The authority of ḥadīth as an integral part of the sharīʿah is undeniable, as evidenced by numerous verses of the Qurʾān. For example, Allāh, the Exalted, says:
وَمَنْ يُطِعِ اللهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ فَازَ فَوْزًا عَظِيمًا
And whoever obeys Allāh and His Messenger has certainly achieved a great triumph.1
مَنْ يُطِعِ الرَّسُولَ فَقَدْ أَطَاعَ اللهَ
Whoever obeys the Messenger has obeyed Allāh.2
قُلْ إِنْ كُنْتُمْ تُحِبُّونَ اللهَ فَاتَّبِعُونِي يُحْبِبْكُمُ اللهُ وَيَغْفِرْ لَكُمْ ذُنُوبَكُمْ
Say: "If you should love Allāh, then follow me; Allāh will love you and forgive you your sins."3
وَمَا آتَاكُمُ الرَّسُولُ فَخُذُوهُ وَمَا نَهَاكُمْ عَنْهُ فَانْتَهُوا
And whatever the Messenger has given you, take it; and what he has forbidden you, refrain from.4
فَلَا وَرَبِّكَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ حَتَّى يُحَكِّمُوكَ فِيمَا شَجَرَ بَيْنَهُمْ
But no, by your Lord, they will not believe until they make you, [O Muḥammad], judge concerning that over which they dispute among themselves.5
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِنْ جَاءَكُمْ فَاسِقٌ بِنَبَإٍ فَتَبَيَّنُوا
O you who have believed, if there comes to you a deviator with information, verify it.6
And the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ has said:
مَنْ أَحْدَثَ فِي أَمْرِنَا هَذَا مَا لَيْسَ مِنْهُ فَهُوَ رَدٌّ
Whoever introduces into this affair of ours something that is not from it, it is rejected. Agreed upon.7
And in another ḥadīth:
كَفَى بِالْمَرْءِ كَذِبًا أَنْ يُحَدِّثَ بِكُلِّ مَا سَمِعَ
It is enough lying for a man that he relate everything he hears. Reported by Muslim.8
Al-Baghawī cited them both in the chapter on holding fast to the Book and the Sunnah.
These verses and aḥādīth show that success and salvation depend on holding fast to the Book and the Sunnah, that holding fast to the Sunnah entails holding fast to the Book, and that verifying (taḥqīq) the Sunnah is indispensable. Otherwise a person will narrate and act on everything he hears, and so end up holding fast to something other than the Sunnah while imagining he is holding fast to the Book and the Sunnah, falling thereby into misguidance and corruption.
This is why Ibn ʿAdiyy,9 in the introduction to al-Kāmil10 (p. 78), said: "Just as Allāh has made obedience to him obligatory upon us, so too has He made it obligatory upon us to take him as our model, to follow in his footsteps, and to scrutinise the transmission of his reports, in order to distinguish their sound from their defective and their strong from their weak." End of quotation.
Sūrat al-Aḥzāb 33:71. ↩
Sūrat al-Nisāʾ 4:80. ↩
Sūrat Āl ʿImrān 3:31. ↩
Sūrat al-Ḥashr 59:7. ↩
Sūrat al-Nisāʾ 4:65. ↩
Sūrat al-Ḥujurāt 49:6. ↩
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2697; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1718. ↩
Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Muqaddima 5. ↩
Abū Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAdiyy ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Jurjānī (277–375 AH). He had over a thousand teachers, as he mentions in his Muʿjam. [tr.] ↩
Ibn ʿAdiyy is most famous for this work, al-Kāmil fī Ḍuʿafāʾ al-Rijāl, such that he is often referred to as "Ṣāḥib al-Kāmil", the author of al-Kāmil. [tr.] ↩
The Ḥanafīs classify narrators into four (or, on some accounts, five) groups, including the al-mastūr and majhūl categories with their five-case treatment.
The threefold division of ḥadīth study: ʿilm riwāyat al-ḥadīth, ʿilm dirāyat al-ḥadīth, and ʿilm uṣūl al-ḥadīth (muṣṭalaḥ al-ḥadīth), as set out in the opening of al-Mulakhkhaṣ.
Al-shādhdh is that which a single narrator has transmitted alone, raising doubt in the mind of the critic; this is also the definition of al-munkar. Statements of the early imāms show the two are one.
How verification of the Sunnah began in the era of the senior ṣaḥāba and developed into the era of codification and taḥqīq through the third century and beyond.
