Carrying on the Tradition: a Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission Across a Thousand Years: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission Across a Thousand Years

"In Carrying on the Tradition Garrett Davidson employs a variety of largely unutilized print, as well as archival sources collected from the Near East, North Africa, India, Europe, and North America. He analyses these sources to excavate the fundamental reinvention of the conceptions and practices of hadith transmission that resulted from the establishment of the hadith canon. Further, the book examines how hadith scholars reimagined the transmission of hadith, not as a scholarly tool, as it had originally been, but instead as, among other things, an act of pious emulation of the forefathers. It demonstrates the emergence of new genres and subgenres of hadith literature, as a result of this shift, examining them as artefacts of the cultural, social, and intellectual history of Muslim religiosity from the tenth to twentieth centuries"-- Provided by publisher ‎Contents 7 ‎Acknowledgements 11 ‎Figures 12 ‎Introduction 13 ‎Chapter 1. Reimagining Hadith Transmission in the Shadow of the Canon 17 ‎1. The Ideology of Hadith Transmission 31 ‎2. The Social Logic of Hadith Transmission 33 ‎3. “Nothing Gold Can Stay:” The End of the ‘Golden Age’ of Hadith Transmission 33 ‎4. Elevation and Decline 37 ‎5. Degrees of Separation 45 ‎6. Supernatural Elevation 48 ‎7. Conclusion 57 ‎Chapter 2. The Post-canonical Evolution of Oral Hadith Transmission 59 ‎1. The Audition Notice 62 ‎2. The Evolving Function of Oral Transmission 73 ‎3. The Age Structure of Oral Transmission 78 ‎4. Hadith Speed Reading 87 ‎5. Further Liberalization of Oral Transmission 91 ‎6. The Ritualization of Oral Hadith Transmission 96 ‎7. Locations of Oral Hadith Transmission 101 ‎8. Musalsalāt: Ritual and Mimesis in Oral Hadith Transmission 103 ‎9. A Shifting Culture of Oral Hadith Transmission 108 ‎Chapter 3. Non-oral Transmission in the Oral Idiom: The Development and Function of the Ijāza 120 ‎1. Confusion in the Secondary Literature 121 ‎2. The Origins and Early Development of the Ijāza 123 ‎3. The Earliest Attestations of the Ijāza 125 ‎4. The Tide Begins to Turn: The Increasing Acceptance of the Ijāza in the Fourth/Tenth Century 130 ‎5. Al-Khaṭīb and the Evolution of the Ijāza 135 ‎6. The ijāza as a Means of Preserving the Chain of Transmission 139 ‎7. Permission for the Unspecified 141 ‎8. Who Can Receive an Ijāza? 147 ‎9. The Ijāza and the Short Chain of Transmission 150 ‎10. The Ijāza and the Unborn 153 ‎11. Ijāzas for All: The Development and Function of the al-Ijāza al-ʿĀmma 155 ‎12. Conclusion 161 ‎Chapter 4. The High and the Low: Men, Women and the Social Aspect of Elevation 164 ‎1. The Laity and the Randomness of Longevity and Elevation 174 ‎2. A Medieval Hadith Rock Star: The Extraordinary Case of Abū ʿAbbās al-Ḥajjār 175 ‎3. The Elevated Chain of Transmission and Women Hadith Transmitters 178 ‎4. The Exceptional Case of Karīma al-Marwaziyya 180 ‎5. The Question of Learning among Women Hadith Transmitters 186 ‎6. The Case of Women Hadith Transmitters in al-Sakhāwī’s al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ 189 ‎7. Longevity, Elevation and Women Transmitters 198 ‎8. The View of Women’s Hadith Transmission from the Documentary Evidence 205 ‎9. Women and Hadith Transmission beyond the Tenth/Sixteenth Century 211 ‎10. Conclusion 213 ‎Chapter 5. Brevity, Breadth and Elevation: The Forty-Hadith and ʿAwālī Genres 215 ‎1. The Prophet’s Promise: The Forty-Hadith Genres and Elevation 216 ‎2. The Forty-Hadith Genre as a Tool for the Cultivation of Elevation 217 ‎3. The Forty-Hadith Genre and Elevation 221 ‎4. Forty Hadith, Forty Shaykhs, Forty Towns 226 ‎5. The ʿAwālī Genre: Compiling and Presenting Elevation 230 ‎6. Thulāthiyyāt al-Bukhārī: al-Bukhārī’s Threes 235 ‎7. Degrees of Separation: Link-Themed ʿAwālī Collections 244 ‎8. Categories of Elevation: Muwāfaqāt, Abdāl, Musāwāt, and Muṣāfaḥāt 247 ‎9. Conclusion 251 ‎Chapter 6. Men of Books and Books of Men: The Muʿjam/Mashyakha and Fihrist/Thabat Catalog Genres 253 ‎1. The Mashyakha and Muʿjam al-Shuyūkh Genre 253 ‎2. The Muʿjam/Mashyakha Genre as a Vehicle for Cultivating Elevated Hadith 260 ‎3. The Reception of Mashyakha and Muʿjam al-Shuyūkh Works 264 ‎4. The Fihrist/Thabat Genres 266 ‎5. The Thabat: The Development of the Catalog Genre in the Central and Eastern Islamic Lands 276 ‎6. Conclusion 286 ‎Chapter 7. Hadith Transmission in an Age of Transformation and Reform 288 ‎1. The Last of the Mohicans: Al-Kattānī and the State of Hadith Transmission in the Early-Twentieth Century 288 ‎2. Hadith Transmission and Reform 297 ‎3. Reformers and the Irrationality of Post-Canonical Hadith Transmission 299 ‎4. Transmitting Hadith in the Shifting Political and Cultural Terrain of the Twentieth Century 305 ‎5. Hadith Transmission as a Feature of Late Sunni Traditionalism 308 ‎Bibliography 317 ‎Index 339