Criticism of Hadith hadith criticism that has been implemented by the "muhaddithin" [orthodox ahadith evaluators] for the past thousand years, ... is far more scientific and exact than modern orientalist approaches." Traditional Islamic scholars who have endevored to refute the Western criticism of hadith include Mustafa al-Siba'i and Muhammad Mustafa Al-A'zami. Some Western academics have also been critical of this "revisionist" approach as a whole, for instance Harald Motzki, (who according to Jonathan Brown demonstrates "convincingly" that studies of early hadith and law by Joseph Schacht and the late G. H. A. Juynboll "used only a small and selective body of sources", "based
Criticism of Hadith "in the early Islamic centuries there could be no better way of promoting a cause, an opinion, or a faction than to cite an appropriate action or utterance of the Prophet." This gave strong incentive to fabricate hadith. According to Daniel Brown, the major causes of corruption of Hadith literature are: Other criticism made of ahadith include Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false "hadith", but believe that through the work of hadith scholars, these false "hadith" have been largely eliminated. al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that “sunna” should be made up exclusively of specific precedents