"never mind how I feel, how did Muhammad feel?"

Submitted by Lactantius Jr (United Kingdom), Jan 28, 2009 at 05:11

To Amin Razaque

Your cheap shot at me is poor stuff, and has no bearing on the truth claims of Islam.

Saying the Sahi Hadith contains "mistakes" surprises me coming from a Muslim, because Bukhari (Abu `Abdullah Muhammad ibn Isma'il ibn Ibrahim ibn al-Mughira al-Ja'fai, 810-870 A.D.), the famous commentator and collector of hadiths, discarded much of what he collected, in an attempt to make his collection line up with the Qur'an. His collection is known as Sahih (authentic) Bukhari, said to be a result of sixteen years of labour. al-Bukhari was one of the first to also compile traditions that stresses the marks of 'authentic' traditions, namely the long chains of narrators (isnad), it being said he only wanted to record authentic traditions. Out of 600,000 hadiths that he examined, he accepted only 7,397 as authentic (some others say 2,602, 9,082 with repetition). Of the more than 590,000 hadith he rejected, plenty of those he accepted as authentic, don't exactly flatter Islam and Muhammad its prophet.

The second most famous hadith collection amongst Sunni Muslims, is the Sahi Muslim collection. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (817-874 AD), collecting, like Bukhari, large numbers of hadith, and rejecting most of them, collecting it is said, 300,000 and rejecting 296,000 of them, accepting 4,000 based on stringent acceptance criteria, checking each hadith for its compatibility with the Qur'an, painstakingly establishing its chain of narrators.

Muslims never claimed to collect all authentic hadith, trying to collect only those on which Muslims agreed on about their accuracy.

With Muhammad dying in 632 AD, the Sahi hadith collections therefore, date at some 200 years after Muhammad's death, and that time interval doesn't lend itself to accuracy of the hadith collections, does it? and with the Qur'an dating from around 650 years after Jesus Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, puts it much further away from the events surrounding the Lord Jesus Christ's birth, life, death and resurrection from the dead, than the Qur'an.

Why should the Qur'an be accepted as a more trustworthy historical record, rather than the Bible?

With kind regards and best wishes

Lactantius Jr

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