A Note on the Quantitative Analysis of Hadith

Abstract

Hiroyuki Yanagihashi observes how recent developments make the quantitative analysis of ḥadīths a "promising" endeavor. The question then becomes: why and how the text of certain ḥadīths, taken literally, appear to contradict established Sunnī legal doctrine? The logical presumption is that either traditionists transmitted the jurisprudence of ancient legal systems that were eventually replaced by later-derived fiqh rulings or they reformulated the ḥadīths in the process of transmission to develop the rulings underlying those later legal systems. By way of example, and to investigate these possibilities, Yanagihashi proposes quantitative analysis to trace variations within the texts of two prominent ḥadīths over the course of more than a century. His analysis yields conclusions that corroborate other work in ḥadīth­­-related studies from recent years (e.g., those of Behnam Sadeghi on a larger scale in his "Traveling Tradition Test," and Intisar Rabb with respect to a select ḥadīth in her evaluation of the doubt canon, and others): an increase in textual variation does not necessarily correspond to a change in legal doctrine; the number of variants can increase over time, even after the compilation of Sunnī Islam’s six canonical ḥadīth collections. His methods represent and propose new directions for quantitative analysis at the intersection of ḥadīth and law in early Islamic history.

Keywords: Islamic law, Islamic legal history, Islamic historiography, Islamic history, Islamic studies, Methods, Data science