Verifying Source Citations in the Hadith Literature

Abstract

Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmiʿ al-Kalim.