Compositions of Qarīb al-Ḥadīth During the Third Hijri Century (Comparative Study of Ibn Sallām and Ibn Qutaybah’s Qarīb al-Ḥadīth Works)

The understanding of Qarīb al-Ḥadīth (hadiths containing unbeknown elements of speech) in the structural hadith comprehension is known to be placed under Fiqh al-Ḥadīth (hadith jurisprudence) as a category. The importance of Qarīb al-Ḥadīth is tied to the hadith and its apprehension. The hadith as a form, is descriptive of tradition, and tradition, second to qur’an, serves as a source of providing help in interpreting and understanding Islam and revelational guidance. The ability to discern and comprehend the critical aspects of a narration is contingent on understanding its difficult words and phrases. In fact, on the one hand, with respect to the crucial role and importance of hadiths and on the other hand, the correspondence of narrations with strenuous and unusual words in need of interpretation, the teachings and knowledge of Qarīb al-Ḥadīth has been greatly paid attention to by the hadith scholars from the very first centuries of Islam while seeing eventual advancement and revisions throughout the history of Islamic sciences. The books of Qarīb al-Ḥadīth by Ibn Sallam and Ibn Qutaybah are from the earliest existing works in this field with one being published at the beginning of the third century while the other was put out at the end of the same century. The difference in the writing style and the content of these two works in the two halves of the third Hijri century reveals the remarkable transformation of hadith-writing in that century. These two works differ from each other by their systemic arrangement of hadiths; in such a way that for the matter of hadith arrangement, Ibn Sallam utilizes a documentary process while Ibn Qutaybah uses an integrated system (based on jurisprudential-documented chapters.) The total number of methods used by the two authors in describing hadiths can amount to 23 methods, of which 17 methods are commonly used by the authors while the utilization of 6 methods remain in dispute with each other.