Research Statement and Proposal

Truth through a New School of Thought and Hadith Science

Utilizing Rankings
Gregory (!dul "uid# "orse
www.islamsource.info
www.gmorsecode.com
gregory.morse@live.com
$ Research Statement
Hadith science has been established out of the need to credibly establish a documentation of the
prophetic sayings, traditions and habits so that they could be passed down through generation.
Early scholars became overwhelmed with the amount of information they had to not only
organize, but determine a way of knowing how authentic and credible the information was. By
analyzing the strength of the chain of narration and the strength of the Hadith itself a set of
criteria was developed to classify each Hadith. The importance of this could not be
underestimated given that without doing so, most people who were not scholars of hadith would
not be able to get a practical to memorize record of the genuine Hadith and the sheer abundance
of Hadith during the early times would have overwhelmed the communities and the academia at
the time. After some generations, schools of thought started to develop based on this science to
develop opinions based on community consensus and analogical deductions to form a consistent
set of principles and means of implementing the Hadiths through all facets and aspects of life.
et since the well!established schools of thoughts which are named for the scholars who
established them, fine!tuned them and wrote about them at great length, there has been little
activity or additional interest in advancement in these areas despite the scholars insistence on
everyone striving towards the greatest truth that can be found even if it go outside any scholars at
the time. The way for a renaissance in Hadith science and the schools of thought surrounding the
Hadiths is thus left open.
"e find ourselves in a world with technology and computers where people e#ist in greater
numbers than ever before while being able to communicate further even all the way around the
world and faster than ever before. The spirit of truth along with community consensus and
mathematical advancement towards better analogical deductions combines almost naturally to
form a system where rankings. $ankings could be applied by any person but could also include
static metadata containing rankings of historical or famous scholars, including those representing
schools of thought among other things.
% Past and &uture Research
The Tanzil pro%ect at http&''tanzil.net has provided a community authenticated (uran te#t with
metadata which is generally considered to be reliable.
The )orpus pro%ect at http&''corpus.*uran.com has provided morphological annotation, a
syntactic treebank and semantic ontology of the (uran, advancing science in that area in a very
beneficial way.
The Al Eman website in Arabic at http&''www.al!eman.com has made available many Hadith
te#ts completely marked up with diacritics including commentary and (uranic references and is
an e#cellent starting resources.
The http&''sunnah.com website has provided mappings between Arabic and other languages for
*uite a few Hadith collections. +ncluding some of the collections which contain cross!references
to more original collections and can tie similar Hadiths appearing in multiple collections
together.
)ountless software pro%ects and web sites have appeared over recent years and been
accomplished aiming at the (uran, Hadiths, prayer times, books or +slamic rulings and various
+slamic disciplines. et none aim to tie together or advance things in the directions this pro%ect
desires. There is no active or future research in these fields and it is a critical void in +slamic
studies remaining to be filled.
There is no limit to rankings and rankings could be applied to +slamic rulings, community
consensus, analogical deductions or any +slamic information. Thus future possibilities would
e#plore those options as it would again apply the same principles of deducing the truth. The
whole pro%ect is in effect a form of community consensus though the amount of weight the
consensus of the communities at large should have versus the scholars is a separate *uestion as
the any consensus found data or lack thereof would not be actionable without the endorsement of
scholars and is merely a data gathering and study tool.
' Research Highlights
The research has already begun with a prototype at http&''www.islamsource.info which attempts
to highlight, and on a primitive level already implement much of the functionality and features
re*uired.
Tools and strategies for computerizing (slamic information The pro%ect will inevitably
encompass tasks such as optical character recognition ,-)$. of scanned te#ts which may
including Arabic, other languages and transliteration which often is using special characters not
normally used in other languages. "hen original publication te#t can be obtained, then this is
ideal otherwise a more powerful -)$ system which can be trained to handle several languages
including special characters would be essential and very useful to automate certain tasks.
Authenticating the te#ts might have its own strategies including going to libraries with ancient
te#ts and scanning or photographing the entire te#t to be perused at another location at a later
time or even making the photographs of these original te#ts available as part of the metadata.
)ealth of metadata The pro%ect would provide a great deal of metadata including the raw
source Hadith te#ts including the detail of the chains of transmissions, the authors of the
collections, the opinions of various scholars and schools of thought both historic and modern on
collections and compilations or individual volumes, books, chapters, sub!chapters or Hadith,
translations of collections, and mapping of hadiths between collections and between translations.
uthenticated source Hadith te*ts /art of the challenge of the pro%ect is to authentic at the
most genuine and available copies of the original te#ts, each authenticated source being listed in
the metadata.
"apping cross+reference of Hadiths 0apping of Hadiths that appear in one collection to
those in others when essentially the same information is repeated would provide a very useful
cross!reference that could further help analyze the credibility of the hadiths or be included in part
of the criteria.
,riterion to identify schools of thought By using the ranking data, a specific set of Hadiths
could be selected and determined which could form a *uiz of sort that after a person evaluates
their feelings of authenticity about a short list of various hadiths, their school of thought could be
identified. This may even shock or surprise many who had thought they were subscribing to one
school of thought when in reality the important *uestions showed the way they really thought
more closely aligned with another.
- "oti.ations for &uture Research
unified de.elopment framework Even the prayer times can cause great argument and
contention but what is ultimately needed is a sound development framework that represents
every possible aspect of thinking though only a few will be stressed and publically encouraged.
An open source framework pro%ect containing endless libraries and metadata would be needed
that needs to become the standard and universal in all pro%ects. The management needs to be
guarded from corruption and compromise as the downside of such unification is that hostile
forces would aim for contamination.
Re.i.al of interest in Hadith study A renewed interest in Hadith could be brought forth if the
pro%ect succeeded in gaining interest in part by having authenticated trust worthy original te#ts,
side!by!side with translations and other features from *uoting to transliteration, and the rankings
which would be of interest in their own right. This goes along with the giving away of all the
metadata would further generate a large amount of development efforts which would make the
result of the research available on as many platforms and systems as developers who choose to
do it and given the trends today, if authentic easy to use data were available, it would be sought
after and integrated into many software products.
Unity of the "uslim communities /art of the goal of this research is to unite the 0uslim
world again given that a lot of the strife of the modern 0uslim is at the hands of a sometimes
sharply divided and outright hostile opinion that is claimed to be due to differences that mostly
revolve around the set of Hadith being followed. "hile tension and conflict are rife outside and
amongst the communities be they divided by countries, sects, races or other worldly boundaries,
and competition to increase as well as other things which we have been specifically ordered and
warned not to do.
Study of the "uslim mind !y demographic +f enough people were interested and
actively participating in the rankings, criterion could be shown publically giving breakdowns by
country, race, gender, sect, scholars followed, age, or any other data collected. This would
provide a large body of data never seen, studied or analyzed before. Healing the 0uslim
communities could become possible as this would enable energy of scholars to be focused on
areas of misunderstanding, misinterpretation or misrepresentation.
The truth 1ltimately, the rankings should make clear over time where hadiths which
historically were generally accepted as true are generally re%ected by the modern communities
and vice!versa. 1ltimately with all the links and metadata provided, a greater truth should be
obtainable and any inconsistencies and discrepancies can be studied in great detail by scholars
interested in furthering knowledge in certain specific focuses that come up. 2ect!ism should be
undermined and the truth at the forefront as issues are resolved once and for all.