The Dark Danger: Bigotry: Where Did Fabricated Hadiths Come from?

The words claimed to have been said by our Prophet (pbuh) and accounts regarded as representing the practices of our Prophet (pbuh) were written down only centuries after his demise. Of the authors of the famous Kutub al-Sittah (The Six Books), consisting of six books of hadiths, Bukhari died in Hijri 256, Muslim in 261, Tirmidhi in 279, Abu Dawud in 275, an-Nasai in 303 and Ibn al-Majah in 273. Furthermore, Shiite hadith books are different, and some Sunnis and Shiites do not recognize one another's books of hadiths. The Shiite books of hadiths were prepared more recently. Of the famous Shiite collectors of hadiths, al-Kulayni died in Hijri 329, Babawayh in 381, Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Hassan Tusi in 411 and al-Murtadha in 436.

Before Bukhari, no attempt was made to differentiate between hadiths on the basis of their degrees of validity. The efforts to divide them into "trustworthy" and "weak" began with Bukhari. However, examination of the hadiths shows that these endeavors were unsuccessful. Not only weak hadiths, but even totally fabricated ones were disseminated under the name of Islam and increasingly grew in numbers.

It was impossible to prevent that state of affairs at that time because six or seven generations had passed from the death of our Prophet (pbuh) until the writing of these books, and the famous books of hadiths in which these hadiths are related involve chains of transmission to, and from, six or seven people. When the hadiths in question were narrated, even the link after the link after the link after the Prophet (pbuh) had passed on. In other words, the people who could have confirmed whether or not the people who handed those hadiths on were speaking the truth were themselves dead.

Hadith scholars were aware of this. Muslim said that he did not include every hadith he regarded as being completely trustworthy in his book (Muslim, Vol. 1). Bukhari, who said that hadiths were the source of the faith, knew 600,000 hadiths but only included 6,000- 7,000, or 1% of the total. He concluded that the remaining 99% were not trustworthy and did not include them in his book. This means that the hadiths for the entire Islamic world were determined solely according to the opinions of a few people, and this is indeed a terrible state of affairs for those who regard the hadiths as "the source of the faith" because they can never acquire any information about other hadiths which may be regarded as trustworthy by others, but that Muslim did not feel necessary to include in his book. Let us remember at this point that while all this analysis was going on, the Holy Qur'an, the utterly trustworthy, protected and unchanging beauty of Islam, was set to one side.

The Egyptian commentator Ahmad Amin makes the following assessment, revealing the scale of fabrication of hadiths: Were we to make an expository display of the hadiths, we would be confronted with a pyramid, the summit illustrating the period of God's messenger. As we go down we observe the gradual expansion toward the base. Yet, the ideal should have been the reverse; for, the companions of the Prophet best knew what the Prophet uttered. As they were to pass away, the number of those who knew the words uttered by the Prophet would decrease and the pyramid would have changed its position and turned upside down. Yet, we observe that the number of hadiths is even greater under the Omayyads than during the lifetime of the Prophet. (Ahmad Amin, Duha al-Islam)

That being the case, the existence and trustworthiness of hundreds of thousands of hadiths, all different to one another and sometimes even contradicting each another, has also led to hostilities between some hadith scholars. For example, while Ikrima is a reliable source in the eyes of Bukhari and several famous hadith scholars, he is accused of lying by Muslim. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the way that Bukhari, the author of the best known book of hadiths in Islam, declares Abu Hanifa, the head of the Hanafi school, to be "ghayr al-siqah," in other words "unreliable," and carries not one hadith narrated by him. In the view of the most famous hadith scholar, the founder of the most famous school is deemed unreliable, yet much of the Muslim world regards the two of them as the most trustworthy hadith scholars. The fact is there are as many inconsistencies in the debates about the reliability of those who related the hadiths as there are in the hadiths. The founders of the four schools are of course worthy Islamic scholars. However, the foundation of the four schools was in fact based on mutually conflicting hadiths. Each school based itself on the hadiths it preferred.

Osman Hamdi Bey's oil painting "Theologist," 1907 Another problem, apart from the fact that a variety of fabricated hadiths have found their way among the many fine hadiths passed down from our Prophet (pbuh) that do reflect the spirit of the Qur'an, is the way the hadiths were handed down. Many people imagine that the hadiths have come down directly from the mouth of our Prophet (pbuh), but that is not so: Not even hadith scholars claim that these are directly transmitted sayings. Many hadith scholars, and especially Bukhari, have considered that it is enough for the meaning of the hadith to have been transmitted and that there is no need to have memorized them word for word. That, of course, has made it possible for much additional commentary to have entered these sayings, for misunderstood subjects to be handed down as true, and for people with a less than total understanding of the subject to have become involved in transmission. While it has been regarded as sufficient to transmit the sense of the hadith, failure to hear the beginning and end of the hadith has Osman Hamdi Bey's oil painting "Girl Reciting Qur'an," 1880 also sometimes led to a loss of meaning. For example, two people came to Aisha (ra) and said to her that Abu Hurayrah narrates that the Prophet (pbuh) used to say that ill fortune is to be found only in women, horses and houses. At this Aisha (ra) replied: "By God Who revealed the Qur'an to the Prophet! The Prophet never said this; what he did say was that the People of the Ignorance hold this opinion." There is no doubt that the founders of the four schools were all worthy Muslims and Islamic scholars. However, we need to know that it was the hadiths in question that were instrumental in the founding of those schools. The founders of the four schools based those schools on the hadiths they personally selected.

The four imams founded their own schools by going beyond the criteria employed by the hadith imams who wrote the collections of hadiths in the Kutub al-Sittah. As we have already seen, Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafi school, the largest of the four, has been criticized by other hadith imams, especially Bukhari, on the grounds of having a weak knowledge of the hadiths and generally emphasizing his own opinions. Despite such division among hadith scholars and schools, there have also been those who have claimed that the hadiths are undeniable. Such people have spread the nonsensical idea that anyone who denies even a single hadith in Bukhari and Muslim is an unbeliever. Some people have gone even further, as we shall be seeing in detail in due course, claiming that the hadiths supersede the commandments of the Qur'an. It is these terrifying irrationalities that underlie the extremism that has spread throughout a great part of the Islamic world.

Let us now see how different fabricated hadiths have given rise to different sects with their own rules within Islam.