Identity information of narrators in the era of narration: The example of al-Kutub al-Sitta

Identity information of narrators represents religious, political, historical and social facts in their own eras. In this respect, changes that can be observed in identity information of narrators and its reasons deserve to be searched. In this paper, it is searched how identity information which is used by narrators is affected by fact mentioned above. With the thought that an adequate result could be reached, this study was limited to the narrators of Kutub-i Sitte, because they were born and have grown in different regions of extensive geography of hadith transmission and they were connected to different nationalities. From this point of view, examining these narrators will help to get a general opinion about how religious, political, historical and social facts affected the society that was living in the geography of hadith transmission. In addition, this research does not claim to be a quantitative study, but it aims to make an attempt to interpretation on the basis of predetermined periods and sources. In order for the study to be carried out more easily, I needed a source that lists the narrators of Kutub-i Sitte according to their periods and informs about them briefly. Because of the fact that I could not find a source has these features, I reclassified Ibn Hajar al-Askalânî's work named Taqrib al-Tahdhib, in which he informs about the narrators of Kutub-i Sitte briefly, according to the periods of the narrators. As a result of this classification, I determined that there were 643 narrators in the 1st period, 315 in the 2nd period, 1078 in the 3rd period, 586 in the 4th period, 419 in the 5th period, 1095 in the 6th period, 1007 in the 7th period, 519 in the 8th period, 587 in the 9th period, 960 in the 10th period, 557 in the 11th period and 91 in the 12th period. Also, I reached the results obtained in the study based on these numbers. As a result, in the first three centuries, I have determined that the reasons related to history and religion affected the use of names, the reasons related to history and tafa'ul affected the use of kunya, the emergence of more functional alternatives affected the use of nisbe and the reasons related to religion affected the use of nicknames.