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 For
the Arabs, among whom Islam took its rise the Qur'an provided simple legislation in regard to their social,
political and religious needs, though even this was not systematized. But as the Muslims extended their conquests
and imposed the rule of Islam on peoples of other nations and other civilizations, the limitations of this Quranic
legislation became apparent.
The immediate successors of Muhammad were thus faced with a serious
problem. On the one hand, there was this clear demand for some enlargement and adaptation of the scanty dogmas of
the Qur'an to meet the needs of new peoples coming under their sway; while, on the other, they did not feel free
to act in contravention of the recognized principle that in all matters of law and politics, as well as faith, the
Qur'an was to be the sole guide. Muhammad himself had been ruled by it, how could it be otherwise with his less
divinely - guided successors, the Khalifas? It was clear, however, that something had to be done, because the
Qur'an did not suffice:how, then, were its deficiencies to be supplied?
The Sunna
Shortly after the Prophet's death an oral law came to be recognized,
called the sunna i. e. the "custom," or "usage," of the
Prophet, according to which the sayings and practices of this "noble pattern"
(Surah 33:21) were made to do duty as a supplement to the Qur'an. There is ground, however, for believing
that Muhammad did not think and speak of himself as infallible, nor look upon his utterances( other than those for
which he claimed divine inspiration) as a sure and certain guide. A story concerning him confirms this view. It is
recorded that he once ruined a date - crop by forbidding the owners to continue a long - established custom of
artificial fertilization of the palm - trees. On seeing the disastrous result of his prohibitory order, he is said
to have confessed that he had spoken in ignorance. He was not, he explained, on that occasion delivering a
revelation, hence his error (Mishkatu’l - Masabih, Book 1, Ch 6, Part 1)
Notwithstanding this, the requisite authority for his sunna was found
in those injunctions in the Qur’an where the believers are told to obey the Prophet as they would God Himself
(e. g., Surah 33; 36; 48:17; cp. 47:2). Thus a new doctrine came to be formulated, according to which it
was believed that the words and actions of Muhammad were under the control and inspiration of God, and there -
fore authoritative. He was to be, in fact, the “noble pattern” in everything.
HADITH
 The
Traditions of Islam as a body of literature are called Ahadith (plural of hadith). Hadith
literally means “communication” or “narrative” and is an act or saying attributed to the Prophet, or to his
Companions, which is used as a justification and support of the sunna.
More precisely the Traditions are the records of:
1) What Muhammad did; what he declared: and that
which was done in his presence and which he did not forbid.
2) They also include records of the conduct and of the sayings of the
Ashab, or "Companions" of Muhammad. Thousands of believers
enjoyed the privilege of consulting the Prophet and thus earned the exclusive title of the
"Companions.” When no other guidance was forthcoming the agreement of these Companions came
to be looked upon as infallible, since they, too, were the object of God's pleasure( Surah 48:18).
It goes without saying, then, that these Traditions are held in great
respect throughout the Muslim world. Certain statements, preserved in the Traditions and alleged to have been made
by Muhammad himself concerning such matters, ensure for them this high regard. We quote from the popular
collection known as Mishkat ul Mafabih, Book I, Ch. 6 :
"Verily the best word is the word of God, and the best rule of conduct
is that delivered to Muhammad."
''That which the Prophet of God has made unlawful is like that which
God Himself has made so."
"I have left you two things and you will not stray so long as you hold
them fast. The one is the word of God, and the other is the sunna of His Prophet."
CONTENT AND SCOPE OF
THE TRADITIONS
It will be as well to say here a word about the contents and scope of
these Traditions :
A very large portion of them deals with legal provisions, religious
obligations, such as the prescribed prayers and the rules appertaining thereto; fasting, alms, pilgrimage, and
jihad( holy war); details concerning fard and wajib duties; things halal( allowable) and
haram( forbidden); ritual purity and laws regarding food; criminal and civil law, and concerning courtesy
and manners.
There are also sections on dogma - retribution at the day of judgment;
hell and paradise; angels; the creation and revelation. Interspersed among these are edifying sayings and moral
teachings attributed to the Prophet. These have now been separately edited and called the Table Talk of Muhammad.
These Traditions also served the further purpose of supplying a much -
needed commentary on the Qur'an, seeking amongst other things to reconcile its conflicting passages.
HOW THE TRADITIONS GREW UP
 The
manner in which these traditions came into existence can be readily imagined. After the death of Muhammad, in the
intervals of leisure on military campaigns, the thought and conversation of the Companions would naturally turn to
recalling the acts and sayings of their remarkable leader, who had put them in the way of becoming a conquering
nation. As time passed the wonder of his achievement grew upon them, until he himself came to be thought of as
endowed with supernatural power.
But such an attitude of awe regarding Muhammad was still more marked in
Muslims of a later generation who had never seen the Prophet and for whom his Companions themselves were objects
of veneration. There are stories on record which clearly indicate this. Here is one :
“Is it possible, father'Abdu'llah, that thou hast been with Muhammad?''
asked a certain pious Muslim in the mosque at Kufa;"didst thou really see the Prophet, and wert thou on familiar
terms with him? ” “Son of my uncle, ” came the reply, “it is as thou sayest. ” “Well, by the Lord ! “exclaimed the
ardent listener, “had I been alive in his time I would not have allowed him to put his blessed foot upon the
earth, but would have borne him on my shoulder wherever he listed. ”
It seems reasonable to suppose that the luxuriant growth of material
embodied in the Traditions took its rise under conditions similar to those we have described.
FABRICATION
When we consider all the circumstances this passionate demand for
detail, the need for a more elaborate code of law, and the authority claimed for such sayings it is not surprising
to find that traditions were fabricated. The requirements of those early, exciting days brought into existence not
only hundreds but thousands of hitherto unknown sayings and practices alleged to have originated from the Prophet.
Every kind of story about Muhammad, false or true, was put into
circulation, until the thousands grew to hundreds of thousands. So notorious was the practice that Muslims
themselves, as we shall see, do not deny, and never have denied, that gross fabrication went on.
ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF A
HADITH
Strictly speaking a hadith has two parts :
1) The isnad(plural of sanad), i.e., The "support" for
the trustworthiness of the statement. This isnad consists of the names of persons who have handed on
the substance of a tradition to one another. Thus there is a : chain of transmitters ending with the original
authority.
2) The matn, or “text,” of the sunna
The following may be taken as a specimen of a perfect hadlth :
“Muhammad, bin 'Abdullah bin Numair al Hamdani said to us that Abu
Khalid (who is Sulaiman bin Hayyan al Ahmar) said that Abu Malik al Ashja’i said that Sa 'ad bin 'Ubaidah said
that the son of 'Umar said that the Prophet of God said: 'Islam is founded on five things; to believe in the Unity
of God, to say the prescribed prayers, to give alms, to fast in Ramadan, and make the pilgrimage '
(Sahihu’l - Muslim, Book 1, p 176).
According to Muslim doctors, a genuine tradition must possess a number
of characteristics, the chief of which we shall proceed to quote. The narrator must have distinctly stated that
such and such a thing had been said or done by the Prophet; the chain of narrators from the last link up to the
Prophet must be complete; every one of the narrators must have been persons conspicuous for their piety, virtue
and honesty, and each one of them must be well known for his learning; the import of the tradition must not be
contrary to the injunctions of the Qur'an, or to the doctrines deduced from it, or to such other traditions as are
proved to be “sound.”
The need for observing great caution in regard to circulating
traditions seems to have been felt by the older Companions of Muhammad. It is recorded, for instance that ‘Uthman,
when Khalifa, issued, orders as follows;
“It is not permitted to anyone to relate a tradition as from the
Prophet, which he has not already heard in the time of Abu Bakr and ‘Umar. And, verily, nothing hinders me from
repeating traditions of the Prophet 's sayings (although I be one of those endowed with the most retentive memory
among all his Companions) but that I have heard him say,' Whoever shall repeat of me that which I have not said,
his resting -place shall be hell’.”
(Ibn Majah, p 5(text Mujtabai Press, Delhi, 1333 A. H).
This mass of material, constituting a supplemental code of law, was for
a long time oral in form. No attempt was made to preserve it in writing; it was committed to memory and
transmitted orally. A teacher who had memorized a mass of traditions would recount them to a student, and in this
way they were passed on to others. It has been suggested in explanation of this method that the superstition
prevailed that the Qur 'an would not tolerate any literature besides itself. Possibly, too, men were afraid lest
such documents should become incorporated in text of the Qur 'an.
COLLECTION AND CLASSIFICATION
We have already observed to what extravagant lengths the traditions
grew. The next task was to collect them and, finally, scrutinize and classify them.
We are told that towards the close of the first century of the Hijra
men developed a positive passion for searching out these traditions. They travelled from city to city and from
tribe to tribe, from one end of the Muslim world to the other, personally interviewing any surviving Companion of
the Prophet, or their successors, in the hope of securing some fragment concerning his life.
But the business was too serious to be thus left to private enterprise,
and so we learn that the Khalifa, Umar 2, about a hundred years after the death of Muhammad, issued orders for a
more formal collection of all extant traditions.
The earliest compilation of which we have knowledge belongs to a date
towards the end of the second century of the Hijra. The material thus amassed has been handed down, both in
the form of biographies of the Prophet and in collections of traditions which bear upon every conceivable aspect
of his life. In compiling these collections the question of evidence assumed great importance.
Two main classes of Companions, or Successors of the Prophet, took
precedence in the transmission of the traditions.
1) The Ashab, i.e., the actual Companions of the Prophet.
The evidence of their own eyes and ears was considered sufficient.
2) The Tabi’in or "successors," i.e., the people of the
first generation after
Muhammad, who are supposed to have got their information from the
Ashab.
There were other, less important, classes also.
Just as there are classes of the narrators of the traditions, so, too,
there are well -known classifications of the traditions. Only the main groups need be mentioned here, viz, those
that are :
1. Sahih, i.e., sound; traditions containing no
weakness and no contradiction of current belief.
2. Hasan, i.e., fair, a mediocre tradition and not
faultless, since the narrators are not of the first class.
3. Da’if. i.e. weak, either because the contents
are suspicious or because the authority is unreliable.
SOME FAMOUS COLLECTIONS
It is significant that no official codification of these traditions has
ever been made, though certain collections mentioned below are treated as of very high authority.
The method adopted in the earliest collections was to arrange the
various traditions according to their isnad, from which fact they came to be called Musanid. In this
type of compilation each hadith was placed under the name of the person last named in the chain of
attesters. Thus under the names of 'A 'isha, Fatima and Abu Huraira we have traditions that are ultimately traced
back:to these notable persons. A very old and typical Musnad is the six -volume work of Ahmad ibn Hanbal,
the founder of one of the four orthodox"schools"of Muslim jurisprudence. This collection is said to contain about
30,000 hadith, selected from 750,000 and traceable to 700 Companions.
The later collections, on the other hand, were for the most part
arranged according to the subject -matter of the traditions, e.g., prayer, pilgrimage, war, food, the use of
omens, the resurrection, hell, etc., and so were called Musannaf, “digest.“
Six of these Musannaf collections, all dating from the third
century of the Hijra, gained wide recognition and are to this day highly esteemed. These belong to :
 Al Bukhari, d. 870;
Muslim, d. 875;
Abu Da’ud, d. 888;
Al Tirmidhi, d. 892;
Al Nasa'i, d. 915 :
Ibn Majah, d. 886.
These go by the name of the Sihah sitta, “the six sound” books,
but the first two are held in very special esteem, since they are believed to include traditions of the sahih
class only. Other collections appeared in course of time, but they are only compilations based on the works we
have mentioned. The best known of these are the Mishkatu 'l -Masabih and that of As -Suyuti.
HOW FAR ARE THE TRADITIONS RELIABLE?
 We
have it on the authority of some of the early collectors that in the second century of the Hijra tens of
thousands of these traditions had not a vestige of truth in them. Some idea of the scandalous way in which the
name of Muhammad was misused to give support to fabrications may be gathered from the fact that Bukhari finally
came to these conclusions :
(1) out of 40, 000 persons whose names had been used as "transmitters,"
only 2, 000 could be considered reliable.
(2) out of 600, 000 hadith which he found to be current, only 4,
000 could be retained as authentic.
It is recorded that Bukhari set himself this task of compiling an
authentic collection as the result of a vision. He dreamed that be was ''driving flies" off the person of
Muhammad. An interpreter of dreams explained to him that he was destined to "drive lies" far from the Prophet!
Quite obviously the work of men like Bukhari and others was not just
another way of collecting the traditions, but an attempt to submit the accumulated mass to certain standards of
criticism. Yet the moment we enquire into what those standards were it becomes equally evident that their efforts
were inadequate, even futile,
In the first place they never applied the principles of internal
criticism to the matn of a tradition. If they could satisfy themselves that the isnad was sahih
they passed the rest, even though the narrative was in itself improbable, impossible or absurd.
More precisely, their methods of criticism were wholly external; they
confined themselves to scrutinizing the genuineness of the isnad. But even here it can be shown that they
failed to carry out their task, for although they sometimes did reject a tradition on the ground that
the"chain"revealed chronological or other impossibilities yet their courage seems to have largely failed them when
it came to passing adverse criticisms on the transmitters themselves. While they might, and did, deal drastically
with narrators nearer their own time, it was not a task to their liking to find fault with those wonderful men of
an earlier age, the Companions of the Prophet and their immediate successors. It resulted in this, therefore, that
for all practical purposes these Companions were exempt from criticism. But in a matter of this kind it is the
upper end of the chain, the source, that requires the more rigid scrutiny, for defects there affect all that
follows; yet it was just at this point that they least applied their criticisms.
The significance of these remarks becomes apparent when we turn to
enquire who the Companions were whose names stand at the upper end of the ''chains". As a matter of fact, nearly
all the best of this select class died within twenty or thirty years of the death of Muhammad, and we seldom find
their names mentioned among the narrators. Instead, we observe that the greater numbers of the traditions are
attributed to the younger companions of the Prophet. We will mention those most frequently appearing.
Abu Huraira is made
accountable for thousands of traditions, although he embraced Islam only four years before Muhammad's death, and
during those years was an unknown youth.
Ibn ‘ Abbas to
whom also thousands of traditions are attributed, was only a lad of fourteen when Muhammad died, and was in
contact with him for the last four years only.
Anas bin Malik, a man of
no education, was only nineteen years old when Muhammad died.
Yet it has been estimated that more than half of even Bukhari’s
selected traditions are attributed to these lads. In the famous history of Tabari(d. A.D. 923), Ibn 'Abbas is
quoted 286 times, Abu Huraira 52 times, Anas bin Malik 47 times, whereas the first four Khalifa’s are not quoted
once !
There remains the name of'A'isha, Muhammad 's favourite wife. Naturally
no objection can be brought against her name on the ground of the brevity of her association with the Prophet, but
she is notoriously partisan.
The conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that an isnad,
accepted as "correct," may possess very little objective value; least of all can we be sure that such Muslim
narrators of the first generation are reliable. Notwithstanding these defects, it needs to be said that all parts
of these traditions are not equally liable to suspicion.
1. Those that deal with the more prosaic incidents of the life of
Muhammad and the Companions are those which can be most readily credited. It would have served no one 's interest
to garble them. For this reason the Medina period is much better vouched for than the Meccan, not merely because
it was less romantic, but because it was witnessed by many more people, The traditions of the Meccan period and of
Muhammad 's early years are full of details of very uncertain validity.
2. The romantic incidents are much more open to doubt, while those
telling of miracles are suspect if only because of the plain statement of Surah 29 :49. It is enough to know that
this type of tradition is attributed to the group of four mentioned above. Not only was there a demand for such
tales about the Prophet, but it seems to have been an accepted principle that, to quote the words of Ash -Shafi,
“in glorifying the Prophet it is allowable somewhat to exaggerate.”
3. The class of traditions attributing pious sayings to Muhammad is
open to similar objection. The late eminent scholar Goldziher, has shown, for instance, that a tendency prevailed
in early times(it may have been an unconscious one) to draw a picture of Muhammad that should not be inferior to
the Christian Church 's picture of Jesus. So not his deeds only, but also his words must be brought into line with
that standard. In this way sayings borrowed from the Old Testament and from the Gospels found their way, sometimes
in a slightly altered form, into the traditions. We may quote here a few examples of the last class which
illustrate the general tendency :
"Verily God does not look on your outward appearance or your
possessions, but He looks at your heart and your actions."
"0 God, place a distance between me and my sins as Thou hast placed a
distance between East and West."
"Our Lord God, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name:Thy kingdom is
in heaven and on earth. As Thy mercy is in heaven so show Thy mercy on earth. Forgive us our debts and sins."
Here is one from a rare variety of traditions, called Hadith Qudsi,
i.e., a holy tradition, in which, it is alleged, Muhammad received the substance of God 's truth, either by
inspiration or in a dream, and then clothed the idea in his own words.
“God said:I have prepared for my servants who are pious that which, eye
hath not seen nor ear heard, nor that which has entered into the heart of man.”
There is a saying quoted in the introduction to Ibn Majah’s collection,
and attributed to Muhammad, which fully justifies one 's grave suspicion concerning this type of tradition, viz.,
“Whatever good words has been said, I said it.”(op.cit., p 4, line 10).
4. There is a further class of traditions that deal with the domestic
details of Muhammad’s life. Aisha is alleged to have furnished many of these. Scholars are averse to translating
much of them, as being unfit for publication. We are left to wonder how they ever came to be recorded.
5. Another class of traditions which we need to consider comprises
those which supply the material for canon law. It is very noteworthy that the earliest school of systematic
legists very largely dispensed with the traditions they found on fiqh, or canon law, for the reason that it
was known that the most unblushing forgery had been practised in their production. Al Baghawi(d. about 1120), who
was honoured as “a reviver of the sunna,” confesses in the introduction to his Masiblh as -sunna
that the majority of traditions normative for fiqh depend on has as isnads, those of second -class
authority.
SPECIMENS OF TRADITIONS
 The compiler
of the famous collection of traditions, the Mishkatu 'l -Masabih, belonging to the fourteenth century,
arranged his material under twenty -five main heads. We shall conclude our study by quoting a few at random from
this collection. It is to be remembered that in each case the statement or custom is attributed to Muhammad.
"I am ordered to make war on men until they bear witness that there is
no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah"
( Bukhari and Muslim from'Umar).
"When any one of you awakes from sleep and performs his ablutions, let
him cleanse his nose three times, because verily Satan takes up his abode in the nose"
( Bukhari and Muslim from Abu Huraira).
“He who builds a mosque for God, God will build a house for him in
Paradise“
( Bukhari and Muslim from'Uthman).
"The Black Stone came down from Paradise. It was whiter than milk, but
the sins of the children of Adam have made it black"
( Tirmidhi from Ibn'Abbas).
“When the Apostle of God( said'A'isha) wished to go on a journey, he
used to cast lots amongst his wives, and would depart taking her with him whose name came out"
( Bukhari and Muslim).
"God has cursed the thief who steals an egg and his hand shall be cut
off. And the hand of a thief who steals a rope shall be cut off"
( Bukhari and Muslim, from Abu Huraira).
"Do not cut meat with a knife, for that is done by foreigners; but tear
it with the teeth, for that is pleasanter and healthier"
( Abu Daud from A'isha).
"The Prophet(said Anas) forbade a man to drink in a standing position"(
Muslim.).
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