Talk:Shu'ba ibn al-Hajjaj

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Contested deletion

This article should not be speedily deleted for lack of asserted importance because this is an important historical figure for individuals who study early Islam due to his contributions both to the collection "traditions [of the Muhammad]" (or known as ḥadīth in Arabic). Furthermore, he was instrumental in laying the foundation for criticizing individuals who would wantonly attribute sayings to Muhammad, rather than being careful about their sources, which later developed into a science due to Shuʿba Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and his colleagues.

Due to the nature of Early Islam, many of these pivotal figures did not produce books, due to the orality of the society, and instead committed thousands of sayings to memory over the course of their lives. This does not mean there was no record of what they transmitted, rather on the contrary, their transmissions appear hundreds of times in large ḥadīth collections such as that of al-Bukhari and Muslim bin al-Hajjaj. The biographical information was mined from primary source material and is therefore the most accurate that we have. Not only is there an article about in Encyclopaedia of Islam (~1500 words), but he also appears prominently in many books and articles on the subject; here is a short list:

EERIK DICKINSON, The Development of Sunnite Hadith Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi (240/854-327/938)
Racha El-Omari, Accommodation and Resistance: Classical Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Oct. 2, 2012), pp. 231-256
Scott C. Lucas, The Legal Principles of Muhammad B. Ismāʿīl Al-Bukhārī and Their Relationship to Classical Salafi Islam, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 289-324
Jonathan Brown, Critical Rigor vs. Juridical Pragmatism: How Legal Theorists and Ḥadīth Scholars Approached the Backgrowth of "Isnāds" in the Genre of 'Ilal Al-ḥadīth, Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007), pp. 1-41.

Furthermore, there is an Arabic wikipedia page about him as well which contains about the same amount of biographical information, albeit from some different sources. My article is not a translation of the Arabic, but rather my own contribution due to some research I am performing.