The history of Islam
The hadith era
The great hadith collections were compiled between about 850 and 915, two centuries after Muhammad, out of a mass of reports scholars themselves called largely unreliable.
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From memory to books
Reports about the Prophet circulated orally and in private notebooks. Under the Abbasids, scholars travelled to collect them, judged narrators, and wrote the great collections: Malik's Muwatta (before 795), Ahmad ibn Hanbal's Musnad (he died 855), then the six Sunni books (about 850-915). Fabrication was so widespread that classical scholars wrote whole books on forged hadith.
Sources
- Earliest source Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith (Oneworld, 2009).
- Ibn al-Jawzi (died 1201), Kitab al-Mawdu'at (on fabricated hadith).