48 Fun Facts About Hadith

Abu Hurayrah, a Daws tribesman who joined the Prophet in 629, had a kunya meaning father of which animal?

Kitten: by his own account he kept a small kitten to play with while tending his people's flock, and so they called him Abu Hurayrah.

Which trade did the hadith critic Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani, born in Shkodër in 1914, practise in Damascus?

Watchmaker was his trade, but al-Albani was arrested twice in Syria and eventually left the country for Jordan.

Sahih al-Bukhari opens with a report, also first in al-Nawawi's Forty, saying the reward of deeds depends on what?

Intentions: 'the reward of deeds depends upon the intentions', so a migration made for a woman's hand counts only as that. Umar ibn al-Khattab is its narrator.

In the hadith of Gabriel, asked about ihsan, the Prophet says to worship God how?

As if you see Him, the Prophet replied; once the visitor had gone, he revealed that the stranger was Gabriel, come to teach them their religion.

In the hadith of Gabriel, one sign of the Hour is barefoot, destitute goat-herds competing with one another in what?

Constructing tall buildings is one sign, yet asked when the Hour would come, the Prophet said the one questioned knew no more about it than the questioner.

Which wife of the Prophet is credited with narrating more than 2,000 hadiths?

Aisha also corrected other Companions: told of a report that the dead are punished for their families' wailing, she said the Prophet meant they suffer for their own sins.

Ibn Abbas's report of the dying Prophet asking for writing materials is remembered as the calamity of which day?

Thursday: Umar objected that the Prophet was gravely ill and God's Book was enough, the gathering fell to quarrelling, and the Prophet told them to leave him.

In the Hadith of Position, said at the Tabuk expedition, Muhammad told Ali he was to him as who was to Moses?

Aaron: Ali, left in charge of Medina, asked if he was being left behind with the women and children, and the Prophet reassured him, adding that no prophet would come after him.

Sahih Muslim 223, reported by Abu Malik al-Ash'ari, declares which quality to be 'half of faith'?

Cleanliness is half of faith, the report begins, and it ends by warning that every person sets out each day selling his soul, either freeing it or ruining it.

Sahih Muslim 2664, from Abu Hurayrah, calls which kind of believer 'better and more lovable to Allah'?

The strong believer is preferred to the weak, though there is good in both, and the report urges believers to seek what benefits them and ask Allah for help.

In al-Nawawi's Forty Hadith, a man asks the Prophet for counsel and is told not to do what?

Become angry was the one thing the Prophet warned against: each time the man asked again for counsel, he gave him the very same answer.

What does the title of al-Nawawi's Riyad as-Salihin, his book of hadiths on conduct and piety, mean?

Gardens of the Righteous was compiled by a scholar bold enough to confront the Mamluk sultan Baybars, pressing him to ease heavy taxes on the people of Damascus.

Which country saw the Ahl al-Quran movement, which rejected hadiths as a source of law, arise in the early 1900s?

India was where the movement took root; in Egypt, a physician made much the same case in a 1906 article titled 'Islam is the Quran Alone'.

Hadith scholars split every report into the chain of narrators and the narrative itself; what is the narrative called?

Matn is the text, yet early hadith critics rarely rejected a report for what its text said, judging it mainly by the narrators in its chain.

Which grade means a hadith's chains are too many for collusion, like the warning on lying about the Prophet?

Mutawatir status had no agreed threshold: scholars disputed how many narrators each generation needed, with estimates running from a handful to seventy or more.

Which grade, below sahih and hasan, do scholars give a hadith whose chain is broken or whose narrator is criticised?

Da'if means weak, and the modern scholar al-Albani drew criticism for re-grading hadiths, even questioning some that al-Bukhari and Muslim had accepted.

Which term do hadith critics use for a report they judge to be forged?

Mawdu' reports turned up even in the canonical Sunan Ibn Majah, among them reports praising particular towns, the compiler's own home town included.

Which term describes a hadith in which a Successor says 'the Prophet said', skipping the Companion who heard it?

Mursal reports were treated so warily that critics refused even those of al-Zuhri, one of the most eminent early scholars of hadith.

Anas ibn Malik narrates a hadith: none of you truly believes until he wants for his brother what?

What he loves for himself, the report says, and its narrator Anas ibn Malik had been given to the Prophet as a servant by his mother at about ten.

What is a hadith called when the Prophet quotes God, as in the report where God forbids Himself injustice?

Qudsi reports quote God, but many scholars hold that, unlike the Quran, they convey His meaning in the Prophet's own words.

Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, compiler of Sahih Muslim, came from which city in what is now Iran?

Nishapur was the home of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, whose Sahih was at first attacked by the critic Abu Zur'a al-Razi, yet came to rank second only to al-Bukhari's.

Driven into exile late in life, al-Bukhari died in 870 in Khartank, a village near which city?

Samarkand was near Khartank, where al-Bukhari went after a governor forced him out for refusing to come and teach at the palace.

In a hadith from Tamim al-Dari in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet says 'the religion is' what?

Sincere advice, the Prophet explained, is owed to God, His Book and His Messenger, and to the Muslims' leaders and their common folk.

Which compiler from Sistan, who settled in Basra and died in 889, chose the 4,800 hadiths of his Sunan from some 500,000?

Abu Dawud flagged seriously weak reports in his Sunan, and said a believer needed only four hadiths, including one on leaving alone what does not concern you.

Which pupil of al-Bukhari, blind in later life, wrote the Shama'il on the Prophet's person and character?

Al-Tirmidhi's blindness was said to come from excessive weeping, and his Jami', one of the six books, notes the status of the weaker reports it includes.

Termez, home town of a compiler of the six books who died in 892, lies in which modern country?

Uzbekistan's Termez, on the Oxus, still had about a thousand Buddhist monks shortly before the Muslim conquest.

Which compiler of the six books died in 915 after a Damascus mob beat him over a lecture on Ali's virtues?

Al-Nasa'i's shorter Sunan, al-Mujtaba, abridged from a larger work he admitted held weak reports, is the version counted among the six books.

Sunan Ibn Majah, ranked sixth of the Sunni six books, was compiled by a scholar born in 824 in which Iranian city?

Qazvin was home to Ibn Majah, whose Sunan long trailed the other five books, criticised for the many weak reports it contains.

Which scholar, who died in 1113, included Sunan Ibn Majah among the six books in his index of their hadiths?

Ibn al-Qaysarani's six-book canon won acceptance only slowly, and in the Muslim west Ibn Majah's Sunan was never recognised as one of them.

Which book did Ibn al-Athir and others count as the sixth canonical book in place of Sunan Ibn Majah?

Al-Muwatta lost out largely because most of its important reports already appear in the other books, while Ibn Majah's Sunan added more new material.

What does Silsilat al-Dhahab, the name for the Malik–Nafi' isnad that al-Bukhari ranked the most authentic, mean?

The Golden Chain did not escape Western sceptics, one of whom questioned whether Malik had truly heard hadiths from Nafi' at all.

Which companion, fatally wounded by a soldier's lance in 693, ranks second among hadith narrators with 2,630 reports?

Abdullah ibn Umar stayed neutral in the first civil war, yet after Siffin one of the arbiters proposed him as a compromise caliph.

Which region did Caliph Umar appoint Abu Hurayrah, the most prolific hadith narrator, to govern?

Bahrain was where Umar made Abu Hurayrah governor, then removed him over the wealth he had gathered, yet later asked him to return; he refused.

Al-jarh wa al-ta'dil, a core discipline of hadith scholarship, translates as what?

Discrediting and accrediting spared the Prophet's Companions: Sunni critics came to treat them all as upright, so only later narrators were rated.

Which scholar published the Sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih, an early written collection of hadiths that survives intact?

Muhammad Hamidullah's edition revealed a complete written record of hadiths Abu Hurayrah had handed down to Hammam, not just scattered notes.

Which Umayyad caliph had traditionists commit their hadith to writing, with Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri compiling the books?

Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz wanted the hadiths gathered into books so they could circulate, and copies of the compilations were sent to cities across the caliphate.

Which jurist, who died in Egypt in 820, laid the foundations of Islamic legal theory in works such as al-Risala?

Al-Shafi'i broke with his teacher Malik's reliance on Medinan custom, insisting that the Prophet's hadiths must take priority over local legal practice.

Whose book The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence argued that legal hadiths were credited to the Prophet by later schools of law?

Joseph Schacht argued that sayings were first pinned on later jurists and pushed back over time, so the further back a chain reached, the later it was likely forged.

The hadith of the twelve successors, all of them from Quraysh, is usually related in Sunni sources on whose authority?

Jabir ibn Samura admitted he missed the Prophet's closing words himself: his father had to tell him they were 'all of them from Quraysh'.

The Hadith of the Cloak, linked to the purification verse 33:33, gives which collective name to the five beneath it?

Ahl al-Kisa, the people of the cloak: in versions told by the Prophet's wife Umm Salama, she asks if she is with them and he answers that she is 'upon good'.

In the Hadith of the Two Weighty Things at Ghadir Khumm, the Prophet paired the Book of God with what?

His Ahl al-Bayt, his household: Sahih Muslim records this wording, yet Sunnis read it as a call to honour his family, and Shias as naming Ali's line his heirs.

Which compiler of a vast Musnad was flogged under an Abbasid inquisition for refusing to call the Quran created?

Ahmad ibn Hanbal held firm while other scholars gave way under threat, and he was restored to favour once Caliph al-Mutawakkil ended the inquisition.

Al-Kafi, 'The Sufficient', the earliest of the Twelver Shia Four Books, was compiled by whom?

Al-Kulayni opens by addressing a reader who had asked for 'a sufficient book' to guide believers who could find no scholar with sound knowledge.

Which scholar, who taught in Najaf until his death in 1067, wrote two of the Twelver Shia Four Books?

Shaykh al-Tusi reached Najaf as a refugee: after the Seljuks took Baghdad, sectarian rioters burned his house and library in the city's Shia quarter.

Which scholar, known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq, compiled Man la yahduruhu al-Faqih, one of the Twelver Shia Four Books?

Ibn Babawayh wrote it for readers with no jurist at hand, as its title says, and he would say he was born because his father asked the Hidden Imam to pray for a son.

Which Safavid-era scholar compiled Bihar al-Anwar, the 110-volume 'Oceans of Light' of Shia hadith?

Al-Majlisi gathered whatever he could find so nothing would be lost, leaving readers to sort sound reports from weak; some early texts survive only in his pages.

Which 15th-century Cairo judge wrote Fath al-Bari, the most famous commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari?

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's commentary came to be described as the work by which Muslim scholars at last repaid the debt they owed to al-Bukhari.

Which Kurdish-born scholar, who died in Damascus in 1245, wrote the 'Introduction' that became the classic manual of hadith science?

Ibn al-Salah's book drew many commentaries and abridgements, and later scholars even turned it into verse.