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Short articles on how a hadith reaches you and how the scholars of hadith check what is attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. Every quotation names its source, and hadith scholars reviewed each page before it was published.

1. How a hadith reaches you

   Every hadith comes with a chain of named people through whom it reached the compiler, each naming the one he received it from. Follow one famous hadith, «إنما الأعمال بالنيات», from the Prophet ﷺ to the books: a single line for four links, then a tree.

2. Signs of a forged saying

   Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya was asked whether a forged hadith can be recognised without studying its chain. His answer lists the signs scholars watch for. Here they are in his words, with page references.

3. Found in a book is not the same as authentic

   A saying can be printed in a respected hadith collection and still be graded weak by hadith scholars. What ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan, ḍaʿīf and mawḍūʿ mean, why the two Ṣaḥīḥs differ from the Sunan, and what Abū Dāwūd and al-Tirmidhī said about their own books.

4. The scribe

   Zayd ibn Thābit (r.a.) wrote down revelation for the Prophet ﷺ and later gathered the Quran into one written copy. What the reports in al-Bukhārī say about how he worked, and what Ibn Ḥajar made of the «two witnesses».

5. The companions who wrote

   Some companions wrote down what they heard from the Prophet ﷺ. ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAmr's «al-Ṣādiqa», the ṣaḥīfa of Hammām ibn Munabbih, an instruction not to write, an instruction to write for Abū Shāh, and how scholars put the two together.

6. Journeys for one hadith

   A companion rode for a month to hear one hadith directly from the man who had heard it from the Prophet ﷺ. Jābir's journey to ʿAbdullāh ibn Unays, as al-Bukhārī records it, al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī's book on such journeys, and al-Bukhārī's own travels.

7. Widely shared sayings and what the scholars wrote

   Twenty sayings that are widely forwarded as words of the Prophet ﷺ, with what hadith scholars wrote about each, quoted and cited.

The signs ﵁ ﵃ ﵊ in some Arabic quotations are drawn from Scheherazade New, by SIL Global, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: its licence.