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The above has been a very brief description of some of
the important means by which Allah has preserved the ever-important Sunnah of
the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him. One of
the important aspects to note is that these safeguards started going into
effect virtually during the time of the Prophet himself. There was no time
lag, leaving the door open to a massive loss of information or to distortion.
In the following statement, M. Z. Siddiqi has done an
excellent job of summing up the protection of the sunnah in the early years:
The Hadeeth in the sense of the reports of the sayings
and doings of Muhammad has been a subject of keen pursuit and constant study by
the Muslims throughout the Muslim world since the very beginning of the history
of Islam up to the present times. During the life-time of Muhammad many of the
companions tried to learn by heart whatever he said, and observed keenly
whatever he did; and they reported these things to one another. Some of them
wrote down what he said in Saheefahs (scrolls) which were later on read
by them to their students, and which were preserved in their families and also
by the Followers. After the death of Muhammad, when his companions spread in
various countries, some of them as well as their followers undertook long
arduous journeys, courted poverty and penury in order to collect them together…
Their remarkable activity with regard to the preservation and propagation of hadeeth
is unique in the literary history of the world… [And the excellence of their
sciences remains] unparalleled in the literary history of the world even
to-day.
It was these processes that ultimately culminated in the
fine-tuned sciences of hadeeth and the detail grading of the reports traced
back to the Prophet. In general, the scholars would not accept a report as an
authentic hadeeth unless that report can be verified with a complete chain made
up of only sound and trustworthy narrators all the way back to the Prophet. Anything
short of that would be rejected as a weak hadeeth.
The more one goes on to study the sciences of hadeeth,
the more he/she will feel comfortable with the feeling that the teachings of
the Prophet Muhammad has been minutely preserved, just as Allah had promised in
the Quran. When the scholars of hadeeth—who are the specialists in that field
and who have spent their lifetime in mastering that discipline—agree upon the
authenticity of a hadeeth, there should be no need for debate or question. The
only thing left to do is to believe in it and do one’s best to apply the
meaning of that hadeeth in one’s life.
Comparison with Other Scriptures
When referring to the hadeeth of the Prophet, it is
commonplace for some Westerners to use the word “tradition.” This immediately
brings forth the impression of a very haphazard and unscholarly report. The
reality, as alluded to above, is completely different. The use, therefore, of
this word “tradition” may be nothing more than a smokescreen to give the
impression that the hadeeth were not preserved. Another common description that
appears is a reference to the preservation of the hadeeth as being similar to
that of the Gospels.
This is also a rather clever phrase that definitely has
negative connotations to it for many. In fact, many converts have studied the
Gospels and know how unreliable they are—this being one of the reasons why they
began to search for a religion other than Christianity. Therefore, such a
statement will quickly shake their faith in hadeeth.
The stark reality is that no honest comparison can be
made between the minute and scientific preservation of the hadeeth of the
Prophet and the preservation of the earlier scriptures. A few brief
descriptions of the preservation—or lack thereof—of the earlier scriptures
should suffice to contrast them with the preservation of the hadeeth.
After a lengthy discussion of the history of the Torah,
Dirks concludes:
The received Torah is not a single, unitary document.
It is a cut-and-paste compilation… with additional layering… While Moses, the
person who received the original revelation, which the Torah is supposed
to represent, lived no later than the 13th century BCE, and probably lived
in the 15th century BCE, the received Torah dates to a much later epoch. The
oldest identifiable substrata of the received Torah, i.e., J, can be dated
no earlier than the 10th century BCE… Further, these different substrata
were not combined into a received Torah until approximately 400 BCE, which
would be approximately 1,000 years after the life of Moses. Still
further, the received Torah was never totally standardized, with at least
four different texts existing in the first century CE, which was
approximately 1,500 years after the life of Moses. Additionally, if one
adopts the Masoretic text as the most “official” text of the received
Torah, then the oldest existing manuscript dates to circa 895 CE, which is
about 2,300 years after the life of Moses. In short, although the
received Torah may well contain some portions of the original Torah, the
provenance of the received Torah is broken, largely unknown, and can in no
way be traced to Moses.
Although Jesus came many centuries after Moses, the
revelation that he received did not fare much better. A group of Christians
scholars known as the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar tried to determine which of
the sayings attributed to Jesus can actually be considered authentic. They
stated, “Eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were
not actually spoken by him.” In
describing the history of the gospels, they wrote, “The stark truth is that the
history of the Greek gospels, from their creation in the first century until
the discovery of the first copies of them at the beginning of the third,
remains largely unknown and therefore unmapped territory.”
Bart Ehrman’s work The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture has identified
how the scripture has been changed over time. He states his thesis, which he
proves in detail, at the outset, “My thesis can be stated simply: scribes
occasionally altered the words of their sacred texts to make them more patently
orthodox and to prevent their misuse by Christians who espoused aberrant views.”
That is something like putting the cart before the horse: The beliefs should be
based on the transmitted texts; not that the texts should be altered to fit the
beliefs.
A Final Note about the Quran
The nature of the Quran is very different from that of
the statements and actions of the Prophet. Obviously, the statements and
actions are very large in number while the Quran is very limited in size. The
Quran, which is not a large book at all, was preserved in memory as well as
written form from the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Many of the
Companions of the Prophet had memorized the entire Quran and, fearing what had
happened to earlier religious communities, they took the necessary steps to
protect it from any form of adulteration. Soon after the death of the Prophet,
the Quran was all compiled together and shortly afterwards official copies were
sent to the distant lands to ensure that the text was pure. To this day, one
can travel to any part of the world and pick up a copy Quran and find that it
is the same throughout the world. The task of preserving the Quran cannot
actually compare to the task of preserving the bulk of the Sunnah. Hence, it
is no surprise, given the attitude of the Muslims of that time, that the Quran
was minutely preserved.
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