Dr Belal Abu-Alabbas, B.A. (Al-Azhar), DPhil (Oxford), is a historian of Islamic intellectual and legal thought (7th–13th centuries). His research focuses on the hadith corpus, Islamic law and theology in the formative and classical periods. Dr Abu-Alabbas has previously held lectureships at the University of Nottingham and the University of Bristol, and a British Academy International Fellowship at the University of Exeter. He currently holds lectureships at Cambridge Muslim College and Al-Azhar University and is a Research Associate at the University of Nottingham. Among his publications are Belal Abu‑Alabbas, Christopher Melchert, and Michael Dann, eds., Modern Hadith Studies: Continuing Debates and New Approaches (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Belal Abu‑Alabbas, “The Principles of Hadith Criticism in the Writings of al‑Shāfiʿī and Muslim”, Islamic Law and Society 24:4 (2017): 311–35. Christopher Melchert is a Professor of Arabic and Islam at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th Centuries C.E (Brill, 1997), Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Makers of the Muslim World) (Oneworld, 2006) and Hadith, Piety, and Law: Selected Studies (Lockwood, 2015) Michael Dann is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Illinois. He has published a chapter in Songs and Sons: Women, Slavery and Social Mobility in the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Matthew Gordon and Kathryn Hain (Oxford University Press, 2015).

[...] a welcome contribution to the field, containing excellent, detailed, and thorough research.

• AcknowledgementsConventionsIntroduction Christopher Melchert 1. Kunnā nakrahu al-kitāb: Scripture, Transmission of Knowledge, and Politics in the Second Century AH (719–816 CE)Pavel Pavlovitch 2. The History of the adhān: A View from the Hadith LiteratureMaroussia Bednarkiewicz 3. Ibn al-Mubārak, TraditionistChristopher Melchert4. Early ‘Traditionist Sufis’: A Network AnalysisJeremy Farrell5. The Common Link and its Relation to Hadith TerminologyAli Aghaei6. Hadith Criticism between Traditionists and JurisprudentsMutaz al-Khatib7. Hadith Criticism in the Levant in the Twentieth Century: From ẓāhir al-isnād to ʿilal al-ḥadīthAhmad Snober8. The Reception and Representation of Western Hadith Studies in Turkish AcademeFatma Kızıl9. Can Different Questions Yield the Same Answers? Islamic and Western Scholarship on Shīʿī Narrators in the Sunnī TraditionMichael DannIndex.