MAIRAJ SYED, DANNY HALAWI, BEHNAM SADEGHI, NAZMUS SAQUIB University of California, Davis; University of California, Berkeley; University of Oxford; Massachussets Institute of Technology Emails: msyed@ucdavis.edu; dhalawi@berkeley.edu; bsadeghi3@gmail.com; saquib@mit.edu Verifying Source Citations in the Hadith Literature ABSTRACT Historians rely on hadiths (narratives about Muhammad) as a source for writing the history of early Islam. Each hadith is preceded by an isnād, which is a list of names purporting to give the sequence of individuals who transmitted it. Scholars apply a variety of methods to the isnāds of hadiths in order to determine their dates and geographic origins. These methods presuppose the absence of inadvertent mistakes in the names cited. Because the hadith literature is so voluminous and unwieldy, the systematic discovery and correction of these mistakes using manual methods is unfeasible. We introduce new computational and statistical methods for automatically detecting a subset of these errors and correcting them. We do so by investigating the citations of sources in the isnāds documented in the digital hadith repository, Gawāmi al-Kalim. KEYWORDS: hadith, isnād, digital humanities, source criticism, early Islam, computer analysis INTRODUCTION 1 Historians have long used a variety of methods to determine the dates and the geograph- ical origins of the reports about the important events and persons of early Islam that con- stitute our main source for writing history—namely the āthār and the subset of the āthār about the Prophet Muhammad, called hadiths. Most of these methods rely on analyzing the chain of names, isnād, found at the beginning of each hadith that purports to give the sequence of the people who transmitted it until it reached the premodern collector in whose book the report is found. These analytical methods do not take the isnāds at face- value as accurate records of a report’s transmission history; they are often able to distin- guish back-projections from plausible attributions to sources. 2 However, they are at least partly dependent on the absence of egregious inadvertent errors—mistakes such as the 1. The authors would like to thank University of California’s “Middle Ages in the Wider World” program and the University of California, Davis “New Research Initiatives and Interdisciplinary Research” grants for funding the research described in this article. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing invaluable feedback. 2. As examples, three methods may be mentioned: for source-criticism applied recursively to the corpora of early figures, see Harald Motzki, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools, trans. Mar- ion H. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For isnād-cum-matn analysis, see Harald Motzki, Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, and Sean W. Anthony, Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghazi Hadith, vol. 78, Islamic history and civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2010). For the traveling tradition test, see Behnam Sadeghi, "The traveling tra- dition test: a method for dating traditions," Der Islam 85, no. 1 (2010). Journal of Medieval Worlds, Vol. 1, Number 3, pp. 5–20. Electronic ISSN: 2574-3988 © 2019 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jmw.2019.130002 5