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"The Prophet said so!": On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media

Mahmoud Fawzi, Björn Ross, Walid Magdy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Hadiths appear in everyday Arabic social media by constructing a large Arabic tweet dataset (~$3\times 10^5$ tweets) containing Hadith mentions and mapping them to canonical sources using a MinHash-based Jaccard pipeline. It analyzes topical distribution, authenticity, and seasonality to reveal which Hadith are most shared, how authenticity is distributed, and when Hadith discourse spikes (e.g., Fridays, Ramadan). The study highlights gaps in existing Hadith datasets and emphasizes methodological and design considerations for CSCW/HCI researchers and platform providers regarding digital religious expression and misinformation. Overall, the work advances understanding of Hadith usage in online life and provides a reproducible framework for future large-scale, cross-platform analyses of religious texts in social media contexts.

Abstract

Hadith, the recorded words and actions of the prophet Muhammad, is a key source of the instructions and foundations of Islam, alongside the Quran. Interpreting individual hadiths and verifying their authenticity can be difficult, even controversial, and the subject has attracted the attention of many scholars who have established an entire science of Hadith criticism. Recent quantitative studies of hadiths focus on developing systems for automatic classification, authentication, and information retrieval that operate over existing hadith compilations. Qualitative studies on the other hand try to discuss different social and political issues from the perspective of hadiths, or they inspect how hadiths are used in specific contexts in official communications and press releases for argumentation and propaganda. However, there are no studies that attempt to understand the actual presence of hadiths among Muslims in their daily lives and interactions. In this study, we try to fill this gap by exploring the presence of hadiths on Twitter from January 2019 to January 2023. We highlight the challenges that quantitative methods should consider while processing texts that include hadiths and we provide a methodology for Islamic scholars to validate their hypotheses about hadiths on big data that better represent the position of the society and Hadith influence on it.

"The Prophet said so!": On Exploring Hadith Presence on Arabic Social Media

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Hadiths appear in everyday Arabic social media by constructing a large Arabic tweet dataset (~ tweets) containing Hadith mentions and mapping them to canonical sources using a MinHash-based Jaccard pipeline. It analyzes topical distribution, authenticity, and seasonality to reveal which Hadith are most shared, how authenticity is distributed, and when Hadith discourse spikes (e.g., Fridays, Ramadan). The study highlights gaps in existing Hadith datasets and emphasizes methodological and design considerations for CSCW/HCI researchers and platform providers regarding digital religious expression and misinformation. Overall, the work advances understanding of Hadith usage in online life and provides a reproducible framework for future large-scale, cross-platform analyses of religious texts in social media contexts.

Abstract

Hadith, the recorded words and actions of the prophet Muhammad, is a key source of the instructions and foundations of Islam, alongside the Quran. Interpreting individual hadiths and verifying their authenticity can be difficult, even controversial, and the subject has attracted the attention of many scholars who have established an entire science of Hadith criticism. Recent quantitative studies of hadiths focus on developing systems for automatic classification, authentication, and information retrieval that operate over existing hadith compilations. Qualitative studies on the other hand try to discuss different social and political issues from the perspective of hadiths, or they inspect how hadiths are used in specific contexts in official communications and press releases for argumentation and propaganda. However, there are no studies that attempt to understand the actual presence of hadiths among Muslims in their daily lives and interactions. In this study, we try to fill this gap by exploring the presence of hadiths on Twitter from January 2019 to January 2023. We highlight the challenges that quantitative methods should consider while processing texts that include hadiths and we provide a methodology for Islamic scholars to validate their hypotheses about hadiths on big data that better represent the position of the society and Hadith influence on it.
Paper Structure (21 sections, 7 figures, 5 tables)

This paper contains 21 sections, 7 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background & Related Work
  3. HCI Studies on Religion and Spirituality
  4. Hadith and its Significance
  5. Quantitative Studies of Hadith
  6. Methodology & Setup
  7. Data Collection
  8. Challenges in Matching Tweets to Hadiths
  9. Matching Pipeline
  10. Ethical and Privacy Considerations
  11. Results
  12. Topical Distribution
  13. Authenticity Distribution
  14. Time Distribution and Seasonality
  15. Discussion
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: A sample hadith obtained from sunnah.com with the English complete chain of narrators as reported by qaalarasulallah.com. Isnad in bold.
  • Figure 2: Examples of occurrences at which Hadith went viral on Instagram
  • Figure 3: The precision of matches and the percentage of tweets matched from the collection on different Jaccard index thresholds
  • Figure 4: The topical categories distribution of Hadith on Arabic social media from January 2019 to January 2023 versus on sonnaonline.com (Note: The sum of percentages exceeds 100 because a hadith can belong to multiple categories)
  • Figure 5: The authenticity distribution of hadiths on Arabic social media from January 2019 to January 2023
  • ...and 2 more figures