship was evaluating the isnads of whoever's work you were reading. Who were the muhadith's teachers? Teachers? Did he have any rare hadiths that he had traveled far to hear and curate for the scholarly public? What sorts of permissions had he been given from his teachers? These were key questions within early Islamic intellectual history, such that genres arose, allowing compilers to showcase their erudition. The morjam during the 10th century became a genre in which hadith scholars recorded traditions as well as information about their own travels, studies and teachings. Sometimes self aggrandizing and generally very learned and reverent toward tradition, the mojam texts that survive show a general climate of devoutness and respect for authority. In medieval hadith studies, as much as highly specialized hadith works were being Produced during the 900s and 1000s, the six authentic Hadith books continued to grow in Istanbul. And what happens when a text is revered and esteemed in an Abrahamic religion? Why, commentaries, of course? The genre of shah or commentary on a hadith collection blossomed after the second half of the 800s, and commentaries on hadith compilations have been a fixture of Islamic scholarship ever since. Another genre that grew was hadith collection. Collections focused on local histories in which authors used hadiths to chronicle the past times of storied regions and cities. Some of these are gigantic books. A 12th century history of Damascus rooted in hadiths is a jaw dropping 80 volumes in length. But in the medieval period as well as today, not everyone wanted to purchase and read a work tens of thousands of pages in length length and Another genre of hadith literature that flourished during the medieval period was the 40 Hadith collection. As the name would imply, collections of 40 Hadiths that showcased what a specific scholar believed were the very best hadiths and also often hadiths that showcased his expertise and credentials. The most famous of these is a work called Al Arbayen al Naway or Nawawi's 40 Hadiths that a 13th century scholar compiled mostly from Al Buhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj. And In Sunnism today, Nawawi's 40 is among the most popular books in the homes of Muslims. There is really no easy way to generalize about what happened in hadith scholarship during the later Middle Ages. There were movements directed toward concision and usability, with scholars creating indexes filled with bibliographical citations and others taking the key hadiths of Al Bukhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj and sorting them into just one volume. At the same time, though, some Hadith scholars followed the old siren song of creating the most massive all encompassing collection possible, such as an Egyptian scholar who sadly passed away before he was able to complete a compilation that would have included more than 100 Hadiths. There are ultimately two things that I'd like you to take away from this discussion of how the Sunni hadiths came to be. The first is simple. Both before and after the Qutubha Sita, or authentic six Hadith books of the eight hundreds and a little after, the study of hadiths was central to Sunnism. But the six Qutub Asita and especially the collections of Al Buhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajj, these were ultimately the most influential hadith books in Sunni history. And if you're going to read just one hadith book, the single volume of Al Bukhari that's available today, or Even just the 40 hadiths of Al Nawawi I mentioned a moment ago, which itself comes from Al Buhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj. These are the epicenter of Sunni hadith scholarship. Now onto the second point about the formation of the Sunni had hadith canon. Sunnis have studied the hadiths in order to learn how to be good people and good Muslims based on the example of the Prophet Muhammad. But the rigor and scope of hadith studies as a discipline had a profoundly positive effect on Islamic intellectual history more broadly. Over the course of millions of pages of prophetic stories changing hands and millions of hours of oral history being exchanged before that and millions of individual studies of isnads, the epicenter of Sunni theology, became an intellectual gymnasium that honed young minds and kept old ones in shape, just as their Jewish contemporaries at yeshivas and synagogues studied rabbinical disputations, trying to understand and adapt the old Mosaic laws to the medieval present. During the Middle Ages, Muslims with a certain degree of intellectual muscle explored the vast, vast expanses of the hadiths which held the answers to so many crucial questions about life in the Islamic world, past and present. Alum al Hadith, or hadith studies, is a serious and scientific endeavor, and we'll discuss the details of the discipline a bit more later. But even from what you've heard thus far in this program, you can pretty quickly understand how, after the Abbasid revolution in 750, Hadith studies became the training grounds for great minds. If you were a devout young Muslim kid in the eight hundreds or nine hundreds growing up in Kufa or Raqqa or Baghdad or Cordoba or Isfahan, and you disciplined your mind by memorizing the Quran and then exploring endless meshes of isnads and hadiths and laws related to them and associated disputes within contemporary legal theory, theory, you would have quite an agile intellect with such baseline training. If you wanted to go on to study medicine or mathematics, astronomy or history, architecture or poetry, you would have the memory and study skills transferable to any number of fields. In such a fashion, hadith studies are and continue to be a cornerstone of Islamic society, deepening the devoutness toward the past while at the same time sharpening minds for the present and future. We now have a general sense of how the hadiths came to be. We explored how an initial generation of young people who knew Muhammad passed on stories about him and how during the second half of the 800s, these stories eventually became parts of the rigorously researched and organized Qutb as Sita, the six authentic hadith books of Sunnism, and especially the Sahin, the two most pervasive books of Al Buhari and Muslim Ibn Al Hajjaj. We discussed how different varieties of hadith collections came into being and how some muhadiths sought to become parts of isnads, or chains of transmissions, in order to exhibit their pedigree and credentials. The process of distilling laws and ordering society based on the Quran and hadiths is quintessentially a Sunni one. In Sunnism, the Islamic community, or Ummah, is guided by the ulema, or scholarly class schooled in the Quran, hadiths, commentaries, and law books. The Ulama makes decisions about religious laws, decisions that are arrived at through ijma or consensus, and these decisions are nearly as binding as the Quran and hadiths themselves. Sunni societies then, have traditionally been governed by a theological intelligentsia who are academically accountable toward one another and through research and scholarly debate, write rules and laws according to verdicts they reach as a collective. Now let's talk about the history of hadiths within Shia. Just to be very clear, for those of us new to Islam and Islamic studies today, Sunnis account for roughly 85% of Muslims worldwide and Shias 15%. Because the name Sunnism comes from Sunnah or tradition or way, and because the traditions and ways of Muhammad in Sunni Islam are preserved in the hadiths, it's tempting to assume that hadiths are Hadiths aren't really part of Shi'. Ism. In fact, hadiths are a part of Shi'. Ism. It's just that Shi' ism has a different set of prophetic traditions. Shiites from the Rashidun period onward believed that Muhammad's cousin and son in law, Ali, should have been the first Caliph beginning in 632, that Ali's sons ought to have ruled instead of the early Umayyad caliphs, and that moreover, the genetic descendants of Muhammad should have led the Islamic world world the people of the House of the Prophet. Specifically, a set of imams descended from Ali are the luminaries of Shi'. Ism. In Shi', Ism, then, imams of the bloodline of Muhammad through Ali and Muhammad's daughter Fatima, were the foremost men who should have ruled as lawgivers. The single most important difference between Sunni and Shia hadiths then is as Sunnis believe, that only Muhammad had prophetic authority, Shiites believe that Muhammad and a number of his male descendants had prophetic authority. Today, the majority of Shiites are Imami Shiites, sometimes called Twelver Shiites. In Imami Shi', ISM, 12 successors of Muhammad are understood as having shared his esoteric knowledge from his son in law, Ali, all the way down to 12 generations later, Muhammad Ali al Mahdi, the hidden Imam who will eventually emerge as the savior and redeemer of Islam on Judgment Day. The twelve imams of Imami Shi' ism were alive from the birth of Ali around 600, all the way down to the death of the 11th Imam, Al Hasan Al Askari, in 874. Because Shiites believe in a lineage of prophetic descendants who lived and taught for 300 years after the death of Muhammad, Shiite hadiths chronicle the words and deeds of prophetic descendants as well as Muhammad himself. Just as Sunnis during the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates were writing hadiths and biographies of Muhammad and his contemporaries, Shiites, following the death of Ali's son Hussein in 680, worked to collect traditions related to the descendants of Muhammad. There were sayings collections for the descendants of the Prophet and books chronicling their various virtues, and they gradually became more organized and codified into compendiums and topical books. In particular, the sixth Imam, Ja' far al Sadiq and his son attracted followers to collect traditions during the second half of the 700s and throughout the 800s. These sayings collections were quite like the Sunni hadith compilations that arose during the same period. The difference was that while Sunnis were studying isnads to evaluate the veracity of generations old prophetic traditions, Shiites were chronicling the words of near contemporary history with the belief that each of the twelve Imams was infallible. If the Sikhs 6th or 7th Imam in the year 750 or 775 said that Muhammad had said something, then the tradition was valid. Although Shiites revere the line of descendants of Muhammad through Ali, eventually that line came to an end. The rise of Shi' Ism's main Hadith compilations had roots in catastrophes that impacted shiites during the 9th and 10th centuries. When the 11th Imam, Alhassan Al Askari, died in captivity in 874, he had no adult heir. Many Shiites, however, as the 9th century proceeded, claimed that Alhassan al Askari did have an heir, an infant boy who had been hidden. This boy was the 12th and hidden imam, again called Muhammad al Mahdi. In Shi' ism between 874 and 941, a sequence of four ambassadors represented the teachings and the will of the hidden Imam, Muhammad al Mahdi. But when the last of these ambassadors died, Shiites lost their taproot or their direct connection to the esoteric knowledge that had resided in Muhammad and his 12 male descendants. The year 941 begins what in Shiism is called the major occultation or the major dharma. And while it is among the most important dates In Shiite history, 941 is also an important year in the history of Shia Hadith scholarship. The most consequential phase of Sunni Hadith scholarship, as we learned earlier, was from about 850 900. Shi' ism's most influential Hadith compilations came about a couple of generations later, beginning in the mid-900s and concluding in the late 1000s. There are four of them. The first, a fixture of Shiite religious libraries, is a work called Al Kafi, compiled by a Shiite scholar named Muhammad IBN Yaqub Al Qulayni, or commonly the Qaafi of Al Qulayni. This vast collection of over 16,000 hadiths was amassed with the help of the ambassadors said to represent the Hidden Imam. And so Al Kulaini's kafi, completed just before the major occultation, is a storehouse of source materials about Muhammad and some of his genetic descendants, organized into carefully titled subchapters to help make it clear and navigable to devout Shiites who have studied it over the past thousand years. The next great Shiite hadith compilation was that of Ibn Babaway, who lived a generation after Al Qudi. The title of Ibn Babaway's collection is a phrase translated literally as he who has no legal scholar at hand. The collection is a reference book of over 9,000 Hadiths, engineered to help Shiites understand law and legal precedent as established by Muhammad and the Shia imams who followed him. And two generations after Ibn Baba, one of his students, students generally called Sheikh Tusi, set down not one, but two hadith collections, completing the core of the Shiite hadith canon. Sheikh Tusi passed away in 1067, and thus the main Shiite hadith books came about between 900 and 1076, a little while after the principal six Sunni Hadith books. What happened in Sunni Hadith scholarship largely also happened in Shiite Hadith scholarship. The Shiite Muhadith Shaykh Tusi, at work in the middle of the 11th century, began placing particular emphasis on isnads and their reliability, as Shiites naturally wanted the stories they were passing down about Muhammad and his descendants to be reliable. Additionally, Shiites criticized hadiths based upon their contents as as well well. The first main Shiite hadith collection, the Kafi, stated that everything is compared to the Book of God and the Sunnah, and any Hadith that does not agree with the Book of God is but varnished falsehood. Shiite hadith compilations, then, especially the four that have been revered since the 900s and 1000s, had the same hard headed intellectual common sense that Sunni Hadith compilations had. If an iznad looked fishy, the content to which it was attached should be regarded cautiously. If the content itself looked out of step with the Quran and the ways of the Prophet more generally, then again, that content was suspicious. Let's talk about some of the similarities and differences between the main hadith collections of Sunnism and those of Shiite around the year 1076, when the final major Shiite muhadith, Sheikh Tusi, passed away in 1076 CE, Shiites revered Hadiths about the Prophet Muhammad. So did Sunnis. In 1076, Shiites revered Hadiths illustrating the virtues of Ali and Ali's wife, the Prophet's daughter Fatima. So did Sun Sunnis. In 1076, Shiites revered Hadiths about Muhammad's era that underscored the values of the Quran. So did Sunnis. There are thousands and thousands of hadiths to which Sunnis and Shiites of any generation give a mutual thumbs up. Where the sects parted company by the 11th century were the Shiite hadiths revering the authority and and the inerrancy of the later imams who had descended from Ali. Hadiths lauding the character and wisdom of Ali were fine. Those that valorized his descendants half a dozen generations down the line were, from the Sunni perspective, misguided. Nonetheless, Sunni hadith scholarship around again 1076 still found the rigor of individual Shiite compilations strong. Strong. And just because a Shiite transmitted a few sectarian narratives didn't mean that the other narratives with strong isnads in a Shiite collection shouldn't be taken seriously by Sunni scholars. Equally, Shiites still used and revered Sunni hadiths regarding Ali, whom everyone loved. And Shiite disputants with a strong command of the Sunni hadith canon could debate Sunnis using Sunni lips literature. Enough crossover between the two corpuses existed and still exists, that they together form a continuum with sectarian edges rather than two wholly separate silos of text. So now that we've explored the rise and the main hadith canons of Sunnism and Shi', ism, we have two more things to do in this introductory program on the hadiths. First, I want to tell you a bit about the ulum Alphabet hadith or hadith sciences as a formal discipline. In other words, how for over a thousand years scholars have read, analyzed, and evaluated this massive body of material. Then I want to talk at a very high level about how hadiths have been used in Islamic law and politics during and after the classical period of Islamic civilization. Let's begin with ulum aluminum hadith, the traditional methodology that before even the Islamic Golden Age, was honing the minds and pens of some of the finest thinkers of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. In the year 711, Umayyad forces crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into the southern part of the ailing Visigothic King kingdom, setting the stage for the imminent Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula. But something else happened in 711 that also signaled changes to come. And this was the death of Anas IBN Malik, Muhammad's servant, who had been one of the foremost primary generators of Sunni hadiths. Anas IBN Malik, who allegedly lived almost a century, was one of the last living vestiges of Muhammad's work world. A man who could read contemporary hadiths and shake his head and say, no, Muhammad hadn't said that one thing, or yes, Muhammad had said that other thing. With the passing of all of those who had known Muhammad in the early 1700s, Islamic history lost its repository of primary sources on the Prophet's life, and a real danger emerged that the production of hadiths could turn into fiction and hagiography. As early as the first Fitna, that conflict between Ali and Muawiya, fake hadiths were circulating attesting that Muhammad had preemptively condemned Muawiya or that Muhammad had sanctioned Muawiya's rule. And unscrupulous propagandists from the 7th century onward readily put words into the Prophet's mouth to justify their political and ideological growth. Schools hadiths, especially from the 700s to the 1000s, were forged for numerous reasons. Sunni and Shiite hadiths came into being that seemed to justify one sect over the other. The major ideological controversy of the early Abbasid Caliphate, as we learned last time, was whether or not the Quran was created and hadiths appeared that took positions on this subject. Less consequentially, hadiths appeared in which Muhammad aggrandized this or that city or predicted this or that contemporary event. For the rawis or bards of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Muhammad's words and deeds were also pulled into extant story cycles, and tales of the marvelous things the Prophet had done were freely embellished before reverent audiences. Hadiths were forged for the purposes of piety as well. In the words of 1 9th century Hadith scholar, I have not witnessed lying about the Prophet in any one more than I have seen it in those known for asceticism and piety. Religious community leaders who wanted to elicit certain behaviors out of the laity might invent or modify a hadith in order to make their doctrinal innovations appear to have come from modern Muhammad. And more generally, various common adages, colloquialisms and sayings were falsely attributed to Muhammad, though many of These came from the old folkways and superstitions of the Arabic and Persian speaking worlds that predated Muhammad from the seven hundreds onward. Then all sorts of fake hadiths appeared in the Umayyad and Abbasid empires that served various agendas or simply grew organically. Perhaps more subtle and dangerous than new fictions invented about Muhammad though, were forged isnads, or chains of transmission. If a hadith already existed that justified a propagandist's or a sectarian's idea, that partisan could simply dress up the hadith's isnad a bit and present it as more authentic than it had traditionally been considered. Considered subtle manipulation of an old narrative sources could be used to present a novel ideological school as something that Muhammad himself endorsed. In summation, even by the year 711, the extant body of hadiths in Islam had wheat as well as chaff. And even for specialists, it could be hard to tell which was which. The first tool that emerged in Sunism was was a critical method with three different tiers, a method that began first and foremost with the evaluation of each hadith's iznad. Chains of transmitters were always parts of Islamic tradition. Isnads are ultimately one of the foundations of Sunnism and a safeguard to help keep Islam Islam and not a loose heterodox ideology, subject to continuous evolution. Isnad criticism, which was maturing by the mid-800s, was itself a multi part endeavor. Chains of transmission, after all, were made up of individual links of transmitters, and each transmitter could be considered individually. Transmitters first of all needed to be known as individuals. In other words, an isnad couldn't simply say some guys at a well told Abu Harayra this story about Muhammad closing, because without knowing who the guys in question were, the narrative was suspect regardless of its early vintage. This simple criteria over the course of the 800-00 was just one part of a greater methodology of evaluating chains of sources. Hadith scholars began to consider the individual students of specific Hadith teachers. If one student some decades back had generated a bunch of hadiths that the other students of the same same teacher had not, then that student was probably doing something fishy. Additionally, if one of the links in a chain of transmitters was an individual known by historians to be a bad person or a bad Muslim or both, then the isnad in question had a significant flaw in it. By the early 900s, a multi tiered system of evaluation existed for names. In isnad, a Hadith transmitter could be anywhere between thika or reliable and citable in legal scholarship, all the way down to matruk al hadith or absolutely unusable. Between these two extremes, six more categories existed wherein transmitters were placed according to different gradations of reliability. Analysis of the reliability of hadith transmitters was a serious and academic success subject, with a flurry of works written evaluating the strength of certain transmitters and other works pinpointing the weaknesses of other transmitters. Transmitter criticism was not immune to the personalities and prejudices of various critics, with some critics being fearsome and some lenient, with some having vendettas and personal agendas, and others more or less invested in sectarian divergences in Islam. Most importantly, the Sunni Shia split. Transmitter criticism is a pretty granular and technical subject, something rather different than revering the lofty and sweeping verses of the Quran and an even more granular subject in hadith studies as early as the mid-700s was Al Irisal, or the study of the continuity of transmission. An iznad might tell us that person X learned a hadith from person Y. But how did the learning take place? Was it in person, or was the knowledge passed on through a hidden third party? If the teaching had allegedly taken place face to face, had the two transmitters actually lived during the same period and were circumstances such that they could have actually met one another? Put simply, each isnad needed to to have feasible continuity to it, the links of the chain needed to be reliable, but connections between the links also needed to be plausible. As detailed and academic as these rubrics of analysis sound, however, in Sunni hadith studies, some chain links are more automatically valid than others. In Sunnism from the beginning, there has been a special emphasis placed on the infallibility of the companions of monks. Muhammad as transmitters of prophetic narratives. This emphasis makes sense on a fundamental level, of course, because those who knew Muhammad were well positioned to pass down what he had actually said and done. However, Sunnism's traditional emphasis that those who knew Muhammad, even if they were believers who had just met him once, has some logical hiccups. First, hadiths by some companions contradict hadiths by other companions companions. Second, Muhammad was a very active person who met and talked to a lot of people. In the six Hadith compilations central to Sunnism, there are 962 companions involved in chains of narration who are cited. If you had 962 people whom you had met quoting you, especially if you were a famous divisive feature figure, some of those people likely wouldn't get their facts straight. 962 people is a lot of folks, but later hadith collections mention vastly more than just 962 people. The great jurist Ashafi' I wrote that there were more than 60,000 companions, and other Abbasid period scholars cited numbers higher than this. If you had 60,000 people whom you had met quoting you, especially if you were a famous divisive figure, some of those people likely wouldn't get their facts straight. The notion that the hadiths of the companion generation are especially accurate even when Muhammad's passing acquaintances are cited as narrators is still part of Sunnism today. The subject of Hadith studies is complex, so let's once more pause briefly and review what we've learned so far in this portion of the program. Alum al Hadith, or Hadith science sciences were born in order to separate the authentic from the false hadiths. Hadith sciences emerged as three different areas of scholarly practice, and we've just learned about the first two. Number one, Hadith scholars found transmitters whom they decided for various reasons were unreliable. Two, Hadith scholars found isnads, or chains of transmission that were problematic due to vagueness or or historical logistics. Let's go on to number three. The third foundation of Hadith sciences, rather than having to do with transmitters or chains of transmission, had to do with analyzing the hadiths themselves. From what you've heard so far, Sunni Hadith studies up through the very early Abbasid period seem very academically solid. They they seem very academically solid, but for one significant idiosyncrasy. What about content? To give an example, the most famous Sunni Hadith scholar, Al Bukhari, was skeptical about a hadith that said the Prophet forbade breaking apart Muslim coins in circulation, and another that stated that quote, the signs of the Judgment Day are after the year 200 AH or 815 CE. The problem with these two otherwise unimpeachable Hadiths Al Bukhari knew in the mid-800s was that first, there were no Muslim coins when Muhammad lived, and second, that indeed the world had not actually ended in 850. No amount of fancy source criticism related to transmitters or transmission could salvage these patently false proclamations, which Al Bukhari declared inauthentic. As commonsensical as Al Buhari's judgment was in the 800s, Sunni hadith scholars rarely made such pronouncements. The reason for this is complex, and it has to do with the Abbasid period Mutazilite rationalist school and its emphasis on reason and logic. As we discussed last time, strict Sunni Hadith scholars, wanting prophetic traditions to dominate Islamic piety rather than human reason, felt more comfortable criticizing the mechanics of traditions than the traditions themselves. For some, if Muhammad had said that the world would end 200 years after the hijab, and scholars saw the world going on as it always had, the problem was still with the scholars rather than the prophetic tradition. Centuries later, in the 1100s and afterward, Sunni Hadith scholars began engaging much more forcefully in what we might call content criticism. Mutazilite rationalism and Sunni hadith sciences had been at loggerheads in the 800, but in the late afternoon of the Abbasid period, scientific rationalism was a part of Islamic society at so many levels that Sunni scholarship began a more forceful period of hadith content criticism. If a hadith seemed way out of step with reality, or with the Quran or the other teachings of Muhammad during the later Abbasid caliphate, that hadith might be rejected on account of its implausibility or lack of orthodox. When the classical period of Islamic civilization ended with the Mongol invasions of the late 1200s, Hadith Sciences were already half a millennium old and had produced many different methods for evaluating prophetic traditions in general. After the Abbasid period and end of classical Islamic civilization, hadith studies were at once abidingly conservative and at the same time progressive. On one hand, the old Sunni canon of six Hadith collections stood the test of time. Al Bukhari, Moslem, Ibn Hajjaj, and the others, mostly during the second half of the 800s, had as much scientific rigor as any other generation, and they also lived reasonably close to the era of the Prophet. And so their books, the qutuba sita or authentic books, remain at the core of Sunnism to this day. On the other hand, though, the end of classical Islamic civilization also saw more inclusivity in hadith criticism and willingness to take centuries old hadiths seriously and with respect. Even if the Greybeards of past caliphates had nitpicked their chains of transmission. There's a lot more to say about hadith sciences and how they evolved in the post classical period, but this is an introductory program, so let's review what we've learned to finally time Less than a century after Muhammad lived, professional historians were developing painstaking methods for authenticating the stories about him. These methods evolved over the centuries, and though they were never perfect, they were generally an academic, communal affair in which one scholar's work was subject to the evaluation of others in his field. While the general nature of hadith studies is, I suspect, quite clear by now, before we move on, I want to take a moment to consider how Hadiths were actually read and used from the 7 hundreds forward. It's hard to exaggerate how many millions of pages have been written about the hadiths, and even by the year 800, how many multi volume collections had been compiled on the subject. The question is if if you were a literate Muslim person living in Baghdad taking a walk around the grounds of the House of wisdom in say 875, what would you do with hadiths? Why might you spend the morning reading them? What was at stake? What would you be thinking about as you went out to get lunch after half a day spent with the books? The answer to this question is a lot of things actually. You might be a full on Muhal hadith like your soon to be famous contemporaries Al Bukhari and Muslim Ibn Hajjaj, planning your own doorstopper multi volume collection armed with notebooks whose pages were covered with cobwebs of iznads together with your notes on them. But not everyone who studied the hadiths wanted to eat, sleep and breathe them every day. You might also study hadiths for different reasons. You might be working on a top or a commentary on the Quran, a commentary that needed excellent scholarly support from authentic traditions related to Muhammad. You might also be a mufti or jurist or a qadi or judge working on a legal treatise or court case related to a very specific subject, agriculture or water rights or paternity or inheritance. And you might be plumbing the depths of all available hadiths looking for specific prophetic pronouncements on one of these subjects. You might be an ideological firebrand with an axe to grind against the Baghdad status quo in 875 and have spent the morning in search of material that supported your ideas. You might be a government bureaucrat sent by a supervisor to see what the hadiths had to say about some topic related to your division visions project at hand. You might be a devout middle class nobody who was planting a little garden in the courtyard of his home and had just popped into the library to see if there were any cherished hadiths in which Muhammad had said something about plants. Side note, he did. By the way, a beloved collection by the aforementioned 13th century scholar Al Nawawi tells us that if someone gives you basil as a preference present, it's good to graciously accept the gift because basil is both lightweight and it smells nice. So the aforementioned average Baghdadi guy would very possibly end up planting basil in his garden, which is an objectively great idea. The point here is that we have been talking about hadiths at quite a broad collective historical level, but that if we were regular literate Abbasid folk in 875 CE, the Hadiths would serve a wide array of finite practical purposes. The encyclopedic nature of the hadiths, even at this early period, is foreboding, but in comparison, it's easy enough to understand the utility of a shared storehouse of information used by everyone from professional encyclopedists to lawmakers themselves, all the way down to everyday bureaucrats and gardeners. Having just considered how hadiths functioned in the daily lives of Muslims during the early Abbasid period, in the remainder of this program, I'd like to continue discussing how hadiths have been used historically to legislate and administrate Islamic civilizations. The derivation of Islamic law from the Quran and hadith has always been a complicated process. The 114 Surahs of the Quran have been fixed since the 7th century. The Hadiths, however, have not. Coming up with law codes that do justice to both the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad as reflected in the hadiths, has been one of the central intellectual endeavors of Islam. Trying to decide what to plant in your garden is one thing, but when legal experts are trying to draft law codes for entire civilizations, law can become quite complicated quite quickly. The architecture of religious law in Sunnism has several different layers. The foundational layer is the Quran. The second layer up is a composite of the most reliable and canonical hadiths. The layer after that is the ijma, or the consensus of the ulema, or Muslim lawmakers and theologians. Sunni law often has place for a fourth layer, those hadiths whose chains of transmission are unreliable but which otherwise fit so well into the framework of the other three layers that they can be cited as useful sources on a subject. On the one hand, these are four broad, sturdy layers of legal source materials. On the other hand, though, of all four layers, only the Quran itself has been a stable entity over time. Time many hadiths have scuffs and cracks in them, either due to unreliable isnads or because they contradict one another, or because they're out of step with the Quran or the consensus of the ulama or lawmakers and theologians. While the ulama in Sunnism often has strong consensuses corroborated by the Quran and hadiths, different scholars and different schools of law altogether also have dispositions disagreements on how to read and interpret the Quran and hadiths, meaning that ijma or consensus, is neither uniform through time nor place. Let's consider an example of these different layers of source materials working together in contemporary history. Women in Islamic societies generally wear one of a number of different kinds of hijabs or niqabs, and more besides the these. The requirement for women to cover their heads is not explicitly stated in the Quran, as this was more generally a late antique Near Eastern custom that existed in Byzantine and Sasanian civilization at the aristocratic level as well as Arabia. Muslims who are critical of the veil as mandatory headwear for women have cited the lack of a Quranic mandate on the subject and proclaimed that the hadith on the subject aren't reliable. On the flip side, Muslims who endorse veils have emphasized that the Sunni scholarly body that makes up the ulama in the classical period as well as the modern one have ijma, or broad agreement or consensus that headscarves on women are required in Islam. The familiar example of the veil there can give you an idea of how the different layers of reference material material work together in Islamic jurisprudence and how sometimes the ulema can make rulings even if those rulings aren't thoroughly undergirded by the Quran and authentic hadiths. The example of the veil is such a heated topic in contemporary history, though, that I'd like to look at some other ways that the ulema has formed consensus about the Quran and hadiths. Those of us outside of Islam and more generally outside of Christianity and Judaism sometimes think of Abrahamic jurisprudence as something fundamentally oppressive, a bunch of callous patriarchs trying to rule over a subjugated laity. In Islam, however, as in Christianity and Judaism, there is a broad common ground between the ulama again, religious lawmakers and theologians and the citizenry. And sometimes the consensus of the ulama simply reflects the hard common sense of the society more generally. Let's look at an example, one related to inheritance in Sunnism. Sometimes broad consensus among legal scholars or the wide transmission of a hadith can outweigh the doubtful status of a hadith's sources. For instance, there is a hadith that appears in four out of the six paramount Sunni hadith collections. In this hadith, Muhammad proclaims that a killer cannot inherit money from the person whom he kills. This hadith is common sense, a legal bulwark against murdering wealthy relatives for profit. But the hadith also has shaky isnads, meaning that Muhammad may have never proclaimed it. Nonetheless, the hadith scholar atirmidi in the 800s announced that experts agreed that laws could be anchored on the had hadith in spite of its dubious progeny, and all of Islam's law schools today agree on the ruling that a murderer cannot inherit from his victim. On subjects in which inherent logic and wisdom are present in hadiths with faulty sources, hadiths can still have some legal weight in Sunni jurisprudence. The ulema, then, can reach broad consensus in a number of different ways. On other subjects of law, however, hadiths can sometimes lead schools of Islamic law to different conclusions, and no collective consensus can be found. The great Sunni hadith scholar Atirmidi wrote a lengthy analysis of what Muslims should do when one of their five daily prayers were interrupted and then resumed, and what the extant schools of law had decided on the subject. As Muslims know, at the end of each of the five daily prayers a Muslim performs a final prayer, turning to the right and left and proclaiming assalamu alaikum wa rahmad Allah, or may the peace and mercy of God be upon you to those praying on either side of her, thus concluding the daily prayer. This final part of the daily prayer is called the taslim. There are hadiths on the subject of interrupting interrupted prayers and the sujood asah, or additional prostrations to atone for interrupted prayers, in which Muhammad does different things. In one of them, Muhammad's prayer is interrupted and the Prophet prostrates twice in penitence and then performs the taslim in another instance. One prostration occurs before and the next after the taslim. Different schools of Islamic law today have different rules on what to do do when prayers get interrupted. Depending on how their founders read, analyzed, and reconciled the different hadiths on the subject of interrupted prayer. So to summarize, in Sunni jurisprudence, the ulema or lawmaker or theologian class uses hadiths and the Quran in order to make legal rulings. That basic interactivity the ulama using the Quran and hadiths in order to reach consensus. That general concord of study, analysis, disputation, and ruling is not only the heart of Sunni lawmaking, it is more generally the heart of Sunni Islam. Sunnism is the analysis of the Quran and prophetic traditions for the sake of leading a good pious life. In between the bygone period of the Prophet and any later period of Islamic history, Sunnis have used a living bridge of scholarship to the Prophet past in order to legislate the present. This bridge is built of hadiths but also the inertia of cultural traditions and precedents. It is made of millions of pages of text. Prophetic narratives isnads legal scholarship, exegesis, and the more than 6,000 verses of the Qur'. An. And as solid as this vast aggregate is, it is also mortared together with living consensus and the earnest efforts of many generations. So to close this show, let's read two hadiths, a pair that between the two of them tell us a lot about the history of hadiths themselves. The first is an extremely famous one in Sunnism, anthologized in the great Sunni compilers Abu Daoud and Atirmidi, and later in the 1200s in the 40 Hadiths of Al Nawawi. In this hadith, at Muhammad's farewell style sermon, he leaves his companions with the following advice. I counsel you to have fear of Allah and to listen and obey your leader. Even if a slave were to become your leader. Verily, he among you who lives long will see great controversy. So you must keep to my Sunnah and to the Sunnah of the Rashidun Caliphs. Those who guide to the right way, cling to it stubbornly with your molar teeth. Beware of newly invented matters in the religion, for verily, every innovation is misguidance. The hadith is as clear as it is, no matter what happens in the tumultuous times to come, cling to the original ways and teachings of the Prophet rather than the newfangled innovations of future generations. Generations. It is a conservative message, favoring the old ways over the new and tacitly acknowledging that schism and controversy would follow the period of Muhammad's prophetic ministry. But old ways too, must be innovated at some point, and time is a river into which most things sink. And additionally, a cardinal feature of all Abrahamic theology is the tension between progressive theology and conservative theology, and then theology that, while pretending to be conservative, is innovating a revisionist past. Sunnism is, as I'm sure you can understand here at the end of this program, the search for correct Sunnah, the authentic ways of Muhammad. But as when early rabbis wrote the halaha of the Temple Talmud, and early Christian church fathers set down extra biblical laws during the later 600s and after, Muslim scholars did their best to revere the past while living in the ever moving present to move on to our second and final hadith, this one survives in Sahih Buhari, the most famous Sunni hadith collection. In it, a minor companion named Amr IBN Salam remembers how his father converted to Islam rather late in the time of the Prophet Muhammad's ministry, not until after the conquest of Mecca in early 630 the Companion Amr ibn Salemah in this hadith tells us that he memorized some of the Quran at a very young age and that when his tribe began converting, Muhammad gave them instructions for how prayers were to be carried out. The youngster, Amr IBN Salama, who knew the Quran best of all among the new converts of his Trib tribe, was selected to lead the prayer, he says in this hadith. So they looked for such a person and found none who knew the Quran more than I because of the Quranic material which I used to learn from the caravaners. They therefore made me their imam to lead the prayer. And at that time I was a boy of six or seven years, wearing a black square garment called a burden that proved to be very short for me, and my body became partly naked. A lady from the tribe said, won't you cover the buttocks of your reciter for us? So they brought a piece of cloth and made a shirt for me. I had never been so happy with anything before as I was with that shirt. It's a story about a youngster becoming an image at quite a young age and doing the best he can in spite of being inadequately outfitted. As slightly crude as the detail about poor Amr IBN Salemah covering his bottom while he preached is, the story also reflects some of the staying power of Sunnism. Here was a kid who, whoever he was, had a good memory and knew the Quran. Up he went to preach, and the Umm, or Islamic community, recognized that what the little boy lacked, packed in pants, he made up for with expertise and one garment later, the young imam was correctly attired and ready to serve his community. The story of the Hadiths is the story of that community, beginning with those who knew Muhammad well and continuing with those who knew him a little or had just met him, and then on and on through the generations, all the way down to today. It is the time tale of a collective and of diligent, probabilistic intellectual work. Inasmuch as piety requires Muslims to respect the Hadiths, it also mandates that the hadiths be studied critically, lest the innovation of a later generation be mistaken for the sacred traditions of Muhammad. But beyond even Islam, the story of the Hadiths is a quintessentially human one. History is a slippery thing to hold in our hands, and sacred history even more so. We all like the idea of being able to understand posterity and to soak up wisdom from bygone sages. At the same time, though, we know that studying history means sitting on a train racing ever further away from the past on long winding tracks built by by those who lived in between. So that completes our introduction to the Hadiths. Over these past 10 shows on Muhammad, the Quran, the early Caliphates and the Hadith, we have learned the foundations of Islamic history, what happened over Islam's first two centuries, and in this show, how a body of extra Quranic materials grew to have authoritative and legislative power in Islamic civilization. That is all important stuff, and I am proud to have had you along for this leg of our long journey. When outlining this season, I had a bit of a puzzle in front of of me. I wanted to tell the story of early Islam in the way that you have heard it over these past 10 shows. At the same time, though, during the life of Muhammad, something was happening that was absolutely epic in scale and dramatic in its turns of fortune. And this was the Byzantine Sassanian War of 602 to 628. This war was fought during during the Prophet's lifetime. The war was a large part of the reason why the Rashidun Caliphate was able to steamroll the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Understanding the Sasanian side of this war in particular is extremely useful in understanding later Islamic history. So next time we're going to briefly do something we don't usually do in literature and history. We're going to go back in time from the Abbasid period and learn the story of what's often called the Last Great War of Antiquity, that terminal conflict between Rome and Persia, although neither empire knew that it would be. With the main course of our season on Early Islamic History complete, let me check in for just a moment and fill you in on our podcast's goals for the end of this season and the beginning of the next one. As we wrap up this season on Early Islamic History, my goal is to begin steering us back toward literature and away from theology and general history. In shows to come, I hope to devote many hours to classical Arabic and Persian literature. This literature should be better known in the Anglophone world, and for various reasons, I think presenting the Islamic Golden Age Age and the European Medieval period as one big, fat, surprisingly connected system is the right thing to do. We just need to lay a bit more groundwork on the eastern end of this system, and next month's episode on the Byzantine Sassanian war of 602 to 628 will set most of that groundwork in place. After the story of the last Great War of Antiquity, we'll wrap this present season up with two early phases, figureheads of classical Arabic literature just to get a taste of what's to come, Then consider what happened to Zoroastrianism during the Abbasid period, and then finally have a closing episode that concerns itself with early Sufism. As we bring this podcast's seventh season to its conclusion, we'll be ready to move on to a much more literature heavy season on down the road, one that is about the Arabic and Persian literature being written during the centuries of Beowulf, Credien de Trois, Dante and company. However, speaking of Beowulf literature and history's next season will concern itself with early European vernacular literature, focusing on the North Sea and Celtic Sea and the centuries between about 500 and 900 CE, we're going to consider the very earliest roots of European literature, including texts written in Anglo Saxon, Saxon, Old Irish and Old High German. For reasons we will soon learn, speakers of these three languages were both early and prolific in their production of vernacular literature, prolific enough to have left behind some very old and in some cases very revered poetry and sagas. Now that we have a sense of the scale of history during the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid periods, as well as the sophistication of these three empires, as we turn toward frosty, foggy, feudal faraway northern Europe, we'll do so with a sense of what was going on in the contemporary Islamic world. For Muslims of, say, the 800s, living in the metropolises of Iraq, Egypt and the Levant and inhabiting the same river basins and sea coasts that humanity had since time immemorial, the clammy shores of East Anglia, Essex and Kent would have seemed far more exotic than the comfortable Old world of the Fertile Crescent. I have a quiz on this episode in the Notes section of your podcasting app if you want to review what you've learned about the hadiths. I did write a song about the Hadiths, but I decided not to record it. These are are very sacred texts and they are revered by a global ulama. Not, as a rule, known for mixing religion and comedy. Considering that, and in spite of the fact that I really wanted to have a chorus with the line who's your Baghdaddy? I've chosen to err on the side of academic and respectful. So thanks for listening to literature and history and learning all about the hadiths with me and the Roman Roman Emperor Heraclius and his nemesis, the Sasanian Emperor Khosrow II. And I will see you next time in episode 124, the Last Great War of Antiquity.