Hadith Narrators Dataset (+24K)

Context

Hadith (an Arabic word) refers to the words and actions of Prophet Mohammed. Those collections of Hadiths have been transmitted through generations of Muslim scholars until they have been collected and written in big collections. The chain of narrators is a main area of study in Islamic scholarship because a single hadith may have multiple chains of narrators (that may or may not overlap). However, it has mainly remained a qualitative field where scholars of Hadith try to determine the authenticity of Hadiths by investigating and validating the chains of narrators who transmitted a given hadith.

Content

This unprecedented dataset contains over 24,000 scholars and narrators along with their teachers/students (and other metadata as well) which will provide a macroscopic overview of how and where hadith have been preserved in the early days of Islam. The dataset can also answer many other questions about whether certain schools of scholarships are more prolific in preserving hadiths than others.

Acknowledgements

This dataset wouldn't have been possible without the great people who have already transcribed this dataset from primary sources and bibliographies to muslimscholars.info database. I only scraped this database with a Python script plus very minimal cleanup.

Inspiration

The idea of collecting the dataset was inspired by this project.

Future Plans

I plan to extend this project by extracting the chain of every hadith and combining it with this dataset.