Hadith of the Ark Hadith of the Ark The Hadith of the Ark () is a tradition narrated from the Islamic prophet Muhammad by different narrators such as Ali ibn Abu Talib, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari (known as "Sadiq") and Abd Allah ibn Abbas. In this tradition, Muhammad compares his household ("Ahl al-Bayt") to Noah's ark, the only way to salvation in a sea of darkness, deviations, innovations and passions. According to Shi‘ism, the Twelve Imams are the Ulu'l-Amr, who are like the ark of Noah, and refers to them. Both Shi'a and Sunni scholars agree that prophet narrated this hadith. The Hadith is as
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