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Over the course of many years, students of the traditions about Muhammad and his companions worked out a complex and sophis\u00adticated system for testing and classifying hadith<\/em>. Some hadith <\/em>reports were ranked as sahih, <\/em>or \u201csound,\u201d which is to say that all of the links in their isnads, <\/em>their chains of transmission, were good ones going back directly to the purported source of the tradition, who was usu\u00adally the Prophet himself.[1]<\/a> A slightly less reliable group of traditions were determined to be hasan<\/em>, \u201cgood.\u201d These \u201cgood\u201d traditions had a weak link in their chain of transmission\u2014someone whose integrity was questionable or whose contact with another transmitter was subject to doubt\u2014but they were nevertheless acceptable if they were really needed because there was some outside corroboration that led scholars to think they were most likely true. Finally, and acceptable for very little, were those hadith <\/em>reports that were judged to be da\u2019if, <\/em>or \u201cweak.\u201d[2]<\/a> They would be used only when a judge or a theologian was desperate, and they would not be convincing to many.<\/span><\/p>\n A mastery of the thousands of hadith <\/em>circulating in the Islamic world was what constituted \u2018<\/em>ilm<\/em>, or \u201cknowledge,\u201d and those who had such knowledge were the \u201cknowers\u201d (\u2018ulama\u2019) par excellence.<\/em>[3]<\/a> Eventually, the \u2018ulama\u2019\u00a0<\/em>came to be a kind of rabbi class, the nearest thing that Islam has to a clergy. Authority did not proceed from ordination or priesthood, but from knowledge of the law.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, after the process of seeking out and sifting hadith <\/em>reports for many decades, the time came for gathering the ones that had been adjudged to be reliable into accessible works of reference. The need was especially pressing in the law courts of the empire. It is to this that we owe the great collections of \u201csound\u201d hadith <\/em>that\u00a0have taken on almost scriptural status in Sunni Islam. Foremost among these are two multivolume works, each entitled al-Sahih, <\/em>compiled by al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 875). As these and other manuals of hadith <\/em>won acceptance, it was a knowledge of them\u2014extending to memorization\u2014that came to constitute real \u2018<\/em>ilm<\/em> and would win an aspiring young scholar a place among the \u2018ulama\u2019.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Al-Bukhari\u2019s Sahih, <\/em>which holds undisputed pride of place among Sunnis, is worth describing here in a bit of detail. It is com\u00adposed of ninety-seven books divided into a total of 3,450 chapters. Each book is devoted to a general subject, such as prayer, fasting, alms, testimony, buying and selling, marriage, and the like. About 2,762 separate hadith <\/em>reports occur in Bukhari\u2019s volumes, but they are often repeated under different headings, for a total of approxi\u00admately 7,300. As the name of his vast work indicates, it is com\u00adposed only of hadith <\/em>reports that were judged by Bukhari and his associates to be sahih, <\/em>or \u201csound.\u201d These were the best he could find. Muslim tradition says that these \u201csound\u201d reports were culled from the best 200,000 hadith <\/em>Bukhari had encountered in the course of a lifetime spent crisscrossing the Arab empire in quest of anecdotal material about the Prophet and his companions. The obviously spurious or biased reports he had not even taken into account. These facts give some idea of the magnitude of the prob\u00adlem of forgery faced by Muslim scholars and jurists in those early centuries.<\/span><\/p>\n Western scholars, in their turn, have been quick to criticize the classical Islamic method of testing hadith <\/em>by their chains of transmitters, or isnads<\/em>. They have pointed out, no doubt correctly, that anybody clever enough to forge the substance of a plausible hadith<\/em> report could also, if he knew it would come under scrutiny, forge a perfectly plausible chain of transmitters for his report. In fact, as biographical dictionaries began to appear, he would have at his disposal a highly useful set of reference works to help him do precisely that. Such criticism is well aimed, it seems, but there can be little doubt that Muslim isnad<\/em>-criticism did manage to exclude the most blatantly propagandistic forgeries of the first and second centuries after the Prophet. And we must also be grateful for the impetus given by these investigations of hadith <\/em>and hadith<\/em>-transmitters to the study of history, which grew up as a side\u2014or sub\u2014discipline to them.<\/span><\/p>\n The greatest contribution to the study of hadith, <\/em>however, was the creation of the vast, complex, and sophisticated body of Islamic law known as the shariah<\/em>.[4]<\/a>\u00a0Early on, the \u2018ulama\u2019<\/em> began an attempt to codify Islamic law, to systematize it on the basis of the Qur\u2019an and the sunna<\/em>. Several basic principles governed their work. The first and perhaps most important was that, if clear commands existed in the Qur\u2019an or in authenticated hadith, <\/em>those were to be accepted without human speculation or modification. (This is actually less rigid than it sounds, though, since the human mind had to deter\u00admine how widely a given rule applies and precisely what it means. This called for the minute study of Arabic grammar and of the meanings of words, including metaphors, and allowed for some dif\u00adferences of opinion and emphasis.) If, on the other hand, a situa\u00adtion was not covered in either the Qur\u2019an or the hadith, <\/em>most jurists would permit the use of \u201canalogy\u201d (qiyas), <\/em>by which an old princi\u00adple could be applied to a new situation.[5]<\/a> For instance, if the Prophet had forbidden the marriage of a Muslim girl to a pagan Arab on the grounds that he worshiped many gods, a later Muslim judge might rule against the marriage of a Muslim girl to a Hindu, reasoning by analogy from the first case.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>[1]<\/a> The Arabic word sahih<\/em> is pronounced \u201csa-HEEH\u201d\u2014with the final \u201ch\u201d being sounded as if it began a syllable.<\/span><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Da\u2019if<\/em> is pronounced \u201cda-EEF.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> This word, which is spelled in a wide variety of ways by Western scholars, is pro\u00adnounced roughly \u201coo-la-MAA.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Pronounced (roughly) \u201csha-REE-ah.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n