What does it take to reject a hadith?
Sometimes a hadith can seem plain weird and hard to interpret. Does that make it inauthentic? Authentification and interpretation are two separate disciplines. Let's see why.
Very often, young Muslims—especially those of us brought up in a Western or secular society—stumble upon a sahih hadith or a ruling that creates dissonance and frustration in our minds.
An emotional response would be to reject the hadith and maybe even the entire hadith corpus altogether—simply because we cannot comprehend or accept some of the narrations. An intellectual response would be to study and understand the dilemma that has arisen.
A hadith is simply a narration—either literal or meaning-based—that is attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). "Sahih" is no more than a technical term indicating the overall trustworthiness of the narrators who have transmitted a particular narration.
A simple matrix of authenticity and interpretation
Assessing authenticity involves examining the sources of a message, not its content. Interpretation and authenticity are two separate domains. At most, one can be indicative of something in the other—for example, an unusual interpretation may raise questions about authenticity, but authenticity cannot be determined by interpretation alone. If the meaning of a hadith does not make sense, it may suggest authenticity issues—or it may not. We mustn’t compare apples to bananas.
You cannot establish authenticity through interpretation, nor interpretation through authenticity. The same applies to negating authenticity using interpretation. Authenticity must always be assessed based on its own standards, principles, and evidence.
A simple matrix illustrates the logical positions one can take regarding a hadith.
Any individual—or scholar—faced with a hadith cannot accept its authenticity and then reject it. If you accept it, you're compelled to interpret it (assuming you believe it is incumbent upon a Muslim to follow the Prophet (SAW)). If you reject its authenticity, you obviously don’t act on it. Likewise, for each possible interpretation of a hadith, you either accept it (and act on it) or reject it.
This matrix give us three logical outcomes since accepting an interpretation while rejecting authenticity is not an option—the bottom-right box doesn’t apply. Here are an example of each possible category:
🟩 1. Accepted Authenticity & Accepted Interpretation
Example:
Hadith: “Actions are judged by intentions.”
Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī & Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim
Interpretation: Sincerity (niyyah) is essential in Islam and determines the moral and legal weight of one’s actions.
Status: Universally accepted both in chain and meaning.
🟨 2. Accepted Authenticity & Rejected Interpretation
Hadith: "Whoever changes his religion, kill him."
Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī
Interpretation (contested): Taken at face value, this has been interpreted to mean any apostate must be executed. This has been applied historically as a blanket rule in some legal systems.
Scholarly Response: Many classical and contemporary scholars argue the hadith refers to political treason or apostasy coupled with rebellion during the Prophet’s time, not private belief change.
Others emphasize that the Prophet ﷺ never executed anyone solely for apostasy during his lifetime, and the Qur’an repeatedly states that "there is no compulsion in religion" (Q. 2:256).
Legal schools vary: some apply conditions, others differentiate between private apostasy and public sedition.
Status:
✅ The hadith is authentic in its isnād.
❌ The interpretation as a universal rule for killing apostates is heavily contested.
⬛ 3. Rejected Authenticity & Rejected Interpretation
❌ Hadith is not authentic, ❌ meaning is also wrong or harmful.
Example:
Hadith: “If it were not for women, men would enter Paradise.”
Source: Fabricated (mawḍūʻ)
Interpretation: Blames women as a source of men’s sinfulness or misguidance.
Status: Rejected in both chain and meaning—contradicts Qur'anic ethos of accountability and justice.
So what does it take to refute a hadith?
As mentioned, an intellectual response to not being able to comprehend something would be to engage in study and research of that topic. This in turn requires a great amount of humility and not merely browsing for a specific conclusion, which is the definition of being biased. Truth is available to all who are willing to respect the principles of logic, evidence and sound methodology- i.e. the science of domain they’re investigating.
A quick sidenote.
There is no opposition between science and religion, in spite of the beliefs and claims of so many agnostics. Science and religion are both occupied with the Truth and both are viable ways of arriving at it. Allah SWT challenges humankind to reflect upon the reality we are in, in order to realize the Truth and our Purpose. This is why the Prophet and subsequent Muslim civilisations have always massively increased the literacy of people. The very first word revealed from the Quran was “Read/Recite” - the gateway to true knowledge and success. Muslim civilisation after the Prophet (SAW) occupied themselves with natural sciences and the principles and logics of our God-given reality. They contributed to science as the product of using their human reflection, logic and empirical evidence. In fact, the Enlightenment and Renaissance movements in Europe were in many ways continuations of earlier Muslim scientific advances. Specifically, Muslims, Jews and Christians had a massive exchange of scientific and philosophical knowledge in cities like Cordoba, the capital of old Muslim Andalusia. This shows how diversity and pluralism have always been the drivers of human civilisation - and that ethnocentrism, hostility towards other belief systems and racism are signs of a society in downfall.
Back to main topic.
So how do we deal with a hadith that we suspect is inauthentic because we cannot accept the interpretations available to us?
We check it.
We consult the tools of hadith authentication—the product of 1400 years of scholarship. The same scholarship that preserved the hadith you're questioning. To challenge this, you must engage that scholarship on its own terms—through the science of hadith authentication (ʿulūm al-ḥadīth).
Once you gain an understanding of the principles of hadith (authentification) science, you will realize that each hadith is a complex system of assessing narrators; the sources of the hadith. You must engage in narrator scrutiny, chain analysis, and textual consistency. To reject a hadith, you must critique the reliability of narrators or the principles used to assess them. If a hadith is false, someone must have lied or erred—this is what must be demonstrated.
Hadith science is a big data problem with a database solution
When studying hadith science, one quickly realizes that even lay intellectuals struggle to access reliable narrator data. Most resources are in Arabic, and more importantly, the field suffers from data overload. There are endless encyclopedias of hadith and even more expansive collections of narrator evaluations and chain discussions.
This is a big data problem. And the solution is a database.
Imagine a system that:
Organizes all narrator and hadith data from any scholar that ever lived
Allows user-generated input, followed by scholarly verification (like Wikipedia)
Leverages AI and algorithms to identify patterns, contradictions, and reliability
Makes all this transparent and accessible—even for the intellectually curious layperson who wants to know how a hadith can be true - with what evidence and what arguments.
Such a system would revolutionize hadith authentication. It would democratize access, improve transparency, and offer a better user experience than flipping through the thousands of classical works.
I have written a kind of "manifesto" around such a database here and in it also share a prototype showing how such a database would look and feel like.
What about the interpretation of the hadith then?
Until now we have only talked about the science of authentification. But remember: a hadith may be authentic, but that doesn’t mean you know how to act on it.
For example, the fact that the Prophet (SAW) died in Madinah is a narration whose authenticity no one disputes. But do you act on it by making sure you die in Madinah too? Of course not. You believe the hadith is true—but you reject that specific interpretation. In our earlier matrix, this is the top-left box: accepted authenticity, rejected interpretation.
How do we know how to interpret a hadith?
It just so happens that we have a science for that too. The science of fiqh; the interpretation science, as I call it. And there is nothing dangerous about it. Just like any other science, the science of fiqh is also based on logic, reasoning and empirical proofs.
But fiqh is broader. Its toolbox includes:
Linguistic analysis
Comparative study (with other hadith and Qur’anic verses)
Study of the practices of the Companions - e.g. how did they act on this hadith?
Distinguishing literal from metaphorical narrations
Assessing whether the narration was transmitted word-for-word or meaning-based.
The end-game for fiqh is not to arrive at an authenticity grading. It is to arrive at an “act-upon-grading”. Either the hadith is maqbool (accepted) or mardood (rejected). In fact, the authentification of the hadith is one of the main sub-sciences that fiqh scholars use to reach a conclusion of maqbool or mardood.
I have tried to figure out the historical relation between authenticity studies (uloom al hadith) done by the muhaddiths and the interpretation studies (uloom al fiqh) done by the fuqaha (jurists). I have shared my thoughts on this intriguing history of Islamic scholarship here.
Conclusion: A hadith science database is inevitable
To truly understand the Sunnah of our Prophet, we must acknowledge two things:
Hadith authentication is an independent science
It must be followed by the science of interpretation
First we authenticate, then we interprete.1
Each hadith contains so many layers of context, so much historical source criticism and so many discussions on how to grammatically understand the words etc.
We are compelled to accept that each hadith is a rich and diverse centre of metadata and that scholars have enriched the metadata of each narration in countless ways—grading chains, debating meanings, explaining variants.
Once you accept and appreciate this, there is no way back from realizing that we need to store, safeguard and share that metadata in a modern database system.
And that is what I am proposing with the al-Uloom.com manifesto and my light prototype for anyone to explore (passkey is 1234)
I believe that when we have properly digitized the hadith authentication corpus, we can do the same with the fiqh science. The use of databases, co-creation and user-generated knowledge and teaching the principles of the different madhabs to the system etc.
InshaAllah, this will bring about the transparency and clarity the Ummah needs to better follow the Prophet (SAW).
A small note on the order: If we acknowledge text interpreation/criticism as one of the tools in fiqh science, and if you determine that the hadith simply cannot be true, then you are forced to step back into the authenticity domain. Logic compels us to.
Either 1) the hadith is true, and we are simply struggling with fiqh and deriving the proper meaning or 2) the hadith is not true in which case we obviously do not even bother with interpretation (fiqh).
You cannot have both. You cannot accept its authenticity and at the same time deny acting on it. At least not if you follow Sunni Islam.