Hadith same text are each counted as individual ahadith. If, say, ten companions record a text reporting a single incident in the life of Muhammad, hadith scholars can count this as ten hadiths. So Musnad Ahmad, for example, has over 30,000 hadiths—but this count includes texts that are repeated in order to record slight variations within the text or within the chains of narrations. Identifying the narrators of the various texts, comparing their narrations of the same texts to identify both the soundest reporting of a text and the reporters who are most sound in their reporting occupied experts of hadith
Introduction to the Science of Hadith well known as of late as: "Muqaddimah Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ fi `Ulūm al-Ḥadīth", "Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ's Introduction to the Sciences of Hadith". Nūr al-Dīn `Itr, in the introduction to his edition of the "Introduction", concluded that its actual name is either "ʻUlūm al-Ḥadīth" ("The Sciences of Hadith") or "Ma`rifah Anwā`i `Ilm al-Ḥadīth" ("Familiarity with the Types of the Science of Hadith"). This is based upon the author's own usage in his own introduction in addition to the usage of other scholars in the centuries after the authoring of the book. Similar to Bint `Abd al-Raḥmān, he acknowledged that the book is most