The Prophet Muhammad was born in ~570 in Macca and died in 632 in Madina. His mission started in 610. To Muslims, the Quran is the undisputed infallible word of God, revealed to the Prophet by the Angle Gabriel. The Sunna Traditions represents the Prophet’s example as recalled in the Hadith (sayings) and Sira (actions).
In this article, I’ll address certain issues surrounding the collection of the Hadith.
Elevating the Prophet’s Way of Life (Sunna) to a Source of Law Equal to the Quran
Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the caliphs faced in the conquered lands of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Persia different political, economic, and social conditions from what the Quran legislated for the desert Arabians. Of the 6,236 Quranic Verses, around 90% deal with theology, like God’s infinite powers, belief in predestination, blind obedience to the Prophet, Biblical stories, rituals, among others. The rest deal with legislative matters: Family affairs (marriage, divorce, and inheritance) and penal code for theft, highway robbery, illegal sexual relations, false accusation, drinking alcohol, apostasy, among others.
By the end of the ninth century the ulama (religious scholars) succeeded in enshrining the Sunna as a source of law equal to the Quran, though the Quran never made the Sunna a source of law. The Quran is supposed to contain all that the faithful need for salvation (6:38, 16:89). According to Abu Saiid Al-Khudari, a Hadith narrator with 1,170 Prophetic Traditions (see below), the Prophet said: “Do not write from me anything except the Quran and whoever has written anything from me other than the Quran should erase it” (Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature, 1977, 28).
Elevating the Sunna to a source of law equal to the Quran may be seen as a guide on matters on which the Quran was silent. However, the Quranists contend that the Prophet’s words and actions must have complied with the word and the spirit of all the all-encompassing all-knowing Quran.
Incorporating the attributed sayings and actions of the Prophet into the Islamic Sharia made the Prophet more than the deliverer of God’s message. He became the exemplar for the Muslim to faithfully emulate. In so doing the coverage of Quranic law was expanded, thrusting the ulama into the tiniest details of Muslims’ daily lives. For example, Ahmad Bin Hanbal (d. 855), founder of the orthodox Hanbalite School of jurisprudence, “is alleged never to have eaten watermelon because he was not in possession of any Prophetic precedent on the subject” (Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, 1999, 71).
Hundreds of thousands of often contradictory and partisan Traditions in favour or against every imaginable thing affecting the individual, the family, the tribe, the city, the mosque, rituals, personal conduct, hygiene, business, etc., were put to the mouth of the Prophet by thousands of sometimes dubious transmitters. Each transmitter claimed that he had been told by x, that y had told him, that z had told him, that f had told him, etc., claiming the Prophet had said this or done that.
We are told that leading scholars diligently verified the authenticity of every word of every attribution and the integrity of every attributor into every chain of attributions. Eventually, a few thousand Traditions were accepted by Sunni ulama as authentic, with six collections elevated to canonical rank.
The Sunni Collections
The most revered and authoritative collection belongs to Muhammad Bin Ismail Al-Bukhari of Bukhara, present day Uzbekistan (d. 870). Al-Bukhari selected out of 600,000 Traditions he collected from 1,000 sheikhs over 16 years of travel and labour in Persia, Iraq, Syria, Hijaz and Egypt 7,400 Traditions (Hitti, History of the Arabs, 1970, 39). His book, titled Sahih Al-Bukhari (Sahih means correct or sound), is classified according to some 100 subject matters. This collection is regarded by most Sunni scholars second only to the Quran in authenticity. A close second in importance is the collection of Muslim Bin Al-Hajjaj of Naysabur, Iran (d. 875) with 7,600 Traditions. The other four collections are those of Ibn Maja (d. 886); with 4,300 Traditions, Abi Dawood (d. 888); with 5,300 Traditions, Al-Tirmithi (d. 892); with 4,000 Traditions, and Al-Nasai (d. 915); with 5,800 Traditions. Repetitiveness exists in the collections individually and among each other.
The Challenge
Notwithstanding the reported integrity of the collectors and the care that they must have taken to ensure the credibility of the thousands of attributers and the authenticity of the hundreds of thousands of Prophetic Traditions that grew over more than 250 years, it remains impossible to know with certainty whether every word and comma in every attribution by every memorizer was authentic and reliable. What is known, however, is that during the first two-and-a-half centuries following the death of the Prophet, the generations of Hadith attributers and collectors were witnesses to momentous doctrinal, legal, and political conflicts. Aside from the great Arab conquests during that time, which established one of the world’s largest empires, major intra-Muslim conflicts erupted starting with the early days of the caliphate of Ali Bin Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son in law. There were four major civil wars, numerous violent political and religious rebellions, and seven state capital cities. These events spilled rivers of blood and divided the nascent Islamic nation into many factions and sects. Under such circumstances, it is fair to say that some attributors, not to mention the collectors, had financial, political, career, and other interest in the outcome, or they might have simply forgotten what was said or heard.
The first major Muslim civil war was in 657 from between Ali bin Abi Talib (656 – 661), the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and Muawiyah (the Fifth Caliph and founder of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus). To frustrate Ali’s Caliphate, a battle led by Aisha, the Prophet’s widow and Ali’s loyalists took place in 656 in Basra, Iraq. The second major civil war (680-692) was during the reigns of Muawiyha’s four successors against another claimant of the Caliphate, Abdullah Bin Al-Zubair, who was recognized in 683 as a rival Caliph to the Umayyads in parts of Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, until he was killed at Mecca in 692. The third major civil war was in 750 with the destruction of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus and the arrival of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. The fourth major civil war (811-813) was between Al-Amin and Al-Mamoun, the two sons of the Caliph, Haroun Al-Rashid (786-809). Eventually, the former was killed and Al-Mamoun reigned from 813 to 833. Additionally, there was the cataclysmic event in 680 that eventually shook the foundations of Islam and caused a permanent split between Shiites and Sunnis to this very day: The rebellion and killing of Imam Hussain Bin Ali at Karbala, Iraq.
The first capital of the Muslim State was Madina, in which the Prophet’s took refuge to escape the persecution of the Meccans in 622. Medina remained the capital during the rule of the first three Caliphs (632-656) of Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman. In 656, Ali, the fourth Caliph, made Kufa, Iraq his base. Muawiyah (the fifth Caliph) made Damascus his capital in 661. Damascus remained the capital of the Umayyad dynasty’s fourteen Caliphs until the Abbasids destroyed the Umayyads Caliphate in 750. The Abbasids moved the capital to Iraq, transitionally to Al-Hashimiyyah before Baghdad was built, starting in 762. In 836, the eighth Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mu’tasim (833-842), moved the capital to Samarra (a short distance north of Baghdad on the Tigris River). The sixteenth Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mu’tadid (892-902), moved the seat of government back to Baghdad in 892. Meanwhile, Cordova became in 756 the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, rivalling and eventually outlasting the Abbasids in Baghdad.
To uncover the truthfulness of hundreds of thousands of Prophetic sayings and actions, which supposedly occurred ten generations earlier, must have been a daunting task. The monumental size, the old age, and the great significance of the issues involved raise questions regarding the genuineness of some of the Traditions.
To put this challenge into perspective, the assertion that Al-Bukhari (810-870) examined 600,000 Traditions means that, even if he had spent forty years of his sixty-year life exclusively on the one and only task of compiling the Sahih, working 14-hour a day without taking a vacation, a sick day, or working on anything else; be it to earn a living or compose other books, he would have had to investigate an average of more than forty Traditions every single day, or one tradition every 20 minutes. But Al-Bukhari wrote 21 books in addition to the Sahih. If we take Professor Hitti’s statement that Al-Bukhari spent 16 years of travel and labour in order to produce his Sahih, then he would have had to investigate the provenance of an average of 103 Traditions every single day: Or a Tradition every 8 minutes. In addition to confirming the exact text of every Hadith, Al-Bukhari had to ensure the personal integrity of the thousands of attributers over ten generations. Even if the number of the Traditions involved were half as many; or one tenth, the likelihood that every Tradition in Sahih Al-Bukhari is authentic requires a great act of faith to accept. Was Al-Bukhari aided by assistants? The answer is unlikely. The nature of the task was such that Al-Bukhari alone could have judged the integrity of the attributer(s).
The volume of Traditions attributed to some memorizers is huge. “Abu-Huraira, a Companion of the Prophet (allegedly for about two years) . . . and a most zealous propagator of His words and deeds, reputedly transmitted some 5,374 Hadiths . . . Aisha transmitted 2,210 Traditions, Anas Bin Malik; 2,286, and Abdullah, the son the second Caliph, Omar Bin Al-Khattab; 1,630” (Ibid., 394). Other transmitters with large volumes of attributed Traditions include: Ibn Abbas; with 1,710, Jabir Bin Abdullah; 1,540, Abu Saiid Al-Khudari; 1170, Ibn Masud; 748, the second Caliph Omar; 537, and the fourth Caliph Ali; 536 (Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature, 1977, 26-27). Some of these figures are in dispute. Less than fifty years earlier, one scholar, Ghundar Bin Jaafar (d. 808) “alleged to have said that Ibn Abbas did not hear more than nine Traditions from the Prophet” (Juynboll, 1983. Muslim Tradition. Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early Hadith, 1983, 29). Al-Ghazali “maintained that Ibn Abbas heard no more than four Traditions from Muhammad” (ibid.).
Whether these disputations are true or false, whether the Prophet’s teenager wife Aisha, who when the Prophet died was 18 years of age, possibly less, could have remembered accurately 2,200 Traditions, whether Abu-Huraira could have accumulated and remembered perfectly 5,374 Traditions after allegedly two years of companionship with the Prophet, whether Abu-Huraira with his relatively limited access to the Prophet compared with that of Ali Bin Abi Talib, the cousin with whom the Prophet grew up and who married His daughter Fatima could have attributed ten times as many Traditions as Ali did is impossible to tell.
The six canonical collectors lived under Abbasid rule during the turbulent decades of the 800s. The Abbasid Hadith transmitters, upon whom the six collectors relied, were in turn reliant on transmitters who had lived for almost one hundred years under the rule the Abbasids’ great nemesis, the Umayyads (661-750). Abbasid politics and hatred of the Umayyads may have played a role in choosing or ignoring certain attributers, let alone altering certain attributions considered too pro-Umayyad.
The Shi’ite Collections
To add to the controversy, Shi’ite Muslims disregard the Sunni Hadith collections altogether. Twelver Shi’ites, the great majority of world Shi’ites today, assembled four canonical Hadith collections by three authors: Al-Kulayni (d. 939), Bin Babouya (d. 991), and Al-Tusi (d. 1067), who wrote two collections. Additionally, three other authors during the 1600s produced highly regarded Shi’ite collections: Bin Murtada (d. 1680), Bin Hasan (d. 1692), and Majlisi (d. 1699).
Shi’ite collections emphasize the Prophet’s naming of Ali as his first successor, a claim disputed by Sunnis. Also, while the Sunni collections record the sayings and actions of the Prophet, the Twelver Shi’ites, , record the sayings and actions of not only the Prophet but also those of the twelve Imams in Ali’s progeny. For a Tradition to be credible it must be transmitted through one of the Imams. Shi’ite Muslims denounce the first three caliphs, Abu Bakr (632-634), Omar (634-644), and Uthman (644-656) as usurpers of the caliphate from Ali (656-661). Shiites do not consider Abu Bakr, Omar, or Uthman, along with the Prophet’s Companions who supported these Caliphs, as reliable transmitters. Sunnis, on the other hand, revere the first three Caliphs and their supporters, as well as Ali.
Conclusion
The Indian Muslim thinker Muhammad Ashraf observed that it is curious that no caliph or companion found the need to collect and write down the Hadith Traditions for more than two centuries after the death of the Prophet (Guillaume, Islam, 1990, 165). Ignaz Goldziher concludes: “It is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is none in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of Traditions, all equipped with imposing Isnads” [supporting references] (Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 1890, Vol. II., 44). As John Burton observes: “The ascription of mutually irreconcilable sayings to several contemporaries of the Prophet, or of wholly incompatible declarations to one and the same contemporary, together strain the belief of the modern reader in the authenticity of the reports as a whole” (Burton, An Introduction to the Hadith, 1994, xi).