Islam critiqued exposes double standards; weak hadiths depict true Muhammad?

In answer to the video "Muhammad did it. Therefore it is not sinful."

Thats a very naive picture of what Muslims believe. First of all It is very compelling to read how the Quran says that it is itself the best hadith.

39:23"Allah has revealed the best HADITH, a book conformable in its various parts, repeating, whereat do shudder the skins of those who fear their Lord, then their skins and their hearts become pliant to the remembrance of Allah; this is Allah's guidance, He guides with it whom He pleases; and (as for) him whom Allah makes err, there is no guide for him"  

45:6"These are the communications of Allah which We recite to you with truth; then in what HADITH would they believe after Allah and His communications".

Anything besides that best hadith, Allah tells us that the rightly guided are those people who use their brains and reflect over them, following only the best and discarding what is inapplicable or that contradicts the Quran

39:18"Those who listen to the word (qawl or saying), then follow the best of it; those are they whom Allah has guided, and those it is who are the men of understanding".

The Quran contains such warning because

31:6"of men is he who takes instead frivolous hadith to lead astray from Allah's path without knowledge, and to take it for a mockery".

These verses warning to keep the best hadith and discard all frivolous and counterproductive talks, useless and misleading narratives, provide clear evidence that idle tales were even being disseminated at the Prophet's time. If this was then already a problem reaching such levels that the Quran had to correct it, then how much worse did the problem potentially manifest after the prophet's death? It further tells us to investigate thoroughly any information of importance related by an untrustworthy source 49:6.

Muslims are not required to accept whatever rumor and report is disseminated about their prophet or on his behalf, no matter who the narrator is. If the Quran itself plainly corrects its messenger in every day life, besides the prophet himself admitting to making mistakes in common affairs, how much so should one be prudent when deciding on the truthfulness of a story? Neither does the Quran request the outright dismissal of the report based on the unreliability of the source. It simply advises caution in the authentication process of the narration itself which doesnt only include reliability of the transmitor but also of the information in light of certain established facts.

For example all ahadith on a particular subject should be gathered together to form a better picture and establish a pattern, which will then become a criterion of authenticity. That is just common sense for anyone with a slightest spark of intellectual honesty, seeking to interject into a discussion occuring centuries ago, reported differently, through various angles and people in each repetition within a vast corpus.

This opens the way to the possibility that the source might be telling the truth despite its untrustworthiness. Hadith scholars mostly stress on scrutinizing the narrator and do not give much importance to scrutinizing the content of the report. It should also be noted, a few verses down in 49:12 it warns not to harbour ill thoughts of others who have not shown through their words or deeds any misapropriateness or imorality. People should first and foremost think well of one another, abandon the kind of outright suspicion and ill founded inquisitiveness (with harmful objectives).

Here are some major defects leading hadith scholars to either discard or view with caution certain reports, which happen to be mostly valued by the ignorant critics of Islam. The biggest red flag is when some of the numerous Muslim hypocrites (munafiqeen) whom the Quran repeatedly condemns and warns the true Muslims against 63:1-2, are detected in a chain of transmission. They were the ones who murdered the prophet's progeny shortly after his death. Another major source of corruption came from the early generations of Muslims themselves who in their zeal would embelish and exagerate reports in the prophet's favor. There is also manipulation from Islamic sects seeking to produce documentary evidence in favour of their views, forgeries by people with good intentions in order to admonish sinners and promote piety. Others narrators were motivated by tribal and regional prejudices, succession rivalries following the prophet's death.

Some had personal ambition such as pleasing a ruler by condoning certain acts of theirs through a supposed similar action by the prophet. It is interesting to read in a non-Muslim writing of the early 9th century, which is a little before the main hadith books were compiled, the Zuqnin Chronicle says of his contemporary Muslims

"They are a very covetous and carnal people, and any law, whether prescribed by Muhammad or another God-fearing person, that is not set in accord with their desire, they neglect and abandon. But what is in accord with their will and complements their desires, though it be instituted by one contemptible among them, they hold to it, saying: "This was appointed by the prophet and messenger of God, and moreover it was charged to him thus by God".

These same ones would attempt suppressing a potential spirit of revolt among the people by promoting the notions of determinism and predetermination. Some would lie on the spur of the moment to fit the forgery in a discussion and increase one's credibility. Differences among jurists prompted some scholars to fabricate traditions to support their own legal positions. Together with forgeries, there were omission and supression of true ahadith sometimes imposed through death threats by the rulers.

There were also Jewish myths, used by story-tellers, who would include them in their narrations. They wanted to answer the popular sense of curiosity in trivial, spiritualy inconsequential details in the lives and times of former prophets. These israeliyyat were mainly written by the early converts from the people of the book. Under Abubakr's caliphate for instance, Abdullah bin ‘Amr bin ‘Aas, an ex-Jew took possession of many books gathered by the Byzantine Christians following the battle of Yarmouk, and he would use the informatiom therein to comment on certain Quran passages and disseminated many of the stories among the Muslims, which would be used by later comentators. The technical term itself was not used systematicaly before Ibn Kathir. Although before him, the Andalusian exegete, Abu bakr Ibn al-Arabi mentionned it. Ibn Taymiyya, the mentor of Ibn Kathir, and Ibn Taymiyya's contemporary al-Tufi discussed israeliyyat before Ibn Kathir. Keeping in mind the existence of so many published and unpublished tafsirs, it is virtually impossible to identify the commentator who was the first user of the term israeliyyat in a technical sense. These reports have been always understood as an amalgam of truth and falsehood. The Muslim story tellers would take for basis the Quranic text, then add the Jewish traditions from the converts where they deemed it most fit, resulting in a commentary that is neither Quranic nor Jewish. Some other Muslims became influenced by non-Muslims and their scriptures, implementing non-Muslim standards and customs as Islamic traditions with no relation to the Quran, true traditions of the Prophet or Islamic philosophy.

One other thing to be kept in mind is that many of the early writers, particularily the seera writers such as Ibn Ishaq, Tabari, Al Waqidi, Ibn Saad were concerned by amassing and compiling all the material available or what was being talked about, surrounding any historical event or in comment to a verse, fearing they could be lost, without authenticating them. This shows the integrity of the Muslim tradition that did not seek to supress any information related to the life of the prophet and the early Muslims, nor invent things so as to advance their agenda. Such an endeavour would have been close to impossible to achieve anyway. There never was a centralized system of collecting information. Each narrator and historian took whatever was available to him, in his time and place. These historians, after gathering all that was floating around in oral tradition in regards an event of interest, would in the same time write down as many names among the chain of narrators as they could, so as to leave time and room for the specialists whose life was dedicated to sifting through the reliable and unreliable reports. They did not even attempt to examine the various reports in order to inform the reader of what they considered to be the reasons for various incidents. The biographers this way avoided taking responsibility for adopting a particular account when conflicting reports existed. Adopting specific accounts would mean discrediting the authenticity of other reporters and their accounts. And since was not their expertize, they preferred leaving it to the muhaddithun. When the experts finished selecting the authentic reports, the remainders were neither physically destroyed nor erased. They were instead kept as examples of what constitutes a weak narration, for future references and studies. That is the difference between the Muslim tradition and the Judeo-Christian one that shamelessly accepts within its authentic collection of writings the most ridiculous and insulting things about God and the prophetic history, without any critical consideration for either the chain of transmission or the soundness of the content of a tradition. Neither do the Muslims take at face value the reports that over exalt the prophet and the early Muslims. If after deliberation they were deemed weak or unreliable, they were kept nevertheless if there was any moral lesson to derive from them. These weak and rejected narrations are well known to the Muslims, although the misinformed, unqualified critics of Islam make ample use of them to serve their anti Islamic propaganda machine.

These historians thus left the authentication process to the following generations in search of the truth. The famous historian Tabari for instance says in introduction to his work that his primary duty was to faithfully transmit whatever information he could gather, the responsibility is then on the reader or listener to verify not only the authenticity of the reports based on the transmitters' reliability, but also based on reason. As a case in point, the statement 'za'ama or za'amu often precedes Ibn Ishaq's reports implying the inherent caution of something being 'alleged'. This should make it clear for any sincere enquirer that there is more than a hint of a caution that the veracity of the statement he compiles is not necessarily determined as fact. Many narratives are this way injected with Arabic terms by the historians transmitting them, suggesting caution for the reader to undertake. Technically speaking, a seera book is a collection of reports about the prophet and his companions arranged in a chronoligical order with little attention given to reliability. The goal being to have as little gaps in time as possible.