Hadith Qudsi: When Allah Speaks Outside the Quran

A Sentence That Begins With "Allah Says"

A Friday gathering. The speaker raises his voice: "Allah, the Exalted, says — I am as My servant thinks of Me, and I am with him when he remembers Me." Half the listeners assume they have just heard the Quran. They have not. Search the Quran from al-Fatiha to al-Nas and this sentence appears nowhere in it. It is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (hadith 7405), in the Book of Tawhid.

Islamic literature, then, contains a category of texts in which God speaks in the first person — "I", "My servant", "My mercy" — and yet these texts are not part of the Quran. The scholars named this category Hadith Qudsi ("the sacred hadith"), also called Hadith Ilahi or Hadith Rabbani. And around this small body of texts, the classical books themselves recorded hard questions: What kind of revelation is this? Whose wording is it? And how can a sentence that begins with "Allah says" end with a hadith grading of "weak" — or even "no known basis"?