Traditions about the Murder of Ibn Abī al-Ḥuqayq: Harald Motzkiʼs Isnād cum Matan Analysis Revisited

Abstract

While the western scholarship on Ḥadīth and its authenticity has contributed much in recent times, few works have found accolade comparable to those of Harald Motzki (2019). He offered a way of dating Ḥadīth which he named Isnād cum matn analysis, and claimed that it corrected many of the shortcomings of prevalent Ḥadīth dating methods which focused either on the text or the chain of Ḥadīth and concluded incompletely. He studied Ḥadīth clusters using ICMA method without generalizing his conclusions beyond the cases he studied. There are two tiers of available writings on Motzki’s method, those which applied it to cases not studied by Motzki, and those which revaluated the latter’s ICMA method critically. Van der Voort applied ICMA to Zuhrī’s Sīrah traditions while the author and some others have critically revaluated his case studies.

This paper, based upon the author’s doctoral dissertation, examines Motzki’s application of his ICMA method on the Traditions about the Murder of Ibn Abī al-Ḥuqayq.