Ahadith (singular, hadith) are records of the particular sayings and doings of the Prophet (pbuh). Unlike the Quran, Muslims do not consider any of the ahadith to have been divinely revealed; but nonetheless for Muslims, they collectively record the founding principles of a virtuous life, and every virtuous practice in Islam is either stipulated in or not contradicted by any hadith.
There are a great number of ahadith in total, all of which were passed down orally before being collected in written form. Today the most widely read hadith collections are those entitled Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih al-Muslim, although these collections are used only by Sunni Muslims; in Shi'a Islam different collections are considered the most authoritative.
While many of the ahadith were written down during the Prophet's (pbuh) lifetime, some were recorded much later. Understandably, narrations collected and written down many years after their original occurrence are all at risk of being warped, or just invented. Being aware of this, the scholars who put the collections together developed a novel way of sorting the more reliable from the less reliable ahadith.
The authenticity of a certain hadith is the subject of debates among scholars.
Together, ahadith aid in articulating the Sunnah
, the 'tradition' or 'way' of the Prophet (pbuh) - which is considered by Muslims to be the second foundation for Islamic law after the Quran. In fact it is recorded in the Musnad of Ahmad bin Hanbal that Aisha, the Prophet's (pbuh) wife, referred to Him as the 'walking Quran.'
