Kitab Ma’rifat anwa’ Ilm al-Hadith, better known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn al-Salah, is a well-known intermediate level text on the science of Usul al-hadith. For students familiar with the Arabic language and have covered beginners texts in hadith methodology, this...

Modern science is dedicated to explaining events and processes in the natural world, most of the time by means of some degree of mastery of the chain of the causes and effects that lead to specific events and processes. The problem with this approach is two-fold....

Many scholars infer from instances of Qur’anic or Prophetic ruling, what they think is the common or universal principle which governs these rulings. For example, the notion that ‘the state of woman is covering’ is derived from specific rulings about how Muslim women...

Having a debate with someone you disagree with and having a conversation with them are not the same thing. People perhaps think that a debate is just the same as a conversation with the addition of a few rules and procedures. For example, whereas

The two questions put to me since the publication of the full Dictionary are:1- Among the entries in the book, how many women are narrators of hadith and how many are scholars of hadith, muhaddithat? Why are they not distinguished?2- What is the total number of women narrators and scholars of hadith?