Traditions of the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam were passed down mostly orally for more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death in AD 632.
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Muslim historians say that Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (the third khalifa (caliph) of the Rashidun Empire, or successor of Muhammad, who had formerly been Muhammad's secretary), was the first to urge Muslims to write the Qur'an in a fixed form, and to record the hadith.
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Uthman's labours were cut short by his assassination, at the hands of aggrieved soldiers, in 656.
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No sources survive directly from this period so we are dependent on what later writers tell us about this period.
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By the 9th century the number of hadiths had mushroomed.
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Hadith are narrations concerning the words and deeds of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
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Hadith are regarded by traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as important tools for understanding the Qur'an and in matters of jurisprudence.
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Hadith were evaluated and gathered into large collections mostly during the reign of Umar ibn AbdulAziz during the 8th and 9th centuries.
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These works are referred to in matters of Islamic law and history to this day.
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The two main denominations of Islam, Shi'ism and Sunnism, have different sets of Hadith collections.
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The wide acceptance that many of these traditions were fabricated stimulated the development for assessing Hadith.
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Scholars of the Abbasid period were faced with a huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions, some of them flatly contradicting each other.
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Many of these traditions supported differing views on a variety of controversial matters.
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Scholars had to decide which hadith were to be trusted as authentic and which had been invented for political or theological purposes.
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To do this, they used a number of techniques which Muslims now call the science of hadith.
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And so we have yet another religion where the teachings are not agreed.
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Where interpretations are the norm.
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Where they vary considerably from place to place.
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A faith in transition.
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Like so many before it
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The danger is that fanatics take their particular hadith literally and use this as a means of advancing their power and authority.
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Again nothing new here many have done this before.
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Where these teachings clash with reasonable civil and human rights of the modern world we have trouble.
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Education has been found to be one of the only ways out of this barrier to evolution.
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Not just evolution but the reasonable right of women to a fairer life.
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Educate the women of a country and this tends to promote positive change.
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Unfortunately conservative Muslim countries have no intention of educating their women
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For some reason many Muslim clerics seem set against any freedom or rights for women.
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Funny when all humans come from a mother.
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Difficult to believe that time will not change this.
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Fortunately for women and others who would see change there are stirrings of unquiet at some of the more extreme interpretations of hadith.
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