For the western scholar of Islam, the great body of Arabic literature known as the Hadith has long been of outstanding interest and a subject of intensive study. Hadith, as a common noun, simply means talk, conversation but in the technical, religious sense it is used for the individual, reported sayings of the Prophet, his Companions, the first caliphs and others of the pious scholars of early Islam; and from this usage, it has become a generic term for the whole corpus of these sayings. The present book of Maulana Muhammad Ali contains 690 traditions, some three-quarters of them derived from al-Bukhart's Sahih and the rest from the other sunan and authoritative compilations.
