Hadith of position meaning "report", "account" or "narrative". Hadith are second only to the Quran in developing Islamic jurisprudence, and regarded as important tools for understanding the Quran and commentaries ("tafsir") on it. The hadith literature is based on spoken reports that were in circulation in society after the death of Muhammad. Unlike the Quran itself, which was compiled under the official direction of the early Islamic State in Medina, the hadith reports were not compiled by a central authority. Hadith were evaluated and gathered into large collections during the 8th and 9th centuries, generations after the death of Muhammad, after the end
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