The Infancy and Development of Hadith in Central Asia
Shamsiddin Kamoliddin
Shamsiddin Kamoliddin, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor.
Manuscript received on 14 August 2019. | Revised Manuscript received on 19 August 2019. | Manuscript published on 30 September 2019. | PP: 4537-4541 | Volume-8 Issue-3 September 2019 | Retrieval Number: C6821098319/2019©BEIESP | DOI: 10.35940/ijrte.C6821.098319
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: This article discusses process of beginnings and development of the Hadith study in Central Asia in the Early Islamic period. The first transmitters of hadith in Mawarannahr were the Arabs who participated in the wars of invasion. Among the first narrators of hadith (isnad) in Central Asia, were eyewitnesses the Prophet’s life, called as’habs or companions of the Prophet. The second link in the chain of narrators of hadith was represented by at-tabi’in, i.e. followers of the Prophet’s companions, who communicated hadith from the words of as’hab. In Mawarannahr, the followers were represented mostly by the ‘Arabs that settled in Marw and settlements in its environs in the second half of the 7th century. The next link in the chain of narrators of hadith is the tubba’ at-tabi’in, the apprentice of a follower of the companions of Muhammad the Prophet, many of whom lived in Marw and its environs in the 8th century. Though at the beginning of the 8th century it was mainly the ‘Arabs and their Iranian mawali (pl. of mawla) who narrated hadith, by the mid-8th century this science had already been adopted by representatives of the Central Asian peoples. In subsequent centuries, the study of hadith was widespread in Central Asia and it became one of the leading centers of development of ‘Arab-Muslim scholarship and culture. Besides Marw and the other towns of Khurasan, the most important centers of hadith study in the region were Samarqand, Bukhara, Termiz, Nasaf, Kesh, Khwarizm, and Shash. The development of the science of hadith criticism gave impulse to another branch of science—the historical-biographical one. In the 9th century the first collections containing biographies of famous narrators of hadith were compiled. This practice fasted until the late Middle Ages. Written sources give us the biographies of 3,000 transmitters of hadith that lived in different Central Asian cities before the beginning of the 13th century.
Key words: Central Asia, Arabs Invasion, Arabian Caliphate, Hadith Transmitters, Hadith Studies, Islamic Scholarship.
Scope of the Article: Social Sciences