Re: Mutawatir Ahadith superceding Holy Quran's Ayats
I will try to put my best, here is a book i have been reading and finished around 3/4th of it the book is Studies in Early hadith literature by MM Azami, a scholary work written around 1970's.
Believe me its a scholarly work, and he has written this book for upto 150 years of AH. Its with references and acknowledged book now amongst the hadith students. Heard the reference from Shaikh Yasir Qadhi's speech regarding Ulum al Hadith.
This is how the book is divided (this is wrt age, time and date of birth and death of each of the scholars)
1) The writing and works of the companion - Thats around 50 companions writing it down and the last amongst the list is Zaid ibn Thabit, its ofcourse in alphabetical order.
2) Writings of the first century successors - Thats around 48 scholars.
3) Writings of from scholars covering early second centuries - Thats 87 scholars.
4) Writings of early second century scholars - Thats around 251 scholars.
The above all with references. Next to follow was the way of conducting the hadith there were many ways from memorizing, to writing the chain of narrators only in the start of the book, the teachers testing the students.
Thast like asking them from somewhere in between.
Then other ways of recording was one student or two students in the class used to write it down and others used to take it down.
Then there way a few scholars who were against some methodology. Infact the scholars an e.g. of Ahmed ibn hanbal just negated a hadith narrator because he used to not design the hadith and written it neatly.
But most important was memorizing and understanding the Quran and joined the muhaddith circle around or after twenty years old. Then they were various ways of writing it down and also memorizing in case of forgery.
I am actually reading the isnad and the ahadith part, so will get back.