The Peoples’ Hadith: Evidence for Popular Tradition on Hadith as Physical Object in the First Centuries of Islam

Abstract

The Prophet’s documents comprise a category of objects that are the intentions of the Prophet, legally binding texts, and physical objects that touched the Prophet all at once. Reports of these documents are found in various genres of medieval Islamic literature, where they are frequently transmitted through family isnāds. While these reports are self-consciously geared toward recording the intentions of the Prophet, in effect they reflect the concern of the subalterns of hadith literature to locate themselves somewhere within the narrative of the Prophet’s life. The reports investigated here thus preserve an element of what hadith meant to Bedouin recipients, revealing a pre-canonical arena for hadith in which hadith behaved not as text but as physical object, as a “hadith-object.”1