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The Muhammad we find on this page is not simply an individual person who lived at a particular moment in history, but an assemblage formed by encounters between generations. In addition to being a specific body that lies entombed in Medina, Muhammad is also an oral tradition spanning centuries.
The scholarly producers of this oral tradition, while reporting with conviction in Muhammad’s supreme authority as the Messenger of God, in turn authorize him: they wield the power of their reputations as scholars and pious Muslims to vouch for these words as reflecting Muhammad’s actual speech. In this roster of scholars reporting on Muhammad (and one another), we witness the prophetic assemblage as it takes form.
The people who knew and followed Muhammad in his own lifetime appear in the sources as having disagreed with one another on matters of correct belief and practice, and often gave conflicting accounts of what Muhammad had said.
This knowledge remained marked as the domain of a highly specialized field of scholars who devoted their lives to learning not only the hadiths themselves, but the names of thousands upon thousands of hadith reporters (along with information concerning their biographical details and scholarly reputations) and a complex methodology for evaluating each hadith’s level of reliability.
