The Prohibition on Writing Hadith: A Command to Erase, and a Command to Write

Two Commands That Seem to Point in Opposite Directions

In the collections Muslims regard as the most rigorous, two instructions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad sit side by side, and they seem to pull in opposite directions. In one, he forbids his companions from writing anything he says except the Qur'an, and orders that whatever has already been written be rubbed out. In another, he tells a man from Yemen to "write it," gives a young companion leave to record everything he hears, and — in a saying repeated for centuries — urges believers to "bind knowledge by writing."

Behind these two commands lies a plain historical fact: for roughly the first Islamic century, the sayings of the Prophet were carried mostly in memory, not on paper. The great written collections Muslims rely on today were assembled around two hundred years after his death. This article opens the books on that gap — the report of prohibition, the reports of permission, the reconciliations the classical scholars offered, and the recorded history of when hadith actually came to be written and compiled.