Jami’ al-Ahadith 3.5

A brief introduction Jami’ al-Ahadith 3.5

Status of hadith and its transmission: Hadith that indicates the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (S) and the Infallible Imams (A.S), including their words, practices, and approvals, is considered as the second source after the Qur’an for recognizing the religious rulings and propositions in different fields of knowledge.
Many verses in the Qura’n, having emphasis on the noble character of the Holy Prophet, consider his words as being from a divine revelatory source and introduce his conduct as an example for the faithful. There has been also mention of obeying the Prophet and Those of the Command alongside with the mention of obeying God in order to clarify its importance; just as the Prophet left his Household as well as the Qur’an in trust as two companions, so that Muslims may be redeemed from astray.
Not including a short period of time in early Islam when the transcription and transmission of hadiths was officially prohibited, Muslims have always been aware of the importance and significance of hadith and have made every endeavor to save and protect hadith and to transmit it to the next generations.
The Imams’ attempt to collect, transcribe, and publish hadiths has caused the Shi‘a history to experiment brilliant fruitful times. Imam Ali had transcribed a narrative book dictated by the Prophet. His companions like Abu Rafi’s sons and others are considered as the hadith recorders of early Islam. This can be obviously perceived about other Imams; Imam Baqir and Imam Sadiq and their companions in particular.
Collecting, transcribing, and transmitting hadiths have been practiced in different forms in different periods of the Shi‘a hadith history in proportion to needs, occasions, and possibilities of each period and the Shi‘a scholars have always continued this way.
The transmission of hadiths in the form of oral transmission, compilation of personal limited hadith books as well as the hadith books restricted to specific subjects, compilation of primary and secondary hadith collections, and translation and exposition of hadiths are among the attempts made during the history.
By expansion of exploitation of computers in recent years, it has become easy to take advantage of various capabilities of this tool more than ever, in order to promulgate the hadiths. The precise recording of hadiths, collecting of them in a single source, quick searching, and comparing different texts are among the features that can be useful for the researchers while using computers.
Thus, it is necessary for the scholars on Islamic sciences to disseminate the hadiths via new tools properly and also to facilitate the access to and the benefitting from this great source. In addition, they should provide the present and next generations with preparations for new research activities that couldn’t be done through old tools.

Background of the Program: Based on the attempts of some Islamic seminary students and in order to computerize and publish hadith books Computer Research Center of Islamic sciences has been established. Therefore, the development of hadith-oriented software programs has been among the foremost priorities of the Center.
The production of hadith programs commenced in the early 90s by developing libraries of Bihar al-Anwar, Wasa’il al-Shi‘ah, and the Four Books and met with great reception. The DOS-based collection of the Shi‘a hadith books developed in the next step under the title of “Mu`jam Alfaz Noor 1” was considered as a great transition in production of hadith programs.
The other important program that should be mentioned is Noor 2 (Jami` al-Ahadith) which includes the Four Books, as well as Wasa’il al-Shi`ah, Mustadrak al-Wasa’il, Bihar al-Anwar, and the books known as references of Bihar al-Anwar.
This program, including 181 books in 428 volumes, was the first Windows-based hadith software program ever developed. Massive amount of data, content quality like diacritic marks and content accuracy, as well as different technical capabilities in Display and Search parts and other features caused it to remain the most important hadith program used by Islamic sciences researchers since 2000. Being promoted some several times in technical parts and content, the program is now known as Noor 2.5.
The general users’ need to hadiths and their unfamiliarity with Arabic language convinced the CRCIS to develop Noor Hadith Treasury. The software aimed to present those hadith books that have been translated into Persian. This hadith library includes 233 books in 381 volumes.

Motives for Producing Jami` al-Ahadith 3: Although Noor 2.5 and Noor Hadith Treasury have met considerable parts of the demands of both expert and amateur users, some other needs made the CRCIS to make preparations to implement the Jami` al-Ahadith upgrading plan.
Here are some reasons behind developing Jami` al-Ahadith 3:
- Merging the hadith books included in Noor 2.5 with the translations presented in Noor Hadith Treasury into a single program;
- Adding some other hadith sources that were neither contained in Noor 2.5 nor in Noor Hadith Treasury;
- Adding hadith expositions, including a great number of expositions of the Four Books;
- Adding some new technical features that were not available when producing Noor 2.5, such as copying to MS-Word documents, tabbed browsing, and similar hadiths detector;
- Adding the prologues and epilogues of the books not included in Noor 2.5;


Content of the Program: The goal of the program is to present a comprehensive collection of the Shi‘a hadith references along with their translations and expositions.
On the references some points are necessary to be mentioned:
- The selected sources are either among hadith references or translations or expositions of the references. Some books concerning jurisprudence, theology, history etc. that mostly date back to the fifth century AH (11th century AD) or earlier are also counted among hadith references considering their early compilation date and significant number of hadiths.
- Some of the books included in Noor 2.5 whose hadiths are small in number, like some of Shaykh Mufid’s works, have been excluded from the software. Writings of Shaykh Mufid are separately offered in specialized library of Shaykh Mufid.
- In selection of the books, we have tried on the one hand to offer a complete list of references to the researchers so that they can count on the software as a comprehensive reliable source to support their works; and on the other hand the students and amateur users who are interested in hadiths can access the translations and expositions of main references so that they would not face any misunderstanding in the concept of hadiths. In other words, the present program is to meet the demands of people from different social strata who are interested in hadith.
- What is presented in this program is not the complete list of selected references. Due to the long process of typing and correcting the books, the rest of references will be included in the upcoming versions. Needless to say, your constructive suggestions will help us with completing this list.

Software content

• Full text of 427 books within 1142 volumes including Shiite traditional resources along with their translations and explanations on such subjects as:
-Du`as and Ziyarats
-Islamic ethics
-History
-Interpretation of the Holy Quran
-Hadith collections
-Jurisprudence
-Merits of Ahl al-Bayt (PBUT)
-Theology
-Rijal
• Display of translations and explanations alongside the original texts
• Accessibility to interpretation of Quranic verses through hadiths
• Valuable information concerning books, authors, codicology of the books
• 10 Arabic and Farsi dictionaries in 62 volumes