The Hadith Collections: A Complete Tree
Every major hadith collection, Sunni, Shia, Zaydī and Ibāḍī, with who compiled it, when and where, how it reached us, how big it is and how its own tradition rates it. Browse as a tree or a timeline.
New to the Qur'an? Start with The Qur'an: What It Is, How It Came Down, and How It Was Kept, then read Muhammad ﷺ: A Life. All articles: Deen: Start Here.
Deen · Reference · Hadith collections
Every major collection of hadith, Sunni, Shia, Zaydī and Ibāḍī, from the first private notebooks of the Companions to the online libraries of today: who compiled each one, when and where, how it reached us, how big it is, and how its own tradition rates what is inside it. The commentaries and the books that judged the narrators are here too.
Open any entry for the people who carried the book down the centuries (its main transmitters, commentators, editors and translators), the turning points in its history, and the sources behind them. Counts of hadith depend on how an edition numbers repeated reports, so each figure says which numbering it follows. A place on this tree says nothing about whether a book is reliable; the "How it is rated" line gives the tradition's own view. To see how single reports are graded, read How a Hadith Is Judged; for the narrators themselves, The People Behind the Hadith.
Bars run from when each book was compiled to today. Faded bars are works that survive only in part; short faded bars are lost works, drawn to the last point they are known to have been used. Tap a bar to open that entry in the tree.
Built from the sources listed in each entry (Britannica, Encyclopaedia Iranica, publishers' and library pages, sunnah.com, Thaqalayn and Shamela, and academic studies), checked in September 2026. If you spot an error, please tell me and I will correct it.
Related reading: The Qur'an: What It Is, How It Came Down, and How It Was Kept · Muhammad ﷺ: A Life · The People Around Muhammad ﷺ: Companions, Wives and Family · How a Hadith Is Judged · The People Behind the Hadith · Every Hadith on This Site: An Index · Islamic Schools of Thought: The Complete Tree
