Hadith of the Quran and Sunnah having been said during Muhammad's Farewell Sermon atop Mount Arafat after his Last Pilgrimage.(e.g. Malik Muwatta) Slightly varied versions are cited in many Sunni hadith works. Among those are: John Esposito explains the importance of the Hadith in Islam: "the Prophet Muhammad is seen as the "living Quran," the embodiment of God's will in his behavior and words. Sunni Muslims ... take their name from the "sunnah," meaning those who follow the example of the Prophet". Prof. Fatih Okumus refers to Muhammad as "the walking Qur’an," with the Sunnah giving an example to follow. As the sayings and deeds 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