Translator’s Foreword to Dr. Akram Nadwi’s Foundation to Hadith Sciences

Translator’s Foreword to Dr. Akram Nadwi’s Foundation to Hadith Sciences

Within Islamic disciplines ḥadīth can be extremely daunting and complex—at least it was for me. Ḥadīth detractors aside, for those who place ḥadīth at the center of their epistemology, there are vastly different approaches. For some, ḥadīth is sacred text which places the entire ḥadīth corpus at one’s disposal to draw on for their discourse and ideas, which can be incredibly empowering. It can also lead to tremendous amounts of conflicting information on all topics, increasing the levels of confusion and controversy in the Muslim public sphere. There are also more cautious approaches, with differing methods to sift out sound from unsound reports. These methods often place them on opposing sides very much like enemy combatants in a battlefield. How does one make sense of it all? What does one do when one scholar confidently deems a ḥadīth authentic and uses it to build an entire methodological framework, while another deems the same ḥadīth weak, or even fabricated, demolishing that entire edifice? Is it simply a matter of trust? Which books does one rely on, and what parameters should one follow? There are an endless series of questions that cross the minds of students of ḥadīth.

I grappled with many of these questions over the years, as I am sure many of you have as well. Thankfully, with ongoing study, research, and exposure to multiple teachers, I developed answers to some of these fundamental questions, answers which continued to be adjusted over time with new ideas from new teachers and new books. A defining moment in my ḥadīth journey came when I met my beloved teacher Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi. A prolific scholar with a grasp of multiple intellectual traditions, I was most impressed by his deep ḥadīth insights. Those were the sessions that opened my eyes, wherein he vigorously challenged—one might even say, demolished—many notions I had taken for granted while affirming some consistent principles I had learned over time. If my meager knowledge of ḥadīth can be likened to a structure sculpted over time, Shaykh Akram provided remodeling and finishing touches, through the chisel of his critical eye and deep insights.

Shaykh Akram’s ḥadīth scholarship is manifested in various specific projects, which must be highlighted here, in order to understand the position of the current book in your hands.

The first is his life-long research which placed him squarely on the global intellectual map and produced his magnum opus: a 43-volume biographical work on female ḥadīth transmitters entitled al-Wafāʾ bi Asmāʾ al-Nisāʾ. This project spanned decades and took a scholar with humble origins in rural India to far corners of the world in dusty libraries and storehouses in order to comb through ancient manuscripts and uncover the role of the forgotten other-half of the ummah within our intellectual tradition. In that, the research addressed a pressing issue in modern times, one that has consumed many a mind and inspired many a scholar to devise their own solutions.

This very issue, interestingly enough, inspired arguably the greatest legacies for two of my greatest teachers. Maulānā Yūsuf Iṣlāḥī—the Qurʾānic scholar and pioneering patron of many Islamic communities in the West—grappled with this issue and lamented the lack of exclusively female seminaries in the history of Islam. This led him to establish one of the first such Islamic educational institutions for women in India: Rampur’s al-Jāmiʿat al-Ṣāliḥāt.

When Shaykh Akram’s work finally saw the light of day last week—there was no publisher previously willing to produce such a voluminous work—I sent a congratulatory video message to my teacher. In it, I mentioned that his work reminded me of Ibn Khaldūn’s famous remark that a good commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhārī was a debt owed to the Muslim ummah (it had not been done in his time), and another scholar’s famous answer shortly thereafter, that Fatḥ al-Bārī of Ibn al-Ḥajar was the fulfillment of that debt.