History of Ḥadīth

Is it permissible to write and collect aḥādīth

The aḥādīth enable the pious to beautify their actions, and one's actions and character cannot be set in full order except by combining the ḥadīth and the Qurʾān. Allāh mentions in the Qurʾān:

Without the aḥādīth, the blessed life of the Prophet ﷺ would not be documented and would be lost. Allāh mentions in the Qurʾān:

In the early stage the ṣaḥābah would not write the ḥadīth down: the Prophet ﷺ forbade it¹ for fear that it would be confused with the Qurʾān. A second factor was that, in this period, oral memorisation was more prominent because much of the population was illiterate².

Even so, the collecting, writing, and preserving of ḥadīth did take place during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ. The historical sources record the names of several scriptures, writings, and collections devoted to the sunan³:

• ʿAbdullāh bin ʿAmr bin al-ʿĀṣ had a collection named al-Ṣādiqah
• ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib had a ṣaḥīfah in which he collected aḥādīth⁴
• Anas also had a ṣaḥīfah
• ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās⁵
• ʿAbdullāh bin Masʿūd
• Jābir bin ʿAbdullāh (Muslim)

These writings were shown to the people when they gathered. The scripture of Hammām ibn Munabbih, the companion of Abū Hurayrah, is among the oldest of these to have survived.

ʿUrwah ibn Zubayr narrates that the leader of the believers, ʿUmar bin al-Khaṭṭāb, intended to have the ḥadīth written down and consulted the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ. They advised him to do so, and he was minded to act on it at once. He then said: "Indeed I intended to have the sunan written down, but I remembered a people before you who wrote down the book of Allāh and stumbled upon it, and thereafter left the book of Allāh." He therefore did not have the sunan written down⁶.

ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, the khalīfah of the Muslims in his time, intended to do the same as his grandfather ʿUmar bin al-Khaṭṭāb. By his era the fear of confusing the Qurʾān with the ḥadīth had been removed. There was an abundance of ḥuffāẓ, the Muslims had spread throughout the lands, and the certainty of what Allāh had promised and informed them of was firmly established.

ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz wrote to one of the senior ḥadīth scholars of his time, Abū Bakr bin Muḥammad bin Ḥazm, ordering him to write down and compile the aḥādīth. He feared people would abandon the sunnah and that the ʿulamāʾ would be lost. The ḥadīth thus began to be formally gathered under the rule of ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz⁷.

Towards the later era of the tābiʿīn, the writing of āthār appeared, and akhbār began to be organised into chapters. Among the foremost collectors of ḥadīth in this manner were Rabīʿ ibn al-Ṣabīḥ and Saʿīd bin Abī ʿArūbah⁸.

There are three ways to preserve aḥādīth:

1. Memory
2. Acting upon it
3. Writing it

Footnotes

1. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 3004 ↩

2. Hady al-Sārī vol. 1 p. 7 ↩

3. al-Madkhal p. 21 ↩

4. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, kitāb al-ʿIlm ↩

5. Sunan al-Tirmidhī, kitāb al-ʿIlal ↩

6. al-Madkhal p. 20 ↩

7. al-Madkhal p. 21 ↩

8. Hady al-Sārī vol. 1 p. 7 ↩