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Notes -
It is also worth bearing in mind that most hadith collectors were both obsessive and pedantic and therefore included every hadith they had heard that had a reasonable chance of being authentic, including those that were just minor variations of others. This means that if you read any given large hadith collection, it is likely that modern scholars would dispute some of them, or argue over their plausibility and likely context. Al-Bukhari or Imam Muslim did try to filter out unreliable hadith, but their judgements were not infallible. Authentic hadith are authoritative for Muslims, in theory, but the word 'authentic' leaves a lot of room to dispute.
Yeah. I’m not fully equipped to elaborate on their scholarly methodology for determining authenticity at the time Islamic scholars went around collecting Muhammad’s statements, but I think it follows a simple chain logic from tradition and how many times the statement is repeated. I have full English-Arabic collections of the Hadith and these sets are distinguished by the scholarly views of their authenticity. Sahih Al-Bukhari is considered the most authoritative, followed by Sahih Muslim, then you’ve got the less reliable sets like Sunan Dawud.
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