Many people are unaware that Islam is not only a religion of one book (the Quran). The Quran is relatively short and is very repetitive. It is therefore not nearly detailed enough to tell Muslims what to believe or how to practice their faith. For this many Muslims turn to secondary collections called ahadith (traditions). These are supposedly based on oral retellings of traditions going back all the way to the time of Muhammad. Most of them were finally written down from about 200 years after the death of Muhammad. We are therefore expected to believe that a people with a book at the heart of their religion neglected to write down the doings and sayings of the prophet of that religion for seven full generations. Instead they chose to rely on oral transmission (again why would a people containing many literate persons do this?) in the ultimate game of high stakes Chinese Whispers. It is hard to overstate the importance of the hadith to Islam. Without the hadith Muslims would not know: To pray five times daily, how to perform the prayer ritual, how to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, about the five pillars, the words of the shahada (confession of faith) and a host of others aspects of Islam. Muslim scholars recognize the potential for corruption that could have occurred as the hadiths were transmitted and therefore class individual hadiths as weak (daif), hasan (good) and sound (sahih). The following hadiths are drawn from the two most important collections of Sunni hadith that are regarded as sound namely Sahih Muslim Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Judge for yourself if they are accurate in any sense. So we are left with a simple question. If these supposedly sound hadiths are unreliable why not the rest as well?
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 12:15:04 +0000