<![CDATA[The Qur'an and the Sunnah, as the two primary sources of Islamic law, continue to present interpretive challenges that contribute to scholarly disagreements. One notable example concerns the prophetic traditions (hadith) on ru'yat al-hilal (crescent moon sighting) for determining the beginning of the Islamic lunar month. An examination of Sahih Muslim (Al-Maktabah Al-Shamilah edition) reveals significant textual variation among the narrations. Eight traditions (Nos. 5, 10–16) either omit the term ru'yah or its lexical derivatives, or preserve alternative textual formulations, while ten traditions (Nos. 3, 4, 6–9, and 17–20) explicitly employ the term ru'yah and its related expressions. These textual differences correspond to the diversity of transmission chains (isnad). Ideally, the available narrations should produce no more than two principal textual forms, reflecting their original transmission from the two primary Companions, Abu Hurairah and Ibn ʿUmar. However, the existing multiplicity of textual variants obscures the originality of the transmitted wording. Regardless of the long-standing debate over the permissibility of transmitting hadith by meaning (riwāyah bi al-maʿnā), historical evidence demonstrates that the Prophet's diverse practical precedents (fiʿliyyah), together with differences in narrators' interpretive capacities and transmission tendencies across various isnads, have contributed to the emergence of multiple textual versions of the same hadith. Consequently, these textual variations have generated diverse legal interpretations and understandings within the Islamic scholarly tradition.]]>
