For our dear M&M and quoting the hadith!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 25, 2007 at 10:55

Now our dear M&M here is your lesson today about quoting the bogus hadith to tell us that islam is not really the religion of the arabs only (sic).

When you realized that the Qur'an really says that Islam is the religion of the Arabs you quote a tradtion that is very much anachronistic and very much typical of the hadith literature.

Early on the Muslim 3Ulama in Iran and Mesopotamia in the 3rd century of Islam when the hadith was being manufactured and "collected" realized that much of the material was bogus and they came up with the so called al-ahadith al-sahiha wa al-ahadith al-da3eefa and then they decided that the way they can tell the difference is by examination of the so called isnad or line of transmission of the hadith and even if the substance of the hadith or the matn is anachronistic as in the case of the tradition that you quote. This is indeed very flawed because if the matn of the hadith can be bogus, so can the isnad of the hadith.

Now take the case of Ibn 3Abbas and 3A'isha who are used as sources of the correct hadith:

Ibn 3Abbas died in either 693CE or 687CE and only Allahu A3lam or about 60 years after the death of Muhammad. This is at a time when the life span was about 40 years. More likely than not if Ibn 3Abbas really knew Abul Qasim aka muhammad he must have been a very young child. As for 3A'isha she was 18 years old in 632CE when Muhammad died and she hax sexual intercourse and lived with him after age 9 which brings us back to 623CE. This means that 3Ai'sha cannot be an authority on the Meccan period, or the Hijra in 622CE or even for a few more years as what does a 9 year old child really know?

So much for the source of the isnad in the hadith.

Now in the past 100 years the likes of Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht conculded (and this has never been refuted as far as I know) that the hadith is very much anachronistic, and it must be regarded as another from of Quranic exegesis (Haggadic, Halakhic, Masoretic, Rhetorical, Allegorical see QS more later) and their conclusion was that the hadith must be seen as a reflection of the aspirations of the Muslim community, be it legal economic or spritual, in the 3rd century of Islam when the hadith was collected and no hadith can be linked to the historical Muhammad with any degree of certainty.

Now we can date the Muslim masora to the 3rd century and not any earlier and the order of the various forms of Quranic exegesis follows the above 5 forms and it means that that Halakhic exegesis was earlier than the masora and rhetorical exagesis was later than the masora.

I suspect that the above tradtion comes from Iran and as we know from extant literary sources that we have a period pre-Shahnemah where Iranians wanted to be Arabs so bad but after the Shahnemah (circa 10th cetury) Iranians started to view the Arabs as barbarians and they did veiw the Shahnemah as a sign of their great civilization that should not be taken away by the Arabs or their language.

So in the pre-Shahnemah the Arabs looked down at the Persians as they were not Arabs, now enter Golziher the above tradition must have been made up to tell the Arabs that Muhammad said (sic) that Persians and Arabs are equal. So much for hadith saheeh. What is so funny in the post shahnemah we have tradtions where we are told that the Arabs should be respected (see Ignaz Goldziher) and attributed to Muhammad. Go figure.

But the final nail in the coffin of the hadith is what Crone wrote in her book "Roman, Provincial and Islamic law" on page 33"

"Bukhari is said to have examined a total of 600,000 traditions attributed to the prophet; he preserved some 7000 (including repetitions) or in other words dismissed some 593,000 as inauthentic. If ibn Hanbal examined a similar number of traditions, he must have rejected about 570,000, his collection containing some 30,000 (again including repetitions) are transmitted by the companion ibn 3Abbas. Yet less than 50 years earlier one scholar had estimated that ibn 3Abbas had heard 10 traditions from the Prophet in the years around 800, but over 1000 by 850, how many had he heard in 700 or 632? Even if we accept that 10 of ibn 3Abbas' traditions are authentic, how do we identify them in the pool of 1'710? We do not even know whether they are to be found in this pool, as opposed to that of the 530,000 traditions dismissed on the ground that their chains of authorities were faulty. Under such circumstances it is scarcely justified to presume hadith to be authentic until contrary has been proved."

So much for quoting the hadith to tell us that islam is really not the religion of the Arabs only. And you will notice that I never notice the hadith as a source and now you know why.

...Now I have two qurstions for you:

1. What on earth is a moderate Muslim?

2. And who really created your Allah? (sse the Sira pages 571-572).

Stay tuned for more.

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