Hadith

"Sahih al-Bukhari"

"Sahih Muslim"

"Sunan Abi Dawud"

"Muwatta Imam Malik"

"For much of Islamic history, the unit through which the Sunna was preserved, transmitted, and understood has been the hadīth (Arabic plural, ahādīth), or a report describing the words, actions, or habits of the Prophet. Unlike the Quran, the hadiths were not quickly and concisely compiled during and immediately after Muhammad’s life. Because hadiths were recorded and transmitted over a period of decades and even centuries, they are not in and of themselves contemporary historical documentation of what Muhammad said and did."

"The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad … As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith … were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing, the pious Bukhari more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination."

"In hadith collections, jihad means armed action; for example, the 199 references to jihad in the most standard collection of hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari, all assume that jihad means warfare."

"Now, if there was more revelation (i.e., Hadith), then the Prophet’s duty should have been to transmit that as well, in a fashion similar to that of the Quran. But neither did he order it to be written down anywhere, nor did he oversee its memorization, nor did he compile some sort of collection of it, nor did he make any sort of accommodation whatsoever for its preservation. Rather even if someone, out of good will, attempted to record anything on his own, he stopped them saying “Don’t record anything of me other than the Quran,” – Sahih Muslim"