Gautier H.A. Juynboll, Hadith and Hadith-related Technical Terminology: khabar in Western Studies and Early Islamic Literature

Gautier H.A. Juynboll was undoubtedly one of the leading scholars of hadith literature. His vast knowledge of this literary genre and his great interest in the way it emerged and developed in content and in its formal devices is somehow unique in contemporary scholarship. He was not the only one in the last thirty years to work on this topic, of course, but there is no doubt that only few other scholars can be compared with him in knowledge or approach. Harald Motzki is a case in point and their differing attitudes and even polemical confrontations still constitute a significant contribution to the study of hadith and in particular to themomentous question of the dating of hadith and other reports on the basis of their chains of transmitters (isnāds). In particular, Juynboll was not convinced by the results of the so-called isnād-cum-matnmethod used and promoted by Harald Motzki and others following more or less the same line of enquiry. The disagreement concerned method (the weight to be given to the isnād as a tool to date the matns and to judge their historicity) as well as substance, since it was clear that Juynboll did not feel at ease with datings as early as the ones proposed by Motzki, who emphatically pointed to the last quarter of the 1st century AH (ca. 700CE).1

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