Kitabat al-Hadith bayn al-Nahy wal-Idhn
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- King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran in Medina
Kitabat al-Hadith bayn al-Nahy wal-Idhn (The Writing of Hadith between Prohibition and Permission) is a specialized treatise on hadith studies authored by the contemporary scholar Ahmad ibn Muhammad Humayd . The work investigates the transmission and early recording of the Prophetic traditions, focusing on the analysis and reconciliation of reports that prohibit (nahy) and those that permit or encourage (idhn) the transcription of hadith .
Context and Purpose
The book was prepared as an academic research paper for presentation at a seminar organized by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran in Medina, entitled "The Care of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the Sunnah and the Prophetic Biography" (Ināyat al-Mamlakah al-ʿArabiyyah al-Suʿūdiyyah bi-al-Sunnah wa-al-Sīrah al-Nabawiyyah) . Humayd sought to provide a grounded scholarly examination of early hadith transmission, clarifying the historical context of its transcription and addressing the foundational arguments advanced by skeptics and opponents regarding the recording and authority of the Sunnah .
Structure and Contents
The treatise begins with an introduction outlining its methodology and layout, followed by five thematic chapters and a conclusion :
- Chapter One: Defines writing (kitābah) linguistically and terminologically, and surveys its various usages in Islamic legal texts .
- Chapter Two: Examines literacy during the era of the Prophetic mission, detailing the relationship of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabs with writing, the scribes active during the Prophet's lifetime, and the administrative and religious avenues toward which their writing was directed .
- Chapter Three: Discusses the virtue of writing and its historical role and value in preserving knowledge .
- Chapter Four: Analyzes the primary hadith narrations regarding transcription, divided into sections examining the reports of prohibition and those of permission .
- Chapter Five: Explores the legal rulings and scholarly interpretations derived from these texts, analyzing the methodologies employed by traditional scholars to harmonize the reports, alongside a critical discussion of contrary modern or skeptical interpretations .
- Conclusion: Summarizes the research findings, followed by bibliographic references and a subject index .
Method and Findings
Humayd established specific methodological guidelines for the study: he grounded arguments directly in the Quran and the Sunnah, limited general proof-texts where possible to the two Sahihs of al-Bukhari and Muslim, and conducted extensive isnad criticism and source extraction (takhrij) for all traditions concerning prohibition and permission . For biographical evaluations of narrators, he relied primarily on references such as Tahdhib al-Kamal and Lisan al-Mizan .
The principal conclusions highlighted by the work include:
- Rebutting skeptical objections against the Sunnah requires uprooting their underlying premises rather than relying solely on theoretical refutation .
- Written documentation in itself is not an independent proof, but a subsidiary medium bound to the integrity of the transmitters and the transmission chain .
- A significant amount of hadith material was already recorded in writing during the Prophet's lifetime .
- Most narrations containing an explicit prohibition of writing are textually or critically unestablished from the Prophet; those that are authentically transmitted pertain to specific, circumstantial conditions (such as the early period when confusion with the text of the Quran was feared), a conclusion corroborated by the fact that Companions who disliked writing did not justify their aversion by citing a Prophetic prohibition .
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