  The ahadith, prophetic traditions for the Muslims around the world, are
narrations originating from the sayings and the deeds of Prophet Muhammad
(pbuh). They are considered one of the fundamental sources of Islamic
legislation along with the Quran. The list of persons involved in the narration
of each hadith is carefully scrutinized by scholars studying the hadith, with
respect to their reputation and authenticity of the hadith. This is due to the
its legislative importance in Islamic principles. There were many narrators who
contributed to this responsibility of preserving prophetic narrations over the
centuries. But to date, no systematic and comprehensive study, based on the
social network, has been adapted to understand the contribution of early hadith
narrators and the propagation of hadith across generations. In this study, we
represented the chain of narrators of the hadith collection from Sahih Bukhari
as a social graph. Based on social network analysis (SNA) on this graph, we
found that the network of narrators is a scale-free network. We identified a
list of influential narrators from the companions as well as the narrators from
the second and third-generation who contribute significantly in the propagation
of hadith collected in Sahih Bukhari. We discovered sixteen communities from
the narrators of Sahih Bukhari. In each of these communities, there are other
narrators who contributed significantly to the propagation of prophetic
narrations. We also found that most narrators were centered in Makkah and
Madinah in the era of companions and, then, gradually the center of hadith
narrators shifted towards Kufa, Baghdad and central Asia over a period of time.
To the best of our knowledge, this the first comprehensive and systematic study
based on SNA, representing the narrators as a social graph to analyze their
contribution to the preservation and propagation of hadith.
