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

2024-12-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of empirical research on Hadith usage in Muslim digital daily life by systematically investigating real-world Hadith deployment on Arabic Twitter (2019–2023). To tackle challenges—including textual fragmentation, orthographic and transliterational variation, and contextual ambiguity—we propose an interdisciplinary framework integrating Islamic scholarly norms with computational social science: (1) designing Hadith-specific preprocessing and validation protocols; (2) developing a hybrid identification model combining rule-based heuristics with a lightweight fine-tuned BERT architecture; and (3) establishing a context annotation scheme with collaborative verification by Islamic scholars. We release the first publicly available dataset of Arabic Hadith social mentions (127,000 annotated tweets), revealing prevalent citation patterns, thematic distributions, and functional differentiation across political and religious discourse. This work provides a reproducible data foundation and methodological paradigm for analyzing Hadith’s role in contemporary Arabic public spheres.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

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.

Problem

• Hadith frequency
• Social media analysis
• Big data challenges

Innovation

• Digital Hadith Analysis
• Social Media Impact
• Big Data Verification