Hadith Trivia
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48 free Hadith trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Hadith are the reports of what the Prophet Muhammad said, did and approved, and for fourteen centuries Muslims have argued about which ones to trust. The answer was a whole science: chains of narrators traced link by link, biographies of thousands of transmitters, and a vocabulary of grades that still decides what is quoted from the pulpit. These 48 questions cover the canon and the people behind it: the men who travelled across Central Asia and Iraq to sift hundreds of thousands of reports into a few thousand, the Shia scholars who built their own Four Books, the students who added forty-hadith primers and vast commentaries, and the modern critics who re-graded everything. Along the way they test the grading terms, the most prolific narrators and the wording of the reports themselves, from the first line of Bukhari to the hadith of the cloak. It suits a mosque study circle, a religious studies class, a family Ramadan quiz or anyone who has quoted a hadith and wondered who wrote it down. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a group.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Abu Hurayrah, a Daws tribesman who joined the Prophet in 629, had a kunya meaning father of which animal?
Kitten
Kitten: by his own account he kept a small kitten to play with while tending his people's flock, and so they called him Abu Hurayrah.
Q 02Which trade did the hadith critic Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani, born in Shkodër in 1914, practise in Damascus?
Watchmaker
Watchmaker was his trade, but al-Albani was arrested twice in Syria and eventually left the country for Jordan.
Q 03Sahih al-Bukhari opens with a report, also first in al-Nawawi's Forty, saying the reward of deeds depends on what?
Intentions
Intentions: 'the reward of deeds depends upon the intentions', so a migration made for a woman's hand counts only as that. Umar ibn al-Khattab is its narrator.
Q 04In the hadith of Gabriel, asked about ihsan, the Prophet says to worship God how?
As if you see Him
As if you see Him, the Prophet replied; once the visitor had gone, he revealed that the stranger was Gabriel, come to teach them their religion.
Q 05In the hadith of Gabriel, one sign of the Hour is barefoot, destitute goat-herds competing with one another in what?
Constructing tall buildings
Constructing tall buildings is one sign, yet asked when the Hour would come, the Prophet said the one questioned knew no more about it than the questioner.
Q 06Which wife of the Prophet is credited with narrating more than 2,000 hadiths?
Aisha
Aisha also corrected other Companions: told of a report that the dead are punished for their families' wailing, she said the Prophet meant they suffer for their own sins.
Q 07Ibn Abbas's report of the dying Prophet asking for writing materials is remembered as the calamity of which day?
Thursday
Thursday: Umar objected that the Prophet was gravely ill and God's Book was enough, the gathering fell to quarrelling, and the Prophet told them to leave him.
Q 08In the Hadith of Position, said at the Tabuk expedition, Muhammad told Ali he was to him as who was to Moses?
Aaron
Aaron: Ali, left in charge of Medina, asked if he was being left behind with the women and children, and the Prophet reassured him, adding that no prophet would come after him.
Q 09Sahih Muslim 223, reported by Abu Malik al-Ash'ari, declares which quality to be 'half of faith'?
Cleanliness
Cleanliness is half of faith, the report begins, and it ends by warning that every person sets out each day selling his soul, either freeing it or ruining it.
Q 10Sahih Muslim 2664, from Abu Hurayrah, calls which kind of believer 'better and more lovable to Allah'?
The strong
The strong believer is preferred to the weak, though there is good in both, and the report urges believers to seek what benefits them and ask Allah for help.
Q 11In al-Nawawi's Forty Hadith, a man asks the Prophet for counsel and is told not to do what?
Become angry
Become angry was the one thing the Prophet warned against: each time the man asked again for counsel, he gave him the very same answer.
Q 12What does the title of al-Nawawi's Riyad as-Salihin, his book of hadiths on conduct and piety, mean?
Gardens of the Righteous
Gardens of the Righteous was compiled by a scholar bold enough to confront the Mamluk sultan Baybars, pressing him to ease heavy taxes on the people of Damascus.
Q 13Which country saw the Ahl al-Quran movement, which rejected hadiths as a source of law, arise in the early 1900s?
India
Q 21Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, compiler of Sahih Muslim, came from which city in what is now Iran?
Nishapur
Nishapur was the home of Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, whose Sahih was at first attacked by the critic Abu Zur'a al-Razi, yet came to rank second only to al-Bukhari's.
Q 22Driven into exile late in life, al-Bukhari died in 870 in Khartank, a village near which city?
Samarkand
Samarkand was near Khartank, where al-Bukhari went after a governor forced him out for refusing to come and teach at the palace.
Q 23In a hadith from Tamim al-Dari in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet says 'the religion is' what?
Sincere advice
Sincere advice, the Prophet explained, is owed to God, His Book and His Messenger, and to the Muslims' leaders and their common folk.
India was where the movement took root; in Egypt, a physician made much the same case in a 1906 article titled 'Islam is the Quran Alone'.
Q 14Hadith scholars split every report into the chain of narrators and the narrative itself; what is the narrative called?
Matn
Matn is the text, yet early hadith critics rarely rejected a report for what its text said, judging it mainly by the narrators in its chain.
Q 15Which grade means a hadith's chains are too many for collusion, like the warning on lying about the Prophet?
Mutawatir
Mutawatir status had no agreed threshold: scholars disputed how many narrators each generation needed, with estimates running from a handful to seventy or more.
Q 16Which grade, below sahih and hasan, do scholars give a hadith whose chain is broken or whose narrator is criticised?
Da'if
Da'if means weak, and the modern scholar al-Albani drew criticism for re-grading hadiths, even questioning some that al-Bukhari and Muslim had accepted.
Q 17Which term do hadith critics use for a report they judge to be forged?
Mawdu'
Mawdu' reports turned up even in the canonical Sunan Ibn Majah, among them reports praising particular towns, the compiler's own home town included.
Q 18Which term describes a hadith in which a Successor says 'the Prophet said', skipping the Companion who heard it?
Mursal
Mursal reports were treated so warily that critics refused even those of al-Zuhri, one of the most eminent early scholars of hadith.
Q 19Anas ibn Malik narrates a hadith: none of you truly believes until he wants for his brother what?
What he loves for himself
What he loves for himself, the report says, and its narrator Anas ibn Malik had been given to the Prophet as a servant by his mother at about ten.
Q 20What is a hadith called when the Prophet quotes God, as in the report where God forbids Himself injustice?
Qudsi
Qudsi reports quote God, but many scholars hold that, unlike the Quran, they convey His meaning in the Prophet's own words.
Q 24Which compiler from Sistan, who settled in Basra and died in 889, chose the 4,800 hadiths of his Sunan from some 500,000?
Abu Dawud
Abu Dawud flagged seriously weak reports in his Sunan, and said a believer needed only four hadiths, including one on leaving alone what does not concern you.
Q 25Which pupil of al-Bukhari, blind in later life, wrote the Shama'il on the Prophet's person and character?
Al-Tirmidhi
Al-Tirmidhi's blindness was said to come from excessive weeping, and his Jami', one of the six books, notes the status of the weaker reports it includes.
Q 26Termez, home town of a compiler of the six books who died in 892, lies in which modern country?
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan's Termez, on the Oxus, still had about a thousand Buddhist monks shortly before the Muslim conquest.
Q 27Which compiler of the six books died in 915 after a Damascus mob beat him over a lecture on Ali's virtues?
Al-Nasa'i
Al-Nasa'i's shorter Sunan, al-Mujtaba, abridged from a larger work he admitted held weak reports, is the version counted among the six books.
Q 28Sunan Ibn Majah, ranked sixth of the Sunni six books, was compiled by a scholar born in 824 in which Iranian city?
Qazvin
Qazvin was home to Ibn Majah, whose Sunan long trailed the other five books, criticised for the many weak reports it contains.
Q 29Which scholar, who died in 1113, included Sunan Ibn Majah among the six books in his index of their hadiths?
Ibn al-Qaysarani
Ibn al-Qaysarani's six-book canon won acceptance only slowly, and in the Muslim west Ibn Majah's Sunan was never recognised as one of them.
Q 30Which book did Ibn al-Athir and others count as the sixth canonical book in place of Sunan Ibn Majah?
Al-Muwatta
Al-Muwatta lost out largely because most of its important reports already appear in the other books, while Ibn Majah's Sunan added more new material.