The Hadith is the second of four sources of Islamic law, and therefore the second authority of Islam. The first sources is the Qur'an itself. The third is the final analogy in questions of law - based on the Qur'an and Sunna among Sunnis and reason among Shiites. The fourth and last sources is the agreement or consensus of all Islamic scholars. Special reasons make the Hadith synonymous with the Qur'an, and, in folk Islam, sometimes more important than the Qur'an itself.
Many Islamic scholars consider the everyday words of Muhammad to be actual revelations, for it is written in the Qur'an (Sura The Star 53:2-4): "Your comrade (Muhammad) is not astray, neither errs, nor speaks he out of caprice. This is nothing but a revelation revealed" (4). Some exegetes understand the word this to be everything that Muhammad said, while others limit this to what was said in the Qur'an only. Another Qur'anic verse (Sura The House of Imran 3:42) is also considered a pointer to the meaning of the Hadith; for the word wisdom, which in this and other verses is found next to the term The Book, is believed to mean Muhammad's sayings: "And he(Allah) will teach him (Jesus) the Book, the Wisdom, the Torah, the Gospel" (5).
However, the most important reason for the Hadith being esteemed so highly is that the Qur'an gives no detailed information about essential orders for faith and life; therefore the Qur'an demands tradition as an indispensable supplement. A clear example is found in ritual prayer. Although the Qur'an obliges believers to exercise this practice, it gives practically no rule as to how and when one should pray. Without the traditions, which describe the prayer duty of the Prophet in detail or in which the Prophet instructed his congregation, one could determine neither the number of daily prayers nor how to perform them (6).
The influence of the Hadith is particularly far-reaching in the area of Islamic law, the Sharia, as we can see in this famous rule from the Sunnis: "If a Qur'anic verse is found to contradict a tradition of the Prophet, it (the Qur'anic verse) may be abrogated, provided the tradition came from him" (7).
No one can know exactly which (and how many) traditions are really traceable to the Prophet, because these held a powerful position from the beginning, were based almost exclusively on oral traditions when collected in Muhammad's time, and were not actually written down until a decade after Muhammad's death. Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafite school of law in Turkey (and among the predominantly Turkic peoples) is believed to have regarded only 17 traditions as reliable. Abu Dawud (d. AD 888), one of the main collectors of traditions whose Sunanu Abi Dawud is one of six reliable Hadith collections, re-ports in the Forward of his work, that out of 500,000 traditions, he could only accept 4,800 as reliable.
Most traditions cannot be viewed as actual, believable, historical accounts of the Sunna of the Prophet. Much more, they express what leading Muslim circles deemed authoritative in the first centuries after Muhammad's death, and were only attributed to the Prophet then.
From the approximately one thousand collections of traditions, the Sunnis consider only six to be approved. They all originated in the third century after Muhammad's death. They are collections from:
Al-Bukhari (d. AD 870)
Muslim (d. AD 875)
Abu Dawud (d. AD 888)
Al-Tirmidhi (d. AD 892)
Al-Nasa'i (d. AD 915)
Ibn Madja (d. AD 886)
These works are most commonly and conveniently called "The Six Books" (al-kutubu's-sitta) - the six accurate, reliable collections. They are regarded as Holy Books in addition to the Qur'an. The collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim hold a particularly lofty position.
The Shiites have developed their own Hadith collection. They view the traditions in the Sunni collection with suspicion if one link in the chain of commentators did not belong to Ali's group. The most important Hadith collection of the Shiites is Al-Kafi fi usuli'd-din.
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