Departure of Scholars from the Way of the Ḥadīth Imāms

Departure of Scholars from the Way of the Ḥadīth Imāms

By Dr. Mohammed Akram Nadwi
Oxford, UK
Translated by Dr. Abu Zayd

They asked: We attend your lectures and you point out all sorts of scholarly mistakes in the treatment of the Prophetic sunnah and the failure to fully grasp the approach of the Imāms of ḥadīth. So please inform us of the roots and origins of this fault and error.

I replied:

There are two matters: that which most scholars fell into and that which only some of them did.

They asked: What affected most of them?

I replied: Two matters.

They asked: What are they?

I replied:

Need to Treat Ḥadīth as Historical Reports

First, there is failure to fully discern the meaning of ḥadīth authentication, whose underlying factor goes back to not apprehending the real nature of ḥadīth. Ḥadīth is basically a historical report, and you cannot arrive at an understanding of its reality or depth without familiarity with the discipline of history: through examining and analyzing reports of its events and occurrences, and keeping in view the causes, multifold dimensions and subtle deficiencies of those reports. The Imāms of ḥadīth were thoroughly and utterly proficient in the science of history. Contemplate their reports, discussion and discourse, and you will indeed find my claim to be truthful and correct. Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn, Ibn al-Madīnī, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Bukhārī, Muslim, Nasā’ī, Ibn Abī Ḥātim and others wrote on history and biographies. Bukhārī wrote on history before working on his Ṣaḥīḥ. Reports can often be contaminated by mistakes and errors, insertions and additions, fabrication and falsehood, and other types of deficiencies. These Imāms exerted their efforts in distinguishing and scrutinizing them with precision and proficiency. They reached the furthest extents of caution and diligence in their treatment of narrations, such that scholars of no other discipline managed to reach. Those luminaries did well to classify ḥadīth into ṣaḥīḥ (sound), ḥasan (fair), daʿīf (weak), munkar (rejected), and mawḍūʿ (fabricated); and authored great works on ʿilal (hidden defects of reports) which bore witness to their skill and proficiency in this craft, while yet others even surpassed them and excelled over them in this domain.

Not All Narrators are the Same

It is quite obvious that memorizing one or two legal rulings does not make one a jurist, nor does dealing with an issue or two of logic makes one a logician, nor possessing one or two dirhams makes one rich. This matter is self-evident and does not even deserve to be pointed out. At the same time, unfortunately, most scholars did not observe this crucial difference for the narrators of ḥadīth. They deem equivalent those who were specialists and those who narrated a report or two. How many reports were narrated solely by non-specialists while seasoned experts deemed them suspicious or even rejected them, and yet they attained acceptance among scholars who began to narrate them in their books until the public took them fully? For that reason, the Imāms of ḥadīth stipulated for a narrator conditions such as accuracy, prolonged tutelage under their teachers, and proficiency in this discipline. They were particularly attentive to the discrepancies among narrators, especially when one of them differed from others in a solitary manner. They ruled on the strength or weakness of the accuracy of narrators. They frequently described reports as gharīb (solitary), shādh (anomalous), or munkar (rejected), while later scholars frequently elevated these same reports to ṣaḥīḥ or ḥasan based upon the multiplicity of their chains or their being widespread among people.

Recognizing Intra-Narration Mistakes