Modern Hadith Studies: Continuing Debates and New Approaches

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).