Hadith and Sunnah: The Prophet's Teachings

Why the sunnah matters alongside the Quran

The Quran often gives a command in general terms and leaves the details to be learned from the Prophet. It tells believers to establish the prayer, for example, but it does not list every movement and word. Those details were learned by watching the Prophet pray and following him. The same is true of fasting, charity and pilgrimage.

The Quran itself points believers to his example, describing him as a beautiful model for anyone who hopes in God and the Last Day. For this reason Muslims see the sunnah not as a rival to the Quran but as its living explanation. The Quran gives the message; the Prophet's life shows that message being put into practice by a real person in real circumstances.

How hadith were recorded and checked

During the Prophet's lifetime his companions watched him closely and passed on what they saw and heard. Some kept written notes, while many relied on memory, which was highly trained in an oral culture. Over the following generations, students travelled widely to collect reports from those who had heard them.

Early scholars were aware that mistakes and even deliberate inventions could creep in. They developed careful methods to test each report. Every hadith has two parts:

• The isnad, or chain of narrators: the list of people who passed the report along, one to the next, back to the Prophet.
• The matn, or text: the actual words of the report, describing what was said or done.

Grading: sound, good and weak

To judge a chain, scholars studied the lives of thousands of narrators. They asked whether each person was known for honesty, whether their memory was reliable, and whether they could actually have met the person they claimed to have heard from. A whole field of biography grew up around these questions.

They also looked at the text itself, checking whether it clashed with the Quran or with better-established reports. Based on this work, reports were given grades. The terms most often met by beginners are:

• Sahih (sound): a report with a continuous chain of trustworthy, precise narrators and no hidden flaw.
• Hasan (good): a reliable report whose narrators are trustworthy but slightly less precise.
• Da'if (weak): a report with a gap or weakness in its chain, which is not used on its own to establish a ruling.
• Mawdu' (fabricated): a report judged to be invented and falsely attributed to the Prophet.

The great collections

Over time, scholars gathered hadith into large books. In Sunni scholarship, six collections are especially well known and are often called the six books. Two of them, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, are regarded by Sunni scholars as the most authentic books after the Quran. Some scholars place the Muwatta of Imam Malik in the list in place of Ibn Majah's work.

• Sahih al-Bukhari
• Sahih Muslim
• Sunan Abi Dawud
• Jami' at-Tirmidhi
• Sunan an-Nasa'i
• Sunan Ibn Majah

Shi'a collections and reading hadith wisely

Shi'a scholarship relies on its own major collections, known as the four books: al-Kafi, Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Tahdhib al-Ahkam and al-Istibsar. These gather reports from the Prophet and from the Imams of his family. Shi'a scholars also grade narrations by examining their chains and do not treat every report in these books as automatically authentic.

For a beginner, hadith can be a source of great inspiration, but they are best approached with some care. A few simple habits help:

• Start with a trusted, well-translated selection made for general readers, ideally with short explanations.
• Check where a hadith comes from and how scholars graded it before relying on it or sharing it.
• Be cautious of sayings passed around online with no source at all.
• Read each report in light of the Quran and the wider picture of the Prophet's character.
• Leave detailed rulings to qualified scholars, who weigh many reports together rather than one alone.