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Research Statement and ProposalTruth through a New School of Thought and Hadith Science
Utilizing RankingsGregory (Abdul Muid) Morse
1 Research StatementHadith science has been established out of the need to credibly establish a documentation of the prophetic sayings, traditions and habits so that they could be passed down through generation. Early scholars became overwhelmed with the amount of information they had to not only organize, but determine a way of knowing how authentic and credible the information was. By analyzing the strength of the chain of narration and the strength of the Hadith itself a set of criteria was developed to classify each Hadith. The importance of this could not be underestimated given that without doing so, most people who were not scholars of hadith would not be able to get a practical to memorize record of the genuine Hadith and the sheer abundance of Hadith during the early times would have overwhelmed the communities and the academia at the time. After some generations, schools of thought started to develop based on this science to develop opinions based on community consensus and analogical deductions to form a consistent set of principles and means of implementing the Hadiths through all facets and aspects of life. Yet since the well-established schools of thoughts which are named for the scholars who established them, fine-tuned them and wrote about them at great length, there has been little activity or additional interest in advancement in these areas despite the scholars insistence on everyone striving towards the greatest truth that can be found even if it go outside any scholars at the time. The way for a renaissance in Hadith science and the schools of thought surrounding the Hadiths is thus left open.
We find ourselves in a world with technology and computers where people exist in greater numbers than ever before while being able to communicate further even all the way around the world and faster than ever before. The spirit of truth along with community consensus and mathematical advancement towards better analogical deductions combines almost naturally to form a system where rankings. Rankings could be applied by any person but could also include static metadata containing rankings of historical or famous scholars, including those representing schools of thought among other things.
2 Past and Future ResearchThe Tanzil project at http://tanzil.net has provided a community authenticated Quran text with metadata which is generally considered to be reliable.
The Corpus project at http://corpus.quran.com has provided morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank and semantic ontology of the Quran, advancing science in that area in a very beneficial way.
The Al Eman website in Arabic at http://www.al-eman.com has made available many Hadith texts completely marked up with diacritics including commentary and Quranic references and is an excellent starting resources.
The http://sunnah.com website has provided mappings between Arabic and other languages for quite a few Hadith collections. Including some of the collections which contain cross-references to more original collections and can tie similar Hadiths appearing in multiple collections together.
Countless software projects and web sites have appeared over recent years and been accomplished aiming at the Quran, Hadiths, prayer times, books or Islamic rulings and various Islamic disciplines. Yet none aim to tie together or advance things in the directions this project desires. There is no active or future research in these fields and it is a critical void in Islamic studies remaining to be filled.
There is no limit to rankings and rankings could be applied to Islamic rulings, community consensus, analogical deductions or any Islamic information. Thus future possibilities would explore those options as it would again apply the same principles of deducing the truth. The whole project is in effect a form of community consensus though the amount of weight the consensus of the communities at large should have versus the scholars is a separate question as the any consensus found data or lack thereof would not be actionable without the endorsement of scholars and is merely a data gathering and study tool.
3 Research HighlightsThe research has already begun with a prototype at http://www.islamsource.info which attempts to highlight, and on a primitive level already implement much of the functionality and features required.
Tools and strategies for computerizing Islamic information The project will inevitably encompass tasks such as optical character recognition (OCR) of scanned texts which may including Arabic, other languages and transliteration which often is using special characters not normally used in other languages. When original publication text can be obtained, then this is ideal otherwise a more powerful OCR system which can be trained to handle several languages including special characters would be essential and very useful to automate certain tasks. Authenticating the texts might have its own strategies including going to libraries with ancient texts and scanning or photographing the entire text to be perused at another location at a later time or even making the photographs of these original texts available as part of the metadata.
Wealth of metadata The project would provide a great deal of metadata including the raw source Hadith texts including the detail of the chains of transmissions, the authors of the collections, the opinions of various scholars and schools of thought both historic and modern on
collections and compilations or individual volumes, books, chapters, sub-chapters or Hadith, translations of collections, and mapping of hadiths between collections and between translations.
Authenticated source Hadith texts Part of the challenge of the project is to authentic at the most genuine and available copies of the original texts, each authenticated source being listed in the metadata.
Mapping cross-reference of Hadiths Mapping of Hadiths that appear in one collection to those in others when essentially the same information is repeated would provide a very useful cross-reference that could further help analyze the credibility of the hadiths or be included in part of the criteria.
Criterion to identify schools of thought By using the ranking data, a specific set of Hadiths could be selected and determined which could form a quiz of sort that after a person evaluates their feelings of authenticity about a short list of various hadiths, their school of thought could be identified. This may even shock or surprise many who had thought they were subscribing to one school of thought when in reality the important questions showed the way they really thought more closely aligned with another.
4 Motivations for Future ResearchA unified development framework Even the prayer times can cause great argument and contention but what is ultimately needed is a sound development framework that represents every possible aspect of thinking though only a few will be stressed and publically encouraged. An open source framework project containing endless libraries and metadata would be needed that needs to become the standard and universal in all projects. The management needs to be guarded from corruption and compromise as the downside of such unification is that hostile forces would aim for contamination.
Revival of interest in Hadith study A renewed interest in Hadith could be brought forth if the project succeeded in gaining interest in part by having authenticated trust worthy original texts, side-by-side with translations and other features from quoting to transliteration, and the rankings which would be of interest in their own right. This goes along with the giving away of all the metadata would further generate a large amount of development efforts which would make the result of the research available on as many platforms and systems as developers who choose to do it and given the trends today, if authentic easy to use data were available, it would be sought after and integrated into many software products.
Unity of the Muslim communities Part of the goal of this research is to unite the Muslim world again given that a lot of the strife of the modern Muslim is at the hands of a sometimes sharply divided and outright hostile opinion that is claimed to be due to differences that mostly revolve around the set of Hadith being followed. While tension and conflict are rife outside and amongst the communities be they divided by countries, sects, races or other worldly boundaries, and competition to increase as well as other things which we have been specifically ordered and warned not to do.
Study of the Muslim mind by demographic If enough people were interested and actively participating in the rankings, criterion could be shown publically giving breakdowns by country, race, gender, sect, scholars followed, age, or any other data collected. This would provide a large body of data never seen, studied or analyzed before. Healing the Muslim communities could become possible as this would enable energy of scholars to be focused on areas of misunderstanding, misinterpretation or misrepresentation.
The truth Ultimately, the rankings should make clear over time where hadiths which historically were generally accepted as true are generally rejected by the modern communities and vice-versa. Ultimately with all the links and metadata provided, a greater truth should be obtainable and any inconsistencies and discrepancies can be studied in great detail by scholars interested in furthering knowledge in certain specific focuses that come up. Sect-ism should be undermined and the truth at the forefront as issues are resolved once and for all.
