VIDEO: Hadith Collection and Criticism
Posted by Ibn Saad
“…Hadith science is an amazing accomplishment, that stands as one of the most impressive intellectual feats and edifices in human history…”- Prof. Jonathan Brown
The following video is a talk delivered at MIT by University of Washington’s NELC Assistant Professor Jonathan Brown. He recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago where his studies focused on the history of Islam, Islamic law, Qur’an and hadith, Islamic historiography, and hermeneutic traditions in Islam. His dissertation is entitled “The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon.” This talk was sponsored by the MIT Muslim Students’ Association, delivered on November 18, 2006, and was titled “A Brief History of Hadith Collection and Criticism.”
Masha Allah. He’s a very knowledgable brother.
By the way, I noticed he’s in the upcoming documentary ‘Common Ground’ as well: http://www.commongroundfilm.com/trailer.html
This was on Halal Tube as well. Good stuff, mashaAllah!
I notice christians make fun of the ‘science of hadith’, God knows why, at least we muslims have a science. Maybe if the christians had developed their own ‘science of hadith’ then their bible would not have been as corrupt as it is today, LOL.
The only reason a christian would make fun of the science of hadith is due to how ignorant they are of historical chains of transmission – considering they do not have any and must entirely verify narratives by “faith” and not some objective structure.
If anything, Christians should make fun of their own methodology. They accept books written by men we don’t even know, with no isnad, no knowledge of how good their memories were, no knowledge how honest they were or weren’t, in a language Jesus never spoke, written decades after Jesus’ ascension and full of variants in their manuscripts due to intentional and unintentional changes. Our standards are too high for them to reach.