Is it fair to ask if hadith can be trusted?

Yes. It is a fair question, and asking it is not a sin. It often sounds like this:

• "Allah promised to protect the Quran. He did not say the same about hadith."
• "Hadith were passed on by people. People forget. Some people lie. Some take sides in politics."
• "I heard that books like Bukhari were written about 200 years after Nabi ﷺ. How can anyone be sure what he said after so long?"

A hadith is a report of what Nabi ﷺ said or did. The Sunnah is his way: his words, his actions, and what he saw others do and agreed with. We learn the Sunnah through the hadith.

This chapter answers the question step by step, honestly. If you feel bad for even having this question, read Is it normal to have doubts? first.

The short answer

• The Quran sends us to the Sunnah. Allah tells us again and again to obey His Messenger ﷺ and to take what he gives us.
• The Companions kept it with great care. They memorized it, acted on it every day, taught it, and some wrote it down in his lifetime.
• Scholars checked every report. They looked at every person in the chain, one by one.
• Weak and made-up reports were marked, and people were warned about them.
• Not every hadith is equally certain, and scholars say so openly. The Quran is on the highest level. Hadith come in grades.

Why do we need the Sunnah at all?

Some people say: the Quran is enough. But the Quran itself points us to Nabi ﷺ. Look at what Allah says:

• Take what he gives you. Whatever the Messenger gives you, take it. Whatever he forbids you, stay away from it¹.
• He explains the Quran. Allah sent the Quran to him so that you may explain to people what was sent down to them². If the Quran needed no explaining, this job would make no sense.
• Obeying him is obeying Allah. Whoever obeys the Messenger has obeyed Allah³.
• He does not speak from his own wishes. It is only revelation sent to him⁴.
• He is our example. In the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example⁵. You cannot follow an example you know nothing about.

Allah also taught through Nabi ﷺ outside the Quran

Here are two clear signs from the Quran itself:

• The first qiblah. In Madinah, Nabi ﷺ and the Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem for about sixteen or seventeen months⁶. No verse of the Quran told them to do that. Yet when the qiblah (the direction of prayer) was changed to the Kabah, Allah said: We made the qiblah you used to face only to show who follows the Messenger⁷. So Allah called that earlier instruction His own, even though it came through Nabi ﷺ and not through a verse.
• "Who told you this?" Nabi ﷺ told one of his wives a secret, and she passed it on. Allah let him know. When he told her so, she asked: who told you this? He said: the All-Knowing, the All-Aware told me⁸. That news is not in the Quran. Allah told him in another way.

For more on the Quran and Sunnah as the two sources of belief, see Where belief comes from.

Can we live by the Quran alone?

Try it with the most basic act of a Muslim: salah. The Quran tells us many times to pray. It says prayer has set times⁹. But open the Quran and look for these answers:

• How many prayers a day, and at exactly what times?
• How many rakat (units of prayer) is Fajr? Is Maghrib three?
• What do you say in ruku (bowing) and in sujud (when your forehead is on the ground)?
• When do you sit, and what do you say when you sit?

You will not find these details in the Quran. Nabi ﷺ said: pray as you have seen me praying¹⁰. The same is true for other pillars of Islam:

• Zakat. The Quran says pay zakat. It is the Sunnah that tells us it is one fortieth (2.5%) of silver, and that there is no zakat below a set amount¹¹.
• Hajj. At Hajj, Nabi ﷺ said: take your Hajj steps from me¹². Millions of Muslims do Hajj the way he showed.

Nabi ﷺ even said this question would come. He said: I was given the Quran, and something like it with it. He warned of a man, full and relaxed on his couch, who would say: just keep to the Quran. Then he named things the Sunnah made haram, like the meat of the donkey¹³.

"But the Quran says nothing was left out of the Book"

Some people quote: We have left nothing out of the Book¹⁴. Many scholars say "the Book" here means the record Allah keeps of all things. Others say it means the Quran. Either way, the Quran does not leave out the command to follow the Messenger ﷺ. It covers the Sunnah by sending you to it.

People who say "the Quran is enough" often love the Quran deeply and are tired of fake hadith online. That worry is fair. The answer to fake hadith is to check them, not to throw away the real ones.

How did the Companions keep the hadith?

The Companions knew that the words of Nabi ﷺ were part of their religion. They kept them in three ways.

1. They memorized them and passed them on

• Nabi ﷺ told them to pass his words on. In his last Hajj he said: let the one who is here tell the one who is not here¹⁵.
• He made a special dua: may Allah make bright the face of a person who hears a hadith from us, memorizes it, and passes it on¹⁶.

2. They lived by them every day

A hadith about how to pray was not a story people heard once. Whole towns prayed that way five times a day. You could not quietly change how a whole city prays.

3. Some of them wrote them down

• Abdullah ibn Amr wrote down what he heard. Some people told him to stop, since Nabi ﷺ was a human who spoke when angry and when happy. Nabi ﷺ pointed to his mouth and said: write, for by the One who holds my soul, only truth comes out of this¹⁷.
• Abu Hurairah said that no Companion told more hadith than he did, except Abdullah ibn Amr, because he wrote and I did not¹⁸.
• When a man from Yemen asked for a speech to be written for him, Nabi ﷺ said: write it for Abu Shah¹⁹.

An honest point: early on, Nabi ﷺ said: do not write anything from me except the Quran²⁰. In the same hadith he said: tell what you heard from me, there is no harm in it. Scholars explain that at first he wanted the Quran written on its own, so nothing would mix with it. Later, when the Quran was well known, he allowed writing, as the reports above show. Many scholars hold that the later permission is the final word.

They also feared lying about him. Nabi ﷺ said: whoever lies about me on purpose, let him take his seat in the Fire²¹. Some Companions told very few hadith, out of fear of a mistake.

Were hadith only written down 200 years later?

No. This is one of the most common claims online, and it mixes up two things.

• Writing started early. As you just read, some Companions wrote hadith in the lifetime of Nabi ﷺ. Their students wrote too. One early notebook, written by Hammam ibn Munabbih, a student of Abu Hurairah, still exists today. Its hadith match the ones in the later books.
• Gathering started early. About a hundred years after the Hijrah, the khalifah (leader of the Muslims) Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz asked scholars to gather the hadith in writing, so that knowledge would not be lost when scholars died.
• Large books came next. Imam Malik wrote al-Muwatta in Madinah, well before Imam Bukhari was born.
• Then came the great sorting. Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim lived in the third century after the Hijrah. They did not start from nothing. They took hadith from teachers, chains and written notebooks that went back, step by step, to the Companions. From a very large number of reports, they chose only those that passed the strictest tests.

So Bukhari is not where hadith began. It is where a long, careful work of checking was gathered into one trusted book.

How did scholars check every hadith?

Every hadith comes with two parts:

• The isnad (the chain): the list of people who passed it on, one to the next, back to Nabi ﷺ. For example: "Bukhari heard it from A, who heard it from B, who heard it from Abu Hurairah, who heard Nabi ﷺ say..."
• The matn (the text): the words of the hadith itself.

The early scholar Muhammad ibn Sirin said that at first people did not ask about chains. When troubles and lies began to spread, they started to say: name your men to us. Then they took hadith from trusted people and left the rest. This is reported in the opening pages of Sahih Muslim. It follows the Quran's own rule: if someone you cannot trust brings you news, check it²⁴.

What did they check?

• Was each person honest? A man known to tell lies, even in daily life, was not trusted with hadith.
• Did he have a good memory, or careful notes? A very good and pious man could still be called weak if he often mixed things up. Being religious was not enough.
• Did he really meet the person he heard it from? Scholars checked dates of birth and death, and who traveled where. A missing link made the chain weak.
• Do other students agree? If many students heard a hadith from one teacher, scholars compared their versions word by word. A student who kept getting it different from the others was marked as less careful.
• Does the text have a hidden fault? Does it go against the Quran, or against stronger hadith? Scholars looked for these too.

Scholars traveled for months between cities to meet teachers and compare reports. They wrote large books about many thousands of narrators: who they learned from, and how good their memory was. Checking was not new. Even Umar once asked Abu Musa to bring a witness for a hadith, just to be sure²⁵. That story is told in full in Where belief comes from.

What do sahih, hasan, weak and made up mean?

After checking, scholars gave each hadith a grade. Here are the main ones:

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim are the two most trusted books. The ummah accepted their hadith as authentic. Other books, like Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasai and Ibn Majah, have sahih, hasan and weak hadith side by side, so scholars graded each one. On Sunnah Daily, every hadith we use is from Bukhari or Muslim, or graded sahih or hasan by a known hadith scholar. You can read many of them in our hadith library.

Can a weak hadith ever be used?

Scholars differ here, and both views come from real scholars:

• Many scholars allowed a slightly weak hadith to encourage a good deed that is already proven, like charity. It must not be very weak, and you must not say for sure that Nabi ﷺ said it.
• Other scholars said do not use weak hadith at all. The sahih ones are more than enough.

Both agree on the main point: a weak hadith never decides what we believe, or what is halal or haram.

A famous example

You may have heard "Paradise is under the feet of mothers". The exact wording people share has a weak chain. But a man asked Nabi ﷺ if he should go out to fight. Nabi ﷺ asked if he had a mother, and said: stay with her, for Paradise is beneath her feet²⁶. Scholars graded that one as strong. So the meaning is true. Scholars check the exact words and the chain, not just whether it sounds nice.

Do scholars ever disagree about hadith?

Yes, and it is good to know this, so it does not shock you later.

• Grades can differ. One scholar may call a hadith hasan, and another weak, because they judged one narrator a little differently. It shows they thought for themselves, not copying each other.
• Even Bukhari and Muslim were checked. A few scholars, like ad-Daraqutni, raised technical questions about a small number of chains in these two books. Other scholars studied those questions and answered them. The ummah still accepted both books as authentic. Nobody hid this. It is all written down.
• Not every hadith is equally certain. A mutawatir hadith is certain. A sahih hadith with one chain is very strong, but a step below that. The hadith scholars accept such a hadith in belief too. Many Ash'ari and Maturidi scholars act on it, but for the core beliefs of Islam they looked for certain proof. Both are views within Ahl al-Sunnah (the main body of Muslims). Learn from a teacher you trust.

So the honest picture is this: the Quran is on the highest level of certainty. The hadith are a very carefully checked record, with grades that tell you how strong each one is.

What if a hadith troubles me?

Sometimes you read a hadith and it feels strange, harsh or hard to accept. That feeling is not a sin. Here is a calm way to deal with it:

• 1. Is it really a hadith? Many troubling "hadith" online are weak or made up. Look for the book, the number and the grade. If there is none, it may not be real.
• 2. Read all of it. A clip often cuts a hadith in half. For example, Nabi ﷺ said: help your brother, whether he is doing wrong or being wronged. The Companions asked: how do we help him if he is doing wrong? He said: by stopping him from doing wrong²⁷. Half of that hadith sounds wrong. The whole of it is wise.
• 3. Learn the story behind it. Who was Nabi ﷺ speaking to? Was it war or peace? Was it a rule for everyone, or an answer to one person?
• 4. Read what scholars said about it. Your question has usually been asked, and answered, hundreds of years ago.
• 5. Ask a scholar you trust. Allah says: ask the people of knowledge if you do not know²⁸. See How to look for answers.
• 6. If it still feels hard, put it on the shelf. It is fine to say: Allah and His Messenger know best, and keep learning. Many people found the answer years later.

Keep one thing in mind: not understanding one hadith does not cancel everything else you know. You know the Quran is from Allah. You know Nabi ﷺ was truthful (see How do we know Muhammad ﷺ was a prophet?). One question you have not answered yet does not undo that.

What can I do with this doubt, day to day?

• Read the hadith yourself. A few a day, with their meaning. Most are full of mercy, good manners and wisdom. Clips online often show only the hardest few.
• Read about his life. When you know the person, his words make more sense. Our Seerah page tells his life story.
• Check before you share. Nabi ﷺ said: it is enough of a sin for a person to pass on everything he hears²⁹. Do not spread a "hadith" with no source, even a nice one.
• Make dua. Ask Allah to show you the truth and keep your heart firm.

If this doubt comes with deep sadness or worry that will not leave you, please talk to someone today: family, an imam, a doctor or a counselor. You do not have to carry it alone.

Common questions

Is Sahih al-Bukhari like the Quran?

No. The Quran is the word of Allah, and every letter of it is certain. Bukhari is a book written by a great scholar, who chose hadith with very strict tests. The ummah accepted its hadith as authentic. But we do not treat Bukhari's book as the word of Allah.

How do I check if a hadith I saw online is real?

Look for the book and the number, like³⁰. Search for it on a trusted hadith site, or in our hadith library. Check the grade. If you cannot find it, ask someone with knowledge before you share it.

My cousin says all hadith are made up. What do I say?

Stay calm and kind. Ask how they pray, how many rakat, and what they say in sujud. Then show them that the Quran itself tells us to obey the Messenger³¹ and take what he gives³². Share this chapter if they want to read more.

Why do Muslims of different schools pray a bit differently, if hadith are reliable?

Often Nabi ﷺ did something in more than one way, and different Companions saw different ways. Scholars also weighed some reports differently. These are small differences, and the core of salah is the same everywhere.

I have doubts about hadith. Am I still a Muslim?

Yes. Having a question is not leaving Islam. Keep praying, keep learning, and ask your questions. Seeking the truth is something Allah loves.