About
Open Hadith is a research platform for the hadith literature. It holds the narrations, the books they come from, and the people who transmitted them — and it keeps the links between all three intact, so any narration can be followed back to its source.
The corpus covers over a million narrations drawn from roughly fourteen hundred source books, together with biographical records for close to fifty thousand transmitters. Every narration carries its chain of transmission as structured data rather than as a block of prose, which is what makes the chain navigable: each transmitter in an isnad is a record you can open, with the reliability judgements passed on them attached.
Book records carry their author, edition, and place of publication, so a citation points at a specific printed text rather than a floating quotation.
Researchers and students working with hadith material who need to see the apparatus, not just the text. The interface is built around the assumption that the chain matters as much as the narration, and that a reader will want to know who said what, on whose authority, and how that person was assessed.
The scholarly assessment layer is not yet populated. Narrator-level judgements are present and drawn from the biographical literature, but hadith-level gradings attributed to named scholars are still being assembled, and the platform does not currently display them.
The corpus is in Arabic. The interface is available in English and Kurdish, but the narrations themselves are not translated. Topic classification and the glossary are also still being built; both are marked as such where they appear.
We would rather show these gaps than paper over them. A research tool is only useful if you can tell what it does not yet know.