"The Prophet said so!": On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media

TL;DR

This paper investigates the presence and influence of hadiths on Arabic social media, specifically Twitter, over four years, offering a methodology for scholars to analyze hadiths in societal contexts using big data.

Contribution

It fills a research gap by analyzing how hadiths appear in daily social media interactions and proposes a methodology for validating hadith-related hypotheses in large-scale data.

Findings

Hadiths are actively present in Twitter discussions from 2019 to 2023.

Challenges in processing hadith texts on social media are identified.

A new methodology for analyzing hadith influence in society is proposed.

Abstract

Hadith, the recorded words and actions of the prophet Muhammad, is a key source of the instructions and foundations of Islam, alongside the Quran. Interpreting individual hadiths and verifying their authenticity can be difficult, even controversial, and the subject has attracted the attention of many scholars who have established an entire science of Hadith criticism. Recent quantitative studies of hadiths focus on developing systems for automatic classification, authentication, and information retrieval that operate over existing hadith compilations. Qualitative studies on the other hand try to discuss different social and political issues from the perspective of hadiths, or they inspect how hadiths are used in specific contexts in official communications and press releases for argumentation and propaganda. However, there are no studies that attempt to understand the actual presence of hadiths among Muslims in their daily lives and interactions. In this study, we try to fill this gap by exploring the presence of hadiths on Twitter from January 2019 to January 2023. We highlight the challenges that quantitative methods should consider while processing texts that include hadiths and we provide a methodology for Islamic scholars to validate their hypotheses about hadiths on big data that better represent the position of the society and Hadith influence on it.