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« on: July 05, 2013, 07:49:21 PM »
WHAT HADITHIST WONT TELL YOU ABOUT THE HISTORY OF HADITHS AND HOW THEY PORTRAY OUR DEAR PROPHET.
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The falsifiers (of the attributes, personality and deeds of our dear Prophet as described in Hadiths and other man-made literature) have presented a concoction of medieval Arab, Pagan, Jewish and Christian culture as good examples of the messenger. However, if you look at the context of the verse 33:21, the good example has been described as the messenger's courage and his constant remembrance of God. They extended this good example to irrelevant individual or cultural behaviors. For instance, they sanctified the beard and turban, ignoring the fact that the Meccan idol worshipers, such as Amr bin Hisham (aka, Abu Jahl) and Walid b. Mugiyra also had long beards and big turbans.
What is worse, the actions and words ascribed to prophet Muhammad PBUH have depicted him with a character that is far from exemplary.
The hadith books portray the prophet as a phantasmagoric character with multiple personalities. That character is more fictitious than mythological gods and goddesses, such as Hermes, Pan, Poseidon and Aphrodite. He is a pendulous character, both bouncing up to deity, and down to the lowest degree. He is both wise and moronic. He is sometimes more merciful than God and sometimes a cruel torturer.
He is both perfect and criminal, humble and arrogant, chaste and a sex maniac, trustworthy and a cheater, illiterate and educated, rich and poor, a nepotistic and a democratic leader, caring and a male chauvinist, a believer and a disbeliever, prohibiting hadith and promoting hadith.
You find numerous conflicting personalities presented as an exemplary figure. Choose whichever composite character you like out of thousands of different examples. Those with preconceived ideas may go fish out hadith to support any personality or role model they want to carve out of the hero called Muhammad PBUH.
Want a terrorist? You will find a few hadiths to justify it. He did after all, according to Bukhari, justify killing women and children in battle.
Want a lamb? You will again find a few hadiths to depict him that way. When the children of Taif stoned him, he prayed for them.
Hadith books contain almost anything you wish, especially about Muhammad PBUH. You may find an extremely kind and nice Muhammad PBUH besides a cruel torturer one.
You may find Muhammad PBUH to be a person with great morals on one page and on another page, you will see him a pedophile.
You will find Muhammad PBUH pointing at the moon and splitting it into two pieces letting one piece fall into Ali's backyard, and on another page, you will find a Muhammad PBUH incapable of reading a simple letter.
Hadith books, by their very nature, are perfect sources for such abuse. They contain fragments of hearsay that were produced within several centuries with multiple authors, numerous agendas, inconsistent language/terminology, unreliable and fragmented contexts, and divisible or severally liable authorities.
An "expert" can subject almost any hadith he dislikes to one of the rules of procedure called usul ul-hadith with multiple standards. The evaluation of the narrator by using another hearsay, partisanship, tribalism, racism, or personal scrupulousness, is called "jarh" and "tadeel" simply meaning, "trash" and "save."
For instance, the most prominent Sunni hadith collector Bukhari who grew up in Bukhara, collected hadiths two hundred or so years after the departure of Muhammad PBUH. This story collector, while bragging about how meticulous he was, claims that he once traveled for about a month to hear a particular hadith from a narrator. When he visited him, he saw him deceiving his horse to the barn with an empty bag. Consequently, our meticulous Bukhari gave up from collecting the story he was going to report! In other words, he used the tool of "jarh" (trash) to cross over that particular narrator.
Looking at the quality of the 7275 hadiths he allegedly picked out of 600,000 reported hadiths (99% defective material!), we can easily infer that he was not very lucky or did not have very good eyes in witnessing thousands of more deceivers with their horses.
Ironically, this Bukhari narrates hadith from drunkard and oppressive Umayyad governors, and hundreds of hadith from Abu Hurayra who according to Bukhari himself was considered a congenial liar and fabricator by his prominent peers such as Omar, Ibn Abbas and Aisha. Either Bukhari was himself a deceived horse or another deceiver.
Let's sidetrack here and do a simple calculation. Bukhari, in his introduction, uses a first-class sales pitch according to the standards of the medieval era. He, or the later editors and promoters of his collection, try hard to depict the portrait of a devout, genius, scrupulous, and steadfast scholar. Although his Christian counterpart, St. Paul, was more articulate and more cunning in his self-promotion, history is a witness to the fact that Bukhari has done a similarly good job in another market.
In the introduction of the collection called Bukhari, we learn that this celebrated hadith collector endured long trips, occasionally from one country to another, just to collect one hadith. We also learn that he was very careful in his evaluation of the chain of narrators; he was so pious that he performed ablution and prayed before recording each of his hadiths.
We might be surprised to see, in the same section of this solemn promotional introduction, some funny animated clips too. For instance, we learn that some of the prophet's companions witnessed a group of monkeys stoning an adulterer monkey in the jungle (perhaps that provided some inspiration and imagination for later hadiths narrations involving the story of the holy hungry goat).
Well, let’s do some calculations…
- Let's assume that Bukhari told us the truth regarding the 600,000 hadiths he listened to and evaluated.
- Let's also be extremely generous to Bukhari and assume that on average it took him only one hour to go, interview, and evaluate each of the 600,000 hadiths, 99% of which he would later trash.
- Let's assume that he started wandering around, seeking hadith narrators, listening to them, and evaluating the chain of narrators from dawn until dusk.
- Let's assume that all his days were summer days, so that he worked ten hours a day without a break.
Since we do not have any claim by Bukhari or another "holy" person regarding Bukhari's ability to inflate time, create time within time, or slow down time, we assume he worked like a super human being limited by the natural law.
With these assumptions, Bukhari who lived 60 years, between 810-870 AC, would need 60,000 days, or 164 years. In other words, he would need more than a hundred years to be able to do what he was bragging about.
Yes, this Bukhari and his ilk have hijacked Muhammad PBUH, and have replaced the light of the Quran, with the darkness of ignorance.
Arabic fancy jargon are frequently used to impress non-Arabs to overwhelm them into believing that the "experts" indeed have an incredible amount of special knowledge; perhaps specially granted by God.
The "expert" might evaluate the trustworthiness of one of the narrators listed in the chain, by various contradictory rules already established by previous hadith scholars. The hadith can then be classified in one of the numerous ranks of authenticity and thus discarded in favor of another one.
Only a handful hadiths, which are called mutawatir (allegedly narrated by many people), may escape ending up in the trash via an arbitrary scrutiny of a determined scholar.
Ironically, there is not even a consensus on the mutawatir hadiths. They do not call it "trash can" but they have invented fancy names to label how deep and stinky their cans are, labeling them mursal, hasan, daif, mawdu, etc.
If you are a muqallid, that is a blind follower of a particular sect or order, then you pick what they have already picked for you.
Your choice might be more limited with the leftover hadiths evaluated by the scholars, but you can be sure that by even staying as a muqallid in a particular sect, you will find plenty of room for wiggling around to make up your own religion.
But, you can be sure that your choices will be limited to medieval Arab, Jewish and Christian cultures. If you are living in a modern metropolitan city, you may not be able to escape developing multiple personalities separated from each other by two millennia.
Considering that most of the hadith narrations are ahad, that is allegedly narrated by only one person from Muhammad PBUH, their authenticity can always be challenged by how you may personally deem the chain of narrators and the hadith books.
This provides many opportunities to hatch and mutate numerous custom-made religions, sects, sub-sects, orders, or sub-orders out of the mishmash collection of medieval culture.
This peculiar aspect of hadith collection is well described by the prophetic verses of the Quran: "Shall we treat the muslims (peacemakers, peaceful submitters/surrenderers) like the criminals? What is wrong with your judgment? Do you have a book where you can find anything you wish?" (68:35-38).
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NOTE: Extracts, narration, paraphrases and replication from multiple sources. Please contact LMU if you require references.
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