Living Hadith at the Boundary of Canon: The Panjang Mulud Tradition in Cilegon, Indonesia

Existing studies of living hadith in Indonesia have largely examined how canonically attested hadith are reinterpreted and embodied in social practice. Less understood is how communities receive and enact prophetic sayings that fall outside the canonical hadith corpus. This study addresses that gap through an ethnographic study of the Panjang Mulud tradition in Pangabuan Village, Cilegon, Banten. Using Husserlian phenomenology, data were gathered through observation and semi-structured interviews with religious leaders, community leaders, government officials, a santri, and younger participants, then analyzed thematically across these groups. The findings show that while practices of shalawat, charity, and love for the Prophet draw on hadith recorded in al-Tirmidhī, al-Bukhārī, and Muslim, the community’s motivation for spending wealth during the celebration is instead traced to a saying attributed to the Prophet and reportedly sourced by informants to Madārij al-Su’ūd, transmitted orally and without a canonical isnad. This study argues that in such cases, living hadith operates at the boundary between canonical and non-canonical prophetic tradition, where communal conviction and practiced meaning outweigh textual authentication, independently of this study’s own verification of the saying’s status. The study contributes to living hadith scholarship by showing that a community's practical treatment of a saying as hadith, and that saying’s canonical status, can operate as two independent variables rather than two descriptions of the same fact, and by documenting, through the figure of a santri who examined and then set aside the saying's textual uncertainty, that this independence can itself be reached through deliberate, informed judgement rather than only through unexamined conviction.