Carrying on the tradition: An intellectual and social history of post-canonical hadith transmission

Based on a variety of largely unutilized printed, as well as documentary and manuscript sources collected from archives in the Middle East, North Africa, India and Europe, this dissertation is a longue duree study of the evolution of the conception and function of hadith transmission following the establishment of the hadith canon in the tenth century. It documents how the emergence of the hadith canon plunged Muslim religious scholars in a deep controversy. The establishment of a stable written hadith canon negated the need for the continued oral transmission of hadith. The institution of hadith transmission in the oral/aural mode was, however, integral to the community of hadith scholars' culture and self-image. Hadith scholars saw themselves as the heirs and carriers of a continuous tradition stretching back to the Prophet and the transmission of hadith and the associated chain of transmission was symbolic of this status. On the other hand, scholars, jurists in particular, wanted to be able to harness the authority of the hadith canon as evidence directly without citing a personal chain of transmission. The debates over the value and need of continued oral transmission that erupted in this context are traced revealing how hadith scholars developed an ideology to sustain and give meaning to the chain of transmission in spite of its obsolescence. This ideology asserted that, among other things, the chain of transmission was an essential and unique trait of the Muslim community linking successive generations of Muslims to the Prophet and distinguishing them from the Jews and Christians that preceded them and therefore must be preserved for its own sake, regardless of the fact that the establishment of a stable written hadith corpus had made the original function of the chain of transmission obsolete. It is demonstrated that hadith scholars successfully mobilized this ideology to sustain hadith transmission as an act of piety and further to preserve the chain of transmission as a species of social capital, which scholars could use to establish their position and relative merit within scholarly networks and further which they used in the reproduction of their group identity. This profound shift in the conception of the chain of transmission resulted in a radical reworking of the theory and protocols that had originally been developed to govern the transmission of hadith, as well as the culture and norms of transmission. This new conception of hadith transmission resulted in the emergence of a number of popular and enduring genres of hadith literature, which scholars used as vehicles to express their connection to the Prophet and previous generations of masters through the presentations of chains of transmission. The development of these genres is traced and for the first time their functions are situated in this context of an evolving conception of hadith transmission. The dissertation concludes with an examination of the fate of hadith transmission in the twentieth century following the rise of the various Islamic reform movements and the radical changes to the social and educational institutions of the majority of dar al-Islam..