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The Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) is the second of the two fundamental sources of Islam, after the Glorious Qur'an.


The authentic Sunnah is contained within the vast body of Hadith literature.
A hadith (pl. ahadith) is composed of two parts:

The matn (text)
and

the isnad (chain of reporters).


Even if a text is logical and reasonable, yet it needs an authentic isnad with reliable reporters to be acceptable.

During the lifetime of the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) and after his death, his Companions (Sahabah) used to refer to him directly, when quoting his sayings.

The Successors (Tabi'un) followed suit; some of them used to quote the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) while mentioning the Companion from whom they heard the narration, while others would omit the intermediate authority (viewing that all Companions were trustworthy).

As time passed, more reporters were involved in each isnad, and so the situation demanded strict discipline in the acceptance of ahadith. The rules regulating this discipline are known as Mustalah al Hadith (literally "Convention of Hadeeth", meaning: the Methodology of Hadith Classification).

Amongst the early Scholars of Hadith, the rules and criteria governing their study of Hadith were meticulous, although some of their terminology varied from person to person.
Their principles began to be systematically written down, but scattered amongst various books, many of the criteria of early Hadeeth Scholars (e.g. al-Bukhari, Muslim, etc.) were deduced by later scholars from a careful study of which reporters or isnads were accepted or rejected by them.

According to the trustworthyness and memory of the reporters; the final judgment on a hadith depends crucially on this factor: verdicts such as sahih (sound, authentic), hasan (good), da'if (weak), and maudu' (fabricated, forged), rest mainly upon the nature of the reporters in the isnad, although a hadeeth can rise to a higher level of authenticity (mutawatar: corroborated) if several other hadiths exists with the same text or meaning, while other hadiths can become "weaker" if obviously contradicting more authentic hadiths.


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