Digital Scholars in Practice Series

April 26, 2024
4 – 5:30 PM
PCL Learning Lab 2

Mairaj Syed
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
University of California Davis

Digital Hadith Studies: Survey of a New Research Program

Over the last few decades, there has been a significant surge in the digitization of Islamic texts, including narratives about the Prophet Muhammad (called hadith). The unique structure, sheer number of hadiths, and a voluminous literature analyzing the people involved in documenting them make them particularly well-suited for digital analysis. This structure typically involves a list of names documenting the transmission of the narrative from one person to the next, known as ‘isnad’, prepended to the actual text describing what the Prophet Muhammad said or did. Our dataset has collected ~625,000 of hadiths, involving close to ~50,000 unique transmitters in isnads, consisting of ~320,000 unique transmitter relationships between them. The size and intricacy of such a large instance of a premodern social network makes it highly amenable to digital analysis, which our research has undertaken. The lecture explores three types of such analysis: 1) Basic statistical analysis that integrates isnad and biographical data to map hadith transmission activity across cities and years. 2) Social network analysis that extracts relationships from individual isnads, filling gaps in biographical dictionaries. 3) Machine learning techniques that annotate isnad data, enabling the development of NLP tools that expedite research by automatically identifying narrators.