Social Network Analysis of Hadith Narrators from Sahih Bukhari

The ahadith (plural of hadith), prophetic traditions for the Muslims worldwide, are narrations originating from the sayings and the deeds of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). They are considered as one of the fundamental sources of Islamic legislation along with the Quran. The list of persons involved in each hadith's narration is carefully scrutinized by scholars studying the hadith, concerning their reputation and authenticity of the hadith. This is due to the ahadith's legislative importance in Islamic principles. Many narrators contributed to this responsibility of preserving prophetic narrations over the centuries. But to date, no systematic and comprehensive study adapted to quantify their contributions in the propagation of hadith across generations. This study represented the chain of narrators of the hadith collection from Sahih Bukhari as a social network graph. We discovered this network as a scale-free network based on social network analysis (SNA) on the proposed graph. We identified a list of influential narrators from the companions (e.g., Abu Hurairah, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Umar, etc.) as well as from the second and third-generation (e.g., Shu'bah bin al-Hajjaj, Az-Zuhri, Sufyan bin `Uyaynah, Sufyan bin Sa'id Ath-Thawri, etc.) who contributed significantly in the propagation of hadith. We discovered sixteen different communities from the network of narrators. Most narrators were centered in Makkah and Madinah (in today's Saudi Arabia) in the era of companions and, then, gradually, the center of hadith narrators shifted towards Kufa, Baghdad (in today's Iraq), and central Asia (e.g., Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan) over a period of time. To the best of our knowledge, this the first comprehensive and systematic study based on SNA, representing the narrators as a social graph to analyze their contribution to the preservation and propagation of hadith.