Muhammad Mustafa al-Azamī and his place in the science of hadith

al-A'zamī, who combined the traditional scientific methods of the East with the secular research, analysis and methods of the West, embarked on a scholarly struggle in the West, the center of orientalism, at a time when the orientalist intellectual currents that rose in parallel with Western colonialism surrounded the Muslim East, and became the owner of a deserved reputation by making scholarly refutations in the orientalists' own languages and with their own arguments against the discrediting operations on the Qur'an and Sunnah. A'zamī is an activist scholar. However, these activities are purely at the level of knowledge and ideas. Sometimes we see A'zamī criticizing the madrasa and its curriculum, and sometimes we see him criticizing Western sources. A'zamī was always in pursuit of the truth. For A'zamī, hadith and sunnah themselves are not the end but the means. A'zamī's works are mostly on Sunnah and Hadith, but towards the end of his life he did Qur'an-centered studies. He conducted very detailed research on the Qur'an and Sunnah and contributed many important works to the Qur'anic and Hadith literature. His first academic work, a doctoral dissertation titled Studies in Early Hadith Literature, made a great impression, especially in Western scholarly circles. He attracted all the attention with this study in order to prove that the Hadiths were written while the Prophet was still alive and that the writing activity started in the first century. Because the works written on this subject before A'zamī's work did not have sufficient impact both in terms of content and style. al-A'zamī unearthed the lost parts of İbn Khuzaymah Sahih through his critical studies, demonstrated that the criteria and measures of the Muhaddiths were based on clear and objective formulas in his Hadith Criticism Method of the Muhaddiths, and made authentic studies by increasing the number of the Prophet's scribes to 65. Thus, he received the recognition he deserved in the Islamic world. Keywords: Qur'an, Hadith-Sunnah, Mustafa al-A'zamī, Orientalism.