Literature and History.com

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 123, an introduction to the hadiths.

In this program, we will explore the hadiths, or in Arabic, a Hadith of Islam, one of the core parts of the religion.

The Hadiths are short narratives about the Prophet Muhammad, the things that he said and the things that he did.

They are instructive accounts about Muhammad and his generation,

detailing episodes from his busy, eventful life during which his unique insight as the messenger

of God, together with his natural intelligence and experience as a man of the world, helped

enlighten those around him. The hadiths are eloquent, wise, practical, detailed,

and often folksy, witty, and endearing. They are also sometimes bafflingly dense,

cryptic, and at loggerheads with one another. Above all, the Hadiths are important over much of the world today. For over a thousand

years, Sunnis have been carefully studying Asana, or the way or path of Muhammad, who was, for many

of us, the one true prophet of God whose every word and deed reflected his transcendent knowledge

of the divine. The Hadiths, as complex a source

material as they are, are the best thing we have to understand who Muhammad actually was.

If you are new to Islam, you might expect the Quran itself to be a comprehensive source book

on all the rules and regulations meant to govern Muslim life.

And indeed, the Quran does contain a significant amount of timeless advice for living

and rules and regulations for Islamic society as we learned a number of episodes ago.

However, the Quran is also a fairly short text, and one that has most often been

augmented by additional sacred material in Islamic history. The core of this material for almost

a thousand and a half years has been the hadiths, again, sayings collections and short narratives

...