Hadith, literally "report," means both a tradition about the prophet Muhammad or one of his Companions, and the whole corpus or genre of such traditions. A complete hadith consists of the text itself and information about its path of transmission back to an eyewitness or at least an earlier authority. The 17 articles here, published between the first and last decades of the 20th century, were chosen as being of interest from a methodological perspective and to provide an overview of the development of the research by scholars trained in the Western academic tradition since it began in earnest in the 19th century. Six of them were translated for the anthology; those originally published in English are reproduced. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Contents: General editor's preface; Introduction; Origin, Transmission and Establishment of the Hadith: The role of traditionalism in Islam, J. Fueck; A revaluation of Islamic traditions, Joseph Schacht; Notes towards a fresh perspective on the Islamic Sunna, John Burton; Disputes over the status of Hadith in Islam, Ignaz Goldziher; Oral Torah and Hadith: transmission, prohibition of writing, redaction, Gregor Schoeler; Al-Usul al-arba'umi'a, Etan Kohlberg. Origin and Reliability of the Isnad: The antiquity and origin of the Isnad, Josef Horovitz; Further on the origin of the Isnad, Josef Horovitz; The Isnad in Muslim tradition, James Robson; Some Isnad-analytical methods illustrated on the basis of several women-demeaning sayings from Hadith literature, G.H.A. Juynboll; Eschatology and the dating of traditions, Michael Cook. Methods of analysing and dating Hadiths: A tradition of Manichean tendency ('the she-eater of grass'), J.H. Kramers; The will of Sa'd b. a. Waqqas: the growth of a tradition, R. Marston Speight; Pare your nails: a study of an early tradition, M.J. Kister; The Musannaf of 'Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani as a source of authentic Ahadith of the first century A.H., Harald Motzki; Common features of Muslim and Western Hadith criticism: Ibn al-Jawzi's categories of Hadith forgers, Albrecht Noth; The martyrdom of passionate lovers: holy war as a sacred wedding, Maher Jarrar; Index.
Harald Motzki is Professor at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Middle-East, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands
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