User:Louis P. Boog/sandbox/Wahhabism

To Do: cleanup History of Muslim criticism of hadith ORGANIZATION *why hadith is important *1st criticism -- science of hadith *2nd crit, Examples of the false hadith critics think hadith science didn't find *contradictions *Logical/Empirical flaws in the Hadith *why we should care (ethical isues) *why critics think false hadith remain *Authenticity *Theological critique (primacy of the Quran) *Ethical content TOOLS *http://self[fullstop]gutenberg[fullstop]org/articles/eng/Criticism_of_Hadith * Contradictions in the Hadith wikiislam squelched by editor (rvt 8-2020). earlier another editor rvt with an islamic rationale that the hadith are not necessarily incompatible. to use requires more evidence that wikislam doesn't have *fabricated hadith that fills the hadith books Criticism of hadith is the critique of the genre of Islamic literature made up of reports of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

The legitimacy of hadith is of considerable importance in mainstream Islam because the "great bulk" of the rules of Sharia (Islamic law) are derived from hadith, following Quranic injunctions for Muslims to obey Muhammad (in verses such as, ), and follow his example (, and ). Mainstream Islam holds that the Sunnah -- teachings and doings of Muhammad -- are like the Quran, divine revelation to be obeyed.

Criticism of hadith has taken several forms. The classical Islamic science of hadith studies was developed to weed out fraudulent accounts and establish a "core" of authentic (aka  "sound" or sahih) hadiths compiled in classical hadith collections. But some Muslim thinkers and schools of Islam contend that these efforts did not go far enough. Among their complaints is that there was a suspiciously large growth in the number of hadith with each early generation; that large numbers of hadith contradicted each other; and that the genre's status as a primary source of Islamic law has motivated the creation of fraudulent hadith.

They have criticised use of hadith as Sunnah of Muhammad on grounds of authenticity, but also on the grounds that the Quran's admonition to obey the Prophet applied only to the first generation of Muslims, and that the Quran already declared itself "complete", "clear", "fully detailed" and "perfected" so that hadith should be unnecessary for the development of rulings on legal and religious matters.

These critics range from those who accept the techniques of hadith studies but believe a more "rigorous application" is needed (Salafi Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi); in preparation for updating and re-establishing Sharia law; to those who believe it is important to follow Sunnah but that the only a handful of hadith (mutawatir hadith) are of sufficiently reliable basis to accept (19th century Modernist Sayyid Ahmad Khan); to "deniers of hadith" who believe hadith is not part of the Sunnah and that what Muslims are required to obey is contained entirely in the Quran (20th century modernists Muhammad Aslam Jairajpuri, Ghulam Ahmed Perwez).

Although these scholars/critics who believe that even sahih hadith suffer from corruption or who proposed limitations on usage of hadith outside of the mainstream have "never attracted a large following", they and others who propose limitations on usage of hadith outside of the mainstream include include early Muslims (Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, Ibrahim an-Nazzam), later reformers (Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal). In addition, scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook (historian), and Patricia Crone, question its historicity and authenticity. Being a munkir-i-hafith or denier of hadith, is considered an act of unbelief by many Muslims. At least one Muslim Islamic scholar (Hossein Nasr) has attacked the criticism of "Orientalist" non-Muslims scholars, calling it "one of the most diabolical attacks made against the whole structure of Islam."

Different arguments and types of criticism
BRIEF DESCRIPTION ON WHY HADITH SO IMPORTANT

Importance of hadith and al-Shafiʿi
The earliest schools and scholars of Islamic law -- starting around a century and a half after the death of Muhammad -- did not all agree on the importance of Prophetic sunnah and its basis, the hadith of Muhammad. Some (legal pragmatist scholars known as ahl al-raʿy) regarded Prophetic sunnah as only one source of law among many -- other sources being the traditions of other caliphs and of leading early Muslims. Others (speculative theologians were known as ahl al-kalām) rejected the authority of hadith because they thought there was no way to be absolutely certain about the authenticity of century and a half old reports of Muhammad's words, actions, and silent approval.

The school credited with establishing the overriding importance of hadith of Muhammad found in classical Islamic law/fiqh was that of al-Shāfiʿī (767–820 CE), founder of the Shafi'i school of fiqh.

Al-Shafi‘i preached that hadiths "from other persons are of no account in the face of a tradition from the Prophet, whether they confirm or contradict it; if the other persons had been aware of the tradition from the Prophet, they would have followed it".

A number of scholars, (including Joseph Schacht, Daniel W. Brown) suggest the primacy of hadith of Muhammad in Islamic law/fiqh was not a consensus of opinion among the first generation of Muslims which was then passed down to each succeeding generation. The fact that Shafi'i felt the need to continually insist on his point in his writing suggests (to Joseph Schacht) that he was not upbraiding the occasional deviant/heretic, but that his point had not yet become doctrine/orthodoxy, and he needed to work to establish it there.

Belief that Muslims must obey the Prophet and follow his sunnah comes from verses in the Quran such as, , ,. Hadith had been passed down by oral transmission until around the third century of Islam and some questioned how closely they followed Muhammad's actual teachings and behavior in authenticity and spirit, but Al-Shafiʿi argued that Muslims must obey the hadith using a "simple proposition: having commanded believers to obey the Prophet, God must certainly have provided the means to do so."

Not only was Sunnah considered divine revelation (wahy) according to Al-Shafi‘i, and records of it (i.e. hadith) the basis of classical Islamic law (Sharia), but the number of verses pertaining to law in the Quran -- the other source of divine revelation -- are relatively few, while hadith give direction on everything from details of religious obligations (such as Ghusl or Wudu, ablutions for salat prayer), to the correct forms of salutations, and the importance of benevolence to slaves. In the words of J.A.C. Brown, “the full systems of Islamic theology and law are not derived primarily from the Quran. Muhammad’s sunna was a second but far more detailed living scripture, and later Muslim scholars would thus often refer to the Prophet as `The Possessor of Two Revelations`”.

Al-Shafiʿi's success was such that later writers “hardly ever thought of sunna as comprising anything but that of the Prophet”, but later critics of hadith sometimes made similar arguments to that of the early schools that competed with Al-Shafiʿi's theory (such as the belief that only the Quran was divine revelation).

ABOVE IS A REWRITE to make it less confrontational with orthodoxy A number of scholars, (including Joseph Schacht, Daniel W. Brown) have credited the overriding importance of hadith of Muhammad in Islamic law/fiqh not to a consensus of opinion among the first generation of Muslims which was then passed down to each succeeding generation, but to a scholar who wrote/preached sometime around a century and a half after the death of Muhammad -- al-Shāfiʿī (767–820 CE), founder of the Shafi'i school of fiqh.

Prior to Shafi'i, Islamic legal scholars had regarded Prophetic sunnah as only one source of law among many -- other sources being the traditions of other caliphs and of leading early Muslims, (these legal pragmatist scholars were known as ahl al-raʿy); or rejected the authority of hadith because they thought there was no way to be absolutely certain about its authenticity (these speculative theologians were known as ahl al-kalām).

But Al-Shafi‘i preached that hadiths "from other persons are of no account in the face of a tradition from the Prophet, whether they confirm or contradict it; if the other persons had been aware of the tradition from the Prophet, they would have followed it".

The fact that Shafi'i felt the need to continually insist on his point in his writing suggests (to Joseph Schacht) that he was not upbraiding the occasional deviant/heretic, but that his point had not yet become doctrine/orthodoxy, and he needed to work to establish it there.

Belief that Muslims must obey the Prophet and follow his sunnah comes from verses in the Quran such as, , ,. Hadith had been passed down by oral transmission until around the third century of Islam and some questioned how closely they followed Muhammad's actual teachings and behavior in authenticity and spirit, but Al-Shafiʿi argued that Muslims must obey the hadith using a "simple proposition: having commanded believers to obey the Prophet, God must certainly have provided the means to do so."

Al-Shāfiʿī thought hadith so important that even the Qurʾan was "to be interpreted in the light of traditions (i.e. hadith), and not vice versa", and that “the command of the Prophet is the command of God.”

While the sunnah has often been called "second to the Quran", (it has also been said to "rule over and interpret the Quran") Al-Shafiʿi "forcefully argued" that the sunnah stands "on equal footing with the Quran", (according to scholar Daniel W. Brown) for (as Al-Shafi'i put it) “the command of the Prophet is the command of God.”

Opponents of Shafiʿi
Two second century groups who can be said to be the first "critics" of Hadith in the sense of arguing against the doctrine of al-Shafiʿi that hadith ought to be one of only two primary sources of Islamic law or divine revelation, (the Quran being the other).
 * ahl al-raʿy (legal pragmatists) -- who championed region-based schools of law and jurisprudence that regarded between Prophetic sunna as one source of law among many, that they did not distinguish between sharply. They "upheld the conclusions of their own methods of legal reasoning in the face of contradictory hadith".
 * ahl al-kalām (speculative theologians about whom we know mainly through al-Shafiʿi's writing) -- rejected the authority of hadith because they rejected almost all hadith reports because they rejected any reports about which there was "the smallest doubt". ahl al-kalām were "highly critical of both the traditionists' method and the the results of their work", including the traditionists' evaluation of the "qualities of the transmitters" of hadith they considered "purely arbitrary". They did not doubt that Muslims ought to follow the example of the prophet, (as verses of the Quran commanded) but that his "true legacy" was found "first and foremost in following the Quran", which hadith "should never be allowed to rule on". Ahl al-Kalam "tended" to regard any question "not referred to in the Qur'an" as  "having been left deliberately unregulated by God."

Science of hadith
"Criticism" of hadith in the sense of weeding out fraudulent accounts and establishing a core of authentic "sound" (sahih) hadiths -- was taken on by the classical Islamic science of hadith (ʻilm al-ḥadīth, also "hadith studies"). This science became a "mature system", or entered its "final stage" with the compilation of the classical collections of hadith  in the third century of Islam, roughly a century after al-Shafiʿi's passing.

The establishment of this elaborate system of evaluating the authenticity of traditions science/discipline was important in Islam for a number of reasons: After the third century of Islam the triumph of Al-Shafiʿi's doctrine meant that the supreme importance of the Sunnah of the Prophet was undisputed. The status of Hadith as primary sources of Islamic law gave them great power as "ideological" tools in political/theological conflicts. But since hadith were transmitted orally over 100-150 years, until the classic collections of hadith of third century of Islam were compiled, there was no written documentation to verify the chain of transmission of a hadith. Forgery "took place on a massive scale" which threatened to undermine hadith's divine legitimacy of reports of the Prophet.

The system of judging the authenticity (sihha) of hadith is based on three criteria in hadith studies: These criteria in turn are based on other premises:
 * 1) Whether a report was corroborated with "other identical reports from other transmitters"; such mutawatir hadith were reliable but very rare. For all the other numerous hadith that did not meet this criteria, evaluate ...
 * 2) the "reliability in character and capacity" of the transmitters of reports with only one chain (isnad) of transmitters,
 * 3) (this did not apply to the companions of prophet (ṣaḥāba) transmitting in the chain because their character and competence was guaranteed "by virtue of their direct association" with Muhammad);
 * 4) "the continuity of their chains of transmission".
 * 1) That "defects of corruption in hadith could be directly attributed to lack of character (ʿadāla) or competence (ḍābiṯ) in its transmitters";
 * 2) that these "faulty transmitters could be identified";
 * 3) and that while the transmitters might or might not be reliable, there was no need to question the concept of chains/isnads of the hadith as accounts "of the actual transmission history of a tradition."

Evaluation was "almost exclusively" of the chain/isnad of the hadith, and not the content (matn).

The work of ʻilm al-ḥadīth criticism of hadith is found in major collections of hadith (Kutub al-Sittah, "The six books") of the third century of Islam. Perhaps the most famous collector of hadith and practitioner of ʻilm al-ḥadīth, and author of one of the six books, Muhammad al-Bukhari, reportedly devoted 16 years to sifting nearly 600,000 narrations, and eliminated all but approximately 7400 (this includes different versions of the same report and repetitions of the same report with different isnad, i.e. chains of transmitters).

TRIM OR DELETE?

Although the scholars/critics who believe that even sahih hadith (hadith rated authentic) suffer from corruption or who proposed limitations on usage of hadith outside of the mainstream have "never attracted a large following", they include include early Muslims Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, Ibrahim an-Nazzam, later reformers  Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal; and scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, John Wansbrough, Michael Cook (historian), and Patricia Crone.

Problematic hadith rated authentic
Whether al-Bukhari and other traditional hadith scholars were successful in narrowing down hadith to its authentic "core" is disputed. Medieval Jurist and hadith scholar Al-Nawawi wrote that "a number of scholars discovered many hadiths" in the two most authentic hadith collections -- Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim -- "which do not fulfill the conditions of verification assumed" by the collectors of those works; and European scholar (Joseph Schacht), argues that "even the classical corpus contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic".
 * Skepticism of science of hadith

Hadith appearing to be in conflict with science
Islamic scholar Jonathan A. C. Brown describes hadith that were particularly troubling (sometimes called mushkil al-ḥadīth) for some pious educated Muslims of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The "hadith of the fly", which is rated ṣaḥīḥ (sound) by Muhammad al-Bukhari and other famed scholars of hadith, though it seemed in conflict with the germ theory of disease, and "clearly scientifically impossible". It reportedly caused Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi, an Egyptian physician, to question his faith in hadith.
 * 'If a fly lands in your drink, push it all the way, under, then throw the fly out and drink. On one of the fly's wings is disease, on the other is its cure.'

Another hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari seemed in conflict with astronomical knowledge "How does the sun, an orb, prostrate itself? It has no knees or joints. Like Aristotle and Augustine, Muslim scholars knew the earth was a sphere. In the course of one of their basic duties -- calculating prayer times in various locales -- they had noticed that the sun is always visible somewhere, rising and setting at different times depending on latitude and longitude. When would it be free to engage in this prostration before the throne of God?"
 * "... the Prophet said, "O Abu Dharr! Do you know where the sun sets?" .... It goes and prostrates underneath (Allah's) throne; And that is Allah's Statement ..." J.A.C. Brown writes:

Others in Sahih al-Bukhari are This provoked another Egyptian and friend of Sidqi, Mahmud Abu Rayya, to also question hadith.
 * "when the Devil hears the call to prayer, 'he flees, farting.'"

Al-Ghazali addresses questions from an unnamed "questioner" about a number of problems the questioner sees in several hadith (p.98-100) in his work Al-Qanun al-kulli fi t-ta'wil; such as: "Satan runs in the blood vessels of one of you" (p.99) "satans nourish themselves from manure and bones", and "Paradise is as wide as heaven and earth", yet it must be contained somewhere within the bounds of those two?" (p.100)

Two Christian missionaries, Sam Shamoun and Jochen Katz, list a number of sahih hadith with supernatural elements they argue are in contradiction to "reason and common experience", and not meeting the "criteria of authenticity": trees that weep, human beings (Jews) turned into rats, into monkeys and pigs; stones that steal possessions (clothes) and run away with them, stones that talk -- give salutations to Muhammad, or urge people to kill others (Jews); and monkeys that stone another monkey for adultery (A hadith not from Muhammad but from a Companion ‘Amru bin Maimun):

Skeptic Abdullah Gondal asks, "How did this narration end up in the most authentic hadith book? Do monkeys have marriages too? Do you need four witnesses for monkey stoning? What was this companion [‘Amru bin Maimun] thinking? Is this supposed a twisted endorsement of Sharia stonings by the animal kingdom?" A defender of hadith, scholar Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, points out it has no legal implications because it is not a hadith of Muhammad but argues that it should have been rejected as sahih (authentic) on the grounds of its content.
 * "During the pre-lslamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a number of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them."

Centuries earlier, objections by Mutazila to these and similar hadith and been dismissed by Sunni scholars as error brought about by a failure to subordinate reason to divine scripture. When fifteenth century medieval scholar Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani came across the hadith he noted that the ancient inhabitants of houses carved out of cliffs he had seen must have been about the same size humans of his day, simply "admitted frankly that `to this day, I have not found how to resolve this problem'", without doubting the hadith's authenticity. However, with the rise of natural sciences and technology of the West, some Muslims came to a different conclusion.
 * When `God created Adam, and he was sixty arms tall,' and that, after Adam fell, 'mankind has continued to shrink since that time.'

Critics complain of hadith that sound less like what a prophet would say than someone in the post-Shafiʿi era justifying fabricating hadith. Such as
 * '[Sayings attributed to me] which agree with the Koran, go back to me, whether I actually said them or not', and
 * 'Whatever good sayings there are, I said them.'

Hadith appearing to be in contradiction
One of the earliest Muslim scholars to recount contradictory ḥadīth as an argument against their use was Mu'tazilite Ibrahim an-Nazzam (c. 775 – c. 845) (although this was probably before development of sahih hadith).

Indian journalist, activist and Islamic scholar Maulana Mohammad Akram Khan (1868–1969) noted contradictions in sahih hadith, although a requirement of this class of hadith—in addition to be transmitted by trustworthy transmitters with good memories, etc.—is supposed to be freedom from irregularity, i.e. not contradicting another hadith already accepted as reliable. Mohammed Amin and Mohammad Omar Farooq have cited Mohammad Akram Khan's work, giving examples of these hadith.

Akram Khan found different "sound" (sahih) hadith indicate different ages for Muhammad at his death -- 60, 63 and 65 years old respectively. Two Sahih al-Bukhari hadith (4:56:747 and 4:56:748) state Muhammad's mission started at 40 years of age, and that he lived in  Medina for 10 years and in Mecca for 10 -- adding up to a life span of 60. But according to another couple of sound hadith (Sahih al-Bukhari 5:58:242 and 5:59:742) he must have been 63 (these have him living in Mecca for 13 years); and based on yet another sound hadith — this one from Sahih Muslim  — Muhammad lived in Mecca for fifteen and so died at the age of 65.

Amin cites several hadith describing the sale of a camel to Muhammad by a companion—one Jabir b. 'Abdullah. Though five hadith quoted by Amin each mention the same sale, each gives a different price for the camel. Muslim 010:3886 – one uqiya (about 28.6 grams of silver); Muslim 010:3891 – five uqiyas; Muslim 010:3893 – two uqiyas and a dirham (2.975 grams of silver) or two dirhams; Muslim 010:3895 – five dinars.

According to other sources  a number of Bukhari hadith contradict themselves in terms of being examples for Muslims to follow, for example, three hadith on ablution: one stating Muhammad "performed ablution by washing the body parts only once", another stating that he washed body part twice in ablution, and a third saying "he performed ablution thus: He washed his face thrice ..."

Farooq complains that if these hadith can't agree on basic facts such as numbers, what kinds of problems might arise in hadiths "conveying concepts and understanding, often not in exact words of the Prophet, but paraphrasing by the reporters?"

Joseph Schacht argues that the very large number of contradictory hadith are very likely the result of hadith fabricated "polemically with a view to rebutting a contrary doctrine or practice" supported by another hadith.

Ethical aspects, as sources of Islamic law
While how old the prophet was when he died may be of little relevance for "people’s life, honour and property", other hadith provide not just inspiration or information, but "the basis" -- at a "detailed level" -- for "most" Islamic laws and codes; laws and codes considered not only "sacrosanct or immutable Shari'ah" by pious revivalist and conservative Muslims, but ones whose enforcement is necessary if Islam is to be revived. Others (Modernists Muslims), however, questioned whether the laws/codes based on some hadith are fair/ethical or even make sense. According to AbdulHamid AbuSulayman, the former Rector of International Islamic University in Malaysia, "The problem of the authenticity of the Sunnah is basically an expression and reflection of the unhappiness on the part of Muslims with the centuries-old jurisprudence."

One group of hadith form the basis for riba al-fadl or prohibitions on certain trading of different quantities of certain commodities. Specifically it forbids the trading/barter of six different commodities (gold, silver, wheat, barley, date, or salt) unless the quantities are the same and traded on the spot. Sahih al-Bukhari 3:34:86 (and other sahih hadith) states gold cannot be bartered for gold “except if it is from hand to hand and equal in amount”. But as with hadith above, there are contradictory hadith -- a well-known hadith by Usama bin Zayd (in Sahih al-Bukhari) makes a rather categorical statement that "there is no riba except in nasi'ah -- i.e. no exchange is forbidden unless there is a difference in price for nasi'ah (delay), for example interest charges for delayed payment.  Similarly, M.O. Farooq cites another hadith from Sahih Muslim, “There is no riba in hand-to-hand [spot] transactions.”

But contradictions aside, questions arise that cast doubt on the fairness and sensibleness of these hadith: why would anyone barter a quantity of some commodity "from hand to hand and equal in amount” -- such as 40 kg of wheat for 40kg of wheat? Why would someone be forbidden from paying for the workmanship of a piece of gold (or silver) jewelry if they used gold (or silver) to pay for that piece? -- since that would mean a trade of gold (or silver) not "equal in amount"; Do these regulation also extend to other commodities? Why or why not? (Schools of fiqh disagree on the reasons.)

More relevant to contemporary Muslims everyday lives are hadith calling for women not topray in mosques (Sahih al-Bukhari, 1:12:828; Sunan Abu Dawood, Vol. I, #570), not to participate in leadership (Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:88:219), and to defer to male relatives (even as distant as step-cousins) in taking over as guardians of their children if their husband cannot. — (a hadith with no reference). ABOVE crossed out argument HAS APPARENTLY BEEN DELETED ONLINE These hadith are also in doubt from contradiction and reliability of a transmitter: in the first instance there are "numerous hadiths/reports that women used to participate in mosques regularly and in large numbers"; in the second the transmitter (Abu Bakra, not to be confused with Rashidun Abu Bakr), was known for receiving punishment for false testimony; and in the third the hadith was quoted without any reference. But in addition, these hadith seem "contrary to the intent and spirit of the Qur'an and Islam's fundamental commitment to justice and fairness", according to some modernists and liberals.

Arguments and explanations for existence of false hadith
Among the scholars who believe that even sahih hadith suffer from corruption or who proposed limitations on usage of hadith include early Muslims Al-Nazzam (775–845), Ibn Sa'd (784–845), Al-Nawawi (1233–1277), Ibn Hajar (1372–1449), later reformers Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898), Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938); and scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, and G.H.A. Juynboll. According to Bernard Lewis, "in the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet." This gave strong incentive to fabricate hadith.

According to Daniel W. Brown citing Syed Ahmed Khan and Shibli Nomani, the major causes of corruption of even the ṣaḥīḥ hadith of Bukhari and Muslim are:
 * 1) political conflicts,
 * 2) sectarian prejudice, and
 * 3) the desire to translate the underlying meaning, rather than the original words verbatim.

Other criticisms made of hadith include:
 * that the primary tool of orthodox ʻilm al-ḥadīth (Hadith studies) to verify the authenticity of hadith is the hadith's isnad (chain) of transmitters. But in the oldest collections of hadith (which have had less opportunity to be corrupted by faulty memory or manipulation) isnad are "rudimentary", while the isnads found in later "classical" collections of hadith are usually "perfect".
 * That whatever the motive was to falisfy, there are indisputable contradictions in hadith, meaning some sahih hadith must be wrong.
 * That hadith are a major source of Islamic law that involve the honor, property and lives of Muslims, and that although sahih hadith are defined as "authentic"—rated above hasan (good) and daif (weak) hadith—this class of hadith do not provide "certainty of knowledge" needed for law making. Mutawatir hadith (meaning reports from "a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable") do meet that criterion, but their extreme scarcity limits their use in development of Islamic law.

Influence of other religions
Mahmud Abu Rayya (d. 1970), a friend and fellow disciple of Rashid Rida, argued in a 1958 book entitled "Lights on Muhammad's Sunna" (Adwa' 'al al-sunna al-muhammadiyya) that "many supposedly authentic Hadiths were actually Jewish lore that had been attributed to Muhammad".

The earliest Western scholar to note a relation between the hadith and Jewish influences was the French Orientalist Barthélemy d'Herbelot (d. 1695), who "claimed that most of the six books" (i.e. the collections of Sunni sahih or sound hadith) "and many parts of the hadith literature were appropriated from the Talmud" (the Talmud being recorded in Jerusalem at least a century before the birth of Muhammad -- between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE -- and later in what is now Iraq). Later many others orientalists, like Aloys Sprenger (d. 1893), Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921), etc. continued criticism in that direction.

A more elaborated study was "Al‐Bukhārī and the Aggadah" by W.R. Taylor, who "appropriated some of these hadiths from al‐Sahih of al‐Bukhārī and some haggadic texts from the Talmud and Midrash. Taylor compared these hadiths with the texts, and concluded that these hadiths were appropriated from the Talmud and Midrash. Afterwards, he also said that there were many narratives in the hadith literature in general, especially in al‐Bukhārī, that were taken from haggadic literature. He then studied the ways of and how these narrations were transmitted to hadith literature. According to Taylor’s opinion, a large amount of the oral information, narrations, stories, and folkloric information entered in Islamic literature in general, and hadith literature, in particular, during the transcription of the Talmud and Mishnah and after the formation of hadiths via the Jews living in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the church fathers and Christian community." Other scholars have different opinions on the same subject: Franz Buhl connects the hadith with a more Iranian/Zoroastrian background, David Samuel Margoliouth with Biblical apocrypha and Alfred Guillaume puts more stress on a generic Christian influence.

Orthodox response
Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the work of hadith scholars, these false hadith have been largely eliminated. al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that “sunna” should be made up exclusively of specific precedents set by Muhammad passed down as hadith, argued that "having commanded believers to obey the Prophet", (in Quranic verse Al-Ahzab 33: 21: "In God's messenger you have indeed a good example for everyone who looks forward with hope to God and the Last Day, and remembers God unceasingly.") "God must certainly have provided the means to do so."

One defense of orthodox hadith studies, The Evolution of a Hadith by Iftikhar Zaman, according to one supporter (Bilal Ali) asserts that "the method of hadith criticism that has been implemented by the muhaddithin [orthodox hadith evaluators] for the past thousand years, ... is far more scientific and exact than modern orientalist approaches." Traditional Islamic scholars who have endeavored to refute the Western criticism of hadith include Mustafa al-Siba'i and Muhammad Mustafa Al-A'zami.

Some Western academics have also been critical of this "revisionist" approach as a whole, for instance Harald Motzki, (who according to Jonathan Brown demonstrates "convincingly" that studies of early hadith and law by Joseph Schacht and the late G. H. A. Juynboll "used only a small and selective body of sources", "based on sceptical assumptions which, taken together, often asked the reader to believe a set of coincidences far more unlikely than the possibility that a hadith might actually date from the genesis of the Islamic community.")

One prominent conservative fatwa website, The Salafi site IslamQA, supervised by Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, states that one who "persists in denying and rejecting" a hadith is exposing themselves to "grave danger" unless they


 * find a "complete contradiction" that is "clear and unambiguous in meaning and not abrogated" between substance of the hadith they reject and what is mentioned in a Qur’anic text,


 * see "a weakness in one of the links of the isnad" in the hadith "that could have led to the mistake mentioned in the text",


 * and state that their rejection of the hadith is "a personal view ... which may be right or wrong".

Interpreting injunctions to obey/imitate the Prophet
Those who argue that even sahih hadith can't be considered reliably authentic confront the orthodox doctrine of al-Shafiʿi -- i.e. that verses of the Quran order Muslims to obey the Prophet and follow his sunnah, and that the Sunnah is spelled out in the collections of sahih hadith. Some of the critics embrace hadith that are much more rare but more certain than sahih, known as mutawatir hadith; others reject hadith completely, arguing the command to obey the Sunnah of the prophet only applied to the first generation of Muslims, and/or that commands to obey the Prophet applying to all Muslims refer only to obedience to the Quran.

Use of limited set of mutawatir hadith
According to M.O. Farooq, while it is untrue that sahih hadith provides "certainty of knowledge" of what Muhammad said/did/approved of, there is a  subset of hadith that can be provide this knowledge -- the much rarer mutawatir hadith. Mutawatir means the report "of a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable. This condition must be met in the entire chain from the origin of the report to the very end." Farooq argue it is these that should be the basis of Islamic law.

However, while mutawatir hadith would exclude the implausible and contradictory hadith outlined above, and might satisfy the Quranic injunctions to obey and imitate Muhammad, they would not provide a basis for the Islamic jurisprudence developed and revered by Muslims for centuries. According to Wael Hallaq, "the bulk of hadith with which the traditionists dealt, and on the basis of which the Jurists derived the law" were known as ahad—i.e. non-mutawatir hadith. Ahad hadith lack "textually identical channels of transmission which are sufficiently numerous as to preclude any possibility of collaboration on a forgery".

Jurists disagreed on how many channels of transmission there had to be for a hadith to be mutawatir. Since "the qadi in a court of law must deliberate on the testimony of four witnesses (as well as investigate their moral rectitude) before he renders his verdict," some thought at least five, but others set the number at "12, 20, 40, 70 or 313, each number being justified by a Qur'anic verse or some religious account".

Farooq quotes a number of sources speaking highly of Mutawatir:
 * In the view of Muslim scholars any hadith which has been transmitted by tawatur and whose reporters based their reports on direct, unambiguous, perception unmixed with rationalization would produce knowledge with certainty.
 * A mutawatir tradition is one which has been transmitted throughout the first three generations of Muslims by such a large number of narrators that the possibility of fabrication must be entirely discarded.
 * [T]he mutawatir hadith stands on the same footing as the Qur'an itself."
 * According to the majority of Ulama, the authority of a mutawatir hadith is equivalent to that of the Qur'an. Universal continuous testimony (tawatur) engenders certainty (yaqin) and the knowledge that it creates is equivalent to knowledge that is acquired through sense-perception.
 * A great majority of Muslim legal theoreticians (usuuliyyun) espoused the view that the mutawatir yields necessary or immediate knowledge (daruri), whereas a minority thought that the information contained in such reports can be known through mediate or acquired knowledge (muktasab or nazari).

Orthodox hadith scholars (like Wael Hallaq) disagree, finding non-mutawatir hadith adequate. "According to the majority of the ulama of the four Sunni schools, acting upon ahad is obligatory even if ahad fails to engender positive knowledge. Thus, in practical legal matters," but not in "matters of belief", "a preferable zann [meaning, speculative] "is sufficient as a basis of obligation." Ibn al-Salah ( (d. 643/1245), "one of the most distinguished traditionists of the muta'akhkhirun", argues (according to Farooq), that because mutawatir type hadith is rare, "for much of Islamic praxis, certainty of knowledge is neither feasible nor required. Rather, probable or reasonable knowledge is adequate" for determining the gamut of Islamic practices.
 * Scholars on mutawatir
 * Sayyid Ahmad Khan's concern for corruption of hadith caused by transmission according to bi'l-ma'na (sense of the story rather than verbatim) led him to "regard the Quran as the supreme standard against which other information about the Prophet should be tested. He came to consider only mutawatir traditions -- those tramsmitted by a great enough number of persons to eliminate the possibility of collusion to deceive -- to be reliable basis for belief independent of the Quran; of those he claimed to have found only five."
 * Rashid Rida thought "the only source of sunna that is beyond dispute ... is the sunna ʿamaliyya which has been practiced and passed on by each generation of Muslims in a mutawātir fashion." He "argued repeatedly that all traditions at variance with the Quran should be discarded, irrespective of their chain of transmission." ("After Rida numerous Egyptian intellectuals, most notably Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, argued that the Quran must overrule hadith.")  He also thought "Isolated traditions could be overruled by mutawatir sunnah -- that is, sunnah transmitted through the continuous practice of the community, e.g. salat and the pilgrimage ceremonies".
 * Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi thought there "could be no question ... that practices such as salat and zakat have come to us from the Prophet by mutawatir transmission" and so are part of Islam but other teachings by him may only be for his time and place.

Applicable only to the first generation?
Another argument is that those verses of the Quran enjoining Muslims to obey/imitate Muhammad are directed at the Muhammad's contemporaries and not later generations.

A least one group of Muslims (the Quranist Ahle-Quran movement) argue that the verses were directed towards the particular circumstances of the Companions of the Prophet, Muhammad's contemporaries, and not to generations thereafter. As circumstances change so must details of the law, while the basic unchangeable principles of Islam are found in the Quran. (In addition, while the Quran includes term sunnah several times, including in the phrase "sunnat Allah" (way of God), it never talks about "sunnat al-nabi" (way of the prophet) -- the phrase customarily used by proponents of hadith -- or "sunnah" in connection with Muhammad or other prophets.)

Later Quranists expanded on this. Early twentieth century scholar, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt argued that while salat (ritual prayer) and zakat (alms) were without question passed down to Muslims from the Prophet, "even mutawatir connection" of a hadith was not enough to "prove that a practice is binding in every age and every place". Sidqi called the sunnah of Muhammad "temporary and provisional law", and offered several reasons why the sunnah was "intended only for those who lived during the Prophet's era":
 * that the sunnah "was not written" down for safe keeping "during the time of the Prophet";
 * the Companions of Muhammad "made no arrangement for the preservation of the Sunnah "whether in a book or in their memories";
 * hadith were not transmitted from one generation to the next verbatim;
 * the sunnah was "not committed to memory" like the Quran so that "differences developed among different transmitters";
 * if the sunnah "had been meant for all people" this would not have happened and it "would have been carefully preserved and circulated as widely as possible";
 * much of the sunnah obviously only applies to "Arabs of Muhammad's time and is based on local customs and circumstances".

In a high court decision in 20th century Pakistan, justice Muhammad Shafiʿi argued against the doctrine that the words and actions of the Prophet are divine revelation, and that (at least in the contemporary era) Quranic demands for obedience to Muhammad are actually demands for us to "be as honest, as steadfast, as earnest and as religious and pious as he was and not that we should act and think exactly as he did because that is unnatural and humanly impossible and if we attempted to do that, life will become absolutely difficult."
 * Obediance/imitation in modern times

Applicable only to the Quran?
Associated with the argument that verses of the Quran enjoining Muslims to obey and imitate Muhammad apply only to The Prophet's contemporaries, is the idea that for modern Muslims obedience to the Prophet is contained in obeying the Qur'an, the book that God sent down to Muhammad; that the Quran was an explanation of everything. When Muslims read verse Q.3:81 -- "'Now that We have given you a share of the Book and Wisdom, ...", the common interpretation that "the Book" is the Quran and "Wisdom" is hadith is incorrect -- "Wisdom" refers to "the specific rulings of the Book". Quranic verses sometimes sited in support of the idea of "Quranism", that the Quran is clear and complete as it is, and hadith are not needed, are:
 * which say the Quran is "detailed" or "fully explained";
 * "complete", "perfect", or "fulfilled";
 * "detailed explanation of all things";
 * which says that "we have not neglected in the book a thing"

This idea goes back to the Ahl al-Kalam movement of the second Islamic century which rejected the Hadith on the theological grounds (as well as questioning its authenticity) and was embraced by Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi, who wrote, "If anything other than the Qur'an had been necessary for religion ... the Prophet would have commanded its registration in writing, and God would have guaranteed its preservation."

History of Muslim criticism of hadith
Critics of collection and/or use of hadith in Islam are found in the early era when the classical consensus of al-Shafiʿi was being developed and established (particularly by the ahl-i-kalam and Muʿtazila) and many centuries later in the modern era when Islamic reformists (such as the ahl-i-Quran and thinkers such as Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Iqbal) sought to revitalize Islam. In addition scholars from the West such as Ignác Goldziher and Joseph Schacht have criticized the science of hadith starting in the 19th century.

Early criticism
According to scholar Daniel W. Brown, the questioning of the importance of Hadith to contemporary Muslims goes back to the second century of Islam when al-Shafiʿi was establishing the final authority of a hadith of Muhammad in Islamic law. An opposing group, known as Ahl al-Kalam, doubted "the reliability of the transmission" of the hadith, were "highly critical of both the traditionists' method and the results of their work", including the traditionists' evaluation of the "qualities of the transmitters" of hadith they considered "purely arbitrary". This is not to say they doubted that Muslims ought to follow the example of the prophet, but that his "true legacy" was found "first and foremost in following the Quran", which hadith "should never be allowed to rule on". If a question was "not referred to in the Qur'an", Ahl al-Kalam "tended" to regard it as "having been left deliberately unregulated by God." Later, a similar group, the Mu'tazilites (which flourished in Basra and Baghdad in the 8th–10th centuries CE), also viewed the transmission of the Prophetic sunnah as not sufficiently reliable. The Hadith, according to them, was mere guesswork and conjecture, while the Quran was complete and perfect, and did not require the Hadith or any other book to supplement or complement it."
 * Ahl al-Kalam

According to Racha El Omari, early Mutazilites believed that hadith were susceptible to "abuse as a polemical ideological tool"; that the matn (content) of the hadith -- not just the isnad -- ought to be scrutinized for doctrine and clarity; that for hadith to be valid they ought to be "supported by some form of tawātur", i.e. by a large number of isnād strands, each beginning with a different Companion.
 * Mutazilites

In writing about mutawatir (hadith transmitted via numerous chains of narrators) and ahad (hadith with a single chain, i.e. almost all hadith) and their importance from the legal theoretician's point of view, Wael Hallaq notes the medieval scholar Al-Nawawi (1233–1277) argued that any non-mutawatir hadith is only probable and can not reach the level of certainty that a mutawatir hadith can. However scholars like Ibn al-Salah (d. 1245 CE), al-Ansari (d. 1707 CE), and Ibn ‘Abd al-Shakur (d. 1810 CE) found "no more than eight or nine" hadiths that fell into the mutawatir category.

Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ (700–748 CE, by many accounts a founder of the Mutazilite school of thought), held that there was evidence for the veracity of a report when it had four independent transmitters. His assumption was that there could be no agreement between all transmitters in fabricating a report. Wāṣil’s acceptance of tawātur seems to have been inspired by the juridicial notion of witnesses as proof that an event did indeed take place. Hence, the existence of a certain number of witnesses precluded the possibility that they were able to agree on a lie, as opposed to the single report which was witnessed by one person only, its very name meaning the “report of one individual” (khabar al-wāḥid). Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. 227/841) continued this verification of reports through tawātur, but proposed that the number of witnesses required for veracity be twenty, with the additional requirement that at least one of the transmitters be a believer.

One Mu'tazilite who expressed the strongest statement of skepticism of any source of knowledge outside of reason and the Qurʾān was Ibrahim an-Nazzam (c. 775 – c. 845). For him, both the single and the mutawātir reports could not be trusted to yield knowledge. He recounted contradictory ḥadīth and examined their divergent content (matn) to show why they should be rejected: they relied on both faulty human memory and bias, neither of which could be trusted to transmit what is true. Al-Naẓẓām bolstered his strong refutation of the trustworthiness of ḥadīth within the larger claim that ḥadīth circulated and thrived to support polemical causes of various theological sects and jurists, and that no single transmitter could by himself be held above suspicion of altering the content of a single report. Al-Naẓẓām’s skepticism involved far more than excluding the possible verification of a report, be it single or mutawātir. His stance also excluded the trustworthiness of consensus, which proved pivotal to classical Muʿtazilite criteria devised for verifying the single report (see below). Indeed, his shunning of both consensus and tawātur earned him a special mention for the depth and extent of his skepticism, even among fellow Muʿtazilites.

Revivalism
Critics of hadith very different from the rationalist "deniers of hadith" were revivalists like Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, Shibli Nomani, Rashid Rida, Abul A'la Maududi, and Mohammed al-Ghazali. They believed strongly in the truth of hadith, the necessity of sharia law, and that they are following the principles of classical hadith criticism, but believed hadith needed to be re-examined to eliminate corrupted traditions and these results used to reformulate sharia law.

In the 18th century, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi sought to reverse the decline of Muslim power in India as the Mughal empire began to collapse. To restore Muslim dominance he preached jihad but he was also interested in a religious revival against innovation (bidah) and against unthinking obedience to classical law (taqlid), where original sources were unexamined and ijtihad unpracticed. A "revival of the study of hadith was at the heart of his program." He sought to examine hadith content (matn) which Hadith experts had traditionally ignored, to clear up apparent contradictions among the hadith caused by transmitters who did not always understand "the significance" of what they had witnessed by using scholars with expertise in both hadith studies and jurisprudence.

Later in the 20th century, Salafist revivalists Shibli Nomani, Rashid Rida, Abul A'la Maududi, and Mohammed al-Ghazali also sought "to restore Islam to ascendency" (not just in India) and in particular to restore Sharia to the law of the lands of Islam it had been before being replaced by "secular, Western inspired law codes" of colonialism and modernity. At the same time they agreed that restoring relevant Sharia required "some reformulation" of the law, which would require a return to sources, which required agreement on how the sources were be to be "interpreted and understand" and reassessment of hadith.

Shibli argued that the traditional science of Hadith had errored by ignoring legal scholarship when its work "required the participation of legal scholars" (fuqaha). Instead had been dominated by Hadith collectors (muhaddith).

Applying legal scholarship involved examining hadith content (matn) for its spirit and relevance "within the context of the Sharia as a whole" according to the method of scholars of Islamic law (fuqaha) and weeding out corrupted hadith inconsistent with "reason, with human nature, and with historical conditions". (Rather than hadith collectors being the scholars of hadith science they more resembled "laborers", who provided the raw materials to the "engineers" of hadith -- the scholars of Islamic law.) Maududi, the leading South Asian revivalist of the 20th century, also argued matn was neglected and resulting in Hadith collectors accepting "traditions that ring false" and rejecting "traditions that ring true."

Maududi also raised the question of the reliability of companions of the prophet as transmitters of hadith, saying "even the noble Companions were overcome by human weaknesses, one attacking another", and cited disputes among the Companions: "Ibn Umar called Abu Hurayra a liar; Aisha criticized Anas for transmitting traditions although he was only a child during the life of the Prophet, and Hasan b. Ali called both Ibn Umar and Ibn al-Zubayr liars." (Maududi's criticism clashed with the doctrine that the collective moral character (ʿadāla) of the first generation of Muslims was above reproach, and though Maududi strongly opposed modernists who thought hadith should be used sparingly or not at all in Islamic law, he nonetheless came under attack from traditional Islamic scholars (ulama) for his views).

Yusuf al-Qaradawi offered "three basic principles of hadith criticism" to work with sunnah:
 * 1) verification of the "trustworthiness and authenticity" of the hadith using "the tools of classical isnād criticism";
 * 2) examination of the circumstances of the "event or utterance" of the hadith, the "reasons for its occurrence", "its place among" Quranic verses and other hadith, must be done in order to understand the hadith's "real meaning and intent";
 * 3) comparison of hadith with "other more reliable texts" to ensure it does not contradict them.

Later in the 20th century another revivalist Muhammad Al Ghazali, also urged re-examination of "isolated" Hadith urging that they be subordinate to "higher principles of authority". These included mutawatir traditions, the practice of the community, and "most important, the Quran". While Shafīʿī and classical scholarship held that the "Sunnah rules on the Quran", Al Ghazali (and Shibli, Rashid Rida, Maududi) believed that the Quran must be "the supreme arbiter of the authenticity" of hadith. Rida "argued that all traditions at variance with the Quran should be discarded, irrespective of their chain of transmission". Examples of conflicts between the two sources were
 * Preeminence of the Quran
 * whether consumption of beef was haram, (The Quran gave permission to eat it, but muhaddith Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani declared it forbidden citing a hadith.)
 * Whether the murder of a non-Muslim should be punished just as the murder of a Muslim was -- with qiṣāṣ, or retribution. (When an non-Muslim engineer was attacked and killed in Saudi Arabia, a religious judge -- qadi-- ruled that qiṣāṣ could not be applied to his murderer, citing a hadith stating la yuqtalu muslimun fi kafirin. According to Muhammad al-Ghazali, this violated a Quranic principle of human dignity, though others do not find it in disagreement with the Quran.)

Modernists
Later, in nineteenth century British Raj, Syed Ahmed Khan "questioned the historicity and authenticity of many, if not most, traditions, much as the noted scholars Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht would later do." His student, Chiragh Ali, went further, suggesting nearly all the Hadith were fabrications. Although Muhammad Iqbal never rejected the hadith wholesale, he proposed limitations on its usage by arguing that it should be taken contextually and circumstantially. Ghulam Ahmed Pervez, a disciple of Iqbal, also asks why, if hadith were divine revelation (wahy), were they "neither written down, nor memorized, nor systematically collected or preserved", as Muhammad and/or his immediate followers made sure the Quran was.

Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt "held that nothing of the Hadith was recorded until after enough time had elapsed to allow the infiltration of numerous absurd or corrupt traditions."

According to Jonathan A.C. Brown, "by far the most influential Modernist critique" of Sunni hadith tradition came from a disciple of Egyptian Rashid Rida named Mahmoud Abu Rayya. Abu Rayya wrote Lights on the Muhammadan Sunna (Adwa` `ala al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya) which argued that the basis of Islam was intended to be only "the Quran, reason and unquestionably reliable mutawatir accounts of the Prophet's legacy". In particular Abu Rayya undermined the credibility of "the single most prolific" transmitter of hadiths from among the Companions, one Abu Hurairah. Abu Rayya used reports of transmitter criticism to characterize Abu Hurayra as a "dishonest opportunist". Having joined the Muslim community only three years before the Prophet's death, it is highly unlikely he heard the thousands of hadiths he claimed to transmitted, nor did he learn the details of ritual and law to avoid mangling the meanings of hadiths on these issues he reported. Abu Hurayra was also known to be obsessed with isr’iliyyat, i.e. tales from Jewish lore about earlier prophets.

According to author Israr Ahmed Khan, traditional methods used to establish authenticity of hadith rely almost entirely on the personal characters of the reported narrators, and fail to pay enough attention to the actual content of the hadith being evaluated. Among the problems he sees in the traditional hadith analysis are: the inability of some narrators to maintain preciseness of the report, textual conflicts among reports, ignoring textual analysis when the hadith was reported by a narrator of good character, and probability of fabrication of hadith.

!-- According to M.O. Farooq, despite the widespread belief that sahih hadith are authentic hadith and thus provides "certainty of knowledge" of what Muhammad said, in fact it is only the much rarer subset of sahih -- mutawatir hadith—that provide certain knowledge. Mutawatir means the report "of a large number of narrators whose agreement upon a lie is inconceivable. This condition must be met in the entire chain from the origin of the report to the very end."
 * Use of limited set of mutawatir hadith

However, according to Wael Hallaq, "the bulk of hadith with which the traditionists dealt, and on the basis of which the Jurists derived the law" were known as ahad—i.e. non-mutawatir hadith; Hadith without "textually identical channels of transmission which are sufficiently numerous as to preclude any possibility of collaboration on a forgery" Jurists disagreed on how many channels of transmission there had to be for a hadith to be mutawatir. Since "the qadi in a court of law must deliberate on the testimony of four witnesses (as well as investigate their moral rectitude) before he renders his verdict," some thought at least five, but others set the number at "12, 20, 40, 70 or 313, each number being justified by a Qur'anic verse or some religious account".

Farooq quotes a number of sources speaking highly of Mutawatir:
 * In the view of Muslim scholars any hadith which has been transmitted by tawatur and whose reporters based their reports on direct, unambiguous, perception unmixed with rationalization would produce knowledge with certainty.
 * A mutawatir tradition is one which has been transmitted throughout the first three generations of Muslims by such a large number of narrators that the possibility of fabrication must be entirely discarded.
 * [T]he mutawatir hadith stands on the same footing as the Qur'an itself."
 * According to the majority of Ulama, the authority of a mutawatir hadith is equivalent to that of the Qur'an. Universal continuous testimony (tawatur) engenders certainty (yaqin) and the knowledge that it creates is equivalent to knowledge that is acquired through sense-perception.
 * A great majority of Muslim legal theoreticians (usuuliyyun) espoused the view that the mutawatir yields necessary or immediate knowledge (daruri), whereas a minority thought that the information contained in such reports can be known through mediate or acquired knowledge (muktasab or nazari).

However, orthodox hadith scholars find non-mutawatir hadith adequate. "According to the majority of the ulama of the four Sunni schools, acting upon ahad is obligatory even if ahad fails to engender positive knowledge. Thus, in practical legal matters," but not in "matters of belief", "a preferable zann [meaning, speculative] "is sufficient as a basis of obligation." Ibn al-Salah ( (d. 643/1245), "one of the most distinguished traditionists of the muta'akhkhirun", argues (according to Farooq), that because mutawatir type hadith is rare, "for much of Islamic praxis, certainty of knowledge is neither feasible nor required. Rather, probable or reasonable knowledge is adequate" for determining the gamut of Islamic practices. -->

Complete rejection of hadith as a basis for Islamic law
The Ahl al-Kalam of the time of Al-Shafii rejected the Hadith on theological grounds—although they also questioned its authenticity. Their basic argument was that the Quran was an explanation of everything (16:89). They contended that obedience to the Prophet was contained in obeying only the Qur'an that God has sent down to him, and that when the Qur'an mentioned the Book together with Wisdom, the Wisdom was the specific rulings of the Book." Daniel Brown notes that one of the arguments of Ahl al-Kalam was that "the corpus of Hadith is filled with contradictory, blasphemous, and absurd traditions."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt wrote an article titled 'al-Islam huwa ul-Qur'an Wahdahu' ('Islam is the Qur'an Alone) that appeared in the Egyptian journal al-Manar, which argues that the Quran is sufficient as guidance: "what is obligatory for man does not go beyond God's Book. ... If anything other than the Qur'an had been necessary for religion," Sidqi notes, "the Prophet would have commanded its registration in writing, and God would have guaranteed its preservation."

Western scholarship
Western scholars have had some of the same "specific concerns" about hadith as Muslim Islamic scholars, but have "only occasionally" had any "direct impact" on debates by Muslims over the issues.

Between 1890 and 1950 the era of "Orientalist" studies of hadith began with Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902-1969) and their "two influential and founding works", (according to Mohammed Salem Al-Shehri). Goldziher "inaugurated the critical study" of the hadith's authenticity and concluded that the "great majority of the Prophetic hadith constitute evidence not of the Prophet's time which they claim to belong, but rather of much later periods", according to Wael B. Hallaq. Schacht later refined Goldziher's critical study.

John Esposito notes that "Modern Western scholarship has seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith", maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later." According to Esposito, Schacht "found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which Schacht concluded that "the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of the Prophet, but apocryphal material" dating from later. According to Wael B. Hallaq, as of 1999 scholarly attitude in the West towards the authenticity of hadith has taken three approaches:

"since Schacht published his monumental work in 1950, scholarly discourse on this matter (i.e., the issue of authenticity) has proliferated. Three camps of scholars may be identified: one attempting to reconfirm his conclusions, and at times going beyond them; another endeavoring to refute them and a third seeking to create a middle, perhaps synthesized, position between the two. Among others, John Wansbrough, and Michael Cook belong to the first camp, while Nabia Abbott, F. Sezgin, M. Azami, Gregor Schoeler and Johann Fück belong to the second. Motzki, D. Santillana, G.H. Juynboll, Fazlur Rahman and James Robson take the middle position."

Henry Preserved Smith and Ignác Goldziher also challenged the reliability of the hadith, Smith stating that "forgery or invention of traditions began very early" and "many traditions, even if well authenticated to external appearance, bear internal evidence of forgery." Goldziher writes that "European critics hold that only a very small part of the ḥadith can be regarded as an actual record of Islam during the time of Mohammed and his immediate followers." In his Mohammedan Studies, Goldziher states: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".

Also throwing doubt on the doctrine that common use of hadith of Muhammad goes back to the generations immediately following the death of the prophet is historian Robert G. Hoyland, who quotes acolytes of two of the earliest Islamic scholars:
 * "I spent a year sitting with Abdullah ibn Umar (d.693, son of the second Caliph, who is said to be the second most prolific narrator of ahadith, with a total of 2,630 narrations) and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet";
 * "I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say 'the prophet said ...' and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour".

Bernard Lewis writes that "the creation of new hadiths designed to serve some political purpose has continued even to our own time." In the buildup to the first Gulf War a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar on December 15, 1990, "and described as `currently in wide circulation`" It "quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return".

Isnads
Reza Aslan quotes Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition`, which he (Aslan) calls "whimsical but accurate".

According to G.H.A. Juynboll, "the institution of the isnad came into existence roughly three quarters of a century after the prophet's death" and before that hadith and "qisas (mostly legendary stories) were transmitted in a haphazard fashion if at all, and mostly anonymously. Since the isnad came into being, names of older authorities were supplied where the new isnad precepts required such. Often the names of well-known historical personalities were chosen but more often the names of fictitious persons were offered to fill the names in isnads which were as yet far from perfect. ..."

Patricia Crone agrees, noting that early traditionalists were still developing the practice of detailing chains of narration (isnads) of their hadith that by later standards were sketchy/deficient, even though these early scholars were closer to the historical material. Later hadith possessed impeccable isnad, but were more likely to be fabricated. She argues it is not possible to narrow down a "core" of authentic hadith because we do not know when the fabrication of them started. "Bukhari [d.870] is said to have examined a total of 600,000 traditions attributed to the Prophet; he preserved some 7000 (including repetitions), or in other words dismissed some 593,000 as inauthentic. If Ibn Hanbal [d.855] examined a similar number of traditions, he must have rejected about 570,000, his collection containing some 30,000 (again including repetitions). Of Ibn Hanbal's traditions 1,710 (including repetitions) are transmitted by the companion Ibn Abbas [d.687]. Yet less than fifty years earlier one scholar had estimated that Ibn Abbas had only heard nine traditions from the Prophet, while another thought that the correct figure might be ten. If Ibn Abbas had heard ten traditions from the Prophet in the years around 800, but over a thousand by about 850 CE, how many had he heard in 700 or 632? Even if we accept that ten of Ibn Abbas' traditions are authentic, how do we identify them in the pool of 1,710?"

Joseph Schacht states that the "whole technical criticism of traditions ... is mainly based on criticism of isnads", which he (and others) believe to be ineffective in eliminating fraudulent hadith. as they were subject to "growth, back-formation, and lateral spread" over decades.

If critics found fault with the traditionists examination of isnads, they were even less complementary of their evaluation (or failure to) of matn -- i.e. the substance of the hadith, what the Prophet did/said/approved of.
 * Isnad and not Matn

Critics argue that a serious weakness of the study of hadith by classical Muslim scholars was that the gist/matn of the hadith could not be examined for "making sense, being logical", as the matn were considered "the substance of divine revelation and therefore not susceptible of any form of legal or historical criticism". N.L. Coulson "points out that, although the Muslim scholars were aware of the possibility of Hadith forgeries, their test for authenticity was confined to a careful examination of the chain of transmitters who narrated the report. 'Provided the chain was uninterrupted and its individual links deemed trustworthy persons, the Hadith was accepted as binding law. There could, by the terms of the religious faith itself, be no questioning of the content of the report: for this was the substance of divine revelation and therefore not susceptible of any form of legal or historical criticism.

Schacht quotes Shafi'i asserting that hadith from the Prophet have to be accepted without questioning and reasoning: `If a tradition is authenticated as coming from the Prophet, we have to resign ourselves to it, and your talk and the talk of others about why and how, is a mistake ..."

Goldziher also casts aspersions on isnads, saying, "judgement of the value of the contents depends on the judgement of the correctness of the isnad. ... Muslim critics have no feeling for even the crudest anachronisms provide that the isnad is correct ... Traditions are only investigated in respect of their outward form".

European and non-Muslim scholars deemed this traditional type of critique inadequate. The Hadith was to be tested by its content and by the place its terms occupied in the development of legal though and institutions ...'"

Another criticism of isnads was of the efficacy of the traditional Hadith studies field known as biographical evaluations (ʿilm al-rijāl) -- evaluating the moral and mental capacity of transmitters/narrators. John Wansbrough argues that the isnads are should not be accepted, because of their "internal contradiction, anonymity, and arbitrary nature": specifically the lack of any information about many of the transmitters of the hadith other than found in these biographical evaluations, thus putting into question whether they are "pseudohistorical projections", i.e. names made up by later transmitters.
 * Biographical evaluation