The Quran and the Hadith

What are the Islamic sacred texts?

Islam has one scripture, the Quran, and a second body of authoritative reports, the Hadith, and Muslims treat them as different kinds of authority. The scholar Abdullah Saeed writes that the standard Muslim view, Sunni and Shia alike, attributes the Quran's composition to God alone and denies any human role in producing it. In this view, Muhammad faithfully passed on what the angel of revelation, usually identified as Gabriel, brought to him in Arabic, without addition or change.¹

A hadith is a report of what Muhammad said or did, passed down through a named chain of transmitters. Mohammad Hashim Kamali calls the sunnah, the example of Muhammad that hadith reports record, the most authoritative source of Islam next to the Quran: it explains the Quran and is also a source in its own right.² Shia writers also count the sayings of their imams, leaders descended from Muhammad's family.²

Text	What it is	Its authority
The Quran	114 chapters, called surahs, made up of verses, called ayat, in Arabic3	God's own words, in Sunni and Shia teaching alike1
Sunni Hadith collections	Six standard collections from the mid-ninth century, led by those of al-Bukhari and Muslim2	The second source of teaching and law, graded report by report2
Twelver Shia Hadith collections	Four main collections, led by al-Kulayni's al-Kafi, with reports from Muhammad and the imams2	The second source for Twelver Shia Muslims, with chains reaching the imams2

How was the Quran revealed?

Muslim tradition holds that the Quran came to Muhammad in stages between 610 and 632 CE, the year of his death.⁴ Farid Esack describes it as a revealed oral discourse that unfolded over twenty-three years.³ The first revelation is linked to the Night of Power, one of the last nights of Ramadan.⁵ The Quran says of itself: Lo! We revealed it on the Night of Power. (Quran 97:1)⁶

Many Muslim scholars, Yousef Wahb of the Yaqeen Institute reports, hold that the whole Quran first descended to the nearest heaven on that night and then came down to Muhammad in parts. Wahb writes that Muhammad reviewed the revelation with Gabriel every Ramadan, and twice in the last year of his life.⁷

How was the Quran memorized and recited?

The Quran was first a spoken text, and many Muslims still learn it by heart, some in full. Wahb notes that the word Quran is related to the Arabic for recitation.⁷ Esack writes that committing it to memory and reciting it were acts of great merit for the earliest Muslims. Today, he notes, virtually all Muslims memorize small parts of it, which they recite in daily prayer, at funerals, and beside the newborn, the sick, and the dying.³

Recitation also carries the qiraat, the recognized readings of the text. Wahb writes that the scholar Ibn Mujahid first limited the canonical readings to seven, and that ten are now recognized, each passed down by two transmitters. The reading of Asim, through his transmitter Hafs, prevails across the eastern Muslim world.⁸ Wahb reports that the ten readings were systematized through chains linking their readers to Muhammad's companions, and that later scholars held all ten to be mass-transmitted. Al-Khoei, a Shia scholar, argues instead that only the Quran itself was passed down without a break. Each reading, he holds, reached us through a few narrators and goes back only to its reader.⁸⁹

How was the Quran compiled into a book?

Muslim accounts hold that the Quran was complete at Muhammad's death but differ on when it was first gathered into one written copy, while historians debate how early its wording was fixed.¹¹⁰¹¹

Muslim sources themselves record other early codices. In one report al-Khoei cites, Uthman complains that people appeal to the readings of Ubayy and of Abd Allah, that is, Ubayy ibn Kab and Abd Allah ibn Masud, two companions whose codices tradition names.¹⁰¹⁴ Shoemaker notes that tradition links four such companion codices to Syria, Kufa, Basra, and Hims, and holds that these competing accounts are far from unanimous about how the Quran was collected.¹⁴

In 2015, the University of Birmingham announced that radiocarbon tests dated the parchment of two leaves in its collection to between 568 and 645 CE. The leaves hold parts of surahs 18 to 20. The test dates the animal skin, not the writing, but David Thomas of the university said the text must have been very close to the Quran read today.⁴ The Writings section describes the early manuscripts, and How ancient texts are dated explains the methods.

How did the texts gain authority?

For Muslims, the Quran's authority comes from its status as revelation, and its contents form a closed text that Sunni and Twelver Shia Muslims share.¹¹⁶ Wahb reads a verse as God's promise to preserve it: Lo! We, even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian. (Quran 15:9)⁶⁷ Muslims also point to its inimitability, ijaz. Issa Boullata writes that Muslims hold the Quran to be Muhammad's miracle and a sign of its divine source, a teaching based on verses that challenge doubters to produce even one surah like it (Quran 2:23 and 10:38).¹⁷ Al-Khoei, a Twelver Shia scholar, holds that a final prophethood needs a lasting miracle, the Quran.¹⁸

Saeed describes early Imami, or Twelver, Shia criticism of how the text was compiled under Uthman, including the charge that its compilers left out and added verses. He adds that many later Imami scholars toned down that criticism and argued the existing text contains no falsification.¹ Al-Khoei calls the belief that the Quran was never altered the common view of Shia scholars, while noting that a faction of Shia Hadith scholars, and some Sunni scholars, held otherwise.¹⁹

The Hadith gained authority through scholarship that judged each report by its isnad, the chain of people who passed it on. Kamali explains that Sunni scholars sorted reports into sound, fair, and weak. The jurist al-Shafii, who died in 820 CE, argued that where the Quran pairs the Book with the Wisdom, it means the Quran and the sunnah. The six standard Sunni collections were compiled around the mid-ninth century; the most respected are those of al-Bukhari, who died in 870 CE, and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, who died in 875 CE.²

Twelver Shia Muslims rely on four collections of their own. Kamali ranks al-Kafi by al-Kulayni, who died in 939 CE, first: it holds 16,199 reports from Muhammad and the imams.² Twelver scholars grade these reports too, in four grades; al-Majlisi, for example, graded the al-Kafi report on the pillars sound.²²⁰ Ibadi Muslims, Alan Jones writes, give the Quran more weight and the Hadith less in legal matters than other branches do.²¹

Historians disagree about how much of the Hadith goes back to Muhammad. Ignaz Goldziher held that most of it arose from the political struggles of Islam's first two centuries and so has little historical value. Joseph Schacht, in 1950, held that every legal report from Muhammad should be treated as a later creation unless shown otherwise.²²² Nabia Abbott, studying early papyri, concluded that several thousand authentic hadith reports were written down in Islam's first century. Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami argued in 1985 that many of Schacht's conclusions are exaggerated.² Harald Motzki faulted the earlier methods for resting on unproven premises and arguments from silence.²² Studying the patterns of transmission, he traced the report of Uthman's collection to the scholar al-Zuhri, who died in 741 or 742 CE; Shoemaker calls the method highly useful but not always completely reliable.¹⁴

How do Muslims interpret the Quran?

Muslims read the Quran through tafsir, a tradition of commentary that Saeed traces back to Muhammad's own lifetime, since the Quran gives him the task of explaining it (Quran 16:44).¹

Saeed calls the thirty-volume commentary of al-Tabari, who died in 923 CE, the most important early Sunni tafsir, and describes Ibn Kathir, who died in 1373 CE, as explaining the text through transmitted reports rather than reason-based interpretation. Imami Shia scholars, whose major commentaries include those of al-Tusi and al-Tabarsi, distinguish the Quran's inner meanings from its outer ones, and Sufi commentators also sought its inner sense. Modern readers range from traditionalists to modernists such as Muhammad Abduh.¹

Can the Quran be translated?

Muslims treat the Arabic text as the Quran itself. Saeed writes that Muslims see the Arabic language as an essential part of the revelation.¹ The Quran itself stresses its language: Lo! We have revealed it, a Lecture in Arabic, that ye may understand. (Quran 12:2)⁶

Marmaduke Pickthall, an English Muslim, presented his 1930 English version, by its title, as the meaning of the Quran. His foreword says: The Koran cannot be translated. That is the belief of old-fashioned Sheykhs and the view of the present writer.²³

The Christianity vs Islam comparison sets the Quran beside the Bible, and the book Christianity vs Islam explores the two faiths at more length.