Editing Hadith (section)

=== Western scholarship ===
Western scholarly criticism of hadith began in colonial India in the mid 19th century with the works of [[Aloys Sprenger]] and [[William Muir]]. These works were generally critical of the reliability of hadith, suggesting that traditional Muslim scholarship was incapable of determining the authenticity of hadith, and that the hadith tradition had been corrupted by widespread fabrication of fraudulent hadith. The late 19th century work of [[Ignaz Goldziher]], ''[[Muhammedanische Studien]]'' (''Muslim Studies''), is considered seminal in the field of Western hadith studies. Goldziher took the same critical approach as Sprenger and Muir, suggesting that many hadith showed anachronistic elements indicating that they were not authentic, and that the many contradictory hadith made the value of the entire corpus questionable.<ref name=":0" />

The work of [[Joseph Schacht]] in the 1950s sought to obtain a critical understanding of the chains of transmission of particular hadith, focusing on the convergence of transmission chains of particular hadith back to a single "common link" from who all later sources ultimately obtained the hadith, who Schacht considered to be the likely true author of the hadith, which could allow dating of when particular hadith began circulating. This method is widely influential in Western hadith scholarship, though has received criticism from some scholars.<ref name=":0" /> Schacht's arguments regarding the validity of hadith have been vigorously disputed by Muslim scholars like [[Muhammad Mustafa Azmi]], who contended that hadiths were written down already during Muhammads lifetime, and that large scale creation of fraudulent hadiths was implausible.<ref>Herbert Berg, [https://books.google.com/books?id=2GGZ-jIQGoMC&dq=m.m.+azami&pg=PT26 The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the Formative Period]. Routledge Studies in the Qur'an. Transferred to digital publishing in 2005. he died in 20 December 2017 [[Routledge]], 2013. {{ISBN|9781136115226}} p.23-26</ref>

Some modern scholars have contested Schacht's assertion that the "common links" were likely forgers of the hadith, instead suggesting that they were avid collectors of hadiths, though their arguments for this have been criticised by other scholars.<ref name=":0" />