Narrative Social Structure I: Anatomy of Hadith Transmission Network of Prophet Muhammad

Unlike the present age where recording and printing devices are taken for granted, disciples of grand masters, such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Socrates and Muhammad, had to spend an enormous effort to preserve the teachings of their masters in the form of oral and/or written narrativ in order to relay it to the future generations. These efforts usually resulted in the creation of transmission networks for the dissemination of narrative, referred collectively by this paper as narrative social structure. This paper focuses on one such narrative structure, the hadith transmission network of Prophet Muhammad (571-632 AD). Hadith, which literally means narrative about Prophet Muhammad, had been widely transmitted orally and/or in writing, and remained as the only currency circulated in the transmission network. From the demise of the Prophet onward, a social structure and a critical approach developed around hadith narration, which transformed it from a conventional narrative into a "science" with formal rules and terminology. The political, religious, and legal importance of hadith in social life reinforced this process. The size of the network grew as Islam spread to other nations. but it also changed with the way hadith hadith became transmitted. In particular, the network began to shrink as written narrative gradually triumphed over the oral narrative, following the fate of traditional oral narratives in other parts of the world. The old tension between memorizing and writing hadith was resolved in favor of the latter, parallel to the spreading institutionalization of education which canonized certain reliable hadith collections. The data is derived from classical sources mainly from Dhahabi (d. 1347 AD) and Suyuti (d. 1505 AD). The analysis of the transmission structure as a narrative social structure reveals the interplay between narrative and social structure as well as other interesting diffusion patterns in a time-stratified network.