Talk:Science of hadith

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A hadith with numerous transmitters at every level of the isnad (mutawatir) was deemed to be beyond doubt of forgery, while one with three or more at each level (mashhur), one with just one at a particular level (gharib), or one with one transmitter at each level (fard) was considered binding but with less weight. On these three bases, a particular hadith would be classified as sahih (sound or authentic), hasan (good), da`if (weak), or saqim (spurious). [1]

--Striver 01:11, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

I found this interesting:

It is essential to remove one of the serious misgivings under which so many Orientalists and Westernized Muslim scholars are laboring. When they are told that Imam Muslim selected 4,000 hadiths out of a total collection of 300,000, they think that since quite a large number of hadiths were unreliable, they were therefore rejected. They then jump to the conclusion that the whole stock of Hadith is spurious and should be rejected outright. This betrays utter ignorance of the critics, even about the elementary knowledge of hadith. Matn (text) is not the basis on which the number of hadiths is calculated. Hadiths are counted on the chain of transmission. Thus when we say that Imam Muslim collected 300,000 hadiths and included only 4,000 in his compilation, it does not imply that he rejected the rest of the whole lot of the Prophet’s sayings as being unreliable. What this means is that the words and deeds of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) were transmitted to Imam Muslim through so many chains of transmission, out of which he selected 4,000 chains as most authentic and narrated the text on their authority. A text (matn) that is transmitted through one hundred isnads is in Hadith literature treated as one hundred traditions. For example, the text of the first hadith in Al-Bukhari (The Actions Are Based on Intention) is counted as a selection of one out of 700 hadiths since it has been transmitted through such a large number of isnads. [2]

--Striver 12:21, 5 November 2006 (UTC)