Islam: Chapter Two: The Ḥadīth: The News of God's Messenger: 5. The Preservation of the Prophetic Practice (Sunna)

This is an excerpt from the *Muqaddimah* of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), a foundational work of Islamic intellectual history, here presenting a systematic overview of the classical sciences devoted to evaluating Prophetic traditions (ḥadīth). Ibn Khaldūn surveys the major sub-disciplines: the doctrine of abrogation (determining which of two contradictory traditions supersedes the other), the rigorous criticism of chains of transmission (isnād), and the grading vocabulary scholars developed to classify traditions as sound, good, weak, or otherwise defective. He traces the development of the canonical ḥadīth collections, giving pride of place to al-Bukhārī's *Ṣaḥīḥ* and explaining how al-Bukhārī, Muslim, and three others each calibrated their inclusion criteria differently — some accepting only the most rigorously vetted material, others admitting any tradition sufficient to ground legal practice. A notably distinctive claim closes the discussion: Ibn Khaldūn argues that by his era the ḥadīth canon is effectively sealed, because the early scholars were too numerous, capable, and close in time to the Prophet to have left any valid tradition undiscovered. The passage is most useful for readers wanting a concise, authoritative medieval Muslim account of how ḥadīth scholarship was organized, what its internal standards were, and why the classical collections came to hold canonical authority.

Islam: Chapter Two: The Ḥadīth: The News of God's Messenger: 5. The Preservation of the Prophetic Practice (Sunna)

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