"After the Canon: A History of Post-Canonical Hadith Transmission" by Garrett Davidson

December 15, 2020

On October 20, 2020, Garrett Davidson, Assistant Professor of Arabic and Muslim World Studies at the College of Charleston, spoke at the first Fall 2020 meeting of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Seminar in Islamic Studies about his new book, Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years (Brill, 2020). In this work, Professor Davidson tells the story of post-canonical hadith transmission. He shows that, although it has until now been overlooked by historians of Islam, for more than a millennium post-canonical hadith transmission was a highly innovative and prolific field of scholarly production as well as a prominent devotional practice. This practice created numerous new genres and sub-genres and a body of hadith literature that dwarfs the canon many times over, and remains a living tradition even today.

This seminar was co-sponsored by the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School.

Watch the video!