The Quran and the Hadith

Islam rests on two textual foundations: the Quran, understood as the literal word of God revealed to Prophet Muhammad ﷺ over twenty-three years, and the Hadith, the recorded sayings and practice of the Prophet that clarify and apply it. How these texts were preserved — first in memory and on scattered material, then in written codices, and finally in the authenticated compilations — is a central subject of Islamic intellectual history.

This collection traces that process. It covers the Quran itself and its compilation under Abu Bakr, the standardisation carried out under Uthman that fixed the text as it is recited today, and the disciplines of hadith and sunnah that developed to sort reliable transmission from unreliable. It also includes the jurisprudential frameworks built upon these sources and the four Imams whose schools grew from them, the compilers whose collections became the reference points of Sunni tradition, and the commentators and hadith scholars of later centuries.