Hadith are "expressed in Muhammad's words", whereas the latter are the "direct words of God". A "hadith qudsi" need not be a "sahih" (sound hadith), but may be "da‘if" or even "mawdu‘". An example of a "hadith qudsi" is the hadith of Abu Hurairah who said that Muhammad said: When God decreed the Creation He pledged Himself by writing in His book which is laid down with Him: My mercy prevails over My wrath. In the Shia school of thought, there are two fundamental viewpoints of Hadith: The Akhbari view and the Usuli view. The Usuli scholars stress the importance of
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