Sunna and Hadith

Sunna, in the earliest usage, denotes normative precedent or established practice generally — a term already in use in pre-Islamic Arabia for tribal custom, applied by the earliest Islamic legal writing to living, communally transmitted practice not necessarily anchored to a specific textualized Prophetic report. Hadith, by contrast, is a discrete literary genre with its own compilational history, reaching canonical form only in the 3rd/9th century. Both traditionalist and source-critical scholarship agree that Sunna-as-living-practice preceded Hadith-as-literary-genre; how much continuity of actual content there was between the two remains a live and largely unresolved scholarly question.