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Absurdities of Hadith and Muslims' Denial
There are two categories of
Muslims. Those who accept the authenticity of the
Quran and the Hadith with no ifs or buts, and those
who deny the Hadith, partially or totally and try to reinterpret
Quran in ways completely opposite to its
apparent meaning so that it become acceptable to a
reasonable mind. For 1200 years Bukhari’s collection of hadithes was regarded (and still is) by the majority of the Muslims only second to Quran. Apart from Quran, Muslims, especially the Sunnis, regard Hadithes as the source of guidance. The hadithes are stories of the life of Muhammad, collected by few scholars in the second and third century after the Hijra. The most famous and revered ones are those of Bukhari and his student Muslim. They are called Sahih (correct, sound or authenticated) because they went through a process of authentication called Ilmul Hadith. However there is a new trend amongst some of the Muslims especially the submitters to deny the authenticity of Hadithes all together. They would go as far as to call their writers liars and charlatans. The point is that these writers did not tell these stories; they collected them and preserved them. The early Muslim scholars
accepted a hadith as Sahih only when its authenticity was
established on the basis of both Fann-i-Riwaayat and
Fann-i-Daraayat. Moreover a Hadith should not have
contradicted Sunnah and Quran. I am not interested and
none of us is any more qualified to determine the
methodology that was used for accepting or rejecting a
Hadith based on Fann-i-Riwaayat. These are old
stories. All those who reported them are dead more
than a thousand years ago and we have no way to verify
their trustworthiness. At this moment the only method
left to determine the sihhat (soundness) of a Hadith
is Fann-i-Daraayat and its compatibility with Quran.
Asif Iftikhar writes “Therefore, a Hadith can be
regarded as a source of religious guidance only `if
the basis of that Hadith exists in the Quran or the
Sunnah or the established principles of human nature
and intellect. Moreover, it should not be
contradictory to any of these bases” (from The
Authenticity of Hadith) By examining some of the Ahadith in the light of “commonsense”, and the recommendations of Ibni Ali Jauzee we find many of them despite being acknowledged as Sahih do not qualify as such and can be rejected. Take the following Hadith for example:
Now, let us take another Hadith
and test it with commonsense. Before that we have to
define what do we mean by commonsense. I have come to
the conclusion that a simple thing like the
commonsense, is not common at all and it may have
different meaning for a religious person whose senses
are flavored by his bigoted mindset. There is no indication that women
are less intelligent than men, and even if there was
any, there is no justification for them to not have
the same voice and rights in a court of law. Therefore
science, justice and commonsense all acknowledge that
men and women should have the same rights. Religious
sense on the other hand defies all that and presents
its own criteria. Baffling as it may be, some women
are delighted to fight for their inequality and
suppression of their rights and call it
“liberation”. They think that hijab elevates their
statues. Being rebuked, punished and even beaten by
their husbands is good for them. They believe that the
majority of them will actually go to hell because
Muhammad has said it. So when I talk about commonsense.
I am not talking about the sense of a religious
fanatic. I am talking about the real genuine
commonsense that is supported by “real” science
and “real” scientists and philosophers. I put the
word “real” between quotation marks because all
religions have made their own version of
pseudo-science and have their own brand of
pseudo-scientists and pseudo-philosophers. (I am
referring to Maurice Bucaille and his kind)
How this story can make sense? If there was ‘nothing’ how God could have put His Throne over the water? Which water? What was holding that water? There must have been an earth to hold it. Then how is it that he creates the Earth after sitting on the water? How is it that the Heavens and Earth are created after the waters? Don’t you need to have an earth to contain the water? And don't you have to have the heavens to hold the Earth? Beyond the fact that the whole notion expressed in this Hadith is ludicrous, there is also an error in the order of creation. Now let us step back and consider what is wrong with
this picture! Isn’t the Earth a planet of the solar
system, which is an insignificant part of a
galaxy that is one of the trillions and trillions of
galaxies of the Universe? Can anyone, including the
genius Maurice Bucaille who said Quran is scientific
and a miracle yet refused to become a Muslim and rather was content with the
money that the Saudi King gave him, put
these two pictures together and solve this puzzle? So we could say that the above
Hadith is a fabrication because it contradicts the
commonsense and is contrary to the universal rule. Or
can we? The problem is that it is in
conformity with Quran and as Asif Iftikhar said “a
Hadith can be regarded as a source of religious
guidance only `if the basis of that Hadith exists in
the Quran or the Sunnah”. What if we find something
in Quran that corroborate the above story? And lo and
behold there
are few verses that do so. See the following:
Obviously Sun rises and sets in
ALL places, or actually no place at all. One doesn’t
have to go "another way" to find it rising. This
gives us the clue that Muhammad really believed that
the Earth is flat and the sun moves in the sky rising
from one place, setting in another. But how can we be sure this is
how Muhammad thought of the shape of the Earth? The
answer can be found in another Hadith.
Ok. Here we have a case in Hadith
that is confirmed by Quran, which is again ratified by
another Hadith and once more demonstrated in Quran. Is this
Hadith against the science and commonsense? It sure is. But it is
not against the Quran. Therefore the message conveyed
by the Hadith is wrong, but it is an authenticated
Hadith. If we have any doubts about what
Muhammad really thought of the shape of the Earth, we
can safely put them to rest when we read the following
verses.
The “expanse” gives an idea of something flat. The Arabic word used in Quran is Mehad, (bed). All the beds that I have seen so far were flat none of them where spherical. Also the mountains are not pegs keeping the earth from shaking as the prophet used to think. Don’t these Hadithes, backed by
these verses, clearly describe a flat Earth, with the
Sun rising from one end and setting in the muddy
waters on the opposite end? Is there a Throne
somewhere that the Sun goes under it to get
permission? What Throne was Muhammad talking about?
When and how the Sun prostrates itself? This
concept sounds ridiculous to us; yet in the old ages
everyone believed in a flat Earth, floating on waters
surrounded by high mountains beyond which one could
fall into an abyss, etc. and the whole story made
perfect sense to those who heard it. In fact this story is not an
invention of Muhammad. Most of the Prophet’s stories
were part of the folklore that he had heard somewhere else. In a book entitled The Oldest Stories
in the Word, Theodor H. Gaster has compiled the lore
of the Babylonian, Hittite and Canaanite people of
3500 years ago. These stories were lost for centuries
and recently found and unearthed in the last century.
They were deciphered and printed in 1952. The
similarities of those old stories and the stories in
Quran, including the above Hadith, are astonishing. It
helps us understand the origin of Quran and the Bible.
Quran has no divine origin, what Muhammad told people
were stories he heard from others, old stories that
were part of the tradition of the people of his time. Miracles There are also many hadithes
attributing miracles to the prophet. What should we
make of them? Again as Asif Iftikhar indicated a
Hadith that is contradicted by Quran cannot be
trusted. I suppose this is acceptable by all Muslims.
If there is a controversy between Hadith and Quran the
authority of Quran overrides the Hadith. What Quran says in respect of the Miracles? Quran categorically denies them. (See here) So according to Quran Muhammad did not perform any miracles and all those hadithes that report stories contrary to that are false. Their falsity also can be proven by logics. The eminent scholar Ali Dashti asked: If Muhammad could really perform miracles, make stones speak, split the moon, multiply the food, visit the hell and the heaven in a night, etc as some of the hadithes suggest, why he did not perform the logical and useful miracle and did not learn how to read and write? Does it make sense that a man who can see the next world when given a piece of written paper in his own language not be able to understand what is written there? Muslims believe that he could look into one’s eyes and reads his mind. He himself claimed that when he leads the congregational prayer he can see this followers behind him without turning. Yet he could not read a simple letter written in his own language? Among all the miracles that he performed wasn’t this the simplest and the most useful of all? Apart from the Quran, there are many Ahadithes that also deny any supernatural power or knowledge attributed to Muhammad.
How a man who is aware of this world and the next, who, as Muslims say, predicted all the inventions that has happened since, is capable of splitting the moon and perform any miracle cannot trust his own judgment fearing the eloquence of one party may deceive him and make him err? Let us examine more hadithes with our own Fann-i-Daraayat, unclogged from preconceived ideas. Sahih
Bukhari Volume 1, Book 6, Number 315 This hadith resembles to a
joke. Just the thought of this little angel that gets
in there and stands in front of the womb each time a
man become intimate with his wife watching the whole
act and supplicating Allah for a drop of semen right
on his face, is entertaining. Shall we discard this
Hadith as a fabrication? It certainly goes against our
commonsense. But wai a minute. this hadith was not against the
commonsense of those who used to count it to each
other 1400 years ago. It does not make sense to us,
but it made perfect sense to them. So whose commonsense is the standard? Few hundred years ago,
the commonsense dictated that the Earth is flat. All
the philosophers and prophets agreed. Today it
doesn’t? Can we say that these hadithes that go
against our modern commonsense are false now, but they
were true then because they were in accordance with
the commonsense of the ancient folks? The point is that we cannot
dismiss the authenticity of a Hadith based on our
commonsense. Today’s Muslims have taken for granted
that Muhammad was the messenger of God and therefore
he could not he wrong. So they reevaluate the hadithes
as time goes by and keep discarding those that their
newfound understanding of science proves unsound. This
method is highly biased. Of course it is consistent
with a defendant’s approach and his defense council
who (if unscrupulous) would deliberately hide, deny or
dismiss all the evidence that would incriminate their
client and present only those that find him an alibi
and are in his favor. On the other hand, an unbiased
jury would weigh all the evidences; the good and the
bad, and pass their verdict after taking into account
all the facts. To examine the truth of the claim
of Muhammad, we have to decide which side we are
standing. Are we part of the defense team or are we
part of the jury? The majority of Muslims, as you
would expect, choose to be part of the first team.
They are not interested to know whether Muhammad was
right or he was an impostor. That question does not
even arise in their minds. They already “know”,
for they were told, that he was the messenger of God
and they have accepted it as a fact.
Choosing to remain in that position, they naturally
would not know the truth and are not in a position to
see it. Today more educated Muslims find
many absurdities in the ahadith and their first
reaction is to deny them. However, since the majority
of the hadithes are nonsensical, the growing consensus
is to deny all the hadithes and vilify the unfortunate
Bukhari and Muslim who were revered for over a
millennium. This is unfair. Bukhari and Muslim, along
with other Muhaditheen did not invent these hadithes
but reported them as they were told. It is not right
to shoot the messenger if the message in unpleasing.
And it is highly unethical to defile these reporters
and deny what they painstakingly collected, because
what they reported blemish Muhammad. Some of these reports are
fabricated and false but many of them are true.
Because many of these hadithes are of dubious nature,
we should not rely on them as religious source of
guidance but to dismiss them as historic source is
committing a grave mistake. These hadithes are all we
have about the life of the Prophet. They narrate the
stories of the historic Muhammad. They should not be
taken as a substitute to Quran (assuming that this is
a revealed book) but they are the biography of the
Prophet. If you deny all the hadithes how can you
prove the historicity of the Prophet? If all those
stories are false and someone with a diabolic wit has
forged all of them, then perhaps someone equally
malignant has fabricated the Quran and the whole Islam
is nothing but a fanciful tale. Without the Hadith, we know
nothing of Muhammad, his life and his history. Absurdities
of Quran: To deny the authenticity of the
hadithes on the ground of their logical absurdity
opens another yet bigger problem and that is what to do with the equally absurd verses of Quran?
Can we dismiss Quran as fabricated and forged?
Certainly this is a line that a Muslim would never
cross. So what would they do when confronted with
quranic verses that are absurd and nonsensical? The common reaction is to
reinterpret the meanings of the verses and find some
esoteric meanings for them. The desire to interpret the Holy
Scriptures and assign esoteric meanings to them is
born out of the fact that these scriptures are crude
and lack meaning. The Shiites were first to notice the
inadequacy of Quran and Sufism is entirely based on
giving esoteric meanings to the revealed book. Sufism
is, par exultance, the effort to ‘interiorize’ the
Quranic revelation, to break away with the purely
legalistic religion and experience the mystical
significance of the encounter of Muhammad with Allah
in the night of Mi’raj, which to the Sufis was also
spiritual in nature. Imam Ja’far Sadiq is reported
to have said. “Our cause is a secret (siir) within
other secret. The secret of something that remains
hidden; a secret that only another secret can reveal.
It is a secret about a secret that is based on a
secret. As we said somewhere else, there are two categories of
Muslims. The first are those that defend Muhammad and
whatever he did irrespective of any consideration for
decency, rightness or justice. They do not deny him
marring with a 9-year-old child, assassinating his
opponents, massacring up to 900 of his prisoners of
war, performing genocide of the Jews of
Arabia,
raping his war captives, sleeping with the maids of his wives
and
other his less than admirable deeds. These are known
as Muslim fanatics. The second group, are those that deny all these
facts about him and try to twist the evidence to make
Muhammad acceptable by modern morality and values.
These are modern Muslim intellectuals and are those
that deny Islam being an intolerant religion. I
don’t want to pass the judgment as which one is
better, but I certainly admire the honesty of the
first category, which the second group lacks. Many
modern Muslims try hard to present Quran different
from what it says. They would quote the earlier verses
of Quran when Muhammad was weak and his preaching were
sugary. But they would play down the harsher
verses of Quran that were “revealed” in Medina when
the prophet was already a chieftain and needed not to
humbug the Quraish, the Jews or the Christians for
support. Interpreting Quran with a different
meaning than its obvious one plays also a great role
in explaining the scientific absurdities of that holy
book. The majority of Muslims prefer to live in
denial. Denial of the authenticity of Hadith is easy
but to deny the authenticity of Quran is not something
they would like to think about. So reinterpretation is
the only option.
The Submitters During the 70s an Egyptian Muslim scholar came up with his brilliant solution that would entice many educated Muslims and renew their faith in Islam. His name was Rashid Khalifa. At first he claimed to have found the mathematical miracle of Quran. This claim was refuted by several thinkers and as a lie-free deception. However because of this he gained
respect and fame amongst the Muslims, until he decided
to start his own messenger business, which angered the
established clergy and finally cost him his life. But
his contribution was important as by his complete
denial of the Hadith and his serious effort to
translate the Quran reinterpreting it in a way that
would down play its harsh and intolerant message he
started a new movement amongst the pseudo-intellectual
Muslims who now could cling to the primitive Quran
while pretend to promote a gentler Islam that does not
advocate killing the apostates and instigating holy
wars. Their denial of Hadith goes as far as denying
everything about the history of Muhammad. They deny
all his wars, all his assassinations, and the genocide
that he committed against the Jews of Medina, his
killings and his robberies. They deny that his sudden
attacks at the merchant caravans were attacks but
rather call them self-defense. They deny the age of
Ayesha (who was only 9 when the prophet at 54 slept
with her) and deny Muhammad licentious lifestyle
reported in hundreds of stories narrated by his
followers and preserved faithfully for posterity. And
their zest to present Quran as a modern logical book
of miracles has made them bend every rule of reason to
the extent that they would misrepresent deliberately
the Quran and interpret it the most absurd ways to
rationalize its absurdity. One submitter went as far as to
assure me that the mistake in the addition of the
inheritance in Quran is not actually a mistake but a
misunderstanding and that the share of 1/3 for the
parents + 2/3 for the daughters + 1/8 for the wife
that is commanded in Quran equals one. He explained
that the 1/8 share of the wife must come out of 2/3 of
the daughters. Quran doesn’t say such thing but
their enthusiasm to justify the errors of Quran goes
beyond any rational thinking. Those who deny the hadithes use
these verses of Quran to prop up their claims. Q.
12: 111 And Q.
31: 6 As the above verse reveal,
Muhammad was ridiculed by his contemporaries and his
Quran was called “non-sense stories” and “idle
tales”. The word story or tale in Arabic is Hadith.
So in these verses he is defending his revelation
arguing that it is not a tale (Hadith) invented or a
frivolous discourse. He compares his words to the idle
tales (hadithes) of the people of his time and claims that they
will mislead men while the Quran guides them. When Muhammad said these words, Bukhari, Muslim and other Hadith collectors were not yet born and there were no tales or hadithes about him. In the above verse, the prophet is rejecting the tales or the hadithes of the unbelievers not the stories of his own life that were not yet told. But since in referring to the idle stories of his contemporaries he used the word “Hadith”, which in Arabic means story, tale or tradition the zealot deniers of the hadith have taken it as the proof that Muhammad was against the Hadith. What confusion!
Ali Sina |
