How Do We Know the Prophet ﷺ Said It?

About this course

A hadith reaches your phone. How would you know it is his? Sayings of the Prophet ﷺ reach Muslims every day through messages and posts, and many cannot tell a sound report from a made-up one. This course answers that question in six weekly live classes. It follows a hadith from the Prophet ﷺ to your phone: why Muslims follow the Sunnah, how his words were heard, kept and written down, why every report came with a chain of names, and how forgeries were caught. It is an introduction and needs no earlier study of hadith. Along the way it takes up the claim that hadith were all written down 200 years later, reads a chain name by name, and ends on one rule: never pass on a hadith without its source. The course is taught by Moeen Mahmood and drawn from a full-semester course in Uṣūl al-Ḥadīth that he has taught. Classes meet live on Zoom on Fridays, 9:00–10:30pm in Pakistan, which is late afternoon in the UK and late morning on the US East Coast. They are taught in English and Urdu, with slides and handouts in English. The course in detail: The course follows the hadith’s journey from the Prophet ﷺ to the student’s phone in three steps of two weeks each. Every class is named by the question a student would ask. Class 1 Isn’t the Qur’an enough? It opens with who he is: the Prophet ﷺ was sent to all people for all time, and no prophet comes after him, so what he taught had to be kept for every generation to come. Class 2 Was everything he said revelation? Two kinds of revelation: the Qur’an, which is recited, and guidance that came to him beyond it. Class 3 How was it kept before it was written? The Prophet ﷺ urged people to hear his words, keep them and pass them on, and warned that whoever deliberately lies about him should take his seat in the Fire. So the Companions عنهم هللا رضي kept his words in three ways that checked each other. Class 4 When was it written down? Writing from start to finish. Why he at first told them to write nothing but the Qur’an (so nothing could be mixed with it while it was still coming down), and the commands to write: ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAmr عنهما هللا رضي was told to write, and “write it for Abū Shāh”. Documents were also written in the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, such as his letter on zakāh, which Abū Bakr and ʿUmar عنهما هللا رضي acted on after him. Class 5 Who told you that? What the science of hadith covers: passing reports on (riwāyah) and understanding and judging them (dirāyah). Every hadith has two parts: the chain of people who passed it on (the isnād) and the words themselves (the matn). Class 6 Who made up hadith, and how were they caught? What a forged (mawḍūʿ) report is, how it differs from a weak one (a weak report is not proven to be his, while a forged one is not his at all), and the ruling on passing one on. Why some people forged sayings and put them on the Prophet ﷺ: after the fitnah, to serve a political or sectarian cause; to draw a crowd as storytellers; even out of misplaced zeal.