Criticism of hadith
[16] The earliest schools and scholars of Islamic law—starting around a century and a half after the death of Muhammad—did not all agree on the importance of Prophetic sunnah and its basis, being hadith ultimately attributed to Muhammad.
[31] Once (authentic) hadith had attained their elevated status among the group inspired by al-Shafi'i who sought to establish Islamic practice on the basis of the Sunnah (Muhammad's deeds and sayings), the focus shifted amongst advocates of this group (who were called the ahl al-sunnah, or the "People of the Sunnah") to delineating between reliable or "sound" (ṣaḥīḥ) with unreliable hadith.
The field that arose to meet this need came to be known as the hadith sciences (ʻilm al-ḥadīth), and this practice had entered into a mature stage by the 3rd century of Islam.
[46] Although scholars and critics of the Hadith such as Aslam Jairajpuri and Ghulam Ahmed Perwez)[16] have "never attracted a large following",[47] they and others who propose limitations on usage of ḥadīth literature outside of the mainstream include both early Muslims (Al-Nawawi, Wāṣil b.
Both modernist Muslims and Quranists believe that the problems in the Islamic world come partly from the traditional elements of the hadith and seek to reject those teachings.
[12] While criticism of the authenticity of any hadith in the Sahihayn ceased during the early modern era, it has been revived again by the Salafi movement, a prominent example of this being Al-Albani.
[62] Later, a similar group, the Mu'tazilites (which flourished in Basra and Baghdad in the 8th–10th centuries CE),[63] also viewed the transmission of the Prophetic sunnah as not sufficiently reliable.
[65][66] In later periods, it was still accepted (such as with Al-Nawawi in the thirteenth century CE) that ahad hadith (those with a single chain of transmitters) only yield theoretical probability of historicity and not certainty.
ʿAṭāʾ (700–748 CE) defined a mutawatir hadith as one passed on by four independent transmitters, inspired by the juridical notion of the necessary number of witnesses needed as proof that an event took place (and to the exclusion that they all collaborated on a lie).
[69] Many conservative revivalists and liberal modernists of 20th century believed that a recourse to the Quran should be made in evaluating the Sunnah, contrary to Al-Shafiʽi and classical hadith criticism.
[70] Revivalists (like Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, Shibli Nomani, Rashid Rida,[Note 8] Salafi Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, Abul A'la Maududi, and Mohammed al-Ghazali[72]), however, believed in the classical principles of hadith and Shariah law[73] and held highly negative views about those who express skepticism towards classical hadith collections.
[87] Examples of conflicts between the two sources were Later, in nineteenth century British Raj, Islamic modernists like Syed Ahmed Khan sought to deal with Western colonial influence and the decline of Muslim powers through greater understanding of science[90] and application of reason.
[92] One of the most influential modernist critiques comes from Mahmoud Abu Rayya, who argued that the basis of Islam rests on the Quran, reason, and mutawatir (as opposed to merely sahih) hadith.
[94] Likewise, others insisted that the Quran could be used to overrule hadith that are at variance with it, including Sayyid Ahmad Khan,[41] Rashid Rida,[87] and a number of Egyptian intellectuas.
[87] Recent political reforms in Saudi Arabia under King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud also reflect trends towards the belief that hadith can be redundant and that religious law can more closely emphasize the Quran.
[96] In the 19th and 20th century, controversy grew in Islamic sources over the interpretation of hadith (sometimes called mushkil al-ḥadīth) that came into conflict with the growing body of scientific knowledge, leading some, like Ahmud Abu Rayya, to question the corpus.
[100] But this did not mean critics accepted the traditional evaluation of hadith transmission with its supposed knowledge of the character and capacity of the reported narrators, that the scientists had focused on.
A least one group of Muslims (the Quranist Ahle-Quran movement) argue that the verses were directed towards the particular circumstances of the companions of the Prophet, Muhammad's contemporaries, and not to generations thereafter.
Early twentieth century scholar, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt argued that "even mutawatir connection" of a hadith was not enough to "prove that a practice is binding in every age and every place".
[92] Sidqi called the hadith-based sunnah of Muhammad "temporary and provisional law", and offered several reasons why the sunnah was "intended only for those who lived during the Prophet's era":[119] Across Islamic history, both prior to the rise of the use of hadith with the school of al-Shafi'i and among later Muslims who criticized the use of canonical hadith as a basis for religious belief and practice, other or more limited traditional sources have been used to establish the basis for Islamic thinking.
[39] Some of the most basic and important features of the sunnah—the five pillars of salat (ritual prayer) and zakat (alms), etc.—were known to Muslims from being passed down 'from the many to the many' (according to scholars of fiqh such as Al-Shafi'i) i.e. by Mutawatir practice[123] bypassing books of hadith.
Though hadith and isnad (chain of transmitters) had been tampered with and could not be held at the level of vertatim divine revelation, nonetheless they should not be discarded because they passed on the "spirit" of Prophet and should be given high regard as ijma (consensus or agreement of the Muslim scholars—which is another classical source of Islamic law).
Three camps of scholars may be identified: one attempting to reconfirm his conclusions, and at times going beyond them; another endeavoring to refute them and a third seeking to create a middle, perhaps synthesized, position between the two.
[Note 15] In his Muslim Studies, Goldziher states: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".
Historian Robert G. Hoyland, states during Umayyad times only the central government was allowed to make laws, religious scholars began to challenge this by claiming they had been transmitted hadith by the Prophet.
Even in the present day, and in the buildup to the first Gulf War, a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar on December 15, 1990, reading: "and described as `currently in wide circulation`", and it quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return".
[163] Another criticism of isnads was of the efficacy of the traditional Hadith studies field known as biographical evaluations (ʿilm al-rijāl)—evaluating the moral and mental capacity of transmitters/narrators.
[168] al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that "sunna" should be made up exclusively of specific precedents set by Muhammad passed down as hadith, argued that "having commanded believers to obey the Prophet" (citing Quran 33: 21),[169] "God must certainly have provided the means to do so.
)[172] Ibn al-Salah (d. 643/1245), "one of the most distinguished traditionists of the muta'akhkhirun",[173] argues (according to Farooq), that because mutawatir type hadith is rare, "for much of Islamic praxis, certainty of knowledge is neither feasible nor required.
The tradition says: ‘The Messenger of God said: "The Banu al-Asfar [white people], the Byzantines and the Franks [Christian groups] will gather together in the wasteland with Egypt[ians] against a man whose name is Sadim [i.e., Saddam]-- none of them will return.
