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Hadith literally means "tradition," and it constitutes for most Muslims the second set of religious scriptures - almost, but not quite as important as the Qur'an. Collected into authoritative books, these represent reports about the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate followers while he was alive.
Why did the Hadith develop? According to tradition, once Muhammad died, his followers may have still had the Qur'an, but they no longer had his personal, authoritative guidance. When a religious group is based solely on personal charisma, it has little chance of surviving the death of its founder.
In order to continue, religious communities need some sort of legal and official framework. The Qur'an filled that role, but not enough - Muhammad himself was too personally active in the early development of the Muslim community in a way that Jesus, for example, could not have been.
What the Muslim community needed was an established, authoritative reference of tradition. They needed something to refer to when making decisions about the many issues which were not addressed in the Qur'an. This role, then, was filled by the development of the Hadith.
But the Hadith did not apparently exist in the earliest days of Islam. The architect of Islamic law is Muhammad ibn Idris Ash Shafi'i (d. 820), and he was the one who insisted strenuously that Muhammad's actions and sayings were the final, binding authority. He argued that the Hadith was, in fact, divinely inspired and should be followed.
Joseph Schacht, a pioneer of Hadith study, made an important point about Shafi'i's continual insistence that nothing can override the authority of the prophet, even if the idea in question is only supported by a single, isolated tradition and even if that contradicts the reported opinions of his Companions, their Successors or later authorities.
Schacht argues that Shafi'i would not have made such a big case about the subordinate status of ideas not directly attributable to Muhammad if they were not at the time standard, common beliefs. Thus, Islamic law before Shafi'i was not dependent upon Muhammad or what he did in his life. Indeed, it wasn't even necessarily connected to his Companions. But of course, Muslim tradition holds to just the opposite.
These collections of saying and actions of Muhammad are all accompanied by a record of tranmission, called an isnad. This is a list of the names of the people who passed the information along, and it is supposed to be tracable back to Muhammad himself through one of his immediate companions. If genuine, this line of transmission is supposed to guarantee the authenticity of this particular Hadith.
What is important to note is that the authenticity of the isnad was regarded as being much more important than the matn, or the content of the saying. Even if the Hadith content is self-contradictory, it would still be accepted:
If the isnad to which an impossible sentence full of inner and outer contradictions is appended withstands the scrutiny of this formal criticism, if the continuity of the entirely trustworthy authors cited in them is complete and if the possibility of their personal communication is established, the tradition is accepted as worthy of credit. Nobody is allowed to say: 'because the matn contains a logical or historical absurdity I doubt the correctness of the isnad'. (Goldziher, Muslim Studies, Vol.2, p.140).
Most Muslims accept the authenticity of six different collections of Hadith. The most authoritative is that collected by Bukhari, and the rest are Muslim, Ibn Maja, Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, and al-Nisai. All of these sources are relatively late. Bukhari, regarded as the best, died 238 years after Muhammad, and the latest, al-Nisai, died another 280 years after that.
Even early Muslim scholars showed a great deal of skepticism towards many of the records in the Hadith, although they were sure that after careful analysis there still remained some core and true information. Other scholars, particularly in the West, have rejected this conclusion and have even argued that absolutely nothing in the Hadith can be counted on as reliable.
One of them, Ignaz Goldziher, is considered one of the founders of the modern study of Islam, and his books are still considered basic reading on the subject. He does, however, regard the Hadith as providing useful information about the state of Muslim beliefs during the time it was recorded:
We (...) will probably consider by far the greater part of it as the result of the religious, historical and social development of islam during the frist two centuries (Goldziher, Muslim Studies, vol II)
We should not imagine, however, that all Muslims accept the Hadith uncritically. Western Mulsims and Western scholars today are particularly prone to such skepticism, something they don't often display as readily towards the Qur'an itself.
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