From a question to an atlas.

A question that began in Egypt

For a long time, the writing of hadith history concentrated on the first three centuries, the period in which reports were collected and the foundational works compiled. How hadith scholarship lived on in different regions after the 3rd/9th century, which cities became its centres and how scholars were connected to one another largely remained buried in scattered biographical information.

GeoHadith began with a question aimed at this gap: Is it possible to write the hadith history of a region not only through texts, but together with geographical, social and demographic data? To test this question, we launched a research project at the Faculty of Theology of Kırşehir Ahi Evran University with funding from TÜBİTAK's 3005 programme, and chose Egypt under Fatimid rule as our case study.

Why we are growing

The pilot study showed us something important: no region is closed in on itself. An Egyptian hadith scholar's teachers might be in the Hijaz, his students in the Maghrib and the copies of his works in Damascus. The tradition of travel in search of knowledge (riḥla) had turned the Islamic world into a single network of learning. That network cannot be understood by looking at one region alone.

This is why, on our new journey, we are bringing data from across the Islamic world under one roof, mapping scholars region by region and period by period, and reconstructing the links between them as a source-referenced network of data. The method developed in the pilot will now be applied on the scale of an entire world.