Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

In their extensive travels in the quest for Hadiths, scholars like Ibn Hanbal collected thousands and thousands of reports attributed to the Prophet. Sometimes they might collect a dozen or even several dozen transmissions of the same statement, its chains of transmission intertwining and converging through a web of pious ancestors back to Muhammad (the Musnad contains seven transmissions alone of the Hadith of Umar kissing the Black Stone). These would all be analyzed and compared with one another to determine their individual and collective soundness. Ibn Hanbal’s Musnad contained some 27,700 transmissions, roughly a quarter of which were repeated versions of Hadiths.54 He sifted these from around 750,000 transmissions he had come across in his travels.