In structuring your literature review, the below is a helpful guide, but you don’t necessarily need to follow it exactly. The main thing is to show your familiarity with the academic conversations surrounding your topic, and this is just one effective way to do that. I: Introduction.This should introduce the topic, and you may wish to simply restate your main research question before jumping off into the discussion of what you’ve been reading. II: Summary of arguments. Give a series of very short (three to four sentences) descriptions of the most essential arguments of each work: what would appear on the back cover of the book, or the abstract of the article, for instance. III: Strengths and Weaknesses. In each paragraph, along with the summaries of the works, you may wish to compare strengths and weaknesses. You can group together works in paragraphs in various different ways. For instance, all your works in one paragraph might have similar strengths and similar shortcomings; and at the end of the paragraph, you can highlight this. Or, you may group together one work with another that addresses or even critiques any shortcomings that you identify in the first. IV: Compare strengths across the works. What are the merits of the arguments overall in the field? What do these works help you understand as a whole? How do some works satisfy you more than others, and why? V: Compare weaknesses across the works. Are there any persistent patterns you can identify that all the works seem to fall into, but that leaves you dissatisfied? Here is a place for you to suggest a future research agenda designed to address these
patterns, and intervene with your own work. And that’s exactly what you will be doing, in your final essay!VI: Conclusion. This should sum up all the above, and pull a common thread out of it. This common thread should be the same as in your introduction. In structuring your literature review, the below is a helpful guide, but you don’t necessarily need to follow it exactly. The main thing is to show your familiarity with the academic conversations surrounding your topic, and this is just one effective way to do that.
patterns, and intervene with your own work. And that’s exactly what you will be doing, in your final essay!VI: Conclusion. This should sum up all the above, and pull a common thread out of it. This common thread should be the same as in your introduction. In structuring your literature review, the below is a helpful guide, but you don’t necessarily need to follow it exactly. The main thing is to show your familiarity with the academic conversations surrounding your topic, and this is just one effective way to do that.
Refer to these readings to use as sources in the essay!
Scheiner, ‘Hadith and Sunna’. Berg (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Early Islam. London: Routledge, 2018.
Pavlovitch, ‘Ḥadīth’, Encyclopaedia of Islam. Three.
Kamali, ‘Hadith’. Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd ed.), 2005.
Saeed, ‘The Sunna of the Prophet’. Islamic Thought. London: Routledge, 2006.
Brown, ‘The Authenticity Question: Western Debates over the Historical Reliability of Prophetic Traditions’. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 197-239.
