Linguistically the word hadith in Arabic has multiple meanings and usages, such as “quotation”, “narrative”, “story”, “incidence”, “experience”, or “tradition”. In the Islamic terminology, the word hadith indicates quotations of the Exalted Messenger Mohammad, our salutes on him. There are numerous books containing 100s and 1000s of ahadith or quotations that have been assigned to the Holy Prophet. According to a famous Islamic scholar, Abdul Haq Muhaddis Dehlawi, the number of recognized books of ahadith is more than fifty, which embrace more than one million quotations. But even the most authentic books are not free from narratives that have been wrongly attributed to the Holy Prophet.
An Important Principle
It must be born in mind that the following two situations are as different as black and white:
1) 1) “Quotation of the Holy Prophet” will mean something the Prophet actually said
and
2) 2) “A quotation attributed to the Holy Prophet”
It is easy to understand that no true Muslim can disagree with the first situation. Anyone questioning or being skeptical about situation number two will not be denying the Holy Messenger’s word. What he is saying is that Mohammad, our salutes on him, would not have said this and the narrator is in error. Such a person cannot be accused of being a denier of hadith. He is being critical of the reporters.
Another Important Point
Even non-Muslim scholars such as Bernard Shaw, Sir William Muir and Thomas Carlysle agree that the Holy Qur’an is the Word of God and that it was committed to writing during the life of the Exalted Messenger. The Qur’an bears internal evidence to that effect when it begins, “This is a book in which there is no doubt.” (And it removes all doubt.) On the other hand, the collections of ahadith were compiled after Mohammad (SA) passed on and in most cases, the interval encompasses centuries.
How Do We Check the Authenticity of Ahadith?
All ahadith have been written through chains of narrators. These chains comprise of several links of reporters, in many instances, more than ten. When our scholars sit down to check on a reported hadith, their research begins and ends at one point. That is whether the narrator is reliable or not. People named in a particular hadith, were they real or fictitious, when were they born, why were they born, where did a particular storyteller live, when did he die, what was his temperament, how good was his memory, was his beard long enough, was he the son of a bondwoman, or his mother was divorced. One was caught listening to music. Another one was seen drinking date-wine. He was seen drinking water with his left hand, and another was conducting ablution with the right hand, etc.
Dr. Henry Springer of Austria, and Dr.John Gibbs of Britain, the great orientalists, noted this massive chaos among Muslim scholarship. They comment that Muslim scholars proudly claim that they have preserved the names of 500,000 narrators. The dilemma is that the same narrator who is perfectly reliable in the eyes of two scholars is totally unreliable and curseworthy according to ten others. Muslim scholars, for centuries, have been going through this mental punishment. They might well have invented 500,000 gods.
Sectarianism in Islam
A simple observation of books written by our historians and muhadditheen makes it plain that these are the people behind sectarian divisions in Islam. The narrators of one sect are called fabricators by another. To view the picture at a large scale, just one example will be enough: while Sunnis consider Bukhari and Muslim ahadith as the most authentic books, Shias reject that notion and consider Nehjul Balagha and Al-Kafi as the most trustworthy sources.
Criteria of Authenticity
Let us briefly examine what criteria scholars have used to examine the massive body of ahadith:
1) 1) The most common practice has been a review and critique of the narrators. I prefer to call it post-mortem scholastic exam. The impossibility of the success of this approach has already been discussed briefly.
2) 2) Many Sufis try to authenticate or dismiss history and tradition based upon clairvoyance or kashf and ilham. The best example of this phenomenon is provided by Shah Waliullah, who in the 18th century compiled forty ahadith stating that the Holy Prophet came to him and said this and did that. He took one step further when he tried to portray his meeting with the Holy Prophet as a physical experience. He claims to have retained some hair from the Holy Prophet during these imaginary visits. What is more amazing is that hundreds of Islamic scholars have promoted these experiences of Waliullah with reverence. Even a title has been given to these supposed forty encounters: “The 40 Pearls”.
3) 3) Evaluation of a hadith could not escape the mysterious “Ilmul Manam”, which means the “Knowledge of Dreams”. Many Mullas and Sufis claimed to have seen the Prophet and his companions in their dreams and received their guidance. They also ventured to interpret their own dreams and kashf to help sort and sift various ahadith. The Andalusi (Moorish Spain) school under the leadership of Sheikh Moinuddin Ibne Arabi, played in this field according to their own rules.
4) 4) Another criterion was projected by claimants to prophethood. This is well illustrated by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian. He claimed visits from angels of revelation during the last 19 years of his life. He presented his “revelations” as equally authentic and authoritative as the Holy Qur’an and called the whole body of ahadith a “magician’s bag”. He said, “Anything can be taken out or thrown away from this magician’s bag.”
5) 5) The knowledge of asma arrajal. In the first few centuries, numerous Muslim and non-Muslim scholars tried to devise scientific means of analyzing the one million ahadith. Many modern scholars believe that they completely failed in their pursuit. Without going into much detail it is enough to realize that Imam Bukhari, considered the greatest muhaddith of all-time, reportedly came across 600,000 Prophetic sayings and using his own judgement, kept 2,800, and discarded the rest. The Imam Kallini collection, Al-Kafi, out of a similar number chose 16,000 but the book itself claims that only 5,000 of these can be considered trustworthy. No one has had the courage to venture into naming those 5,000. In short, the science of asma arrajal is not a science at all. It is mere conjecture. All it deals with is whether a particular hadith has one narrator or
multiple, does the chain have any weak links, do any of the reporters believe in a different school of thought, and so on.
6) 6) The most popular Mulla of the 20th century, Maudoodi, came out with his own branded principle. He claimed that the only rightful scholar who can research a hadith would be the one who would inherently be mizaj shenase Rasul, someone who understands the mindset of the Holy Prophet. In other words, any hadith that Maudoodi would feel authentic should be considered as such.
7) 7) The end result of the above criteria used so far is that they have failed to bring up unanimity and agreement between scholars and sects of Islam. Therefore, different scholars and sects and even the masses tend to accept only those ahadith that fit into their dogmas and reject those that are otherwise.
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