Hadith

Q. What is the Hadith?
A. hadith , a tradition or the collection of the traditions of Muhammad , the Prophet of Islam, including his sayings and deeds, and his tacit approval of what was said or done in his presence.
Q. Is the Hadith important to Islam?
A. Since the formalization of Islam, this source of authority has been viewed as second only to the Qur'an.
Q. Do all sects of Islam accept the Hadith in the same way?
A. Sunni Islam recognizes as authoritative the collections of Bukhari and Muslim, Shiite Islam accepts only traditions traced through Ali's family.
Q. What goes into the tradition of Hadith?
A. Hadith, as a discipline, consists of two branches, the first concerned with the validation of the individual traditions through the process of biographic examination of its chain of transmitters back to the Prophet ( isnad ), and the second concentrating on the actual content of the validated traditions ( matn ) as a source of religious authority.
Q. Which are the four religious schools of the Sunni?
A. The four extant schools of religious law (fiqh) are the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali schools.
Q. What is the main center of scholastic learning in Sunni Islam?
A. The prime center of scholastic learning in Sunni Islam is the mosque-university of al-Azhar in Cairo.
Q. What is the meaning of the word Sunni?
A. The word sunni in Arabic Sunna means tradition.
Q. What is Sunni?
A. Sunni, from ahl al-sunnah wa-l-jamaa [Arab.,=the people of the custom of the Prophet and community], the largest division of Islam.
Q. What is Sunni Islam?
A. Sunni Islam is the heir to the early central Islamic state, in its acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the order of succession of the first four caliphs (see caliphate ), in contrast to the Shiite rejection of the first three as usurpers.