حديث
Ḥadīth
A report of the sayings, actions or approvals of the Prophet Muhammad.
What it means
Each hadith has two parts: the matn, the text, and the isnād, the chain of people who passed it on. Collectors graded reports by the reliability of the narrators and by whether the text agreed with better-attested reports and with the Quran. The best known collections are Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, with four others, Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah, usually counted with them.
Scholars themselves wrote works listing fabricated reports, and graded many as weak or false.
Often misunderstood as
That hadith are late forgeries, and all of them are treated as equally binding.
What the sources say
Bukhari is traditionally said to have chosen roughly seven thousand reports, counting repetitions, from several hundred thousand he examined. The criticism that some reports are weak is one Muslim scholars made first, in their own books. For the Muslim, the issue is not whether a report exists but how well it is attested.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 28, listed as ḤADĪTH. The definition is restated here.