Almost everyone nowadays has heard of the Quran. But what about the Hadith? Far larger than the Quran itself, the Hadith comprise several hundred thousand reports about what the Prophet Muhammad said and did. For almost fourteen centuries, learned Muslim have drawn on these reports for myriad purposes, whether moral or mystical, political or legal. With such high stakes, assessing the authenticity of sometimes contradictory reports became a core intellectual discipline, leading both male and female scholars to memorize thousands of Hadith and debate their implications. Turning from past to present, we’ll finally ask how the Hadith are interpreted today. Nile Green talks to Asma Sayeed, the author of Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
