ABSTRACT
The Divine Saying, or so-called hadith qudsi, is the most common name given those non-qur'anic words of God that were preserved in the form of hadith reports early in the history of Islam. This genre of Hadith has heretofore largely been treated in modern scholarship as a late Islamic phenomenon and thus has never been studied as an artifact for the history of early Islam. The present piece is a modest effort at laying this groundwork of understanding of the history of the Divine Saying in interpretation and use. Islamic-studies scholarship in the West has devoted relatively little attention to the phenomenon of the Divine Saying. The apparent want of any formal term for the Divine Saying as a particular type of report until relatively late is further borne out by the absence of any such designation in the oldest manuals of the "sciences of Tradition" or the early Arabic lexicons.
