In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Does the Hadith have a Solid Historical Basis?
in Hadith/Traditions
By Abdur Rab (email:
rab_abdur@yahoo.com)
An earlier adaption from some sections of a chapter in Abdur's book "Exploring Islam in a New Light".
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And among men are those who purchase idle HADITH (tales) without knowledge to mislead (men) from the Path of God, and make a mockery of it (God’s Path) [Quran, Luqman (31): 6]
Introduction
The Holy Quran is unquestionably the Divine Book of Islam. However, Muslims with some exceptions regard the Hadith as Islam’s second essential source. The Hadith and related literature[1] has greatly influenced Muslim beliefs and practices. However, all Muslims should dispassionately ask themselves this critically important question: Is the Hadith reliable enough as religious guidance? It is time this question was settled decisively for all of us, for if there is some doubt about the authenticity and credibility of the Hadith, the influence it exerts on Muslim beliefs and practices cannot be regarded as wholly welcome, if not totally unwelcome. Indeed many Muslim and non-Muslim scholars have questioned, and in contemporary times, are questioning, the historicity and authenticity of the Hadith. All Muslims should pay attention to what they have said or are saying. No doubt they represent the minority voice, most often due to the suppression of their views in the existing politico-religious conditions in Muslim countries. But the opinion of the majority is not always true. In fact, our Prophet was exhorted not to follow those who have no knowledge [Jathiya (45): 18], and he was specifically urged not to follow the majority, as they follow nothing but conjecture without any knowledge, and do nothing but lie:
If thou (O Muhammad) followed the most of those on earth, they would
have led thee far astray from the path of God. They follow naught but
conjecture; and they do naught but lie.” [An’am (6): 116]
The reader may ask a Muslim: Exactly when and how did the Hadith come? The usual answer is most likely to be: “I do not know.” The time when the Hadith compilations surfaced – particularly those in which Muslims have come to believe - is an important factor to be reckoned with, as it should have important implications for its religious significance for Muslims. It is striking that the compilations Muslims believe in appeared with a long time gap after the demise of the Prophet Muhammad – mostly during the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. (third and fourth centuries Hijrah or A.H.), i.e., between 220 and 270 years after the Prophet's death. The long time gap and other factors (see below) inevitably give rise to the question whether the Hadith literature is reliable enough. All Muslims, even including those who champion the Hadith, accept the fact that after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, false hadith reports about or attributed to the Prophet Muhammad “mushroomed” into hundreds of thousands. The compilations that were made more than two centuries after the Prophet’s death were done after sorting through mountainous piles of individual hadith reports. Bukhari, for example, made a selection of some seven thousand traditions (including repeated ones) out of reportedly six hundred thousand he found in circulation – roughly one out of every one hundred. That means that he discarded all but a tiny fraction of the hadith in circulation as false. This factor alone leaves open the question whether his selection has been foolproof. A similar question is true of the other compilers, too. It is time the true character or status of the Hadith in terms of its trustworthiness got properly reevaluated by every Muslim, for it is important for every Muslim that he relies on what is really fully reliable, and not on something that has a fragile basis.
The authenticity and veracity of the Hadith can be critically appraised along different lines – from a perspective as to whether there is any theological sanction for the Hadith, according to whether there is a solid or sound historical basis, and according to whether the hadith texts meet certain objective criteria such as whether they are consistent with the Quran, basic reason and historical and scientific truths. The author has attempted to cover all these issues in a book under preparation. Here only the historical basis of the Hadith is critically examined.
The Historical Basis of the Hadith
The historical basis of the Hadith is at best tenuous. Some of the historical points such as (1) the prohibition of the Prophet himself on hadith writing, and honoring of the same position by his immediate followers, (2) the long time gap between the Quran and the Hadith, and the accompanying lack of proper records of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet, and (3) flawed oral transmission due to weakness of the human sources, including their imperfect memories add well to effectively dismiss the Hadith altogether. To this list one may add (4) the influence of the ruling regimes, of people with wealth and power of the time, and of the disputing theologians on hadith collection, recording, selection and compilation, and finally (5) the weakness of the criteria used to judge authenticity of individual hadith texts.
The Position of the Prophet and His Immediate Followers
Historical evidence, if there is any, appears to be that the Prophet himself was against the reporting of his own sayings and practices, and his four close companions who became Caliphs after him upheld the same position. Kassim Ahmad notes: “Notwithstanding the conflicting versions of hadith that say otherwise, historical facts … prove beyond any shadow of doubt that there were no hadith collections existing at the time of the Prophet's death. History also proves that the early caliphs prevented the dissemination or recording of hadith.”[2]
The ulama take it for granted that the Prophet gave his blessing to the collection and writing of his hadith. Mazhar Kazi reports that in his farewell address the Prophet declared, “Convey to others even if it is a single verse from me.”[3] This is taken as a go-ahead for hadith dissemination. However, the statement here more meaningfully appears rather to point to the revealed Quranic verses, not his own words, since he was the messenger of God’s message and mercy for the whole universe [Qalam (68): 52; Anbiya (21): 107], and his message, which was nothing but the Quran, needed to be conveyed to all mankind.
The available evidence is rather compelling that the Prophet forbade collection and writing of his own words except the Quran and left clear direction that if anyone has collected and recorded such statements, these should be erased. This is evident from one hadith narration included in Muslim that reads as follows:
Abu Sa'id Khudri reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: Do not take down anything from me, and he who took down anything from me except the Quran, he should erase that and narrate from me, for there is no harm in it and he who attributed any falsehood to me-and Hammam said: I think he also said:" deliberately" -he should in fact find his abode in the Hell-Fire (Sahih Muslim, Book 042, Chapter 17, Number 7147).[4]
There are other similar hadith reports, e.g., one from Abu Dawud, and another from Taqyid by al-Baghdadi confirming the Prophet’s prohibition on hadith writing and direction for erasure of any hadith.[5] The ulamarecognize and accept the Prophet’s prohibition on hadith recording, but brush aside this prohibition by expressing the view that it was applicable for an initial period when the Quran was being revealed to avoid a possible mix-up of the Quranic verses with the Hadith. However, this sort of reasoning is unconvincing, since the Prophet did not explicitly mention this and since there is no evidence that the Prophet ever withdrew or cancelled his earlier discouragement of any hadith recording. Evidently, the Prophet was aware of the dangers of writing down Prophetic traditions beside the words of God and, as Guillaume reports, the Prophet did caution against hadith writing as such writings led people astray before.[6] Some may point out that taking recourse to the Hadith to prove that the Prophet gave no authority for the Hadith and that he rather discouraged it could be considered fallacious. Yet it does give the message that if the hadith about the Prophet’s prohibition on hadith writing is true, as it seemingly was, there remains no genuine basis for the rest of the Hadith literature to stand validated.
Whatever historical reports we seem to have about the position of the Khulafai-Rashidun (the Righteous Caliphs) on the Hadith suggest that they also discouraged its compilation. According to one report, the first Caliph Abu Bakr burned his own notes of hadith (said to be some 500), after being very uneasy about these notes.[7] “According to Jayrajpuri, because the Companions (of the Prophet) so often disagreed with one another Abu Bakr forbade the collection of hadith.”[8] Caliph Umar cancelled his initial plan to compile hadith, apprehending its possible adverse impact in the form of neglect of the Book of God – the Quran.[9] During his caliphate, “the problem of hadith forgery was so serious that he prohibited hadith transmission altogether.”[10] Umar reportedly also arranged for burning of all available hadith. The position of Uthman and Ali also appears to have been lack of any overt effort to collect any hadith for dissemination purposes.
Hazy or conflicting historical reports about developments in the early period of Islam notwithstanding, the fact remains that there were no written records of hadith during the Prophet’s lifetime and during the rule of the four Caliphs. This is despite the fact that “several documents of the Prophet, such as the Medina Charter or Constitution, his treaties and letters, had been written on his orders.”[11] This amply proves the point that if the Prophet had wished, he could have made arrangements for recording of his Hadith as a separate religious document, just as he did in the case of the Quran. The stark fact is that he did not wish such recording, and his discouragement of hadith recording was honored by the four Caliphs, and remained in force apparently for some thirty years after the Prophet’s death, but was ignored later. According to one report, a hadith in Abu Dawud, the Ummayad ruler Mu'awiya wanted a hadith to be written in the presence of one of the Prophet’s most noted scribes Zayd ibn Thabit, but when Zayd ibn Thabit reminded him of the Prophet’s prohibition on hadith writing, he (Mu'awiya) erased it.
As Iqbal notes in his seminal work The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, even Abu Hanifah, regarded as “one of the greatest exponents of Muhammedan Law in Sunni Islam … made practically no use of … traditions”, even though there were collections available at that time made by other people no less than thirty years before his death. Nor did he collect any hadith for his use, unlike his peers Malik and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal. Thus, according to Iqbal, “if modern Liberalism considers it safer not to make any indiscriminate use of them [traditions] as a source of law, it will be only following [the example of Abu Hanifah].”[12] “In reaction to a situation [where huge numbers of forged hadith reports were in circulation] that was virtually out of control, Abu Hanifa approached hadith with the assumption that very few could be proved sahih[authentic].”[13]
The Long Time Gap and the Lack of Proper Records of the Prophet’s Sayings and Deeds
We already noted that the Hadith surfaced more than two centuries after the Prophet’s death, which ifso facto means a long time gap between the Quran and the Hadith. This long time gap raises questions of reliability for the Hadith that can never be satisfactorily resolved. Muslim and non-Muslim historians and scholars all point out that there were no written records of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds during the first century after his death, and not much hadith writing – and not any hadith book that gained respectability later on by the Muslim community at large during the long two centuries after the Prophet’s death.[14] The Hadith literature that gained recognition such as that collected and compiled by Bukhari, Muslim, etc., came more than two hundred years after the Prophet’s death, and they were all based on oral transmission from generation to generation through chains of transmitters (isnads)numbering seven to even one hundred in the chain. A Herculean feat! Isn’t it? But hold your breath. Even written records of the past traditions were not good enough. As the historian MacDonald notes that one danger in written records “was evidently real … the unhappy character of the Arabic script, especially when written without diacritical points, often made it hard if not practically impossible, to understand such short, contextless texts as the traditions.”[15] “There was fierce opposition to the written records of traditions for a long time also on the theological ground that this would lead to too much honoring of the traditions and neglect of the Quran, a fear that was justified to a certain extent by the event.”[16]
The compilers of hadith (the muhaddithun), “no matter how dedicated, were simply too distant from the time of the Prophet, and forgery had become too rampant for authentic hadith to be recovered.”[17]Some anecdotes of the muhaddithun suggest that they could not prevent forged hadith from being circulated even in their own names.[18] Since the Hadith is known among Muslims as the words of the Prophet Muhammad and accounts of his deeds, it is quite natural that it would have a special sentimental value and appeal to them, especially to those who are unwary and unsuspecting believers. Unfortunately, however, the enemies of Islam and pseudo-Muslims who deliberately wanted to mislead Muslim believers and wanted to sabotage the propagation of true Islam have abused this sentimental value by attributing false statements or reports either to God or to His Prophet right from the Prophet’s lifetime. Evidence that there were such people who directed their efforts to diverting attention from the mainstream Islam and to causing dissension and divisions in the Muslimummah even during the Prophet’s lifetime is provided by the Quran itself in the following verses:
And there are those who put up a mosque by way of mischief and disbelief, and in order to cause dissension among the believers, and as an outpost for those who fought against God and His messenger before. They will indeed swear: ‘Our intention is nothing but good’; but God beareth witness that they are certainly liars. Never stand there (to pray). A mosque whose foundation was laid from the first day on piety is more worthy of your standing therein, wherein are men who love to purify themselves. God loveth those who purify themselves. [Tauba or Baraat (9): 106-107]
Here it refers to some people who put up a mosque to cause dissension among Muslims. Such people were evidently not well-meaning Muslims. Thus forgers had been active even during the Prophet’s lifetime. Forgery had been rampant during the caliphate of the Prophet’s immediate successors, and it “only increased under the Umayyads, who considered hadith a means of propping up their rule and actively circulated traditions against Ali and in favor of Mu'awiya. The Abbasids followed the same pattern, circulating Prophetic hadith which predicted the reign of each successive ruler. Moreover, religious and ethnic conflicts further contributed to the forgery of hadith.”[19]
It was during the rule of the Abbasids that Hadith compilation making a mark for the later Muslims was done in earnest. The first such compilation in the third century Hijrah was by al-Bukhari, who died in 257 A.H., whose book contains, as already mentioned, a selection of some seven thousand traditions (including repeated ones) out of reportedly six hundred thousand he found in circulation. Another contemporary compilation was by Muslim (d. 261 A.H.), which contains some four thousand selections out of some three hundred thousand. Other four compilations included in the so-called authentic six and written more or less towards the end of the third century Hijrah are by Abu Dawud as-Sijistani (d. 275 A.H), Ibn Maja (d. 303 A.H), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279 A.H) and an-Nasa'i (d. 303 A.H), which “deal almost entirely with legal traditions, those that tell what is permitted and what is forbidden, and do not convey information on religious and theological subjects.”[20]The compilations accepted by the Shiites came even later.
The big question is why did the compilations come after such an inordinately long lapse of historical time after the Prophet’s death? Kassim Ahmad legitimately asks: "Why was the official compilation not made earlier, especially during the time of the righteous caliphs when the first reporters, i.e., the eye witnesses, were still alive and could be examined?"[21] Because of the long time gap, one can hardly be sure beyond any shadow of doubt that the accounts are genuinely those of the Prophet Muhammad. How can one be so certain that the chain of narrators through the oral transmission has been successful in transmitting the same message ad verbatim from generation to generation, when even in the same generation, or say, even in the same year or month or day, people are often found unable to exactly reproduce one’s utterances? Even in the current electronic age, news reporters often find it hard, without proper recording, to reproduce the exact texts of what speakers say in their speeches. Even today, sometimes there are conflicting news reports of the same event, which may not be intentional lies on the part of the reporters. Note also that noticeable differences can be found in the compilations done by the different compilers – a factor that can also raise a question of credibility of the compilations...............
To be Continue ..........Insha Allah
