Islamic Methods and Sources

Submitted by Insight (United Kingdom), Jul 10, 2010 at 07:50

Muslims have great difficulty saying yes and no and more often than not refuse to hear what is being said. If we take the case of murder/execution of Jews in Medina they will claim we know this from Muslim sources therefore we have to accept every Muslim source. Always it is nice to have non-Muslim sources as corroboration but if they don't exist we must look at what we do have. In general if we are diligent we get our information from original sources if we can get access to them, scholarly articles, books and so on and invariably we will come to different conclusions even over what the facts are never mind the interpretation. However, that is a perfectly scholarly and reasonable way to proceed for anyone.

For example I can go to the Royal Asiatic Society, I can get a copy of Ibn Ishaq's biography of the prophet, I can study Hadith, I can look at Islamic sciences and so on. The difficulty with Islamic accounts from an historical perspective is that they are more often that not mixed up with the supernatural and therefore outside of any possible corroboration. So if Ibn Ishaq says Mohamed led a battle or went to this or that place then there may well be eye witness accounts and even an aesthetic person can subscribe to the notion that it occurred or might have occurred. Though Muslims when it suits them will say Ibn Ishaq did not use foolproof methods. So to me the mistake they make is to say we have a solid chain of reliable narrators (isnad) so reports are always second hand and they report that Mohammed told someone for example that he saw how many women were in hell. Now I might perfectly be willing to accept that Mohammed said that but not believe that the event he describes to be true. Notice I am not saying that his is untrue just that I don't have to believe it, its is just hearsay and cannot be corroborated.

Thus Muslims take hopeless position of saying a messenger of God, being necessarily free from error, receives continuous and permanent guidance from God but how can this be proved when one cannot even prove God exists? This is how the sources are viewed but no rational or honest person can subscribe to the notion on perfection or automatically accepting the supernatural. A question, do Muslims ever feel ANY scepticism about the authentic hadith sources in the sense I described above? For example I consider the idea in the following extract to be implausible and absurd. Sahih Bukhari, Book 60: Volume 6, Number 2: Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "When the Imam says: 'Ghair-il-Maghdubi 'Alaihim Walad-Dallin (i.e. not the path of those who earn Your Anger, nor the path of those who went astray (1.7)), then you must say, 'Ameen', for if one's utterance of 'Ameen' coincides with that of the angels, then his past sins will be forgiven." In short can we reasonably trust these chains on evidence when we end up with such absurdities, if you believe this kind of thing you will believe anything.

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