ما هي أسباب تدوين السنة؟

The recording of the Sunnah began with narrators documenting their narrations in written form as early as the Prophet's era, to ensure their preservation from oblivion. An example of this is what Abu Hurairah narrated concerning Abdullah ibn Amr's writing of hadith.

During the era of the Companions and the senior Tabi'un (successors), some of them would write down certain narrations, but the Sunnah was not compiled into comprehensive works. This was due to two reasons: 1. Preservation of the Holy Quran: Fearing that it might be abandoned or mixed with something from the Sunnah. 2. Strong Memory: At that time, the Sunnah was limited, and the Arabs were people of strong memory. The Sunnah was not like the Quran, whose wording itself was a form of worship; rather, it was its meanings. Thus, it was sufficient for each Companion to know some of it and inquire when needed.

Thereafter, especially in the second Hijri century, a pressing need arose to record the Sunnah in books and compilations, due to changing circumstances, the proliferation of Sunan (plural of Sunnah), and the successive deaths of scholars. Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz feared the disappearance of knowledge and the passing of scholars. Furthermore, the Sunnah began to include the fatwas (religious verdicts) of the Companions and Tabi'un, the chains of narration became longer and more numerous, and the doctrines of innovators spread, along with the emergence of falsehood in narration.

This prompted the imams of Hadith and Sunnah to collect what they possessed of the Sunan into special compilations to preserve and disseminate them. The first to collect these were Al-Rabi' ibn Sabih and Sa'id ibn Abi Arubah. There might have been specific reasons for each compilation, as was the case with Al-Bukhari in compiling "Al-Jami' Al-Sahih," and Ahmad ibn Hanbal in working on "Al-Musnad" to serve as an authoritative reference in cases of disagreement regarding the Sunnah.