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Project
The Hadith in contemporary Islam. Criticism of Hadith and an orthodoxy on the defensive.
Islams five daily obligatory ṣalāt</>-prayers are not explicitly prescribed in the Qurʾān. In the Middle Ages, Muslims sought authorization of the ṣalāt</> in the normative example of the Prophet Muḥammad, to whose way of doing things, his Sunna, they traced the practice of praying at five specific hours of the day.
In this dissertation, the development of the Islamic prayer practice in the first two centuries of Islam as well as the legal discourses it inspired are reconstructed on the basis of the earliest available written sources: the Qurʾān, the exegetical tradition, the Ḥadīth, the jurisprudential works, and the historiographical sources.
To date the Ḥadīth and biographical reports, this research sets forth and relies on an improvedversion of the Common Link analysis, which accounts for variant readings of the same basic narrative, and which incorporates techniques to validate the obtained results.
The principal conclusion is that thefive prayer-times were not established during the Prophets lifetime, but rather at the end of the first or the beginning of the second Islamiccentury. However, the idea that prayers must be performed at specific hours dates back to the beginning of Islam. Some prayers, such as the forenoon prayer, stirred debates as late as the second half of the second century.
In this dissertation, the development of the Islamic prayer practice in the first two centuries of Islam as well as the legal discourses it inspired are reconstructed on the basis of the earliest available written sources: the Qurʾān, the exegetical tradition, the Ḥadīth, the jurisprudential works, and the historiographical sources.
To date the Ḥadīth and biographical reports, this research sets forth and relies on an improvedversion of the Common Link analysis, which accounts for variant readings of the same basic narrative, and which incorporates techniques to validate the obtained results.
The principal conclusion is that thefive prayer-times were not established during the Prophets lifetime, but rather at the end of the first or the beginning of the second Islamiccentury. However, the idea that prayers must be performed at specific hours dates back to the beginning of Islam. Some prayers, such as the forenoon prayer, stirred debates as late as the second half of the second century.
Date:1 Oct 2008 → 13 Sep 2013
Keywords:Hadith, Islam
Disciplines:Theology and religious studies
Project type:PhD project