1. Site Objective
2. About Hadith
3. About The Website
4. Important Note
5. Sources, Numbering, and Grading
6. Miscellaneous
About Us
1. Site Objective
The goal of this website is to provide the first online, authentic, searchable,
and multilingual (English/Arabic at the individual hadith level) database of
collections of hadith from our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.
2. About Hadith
Hadith are the transmitted narrations concerning the speech, actions, appearance, and approvals of
the Messenger of Allah, the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).
Hundreds of thousands of these narrations have been carefully preserved, studied, and passed down through
the centuries, with many of them having undergone a strict procedure to verify
an authentic chain of transmission up to the Prophet (pbuh).
Hadith form the textual core of the Sunnah, an important source for the derivation of Islamic
jurisprudence second only to the Qur'an.
Hadith specialists have compiled hadith in various collections with differing criteria for inclusion,
and not all hadith in all collections are necessarily authentic.
3. About the Website
The hadith collections currently available can be seen on the homepage.
We are working on importing hadith from other major collections as well,
such as the sunans of Imams Ibn Majah, Tirmidhi, An-Nasai, and Abu Dawud.
We currently support full search of both the English text of the hadith as well as the Arabic through a powerful search engine based on Lucene. Feel free to try out Lucene's query syntax to create custom and accurate search queries.
We currently support full search of both the English text of the hadith as well as the Arabic through a powerful search engine based on Lucene. Feel free to try out Lucene's query syntax to create custom and accurate search queries.
4. Important Note
We feel compelled to make an observation here: this is not a fiqh or fatwa website.
Hadith are made available on this website as a resource for research, personal study
and understanding. The text of one or a few hadith alone are not taken
as rulings by themselves; scholars have a sophisticated process using
the principles of fiqh to come up with rulings. We do not advocate do-it-yourself
fiqh using these hadith for those who are untrained in these principles.
If you have a question on a specific ruling, please ask your local scholar.
5. Sources, numbering, and grading
The Arabic text on our website is sourced from al-eman.com
and hadith.al-islam.com. For the English
we use various translators, a full list of which will appear here shortly inshaAllah.
The English has been through two iterations of cleaning (spelling corrections etc.).
We have done our best to provide the most authentic and exact hadith possible.
The reader will note differences in the numbering scheme in English and Arabic. The reason behind this is that the translator took a few liberties while translating, sometimes splitting or combining the Arabic books, and sometimes splitting or combining the hadith as well. This led to a new numbering for the English, while the numbering for the Arabic remained the same.
On sunnah.com we realize that some people will have an English reference number that has been popularized due to the translation, and some others may consult an Arabic version. Sticking with one or the other is not an option due to the numerous errors and inconsistencies (the simplest of which is splitting and combination of hadith that have to be combined and unsplit respectively).
We are moving toward unified reference numbering schemes corresponding to well-known scholars and publications (the numbering of Muhammad Fuad Abdul Baaqi is one such) slowly. You can see an example here.
If the text numbering in a book has been checked and verified, it will say so at the top of the book page. If there is no mention of this, it means it is still in progress and the Arabic references numbers may not be exact in that case.
We are working hard to add grade information for each hadith not in the Sahihain (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim). At this point we are displaying grade decisions by Shaykh al-Albani and Darussalam (Hafiz Zubair `Ali Za`i). Eventually we hope to have grade assignments from several other distinguished muhaddiths such as Shaykhs al-Arna'ut, Ahmad Shakir, and Abu Ghuddah wherever applicable.
The reader will note differences in the numbering scheme in English and Arabic. The reason behind this is that the translator took a few liberties while translating, sometimes splitting or combining the Arabic books, and sometimes splitting or combining the hadith as well. This led to a new numbering for the English, while the numbering for the Arabic remained the same.
On sunnah.com we realize that some people will have an English reference number that has been popularized due to the translation, and some others may consult an Arabic version. Sticking with one or the other is not an option due to the numerous errors and inconsistencies (the simplest of which is splitting and combination of hadith that have to be combined and unsplit respectively).
We are moving toward unified reference numbering schemes corresponding to well-known scholars and publications (the numbering of Muhammad Fuad Abdul Baaqi is one such) slowly. You can see an example here.
If the text numbering in a book has been checked and verified, it will say so at the top of the book page. If there is no mention of this, it means it is still in progress and the Arabic references numbers may not be exact in that case.
We are working hard to add grade information for each hadith not in the Sahihain (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim). At this point we are displaying grade decisions by Shaykh al-Albani and Darussalam (Hafiz Zubair `Ali Za`i). Eventually we hope to have grade assignments from several other distinguished muhaddiths such as Shaykhs al-Arna'ut, Ahmad Shakir, and Abu Ghuddah wherever applicable.
6. Misc
We ask that you to keep all those people who worked on this website in your du'a and help by supporting us.