How Uswa checks every hadith before it becomes a habit

Uswa asks you to change something small in your day because the Prophet ﷺ did it or taught it. That only works if you can trust the source. So here is exactly what happens before a Sunnah reaches the app or this site.

1. Three collections, nothing else

Every habit comes from Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, or Jami at-Tirmidhi.

Tirmidhi's narrations vary in strength, so we use one only when al-Albani grades it sahih or hasan sahih and no grader in the edition calls it weak, fabricated, munkar or shadh. That rule isn't left to memory: the build that produces the app's content and these pages checks it, and a narration that fails can't get through.

2. One narration, one small action

A habit is one action tied to one moment: "When you finish wudu, say the shahada." If a narration mentions three actions, it becomes three habits. If several narrations support one action, the habit cites them all.

Sometimes a narration praises an action without saying when or how often. Then we may suggest a routine, and we label it "Uswa's suggestion" on the habit. We never invent the action, and we never write that the Prophet ﷺ did something regularly unless the narration says so.

3. Every habit is reviewed by hand

Each proposed habit is read side by side with its narration: the action, the moment, the wording, the reference. Then it is approved, sent back, or dropped.

An approval covers that exact version. If a word changes later, even a small one, the habit goes back for review and comes off the site until it's approved again. That's why the number of Sunnahs on uswaapp.com sometimes goes down as well as up.

4. A mistake we caught

Early on, our first data set had Arabic texts attached to the wrong narrations: the reference said one hadith, while the Arabic belonged to another. We didn't patch it. We stopped using that Arabic and rebuilt every text from the hadith editions, matched by number, so that the Arabic, the translation and the reference always describe the same narration.

5. The full text, on every page

Every Sunnah page shows the narration in Arabic with its translation and reference. Every narration also has its own page, with the chain of narration where we have it, the grading, and a link to sunnah.com so you can check it yourself. See an example.

The texts come from the open hadith-api project (public domain). The English is by Muhsin Khan (Bukhari) and Abdul Hamid Siddiqui (Muslim). Where the edition doesn't name a translator, we say so rather than guess. We quote word for word. The only changes are showing the salutation as ﷺ and, in a few Turkish texts, fixing obvious typesetting errors, which those pages point out.

6. What isn't a ruling

Uswa starts you with three habits, pauses at 21 practices to let you choose what's next, and forgives one missed day in seven. These are product choices to keep things small and kind. They aren't religious rulings, and they aren't research findings.

Found a mistake?

Write to hello@uswaapp.com with the page and the reference. We check every report against the source.

You can read how this works in more detail on our sources page, or pick a Sunnah and start tonight.