Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem The Role of Hadith in Islam - A Bibliography of the Works in English Language, Working Draft of 07.07.20191 Abu Raihan Muhammed Khalid2 Abstract In Islam, the Arabic word hadith means ‘prophetic tradition. Hadith are the practices performed and ordained by the Prophet (SA) that a Muslim must follow in fulfilment of his religious obligations. In the corpus of Muslim laws, the hadith stands right after the Quran Majid - the words of Allah Rabbul Alamin, as the second most important source of Islamic laws. However, there are significant differences of opinion among the Muslim regarding the authenticity of a great number of hadith. There are perhaps even more differences regarding the application of these hadith in today’s world after fourteen hundred years of their pronouncement. As a result a Muslim is unsure and often embattled on what he should practice as his religious duty. This has caused significant rifts among the Muslim society throughout the world. It is therefore necessary to precisely determine the scope, breadth and methods of the Hadith in order to enable the Muslim to determine the role of the Hadith and its application in today’s world. As the first part the project we are here preparing a bibliography of the works in English Language. Plan of the Study 1. Methodology 2. Limitations 3. Introduction 4. Definition of Hadith 5. Hadith as a source of Islamic law 6. Source of the authority of Hadith as Islamic law 7. The body of Hadith 8. The science of Hadith 9. Controversies in Hadith 10. Conclusion 11. Works reviewed for this bibliography 12. Instructions to the user of this bibliography 13. Abreviations 14. The Bibliography a. Primary Sources i. Quran Majid 1 Project Home: https://www.researchgate.net/project/An-Introduction-to-Al-Sihah-al-Sittah-of-the-Kutub-al- Sittah. Project started on 06.04.2018. This document opened on 24.04.2018. 2 LL.M. (London); LL.M. (Chittagong); Barrister-at-Law of Lincoln’s Inn, England and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. Worked for several NGOs, Government of Bangladesh and Asian Development Bank (ADB), International Labour Organization (ILO), The World Bank Group (WB) along with many individual clients in environment, climate change, and general legal matters; www.raihankhalid.com. Researchgate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abu_Raihan_Khalid, Email: [email protected]. The Science of Hadith - A Bibliography of the Works in English Language, Working Draft of 07.07.2019 1. Masnuscripts 2. Books 3. Online Databases ii. The Hadith 1. Manuscripts 2. Books 3. Online Databases b. Secondary Sources i. Manuscripts ii. Books iii. Articles iv. Journals v. Website and Blogs 15. Glossary of Terms Methodology This study concerns events that took place in the 7th century C.E. and the centuries that followed. Therefore this study relies on evidences of those events recorded in texts, and living memories of the people. Therefore, this study shall be conducted by review of the texts- both in printed booksand manuscripts, interviews of relevant scholars mostly by means of electronic communications, review of the living memory that are preached in waz and other lectures by the Ulama, etc. Limitations of this study 1. It is necessary to state here that we do not currently have access to a library equipped with materials capable of supporting the entire study. Our personal collection of materials is only capable of providing materials for a part of it. We are relying mostly on materials downloaded from the internet. Thanks to Allah Rabbul Alamin a large body of related literature is available on the internet in various archives and online libraries. These books, which are in most cases scanned digital copy of the original printed work, sometimes do not contain the entire publication information in them. 2. We can read some Arabic but cannot use it for academic purposes and we do not read or write Urdu, Persian. For this reason we are unable to use most of the primary texts that are available but are in those languages. Instead we have used translations of the few original texts into English that are available. This has limited our scope of analysing the original text ourselves. Elaboration of this limitation of the source materials is provided in the following section on ‘Sources’. 3. A lot of the works that we have reviewed for this bibliography contain characters with diacritics by the various translators to give effect to the original pronunciations of words of Arabic, etc. This posed a problem for our work. First of all we are not well conversed in the diacritics and secondly the search engines, both the windows and web based, and the software used in writing this account, the Microsoft Office Word 2010 does not provide a ready tool for using such symbols. For these reasons characters with diacritics will be represented without their diacritical marks. Sources As we have stated above the events relevant to this study took place in the 7th century C.E. and the centuries that followed. The rich civilizatiuon of Islam produced a wealth of literature related to the Page 2 of 123 The Science of Hadith - A Bibliography of the Works in English Language, Working Draft of 07.07.2019 Hadith, Seerah and Quranic studies. Although primarily these works were produced in Arabic, soon wealths work started to appear in other languages - Persian, Urdu, Malaya, Indonesian, English. These new works are no less volumnus or important than the works in Arabic. However, I can only use English beyond my mother language Bengali for academic purposes, and I understand there are many other Muslims who are in the same situation. Therefore, my research shall only include the works in English language. This has created a considerable challenge for me. As we have progressed in our work we have realized that many important primary texts, both of Hadith collections and of the science of hadith, have not been translated in to English. So far we could only find thirteen collections of Hadith that are ailable in English. They are Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Jami at-Tirmidhi, Sunan Abu Dawud, Sunan an-Nasai, Sunan Ibn Majah, Riyadis Saliheen, Nukbatul Fikar, al-Muwatta, Bulugh al-Maram, Mishkat ul Masabih, Musnad Imam Ahmed Bin Hanbal, Nahjul-balaghah3. We do not yet know the total number of Hadith collections but we suppose it would be a number much larger than the above. However, we are unable to study them because they are not available in English. The same is true for the works on the science of Hadith. Kitab mushkil al-ḥadith wa-bayanuh of Ibn Fūrak, -1015. Ta’wil Mukhtalif al-Hadith (The Interpretation of Conflicting Narrations) by Ibn Qutaybah (828 – 885 CE / 213 – 276 AH) Not all the mentioned texts are available today; some remained as manuscripts and were never published. Choosing the English translation of the Quran Majid Quite a few translations of the Quran Majid are now available. Along with the well known translations, such as the translation done by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (year of translation), Pickthall, Muhammad Asad, Malik, Muhsin Khan, etc. new English translations are also arriving to us. Many of these new translations are unique. The Sahih International translation for example is done by three women, there is another translatiin by an woman4, a translation that claims to be a non-sexist5, a translation that is claimed Ti be done by progressive Muslims6, and there are translations done by people of other faiths. 3 For the detailed publication information of these works, please see the bibliography below. 4 The Sublime Qur'an (2007) is by Laleh Bakhtiar, and it was claimed to be the first translation of the Qur'an by an American woman (individually, 5 The Quran: A Reformist Translation (2007), is a recent translation by the team of Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al- Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh. They claim to offer a non-sexist understanding of the text. 6 The Message - A Translation of the Glorious Qur'an (2008) was translated by the Monotheistic Group, which claims to be a group of progressive Muslims Page 3 of 123 The Science of Hadith - A Bibliography of the Works in English Language, Working Draft of 07.07.2019 A personal note to the new scholars of Islam I stopped working to earn a living sometime in 2015. Since then I have employed all my time and resources to work for Allah Rabbul Alamin. I live on a small savings created by my work as a Barrister-at-Law before 2015. For this and the other works that I am doing right now, I did not need to spend much money, beyond what was needed for my personal upkeep and a meagre few books. I did not use any library other than the online ones or purchased much books. This work is almost entirely based on matertials that are available online. It is to tell you that high quality researches on Islam, like most other fields, can be done without ever setting foot in a library or spending any money. 3. Introduction The Hadith is the second most important source of Islamic law regulating every possible aspect of the daily lives of the billions of Muslims around the world - from five daily prayers to marriage, divorce and inheritance. Yet many Muslims today know very little, if any, of these laws accept from what they hear from the Imam in the Mosques or from their elders in the family. Modern education is almost entirely standardized throuout the world, except the Madrasas which are though numerous, have escaped the modern mainstream population.