Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Hadith" in English language version.
Among the various works published on the subject by Western scholars, two major works stood out and became the basis of future Western studies on hadith. The first one was "Muhammedanische Studien" (Muslim Studies) by Ignaz Goldziher in 1889 and 1890, and the second was "The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence" by Joseph Schacht published in 1950. Goldziher adopted a critical and historical-analytical approach to the study of hadith (Alshehri 2014). According to him there was no scientific guarantee to support the proposition that hadith reflected the actual words, action or consent of the Prophet. His studies on the subject led him to conclude that the bulk of hadith in existence was nothing more than the result of socio-religious growth that occurred in early Muslim society. According to Goldziher (1971) ,"hadith will not serve as a document for the history of the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the community during the mature ages of its development." Among the issues that led Goldziher to such conclusion was the fact that there were fewer hadith during the early stages of Islam compared to the later eras, and there were fewer narrations attributed to the senior companions as compared to the younger ones. Since a large portion of the traditions originated after the death of the Prophet and the companions, he concluded that there was an early large-scale fabrication of hadith by later generations to fulfil the legal need of the growing Muslim society and to fill in legal gaps which the Quran was not able to do (Goldziher 1973).
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