Hadith: Difference between revisions

===Joseph Schacht (d. 1969)===

Joseph Schacht, the leading scholar on the history of Islamic law during his time, wrote the following:

===G.H.A. Juynboll (d. 2010)===

{{Quote|{{citation|author=Robert G. Hoyland|year=2015|publisher=Oxford University Press|url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_God_s_Path/i3LDBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0|title=In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire|pages=136-137|ISBN=9780199916368}}|Muhammad’s practice and legislation was of course important to his community: the Arabs “kept to the tradition of Muhammad, their instructor, to such an extent that they inflicted the death penalty on anyone who was seen to act brazenly against his laws,” says the seventh-century monk John of Fenek. But new laws, the Umayyads would argue, were the business of caliphs. Religious scholars soon began to challenge this view, as we have said, and some did this by claiming that the doings and sayings of Muhammad had been accurately transmitted to them. It was rare in the first couple of generations after Muhammad: “I spent a year sitting with ‘Umar I’s son ‘Abdallah (d. 693),” said one legal scholar, “and I did not hear him transmit anything from the prophet.” Not much later, though, the idea had won some grass-roots support, as we learn from another scholar, writing around 740, who observes: “I never heard Jabir ibn Zayd (d. ca. 720) say: ‘the prophet said. . .’ and yet the young men round here are saying it twenty times an hour.” A little later again Muhammad’s sayings would be put on a par with the Qur’an as the source of all Islamic law. In Mu‘awiya’s time, though, this was still far in the future, and for the moment caliphs made law, not scholars.}}

Andreas Görke is senior lecturer of Islamic studies at the University of Edinburgh

{{Quote|{{citation|chapter=Prospects and Limits in the Study of the Historical Muhammad|pages=139-140|title=The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam|publisher=Brill|editor=Voort, et al.|year=2011|ISBN=978 90 04 20389 1|url=https://brill.com/view/title/17316|author=Andreas Görke}}|There are five main arguments against the reliability of these sources:<br>1. The Muslim accounts of the life of Muḥammad are only recorded in written sources that date from more than 150 years after Muḥammad’s purported death; they are neither supported by non-Muslim sources, nor substantiated by archaeological findings.<br>2. Some accounts are apparently inspired by verses from the Qurʾān. They thus do not constitute independent sources, but are only attempts to interpret Qurʾānic verses and to place them into a context.<br>3. Some accounts display obvious secondary tendencies that reflect later political, theological or legal debates.<br>4. Often, the existing accounts are contradictory. They contain conflicting information regarding chronology, persons involved, and the course of events that cannot be reconciled.<br>5. The motivation of the accounts’ creators and transmitters should not be considered to be purely historiographical. Instead, it has to be assumed that they aimed at presenting the life of Muḥammad as salvation history, to provide a context for the Qurʾānic text, support certain legal positions by tracing them back to the Prophet, provide certain persons with a particular status by emphasising their role in the Prophet’s surroundings, or simply to entertain. The accounts are thus not only reshaped and distorted by secondary tendencies, but were never meant to present the life of Muḥammad in any objective way.}}