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of the largest and most diverse literatures in the world, the hadith of the
Prophet Muhammad has for fourteen centuries supplemented the Qur’an as a
source of guidance for followers of Islam. Ranging over topics as varied as doctrine, prayer, taxation, government, fasting, pilgrimage, and
spirituality, this unique reservoir of religious guidance is an
indispensable foundation for the study and understanding of any aspect of
the Muslim religion.
The sheer volume of this material has, however, frustrated all efforts to
collate it as a single, all-embracing anthology. Instead, scholars have
always made use of a large number of individual collections, each of which
brings together material reported by certain types of narrators, on a
certain range of topics, or selected according to a particular standard of
authenticity.
Since the decline of the manuscript tradition, with its meticulous and
detailed methods of presenting texts by use of coloured inks, diverse
calligraphic styles, and certificates of authorised transmission, printing
techniques have presided over the progressive deterioration in the visual
and academic quality of these collections. Attempts were made in the late
nineteenth century to mobilise traditional scholarship in the creation of
authoritative and careful editions, but these trailed off in the twentieth
century, a time of declining scholarly input and the growing prevalence of
commercial pressures. The result is that although several hundred hadith
collections are today available in print, there are few editions which can
be trusted implicitly by scholars. Many major hadith collections have never
been made available to the public in a complete or accurate form, the
current editions simply reproducing first editions made fifty or more years
ago on the basis of single, late manuscripts. More worrying still, from the
traditional Muslim perspective, has been the failure to consult living
scholars who are qualified in the traditional manner, and whose oral memory
and knowledge of proper Arabic style might have enormously enhanced the
reliability and academic value of the printed books. Even those texts which
have appeared in some semblance of a scholarly guise nevertheless typically
fail to supply the indexes without which the use of such large and complex
texts becomes a laborious and inefficient task. |
