What Are the Sunnah and Hadith?

The Qur’an tells Muslims to pray, but it does not spell out every movement of the prayer. It tells them to give charity, but not exactly how much from each kind of wealth. For those details — and for a living picture of what a life devoted to God looks like — Muslims turn to the Sunnah.

The Sunnah: a life to learn from

Sunnah literally means “a well-trodden path”. In Islam it refers to the way of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: his words, his actions, and the things he saw others do and approved. Muslims see his life as the Qur’an put into practice. The Qur’an itself presents him as the model to follow:

لَّقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِى رَسُولِ ٱللَّهِ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌۭ لِّمَن كَانَ يَرْجُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَٱلْيَوْمَ ٱلْءَاخِرَ وَذَكَرَ ٱللَّهَ كَثِيرًۭا ﴿٢١﴾

There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.

It also links following him to obeying God, because he was the one God chose to explain His message:

مَّن يُطِعِ ٱلرَّسُولَ فَقَدْ أَطَاعَ ٱللَّهَ ۖ وَمَن تَوَلَّىٰ فَمَآ أَرْسَلْنَٰكَ عَلَيْهِمْ حَفِيظًۭا ﴿٨٠﴾

He who obeys the Messenger has obeyed Allah; but those who turn away - We have not sent you over them as a guardian.

This is why Muslims everywhere pray in essentially the same way, greet each other with the same words of peace, and try to imitate the Prophet’s ﷺ gentleness, generosity and patience. See Who Was Prophet Muhammad ﷺ?

Hadith: the reports that record it

A hadith is a single report about the Prophet ﷺ. Every hadith has two parts:

• The chain of narrators (isnad) — “A told me that B told him that C heard the Prophet ﷺ say…”
• The text (matn) — what was actually said or done.

The Prophet’s companions memorised his words, taught them in mosques, and — increasingly as time went on — wrote them down. In the following generations, scholars travelled for months to hear a single report directly from someone in its chain, and gathered the reports into great collections. The best known among Sunni Muslims are those of al-Bukhari and Muslim, followed by the collections of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah.

How hadith were graded

Early Muslims took transmission very seriously because the Prophet ﷺ had warned in the strongest terms against attributing words to him falsely. One of his companions explained why he was careful about narrating:

Narrated Anas: The fact which stops me from narrating a great number of Hadiths to you is that the Prophet (ﷺ) said: "Whoever tells a lie against me intentionally, then (surely) let him occupy his seat in Hell-fire

Out of this concern grew a remarkable science. For each report, scholars asked questions like these:

• Is every narrator in the chain known by name?
• Was each one honest and of sound memory?
• Could each narrator actually have met the person they report from?
• Does the text contradict something better established, such as the Qur’an or stronger reports?

Based on the answers, reports were graded. The main grades are:

Only sahih and hasan reports are used to establish beliefs and practices. On this website we follow the same rule: every hadith we quote is from Bukhari or Muslim, or carries a recognised grade of sahih or hasan.

Why it matters

Without the Sunnah, much of the Qur’an’s guidance would stay general. With it, Muslims have a detailed, human example of how to pray, how to fast, how to run a family, how to settle disputes and how to treat neighbours, animals and enemies. The hadith also preserve the Prophet’s ﷺ warmth: his jokes with children, his tears at a funeral, his kindness to people who wronged him.

The grading system also matters for honesty. Not everything said in the Prophet’s name is reliable, and Muslim scholars said so openly more than a thousand years ago. Questions about how reliable this system is are fair, and we look at them in Are Hadith Authentic? On a few details of grading and interpretation, scholars sometimes reach different conclusions — see Where Muslims Differ.

Learning more

The Qur’an and the Sunnah together form the foundation of Islam. If you are curious, try reading a small collection of hadith on good character — many readers are surprised by how practical and gentle they are. For short definitions, see Sunnah and Hadith in our glossary.