In answer to the video "The Most Ignorant Quran Verse"
Hadith books, are based upon oral tradition and oral tradition in any culture, precedes the writing of that tradition. All history is a 'written' attestation to an ORAL tradition, meaning written word comes AFTER THE FACT. Just because pre-Islamic history became written down after a certain time period does not predicate it never existed. History did not fail to exist, because it was not written down. Many times the reporters themselves admitted that in the transmission process, they paid little regard to truth and falsehood.
That is why we find reports about the prophet ranging from overly flattering to slanderous.
In both cases, Muslims do not just accept a report or reject it at face value, but scrutinize it through various meticulous angles so as to arrive to a decent level of certainty. The ahadith, although a secondary source of religious guidance, went through an authentication process that the major scriptures of Christianity and Judaism cannot even hope for, let alone their secondary sources. That authentication process of the ahadith is still open even today, with ahadith seen in the past as undisputed but now downgraded to a lower level of certainty. No writing in the history of mankind received a divine pledge of protection other than the Quran. Anything else is open to human error.
An important thing to be kept in mind, as already said, 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. When the selecting process was finished, the discarded reports werent physically destroyed and erased, but 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment