Current Trends, Changeables and Constants in Hadith-Related Studies in the West A Research on Academic Periodicals (2012-2022)

Abstract

In the 19th century, with Goldziher (d.1921), who drew the attention of the Western world from Siyar studies to hadith by through an independent study, the debates on hadith have focused on the question of the reliability of hadiths. Recently, it has been argued that due to changing theories of meaning and social, political, cultural, historical, and philosophical conditions, the debates on the reliability of hadiths, which are at the centre of Western Orientalism, have largely given away to the meaning and the interpretation of the texts. The main obstacle in analyzing the general characteristics of recent hadith studies in the West is the existence of serious gaps in the tracking of orientalist debates and literature - apart from some individual efforts. These gaps make it difficult to understand whether there is a differentiation of trends in recent hadith studies and if so, to evaluate the mechanisms behind it. Both the graduate courses and the materials used in these courses are mostly based on the orientalist claims which centred on the issue of reliability. This paper focuses on the trend and characteristics of contemporary hadith studies carried out in the West over the last decade. To this end, content and textual analysis methods are applied to the articles published in the field of hadith published in academic journals, published in Europe and America between 2012 and 2022, and indexed by WoS, Scopus, and other subject indexes. The aim is to identify trends in hadith studies and to understand the reasons behind these trends. In this study, articles were identified using the non-probabilistic sampling method recommended in qualitative research. To identify all the articles published in European and American journals in the field of hadith studies were scanned by considering their keywords, abstracts, and, if necessary, their contents. The articles identified in this way were subjected to content analysis using qualitative research methods. Following the content analysis, Voyant Tools was used for the textual analysis of the articles. This paper is the first study in national and international academia using content and text analysis on texts written in the West in the last ten years.