The differences between the Quran and the Hadith

	Quran	Hadith
Meaning	The recitation	Talk, conversation, or speech
Definition	The central religious text of Islam, which Muslims believe to be: -    a revelation from God, -    The only book that has been protected by God from distortion or corruption. -    A sign of the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the religion.	The reports of: -   statements -   or actions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, -   or of his tacit approval or criticism of something said or done in his presence
Components	The Quran consists of 114 chapters (surah) of varying lengths. Each surah consists of several verses (ayah).  Ayah originally means a 'sign' or 'evidence' sent by God.	1- The text of the report (the matn), which contains the actual narrative. 2- The chain of narrators (the isnad), which documents the route by which the report has been transmitted. The sanad, literally 'support', is so named due to the reliance of the hadith specialists upon it in determining the authenticity or weakness of a hadith. The isnad consists of a chronological list of the narrators, each mentioning the one from whom they heard the hadith, until mentioning the originator of the matn along with the matn itself.
Time	Muslims believe that the Quran was verbally revealed from God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel (Jibril), gradually over a period of approximately 23 years, beginning on 22 December 609 CE, when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632 CE, the year of his death.	Traditions of the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam were passed down mostly orally for more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death in AD 632.
Writing	Muhammad himself did not write down the revelation. The Quran describes Muhammad as illiterate. Muhammad's illiteracy was taken as a sign of the genuineness of his prophethood. For example, according to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, if Muhammad had mastered writing and reading he possibly would have been suspected of having studied the books of the ancestors. The Quran was recorded on: - Tablets. - Bones - The wide, flat ends of date palm fronds. Most suras were in use amongst early Muslims since they are mentioned in numerous sayings by both Sunni and Shia sources, relating Muhammad's use of the Quran as a call to Islam, the making of prayer and the manner of recitation. However, the Quran did not exist in book form at the time of Muhammad's death in 632 CE.	By the 9th century the number of hadiths had grown exponentially. Islamic scholars of the Abbasid period were faced with a huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions, some of them flatly contradicting each other. Many of these traditions supported differing views on a variety of controversial matters. Scholars had to decide which hadith were to be trusted as authentic and which had been invented for political or theological purposes. To do this, they used a number of techniques which Muslims now call the science of hadith.
Compilation	In the year 632 CE, after Muhammad died and a number of his companions who knew the Quran by heart were killed in a battle by Musaylimah, the first caliph Abu Bakr (d. 634CE) decided to collect the book in one volume so that it could be preserved. Zayd ibn Thabit (d. 655CE) was the person to collect the Quran since "he used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle". Thus, a group of scribes, most importantly Zayd, collected the verses and produced a hand-written manuscript of the complete book. The manuscript according to Zayd remained with Abu bakr until he died. Zayd's reaction to the task and the difficulties in collecting the Quranic material from parchments, palm-leaf stalks, thin stones and from men who knew it by heart is recorded in earlier narratives. After Abu Bakr, Hafsa bint Umar, Muhammad's widow, was entrusted with the manuscript. In about 650 CE, when the third Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656CE) began noticing slight differences in pronunciation of the Quran, and as Islam expanded beyond the Arabian peninsula into Persia, the Levant and North Africa, in order to preserve the sanctity of the text, ordered a committee headed by Zayd to use Abu Bakr's copy and prepare a standard copy of the Quran. Thus, within 20 years of Muhammad's death, the Quran was committed to written form. That text became the model from which copies were made and promulgated throughout the urban centers of the Muslim world, and other versions are believed to have been destroyed. The present form of the Quran text is accepted by Muslim scholars to be the original version compiled by Abu Bakr.	In the 3rd century of Islam (from 225/840 to about 275/889), hadith experts composed brief works recording a selection of about two- to five-thousand such texts which they felt to have been most soundly documented or most widely referred to in the Muslim scholarly community. The 4th and 5th century saw these six works being commented on quite widely. This auxiliary literature has contributed to making their study the place of departure for any serious study of hadith. The canonical hadith collections are the six books, of which:      -  Sahih al-Bukhari      -  Sahih Muslim      -  Sunan Abu Dawood      -  Jami` at-Tirmidhi      -  Al-Sunan al-Sughra (also known as Sunan an-Nasa'i)      - Sunan ibn Majah
Categories	1-      Meccan surah. 2-      Medinan surah.	1.   Ṣaḥīḥ “authentic” 2.   Ḥasan “good” 3.   Ḍaʻīf “weak”: the cause of a hadith being classified as ḍaʻīf as either due to discontinuity in the chain of narrators (Muʻallaq “suspended”, Mursal “hurried”, and Muʻḍal “problematic”), Or due to some criticism of a narrator (Munkar ‘denounced”, Shādhdh” anomalous”, Muḍṭarib “shaky”, and Mawḍūʻ “fabricated”).
Studies	1.   Asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions or circumstances of revelation): refers to the historical context in which Quranic verses were revealed. 2.   Tajweed (elocution): sometimes rendered as tajwid, refers to the rules governing pronunciation during recitation of the Qur'an. 3.   Qira'at (the readings): the method of recitation. Traditionally, there are 10 recognised schools of qira'at, and each one derives its name from a famous reader of Quran recitation. 4.   Abrogation (Naskh): it shares the same root as the words appearing in the phrase al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh "the abrogating and abrogated [verses]". It is a term used in Islamic legal exegesis for seemingly contradictory material within or between the twin bases of Islamic holy law: the Quran and the Prophetic Sunna. 5.   i'jaz (inimitability) of the Qur'an is the doctrine that holds that the Qur'an has a miraculous quality, both in content and in form, that no human speech can match. According to this doctrine the Qur'an is a miracle and its inimitability is the proof granted to Muhammad in authentication of his prophetic status. It serves the dual purpose of proving the divine source of the Muslim book and the genuineness of the prophethood of Muhammad to whom it was revealed. The concept of miraculousness of the Qur'an developed over the course of two centuries into a full-fledged doctrine; around the middle of the 9th century it became inappropriate to find fault with the Qur'anic style and in the late 10th century the first works on the doctrine were composed.	‘ilm al-rijāl Means "science of people". it is biographical evaluation or biographical analysis in which details about the transmitter are scrutinized. This includes analyzing their date and place of birth; familial connections; teachers and students; religiosity; moral behaviour; literary output; their travels; as well as their date of death. Based upon these criteria, the reliability (thiqāt) of the transmitter is assessed. Also determined is whether the individual was actually able to transmit the report, which is deduced from their contemporaneity and geographical proximity with the other transmitters in the chain. Examples of biographical dictionaries include: -           Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi's Al-Kamal fi Asma' al-Rijal, -           Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb -           al-Dhahabi's Tadhkirat al-huffaz.

Terminology relating to
The authenticity of a hadith	The number of narrators in an isnad	A narration's origin
1.   Ṣaḥīḥ (authentic) 2.   Ḥasan (good) refers to an otherwise ṣaḥīḥ report suffering from minor deficiency, or a weak report strengthened due to numerous other corroborating reports; 3.   Ḍaʻīf (weak): the cause of a hadith being classified as ḍaʻīf as either due to: Discontinuity in the chain of narrators Some criticism of a narrator The omission of a narrator occurring at different positions within the isnād a)   Munkar (denounced): if a narration which goes against another authentic hadith is reported by a weak narrator, it is known as munkar. Traditionists as late as Ahmad used to simply label any hadith of a weak reporter as munkar. b)   Shādhdh (anomalous): a shādhdh hadith is one which is reported by a trustworthy person who contradicts the narration of a person more reliable than he is. It does not include a hadith which is unique in its matn and is not narrated by someone else. c)    Muḍṭarib (shaky): if reporters disagree about a particular shaikh, or about some other points in the isnād or the matn, in such a way that none of the opinions can be preferred over the others, and thus there is irreconcilable uncertainty, such a hadith is called muḍṭarib. d)   Mawḍūʻ (fabricated) cannot be attributed to its origin. It is a hadith the text of which contradicts established norms of the Prophet's sayings, or its reporters include a liar. a)  Muʻallaq (suspended): the omission of the entire isnād, or the omission of one or more narrators, or Discontinuity in the beginning of the isnād, from the end of the collector of that hadith. b)  Mursal (hurried): the omission of the narrator between the Successor and Muhammad, e.g., when a Successor says, “The Prophet said ...” Since Sunnis believe in the uprightness of all Sahaba, they do not view it as a necessary problem if a Successor does not mention what Sahaba he received the hadith from. c)  Muʻḍal (problematic): the omission of two or more consecutive narrators from the isnād. d) Munqaṭiʻ (broken) is one in which the chain of people reporting the hadith (the isnād) is disconnected at any point. The isnād of a hadith that appears to be muttaṣil but one of the reporters is known to have never heard hadith from his immediate authority, even though they lived at the same time, is munqaṭiʻ. It is also applied when someone says "A man told me..."	1.   Mutawatir (successive): A successive narration is one conveyed by narrators so numerous that it is not conceivable that they have agreed upon an untruth thus being accepted as unquestionable in its veracity. 2.   Ahaad (singular): a hadith narrated by few narrators: a)    Mashhur (مَشْهُوْر): hadith conveyed by three or more narrators but not considered mutawatir. b)   `Aziz (عَزِيْز): hadith conveyed by two narrators at any point in its isnād (chain of narrators). c)    Gharib (غَرِيْب): hadith is one conveyed by only one narrator.	1.     Marfu` (مَرْفُوْع): a narration attributed specifically to the Prophet Muhammad. 2.     Mawquf (مَوْقُوْف): a narration attributed to a companion, whether a statement of that companion, an action or otherwise. 3.     Maqtu' (مَقْطُوْع): a narration attributed to a Tabi‘i (a successor of one of Muhammad's companions), whether it is a statement of that successor, an action or otherwise.