Ibadi Hadith and the Reliability of its Transmitters

Despite being a school that began its formalization process in the second half of the first century AH, the Ibāḍī school remains under-appreciated and often misunderstood by mainstream Islamic scholarship. A limited understanding of its early sources, foundational figures, and guiding principles has led both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers to unevidenced conclusions and has denied Ibāḍī scholars a voice in detailing the history of their own school.

In order to offer a corrective perspective, Terron and Roxanna from the Real Talk Podcast are very pleased to have the opportunity to talk to Shaykh Al-Muatasim Said Al-Maawali of Sultan Qaboos University, who is currently completing his PhD on Ibāḍī ḥadīth literature at the University of Birmingham. His previous work includes an extended comparative study of Ibāḍī and Ḥanafī jurisprudence, a seminal article that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining the distinction between the Ibāḍīs and the Khawārij, and a seven-volume series on Ibāḍī Jurisprudence called al-Mu‘tamad. The first volume, "The Reliable Jurisprudence of Prayer," he has translated into English himself. In his PhD work, he is seeking to carry out a codicological and jurisprudential study of the rarely studied manuscripts of the Ibāḍī ḥadīth collection Musnad ar-Rabīᶜ b. Ḥabīb, addressing key questions regarding its early provenance, the historical existence of its compiler, and the reliability of its transmitters and the ittiṣāl between them. The project will then focus on a case study of one of the collection’s unique narrations and its current application in the growing Islamic banking industry in the Sultanate of Oman.