The Abu Hurayra literature - part 0

[dklei...@gmail.com]

Abu Hurayra is famous, or perhaps the word is notorious, as being the
narrator credited with a very large number of hadiths. Exact figures
are hard to come by, but there may be more hadiths "narrated by Abu
Hurayra" than by any other person.

Nevertheless I have been long haunted by the feeling that Abu Hurayra
was not real person - that he was rather a book or perhaps a
literature. So I have decided to explore that possibility as best I
can from the resources available.

My idea is that the Abu Hurayra literature was created in the same
context as the Qur'an. Perhaps it even was once the Surat of the Cat.
But if it was ever counted as part of the Qur'an it fell away at a
fairly early date. Exactly when this might have happened is one of the
things I am investigating.

In order to study who might have preserved or popularized parts of the
Abu Hurayra literature I have created a data base of all the Isnads in
al-Bukhari that go back to Abu Hurayra. I selected al-Bukhari because
he is old-fashioned for his time, eminently respectable and available
to me in Arabic. I would resist extended my data base on the grounds
that it is already so large as to be clumsy and introducing data from
other sources would introduce the possibility of incompatible
acceptance criteria.

As it turns out I am learning almost as much about al-Bukhari as I am
about Abu Hurayra. I have learned that not only is al-Bukhari capable
of including the same hadith with the same isnad more than once, he is
capable of including different matns (although clearly the same story)
with the same isnad.

In the interests of a comprehensible vocabulary I am going to call the
base story of a hadith its pericope and reserved the word matn for
actual rext of a specific hadith. Thus what I call a pericope may be
different than all the matns that developed from it. One thing I would
like to circumscribe is what pericopes were in the original Abu
Hurayra literature.

With this introduction Part 1 will follow in a few days (Allah
willing).