Dating Hadith Based on Document Analysis A Crical Review of Juynboll's Methodology

Hadith in Islamic Tradition is recognized as an important source for fiqh (jurisprudence), akhlaq (ethics), tafsir (exegesis) and even history. But among the Orientalists and Western hadith scholars, it is viewed as the basic source to know the history of Islam especially the first centuries of Islam. To make the best use of this informational source they started studying its historical value, that is, which period these traditions are related and whom these narrations are historically scribed to. This issue has been view from another perspective by Muslim hadith scholars namely hadith text and document criticism and distinguishing unreliable and forged hadiths from authentic and reliable ones. Here the efforts made by Muslim and Western hadith scholars join together. The present paper is concerned with the busiest Netherlander hadith scholars, Gautiar Juynboll and describes his research achievements. To him, the main part of this historical information is hidden in the chain of documents which can be found by a special analytical method which is of his own innovation. The result obtained by this analytical method is the evaluation of historical reliability of documents and also approximate dating of Islamic hadith innovation and publication. Reviewing a set of narration as an example, the author of the present paper gives an introduction to the technical terms utilized by Juynboll and implements his analytical method concerning mentioned example to get theoretically familiar with this kind of research and find its result practically.