Most Muslims today treat the hadith as the second pillar of the religion beside the Quran. The hadith are the thousands of reports attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, describing what he supposedly said, did, and approved, and they are the basis for much of Islamic law and ritual practice. But none of these reports were compiled in the Prophet’s lifetime. They surface in later generations as chains of narrators, each passing a report to the next, and by the third century of Islam there were enormous numbers of them. Many contradicted the Quran, reason, or other reports, and rival theological and legal factions used many as weapons.
That produces a basic question: how could anyone know that a given report actually goes back to the Prophet? The traditionalists answered by examining the chain of narrators. The Mu’tazilites, a school of rationalist theologians, found that the method inadequate. If a report contradicted the Quran or sound reasoning, a polished chain of narrators did not save it, and some of the early Mu’tazilites went further and doubted the whole enterprise. This article explains who the Mu’tazilites were, why they ranked reason so highly, and how they divided into several camps over what the hadith could be trusted to prove. It treats the question the way these scholars did, as an open problem of evidence rather than a settled matter.
Who the Mu’tazilites Were
The Mu’tazilites were one of the earliest and most influential theological movements in Islam. Tradition traces the school to Wasil b. ‘Ata’ (d. 131 AH/748 CE), a student of the scholar al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110 AH/728 CE). The founding story runs as follows. Wasil and his teacher were discussing a Muslim who commits a major sin. Is that person still a believer, or has he become a disbeliever? Al-Hasan said he remains a believer. Wasil said he is neither but occupies a position between the two. Al-Hasan told him to leave the gathering, and Wasil’s group became known as the Mu’tazila, “those who withdrew.” The details are disputed. However, everyone agrees that Abu al-Hudhayl al-‘Allaf (d. 227 AH/841 CE) developed the school’s main doctrines in the early period.
Those doctrines are usually summarized as five principles:
God’s unity and uniqueness (tawhid),
God’s justice (‘adl),
the promise of reward and the threat of punishment,
the intermediate position of the sinner,
and the duty to command good and forbid evil.
Reason as the Governing Principle
What set the Mu’tazilites apart was their confidence in the human mind. They held that God gave people intellect so that they could know Him and understand the world. On this view, one can establish that God exists, that He is one, and that He is just using reason alone, even without scripture and even without prophets. When revelation and reason appear to clash, the Mu’tazilites said the clash must be resolved in favor of reason, usually by reinterpreting the text.
This was an attempt to put religious knowledge on firm footing. Groups such as the Barahima and the Sophists argued that nothing beyond direct experience could count as knowledge, which would rule out religion altogether. The Mu’tazilites responded with a theory of how certainty is reached. They said humans have three sources of knowledge: the senses, reason, and transmitted reports. Reports sit in a weak position in this scheme. Senses and reason give direct knowledge, but a report passes through an intermediary, and it is only as reliable as the person carrying it. Everything the Mu’tazilites say about hadith grows from this point.
The Core Disagreement With the Traditionalists
The two sides regarded each other with contempt. The Mu’tazilites accused the traditionalists, the ahl al-hadith, of being mindless literalists who clung to reports they did not understand and obsessed over chains of narrators (isnads). The traditionalists accused the Mu’tazilites of arrogance, charging that they had abandoned the documented example of the Prophet for the musings of their own limited minds. Each side built its method around its fear. The traditionalists treated the isnad as the guarantee against human corruption of the religion. The Mu’tazilites treated the Quran and reason as the tools for testing any text, hadith included. For them, the Quran was the only literal word of God, and so it alone could lay down the principles of creed and law.
Two terms are needed to follow the rest of the story. In its classical sense, a genuine mutawatir report is one carried by so many narrators, spread so widely, at every stage of its transmission that collusion on a lie is inconceivable, and the theologians who accepted the category held that its knowledge yields certainty.
However, no Hadith besides the Quran genuinely meets the requirement of tawatur. Ibn al-Salah (d. 643 AH/1245 CE), one of the most famous scholars of Hadith of the later period, believed that at most one hadith qualifies as mutawatir, and even that one is inconsistent in both wording (lafzi) and meaning (ma’nawi). In response, Sunni scholars lowered the threshold for what qualifies as mutawatir, bringing more hadith into this category.
Even by the lowest standard of mutawatir, the vast majority of hadith are therefore called ahad, as they do not meet the mutawatir threshold. An ahad report may be true, but error or fabrication remains possible, so it yields at best probable knowledge (zann). Since virtually every hadith is ahad, the Mu’tazilite debate is largely a debate about what, if anything, such reports can establish. A third term is matn, the actual text of a hadith, as distinct from its chain of narrators. The Mu’tazilites were notable for examining the matn itself rather than relying on the chain alone.
The Early Camps
According to the scholar Racha El-Omari, the early Mu’tazilites held three broad positions on hadith.
The first group transmitted hadith but scrutinized the content (matn) rather than relying solely on the chain of narrators (isnad). This distinguished them from the prevailing approach among Sunni traditionalists, who generally treated a report with a sound chain as authoritative unless there was a recognized reason to reject it. Although Sunni hadith scholars did not entirely disregard content, their methodology placed considerable emphasis on the reliability of the transmitters. The Mu’tazilites challenged the assumption that a reliable chain necessarily guaranteed a reliable report. For them, a hadith that contradicted the Quran, reason, or established theological principles could not be accepted merely because its narrators were considered trustworthy. This approach included individuals like ‘Amr b. ‘Ubayd, who rejected reports that contradicted what they considered correct doctrine and reinterpreted those that allowed multiple meanings. Several early Mu’tazilites wrote books on the subject, among them Thumama b. Ashras (d. 213 AH/828 CE), Ja’far b. Mubashshir (d. 234 AH/848–9 CE), and al-Jahiz (d. 255 AH/868–9 CE), though these works survive mostly as titles.
Their justification for this method was a widely circulated report attributed to the Prophet instructing believers to compare any narration with the Quran and reject it if it contradicted the Quran. The principle was not exclusive to the Mu’tazila. It was also prominent among the original Hanafis, the school with which many early Mu’tazilites were associated. Abu Yusuf (d. 182 AH/798 CE), the most prominent Hanafi jurist after Abu Hanifa (d. 150 AH/767 CE), transmitted a version in which the Prophet allegedly declared:
“Reports attributed to me will become widespread. Whatever comes to you from me that agrees with the Quran is from me, and whatever comes to you from me that contradicts the Quran is not from me.” (al-Radd ʿalā Siyar al-Awzāʿī, p. 26; also preserved in al-Shafiʿi’s al-Umm).
Not surprisingly, Al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH/820 CE) rejected the report as unreliable (al-Risala, §§617–619), which fits his view that the Prophet’s sunna binds in its own right and needs no Quranic check. The dispute shows that early Muslim scholars, even beyond the Mutazilites, disagreed not only over individual hadith but over whether the Quran itself should serve as the decisive test of a report attributed to the Prophet.
The second group accepted a report only if it was supported by some form of tawatur, meaning enough independent transmitters to rule out fabrication. Wasil set the bar at four independent transmitters, probably borrowing from the legal idea of witnesses: if several people independently report an event, they cannot all have agreed on a lie, whereas a single report rests on one person alone. Abu al-Hudhayl raised the number. For a hadith to be admitted in matters of doctrine, he demanded twenty transmitters, at least one of them a believer, and for legal matters he asked for four. Al-Jahiz also required four. The practical result was a much smaller pool of acceptable hadith, and so a much narrower body of practices and values that could count as authentic sunna. By setting the transmitter requirement so high, it effectively allowed the entire Hadith corpus to be discarded without openly declaring their rejection. As Jonathan A.C. Brown notes on page 106 of his book Hadith, Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World:
The categories of mutawatir and ahad were similarly unsuitable for the hadith tradition, for essentially all hadiths were ahad. As Ibn al-Salah (d. 643/1245), the most famous scholar of hadith criticism in the later period, explained, at most one hadith (‘Whoever lies about me, let him prepare for himself a seat in Hellfire.’) would meet the requirements for mutawatir.[1] No hadiths could actually be described as being narrated by a large number of narrators at every stage of their transmission. In fact, when Mu’tazilites had insisted that hadiths be transmitted by a mere two people at every stage, the Sunni Ibn Hibban had accused them of trying to destroy the Sunna of the prophet in its entirety.[2]
[1] Ibn al-Salah, Muqaddima p. 454
[2] Ibn Hibban, Sahih Ibn Hibban, vol. 1, p. 145
The third group openly dismissed all Hadith. Dirar b. ‘Amr (d. 195 AH/810 CE) was outraged by how factions used reports as weapons and refused to accept reports as proof at all. He is credited with a book on the contradictions of the hadith, arguing that the collections contained supporting reports for every sect that existed. That observation is hard to dismiss: if every party can find its position in the same body of material, the material cannot settle the disputes. He still accepted consensus as a source of religious knowledge. Ibrahim al-Nazzam (d. 221 AH/836 CE) went further than anyone. For him, neither single reports nor mutawatir reports could deliver certainty. Human memory is faulty, transmitters are biased, hadith had thrived because sects and jurists needed support for their causes, and no single narrator could be placed beyond suspicion of altering a report. He distrusted consensus as well. That left the Quran and reason as the only secure sources. The later heresiographer al-Baghdadi (d. 429 AH/1037 CE) complained that he seemed to want to invalidate the branches of the law by invalidating its roots.
The Classical Compromise
After the Baghdad inquisition, minah, ended in 234 AH/848 CE, the Mu’tazilites lost the political backing they had briefly enjoyed, and hadith became firmly established as a source of religious law. Some scholars call this process the “hadithtification of sunna,” the gradual identification of the Prophet’s sunna with the body of transmitted hadith. From the late third/ninth century, the Mu’tazilites had to bargain with their opponents, and they began studying hadith seriously, on terms the traditionalists could recognize. Some became respected transmitters. Muhammad b. ‘Imran al-Marzubani (d. 384 AH/994 CE) was a Mu’tazilite whom hadith scholars considered reliable, and Abu Sa’id al-Samman (d. 434 AH/1042 CE), also a Mu’tazilite, taught hadith to the historian al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463 AH/1071 CE).
The Mu’tazilites of this period are usually grouped into two schools, one in Basra and one in Baghdad. The Basran school produced most of the early figures discussed above: Abu al-Hudhayl and al-Jahiz with their numerical thresholds, and Abu Bakr al-Asamm (d. 201 AH/816 CE), who took up Dirar’s position of setting ahad reports aside in favor of the Quran and reason. Less is recorded about where the early Baghdad school stood, but by the classical period the two had arrived at the same compromise. Abu ‘Ali al-Jubba’i (d. 303 AH/915 CE) of Basra and Abu al-Qasim al-Balkhi (d. 319 AH/931 CE) of Baghdad both lowered the requirement for hadith used in law to two narrators at each stage of the chain, while keeping the stricter standard for theology.
That compromise rests on a distinction the Mu’tazilites drew between doctrine and law. Doctrine covers what a person must believe: God’s unity and justice, His attributes, prophecy, the afterlife. Here their epistemology was uncompromising. Belief has to rest on certain knowledge, so a hadith could enter a theological argument only if it was mutawatir. Law is different because its purpose is action. Someone deciding how to perform ablution or divide an inheritance does not need certainty, only a sufficient basis for acting, and probable knowledge can supply that. The courts already worked this way, since a judge acts on the testimony of two witnesses even though two witnesses can be mistaken. Al-Balkhi made exactly this comparison, equating the two-narrator rule with the requirement for court testimony. He asked for mutawatir reports for doctrine and for general legal principles, and accepted two or three narrators only for deriving specific rulings. The practical result is that a report too weak to establish a belief about God could still dictate how people prayed. Al-Hazimi (d. 584 AH/1188 CE) later observed that the Mu’tazilites were the only group to require a set number of transmitters before accepting an ahad hadith.
The Qadi ‘Abd al-Jabbar (d. 415 AH/1025 CE) marks a further shift, and the reason is telling. Earlier Mu’tazilites had generally been affiliated with the Hanafi school, which was cautious about hadith. ‘Abd al-Jabbar followed the Shafi’i school, which accepted rulings from ahad reports, so he was obliged to as well. He held that law could be derived from one or two narrations, while keeping the demand for mutawatir reports in theology. In other words, the loosening came from the pressure of legal affiliation, not from any new proof that these reports were reliable.
Abu al-Husayn al-Basri (d. 436 AH/1044 CE), author of the influential legal-theory work al-Mu’tamad, took this a step further. He agreed with the Shafi’i position that an ahad hadith gives only probable knowledge but is still binding in law (mujib al-‘amal). Then he added that when the whole community has agreed on what a report means and accepted it as authentic, its authenticity becomes certain. For al-Nazzam, consensus was one more unreliable thing. For Abu al-Husayn, consensus could turn a single report into certainty. Whether a community’s agreement can certify a claim about the past that no one in that community witnessed is exactly the kind of question the earlier skeptics would have pressed.
What “Sunna” Meant to the Mu’tazilites
The Mu’tazilites did not necessarily reject the Prophet’s sunna, but accepting the sunna was not the same as accepting the Hadith corpus. Originally, sunna referred to an established practice or way of conduct, and in the Islamic context came to signify the example and practices of the Prophet. Hadith, by contrast, were individual reports claiming to preserve his words, actions, and approvals. These were related but distinct concepts. Only gradually, particularly through the efforts of scholars such as al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH/820 CE), did the Prophet’s sunna become increasingly identified with the body of transmitted hadith.
This distinction is especially important when considering the most skeptical Mu’tazilites. Dirar ibn ‘Amr (d. 195 AH/810 CE) rejected hadith reports as religious proof, arguing that competing factions could each produce narrations supporting their contradictory doctrines. Ibrahim al-Nazzam (d. 221 AH/836 CE) went further, challenging not only individual (ahad) reports but even the supposed certainty of mass-transmitted (mutawatir) reports. He also questioned consensus as an independent guarantee of truth. For al-Nazzam, the Quran and reason remained the secure foundations of religious knowledge. These were not modern reformers retrospectively questioning the tradition. They were influential thinkers operating during the formative centuries of Islamic theology, before the major Sunni hadith collections had even been completed.
Other Mu’tazilites took less radical positions but shared the concern that transmission alone could not establish religious truth. Abu al-Hudhayl imposed numerical requirements so demanding that few reports could satisfy them. Al-Balkhi maintained that a sound hadith must agree with the Quran and the sunna upon which the community had agreed, while al-Jahiz preferred to invoke “the sunna agreed upon by all” rather than rely on disputed individual reports. The Prophet’s actual example could be authoritative without granting authority to every report that claimed to preserve it.
Over time, however, the Mu’tazilites increasingly accommodated the hadith-based legal methods of the emerging Sunni schools. Scholars such as al-Jubba’i, ‘Abd al-Jabbar, and Abu al-Husayn al-Basri accepted ahad reports for legal rulings while generally maintaining stricter evidentiary standards for theology. This development should not obscure the earlier positions. Some Mu’tazilites scrutinized hadith, others imposed standards that excluded nearly all of them, and still others rejected their authority as religious evidence altogether. The Mu’tazila were never a monolith, and their later compromises should not be mistaken for the position of the entire movement.
The historical significance is difficult to overstate. Skepticism toward hadith did not originate with modern Quran-only movements or from critics outside Islam. It existed among early Muslim theologians who questioned whether reports transmitted across generations, frequently contradicting one another and serving competing factional interests, could reliably establish what God or His messenger had commanded. The eventual dominance of hadith in Islamic law did not erase those objections, nor did it establish that the early Muslim intellectual tradition had unanimously accepted hadith authority.
The central lesson is that the authority of the Prophet’s sunna and the authority of the Hadith corpus were once distinguishable questions. Some of the earliest Muslim theologians accepted the former while rejecting the latter altogether. The later identification of the two should not be projected backward onto a period when Muslims were still openly debating whether hadith deserved religious authority at all.
Reference
Ghani, Usman. “The Concept of sunna in Mu’tazilite Thought.” In The Sunna and its Status in Islamic Law: The Search for a Sound Hadith, edited by Adis Duderija, 59–73. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.