Did your prophet kill a woman who was breastfeeding her baby?
Question:
Hello,
I was going through your blog and noticed this specific article https://www.exploring-islam.com/did-our-prophet-pbuh-kill-a-woman-breastfeeding-her-baby.html
in which you tried to answer a valid question.
According to Islamic scholars, what you provided as answer is not accurate and I would like to discuss this further with some references.
I will go through your answer, quote and response to the parts that I believe they are inaccurate, incorrect or misleading.
- "Unfortunately the scholarship of Islam suffers from the lack of reliable historical sources"
-- The above statement is not incorrect, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that Qur'an itself is derived from historical sources/says.
As you know there are numbers of Qur'an variants in hand in present-day and not all of the manuscripts are the same, therefore, the Qur'an has not been perfectly preserved. So in order to dismiss a Hadiths/historical say, referring it to the current Qur'an, is incorrect. since if you find a mismatch between them, you can not prove which one is reliable, if any of them is?
Also could you please let me know whether you believe that the original Qur'an is held with Ali ibn AbuTaleb and the current Qur'an we have is only one third of the original Qur'an?
- "We know that the Qur’an and the Established Sunnah have reached us through the consensus of generations of Muslims and are therefore reliable."
-- The first part of above sentence can be either true or false. Please note that, as mentioned above both Qur’an and the Established Sunnah have reached us via historical sources as well as Hadiths. You, as a scholar, can not fully rely on consensus of generations only for Qur’an and Sunnah but on the other hand, doubt the Hadiths which have been reached to us in the same way.
Unless you are speaking as believer, not a researcher without any bias?
- Killing a person (unless it is a man to man situation in a battlefield as a part of a religiously allowed war) is absolutely forbidden according to the Qur’an. There are only three exceptions:
.........
-- I highly doubt that an educated person like yourself, is not aware of the concept of 'The initial jihad'. The rules of 'initial Jihad' have been derived from Surah At-Tawbah ( سورةالتوبة) and specially verses number 11 onwards.
In Surah At-Tawbah, not only there is no pointing to 'defensive' war, but also according to the Descends of this verse, it's a proof of it's referring to offensive wars.
- "It is already a known fact among many scholars of Hadith that the story is not reliable at all. The story is reported by Ibn Ishaq and by Ibn Sa’d through al-Waqidi. It is not reported in any Hadith collection that is considered more reliable."
-- before I go to the facts against this claim, I hope by reading your own sentence above, you can see the logical problems in your own reasoning.
".... not reliable at all" vs "it is not reported in A MORE RELIABLE source"
I believe in your first sentence, you are intentionally trying to make readers believe that the source is not reliable (which is incorrect, if not a lie), but later on you tried to be more reasonable, but could not justify your first claim and it remained as a false claim.
Anyhow, I think you are one of the few Muslims who consider Maghazi book as a unreliable historical reference!
Other than 'the story is not reliable at all', do you have other evidences saying this story is not reliable?
Also, in addition refusing the terrpr of Asma Bint Marwan, do you have any evidences to refuse below terrors (Fatk - فتک) too?
- Ka'ab al ashraf (کعب الأشرف)
- Abu Afak (ابوعفک)
- Abu Rafi bin Haghigh (ابو رافع بن حقیق)
- "The chain of narrators ...."
-- It seems you are referring to Rejaal chain, but I am certain that you are already aware that Majlesi the highest referred and respected person of Islamic scholar, specially between Shia's) mentioned that not few of the narrator names provided in Islamic books are fabricated, and there is no problem with that since the writer's intentions was through Savab. So referring to elm-ol-rejaal or ravian-hadith to debunk it is either coming from your ignorance of this Majlesi's say (which I again doubt that), or you tried to give a dishonest answer based on incorrect information.
Also, could you please let your readers know about the validity of 'Abū ʽAmr Ḥafṣ ibn Sulaymān ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Abi Dawud al-Asadī al-Kūfī ' ?
According to Elm-Ol-Rejaal, this person considered as forgetful, therefore the Hadiths leading to him will be considered and invalid,
BUT please let your readers know that one of the most reliable Qur'an variants at this date (حفص عن عاصم), is the one told by same person.
So I suggest you don't use elm-ol-rejal for dismiss hadiths, doing so, you will put a big question mark on top of your holy book, Qur'an.
I am certain that you are well aware of different editions of Qur'an accepted by different countries/regions of Islam world, but I could not see it anywhere in your weblog. I believe it would be a very interesting and informative post. what do you think?
Thanks
Answer:
Hello and Salam,
Thanks for your message, please allow me to first let you know about some of my views that are not inline with the traditional Islamic views. then I will try to reply to your point:
1. I do not consider any religion to be the best or the most complete religion, including Islam. I believe in religious pluralism.
2. I do not believe that prophets of God were infallible. I do believe that they could commit mistakes or sins. However when that was against their mission of guidance then revelation would correct that.
With these in mind I now try to answer your comments, using blue to make it easier for you to see:
You wrote:
"I want to draw your attention to the fact that Qur'an itself is derived from historical sources/says.
As you know there are numbers of Qur'an variants in hand in present-day and not all of the manuscripts are the same, therefore, the Qur'an has not been perfectly preserved. So in order to dismiss a Hadiths/historical say, referring it to the current Qur'an, is incorrect. since if you find a mismatch between them, you can not prove which one is reliable, if any of them is?
Also could you please let me know whether you believe that the original Qur'an is held with Ali ibn AbuTaleb and the current Qur'an we have is only one third of the original Qur'an?"
I do appreciate that we cannot say for sure that the Qur'an is 100% preserved. However I do believe that the Qur'an is more reliable than Hadith. It is an obvious academic rule that you always check a less reliable evidence against a more reliable one. On the subject of killing, the Qur'an is very clear and there are no contradicting instructions in it. The variant Qur'ans that you referred to do exist, however I think maybe you do not know the extent of variations between them. The variations are mostly in vowels (grammar) and sometimes individual words. They are not varied any further than this limit. So which ever variations that you go for says pretty much the same thing about killing or not killing a person. Don't take my words for it, you can check it yourself from here: https://erquran.org/. Simply choose what reading (qira'ah) of the Qur'an you want to check and choose a verse, see how minor the variations are. As you know the versions of the Qur'an that have recently been found in Birmingham or the Yamani San'a version, both belonging to the early era of Islam, are not that different from what we have today. No I do not believe that story about the Qur'an of Ali ibn AbuTalib, and I do not know many scholars who hold that belief today, being Sunni or Shia.
You wrote:
" You, as a scholar, can not fully rely on consensus of generations only for Qur’an and Sunnah but on the other hand, doubt the Hadiths which have been reached to us in the same way."
Well, as I explained above, actually I can, because unlike what you wrote the Qur'an is not reached us through the same way that hadith has reached us. The Qur'an has reached us through consensus of generations, or to make it less debatable, I say the Qur'an has reached us through numerous narrators. This however is not the same for hadith. Each hadith has reached us through one or at most handful narrators in each generation. That is why it is called hadith al-Ahad (hadith that is narrated by one or few). Also while the Qur'an was being with Muslims from the early days of Islam, hadith only entered the scholarship of Islam more than 150 years after the prophet. So yes, I use a more reliable source to judge about a much less reliable source. This is what has been accepted by all Muslim scholars.
You wrote:
"I highly doubt that an educated person like yourself, is not aware of the concept of 'The initial jihad'. The rules of 'initial Jihad' have been derived from Surah At-Tawbah ( سورةالتوبة) and specially verses number 11 onwards.
In Surah At-Tawbah, not only there is no pointing to 'defensive' war, but also according to the Descends of this verse, it's a proof of it's referring to offensive wars."
I am very much aware of the concept of initial jihad (jihad al-ibtidayi), however I ask you to please read some of my writing in the website, you will then see that in my understanding the initial jihad is of two kinds, one that only applies at the time of the messengers and one that applies at all times. The first one, according to the Qurán, is against those direct addressees of a messenger who rejected him out of arrogance. This does not apply at our time. The second is to stop persecution. This applies at our time and is the only excuse that today UN considers as legitimate for approving a war. Please read the verses in the Surah Tawbah again, please note in particular verses 1-22. I am sure that you will see and appreciate that these verses instructed the prophet and the companions about the polytheists in Mecca at their time. If you see anything in these verses that suggest these instructions are for all Muslims at all time, regarding all kinds of polytheists at all time, then please let me know and I will look into it.
You wrote:
"... you can see the logical problems in your own reasoning.
.... not reliable at all" vs "it is not reported in A MORE RELIABLE source"
I believe in your first sentence, you are intentionally trying to make readers believe that the source is not reliable (which is incorrect, if not a lie), but later on you tried to be more reasonable, but could not justify your first claim and it remained as a false claim."
I do not see any logical problems. Due to the same procedure that I explained about transmission and collection of hadith, some hadith are less reliable than others, while all of them are less reliable than the Qur'an. So for instance a hadith that is in the books of Bukhari and Muslim is considered as more reliable ones for Sunni Muslims than those in some other books. This is simply due to the strict filters and rules that the authors of these books applied when including hadith in their collections. In comparison, the books of historical narrations are among the weakest when it comes to reliability. This is because the narrations in them often do not fulfill the accepted criteria in terms of chain of narrators. For instance the Sira of Ibn Ishaq that is officially the first sira of Muslims was written more than a century after the prophet and it is not even available today, what is available is what later people copied from it.
You wrote:
"Anyhow, I think you are one of the few Muslims who consider Maghazi book as a unreliable historical reference!
Other than 'the story is not reliable at all', do you have other evidences saying this story is not reliable?"
I am not sure where you found my comment on al-Maghazi but you are right in that I do not trust any of the books of history written by classical Muslim scholars. No historian today consider any of these books to be really a 'history' book. Having said that, al-Waqidi, the author of al-Maghazi is actually a controversial figure and many great Muslim scholars have strongly criticised him. You can find a list of those who criticised him (and those who praised them) here.
You are asking me if I have any evidence that the story is not reliable. Sorry but narration of stories work the other way round, meaning, if a person believes a story is reliable then it is that person's responsibility to prove it. Others do not have responsibility to prove that a story is not reliable. If this was the case our news agencies today would have had unthinkable load of work to do.
Having said that, I did actually provide two reasons: One that it is against the Qur'an, two that its narrators are very weak as I explained in my original post.
You wrote:
"do you have any evidences to refuse below terrors (Fatk - فتک) too?
- Ka'ab al ashraf (کعب الأشرف)
- Abu Afak (ابوعفک)
- Abu Rafi bin Haghigh (ابو رافع بن حقیق)"
My answer would be the same that I provided for that story.
You want me to comment on something that is reported 150 years after it supposedly happened, on an incident that supposedly happened 1400 years ago! Sorry but I cannot even establish if what I hear in the news today about what is happening in my own town, is 100% true.
You wrote:
"-- It seems you are referring to Rejaal chain, but I am certain that you are already aware that Majlesi the highest referred and respected person of Islamic scholar, specially between Shia's) mentioned that not few of the narrator names provided in Islamic books are fabricated, and there is no problem with that since the writer's intentions was through Savab. So referring to elm-ol-rejaal or ravian-hadith to debunk it is either coming from your ignorance of this Majlesi's say (which I again doubt that), or you tried to give a dishonest answer based on incorrect information."
Well between being called ignorant or dishonest, I really prefer the first, but allow me to let you know that your understanding about what Majlesi said is not correct. What Majlesi and many other scholars say is that if there is a hadith that instructs you to do something good (for instance help the poor) then it does not really matter if the hadith is weak because it still encourages you to do something good. I disagree with this, but as you see it is not what you thought Majlesi said. The science of rijal (narrators) and diraya (hadith study) is a well established science among both Shia and Sunni. Majlesi's collection of hadith (bihar al-anwar) itself is subject to this science and he also subscribed to it. As you can see in my original post I provided detailed analysis of the narrators from the books of Rijal. There is a reason that these books are written and there is a reason that those scholars are called experts in hadith.
Again this article from wiki can help you to read about the science of hadith and narrators and from there you can delve into more expert articles if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith_studies
You wrote:
"Also, could you please let your readers know about the validity of 'Abū ʽAmr Ḥafṣ ibn Sulaymān ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Abi Dawud al-Asadī al-Kūfī '?
According to Elm-Ol-Rejaal, this person considered as forgetful, therefore the Hadiths leading to him will be considered and invalid,
BUT please let your readers know that one of the most reliable Qur'an variants at this date (حفص عن عاصم), is the one told by same person.
So I suggest you don't use elm-ol-rejal for dismiss hadiths, doing so, you will put a big question mark on top of your holy book, Qur'an."
Firstly, let me put your mind in ease, I do not have any issues if someone proves to me that the Qur'an is for most parts unauthentic. What is important in every religion is for the followers of that religion to use the sources available to them to become spiritually better people. You see so many spiritually advanced personalities in many religions while their holy books are not reliable.
Second, I think you have misunderstood the story of collection of the Qur'an. It seems like you think that the narrators of the seven readings of the Qur'an each collected and documented the Qur'an on their own. This is not true. The Qur'an was already existing among Muslims, either in writing or in their memory. These narrators learned the versions that their teachers taught them and in turn taught that to others. In order for you to understand what this means, it is like a book of Shakespeare written at old times or memorised by people in old times, but with variations, and then a few experts take that and try to polish it and rewrite it to preserve it. This is what the seven qira'at is all about, and this is the reason that as I mentioned above, you will see very little variation between them. If you think Hafs was not good enough, there are six more, and in fact much more narrators other than him, all teaching their reading of the Qur'an, and what shows that altogether they all learned from a similar ultimate source is the very little difference that you see among them. In fact even if none of these narrators had done their job, today we still had the Qurán, and in different readings with minor variations. This is because the Qurán was not only written but was also memorised by many. Again, please check that website that I copied above. I would like to repeat, my argument is not that the Qurán that we have today is 100% authentic. My argument is that the Qurán is much more authentic than hadith.
You wrote:
"I am certain that you are well aware of different editions of Qur'an accepted by different countries/regions of Islam world, but I could not see it anywhere in your weblog. I believe it would be a very interesting and informative post. what do you think?"
Absolutely, why not. I accepted your suggestion and put that URL in my website so that every one can see and compare different variations of the Qur'an, and to see that these variations are minimal. I put it here: https://www.exploring-islam.com/educational-resources.html as you can see (second item) I clearly wrote "a source to see the variant readings of the Qur'an". I also provide here the website of a very famous and academic-driven project on the Qur'an manuscript and different readings by non-Muslim academia, that is Corpus Coranicum. I hope you and the readers find it interesting.
Thanks for getting in touch.
-------
Related Topic:
- Did Our Prophet (pbuh) Kill a Woman Who Was Breastfeeding Her Baby?
--------
Farhad Shafti
April 2023
Hello,
I was going through your blog and noticed this specific article https://www.exploring-islam.com/did-our-prophet-pbuh-kill-a-woman-breastfeeding-her-baby.html
in which you tried to answer a valid question.
According to Islamic scholars, what you provided as answer is not accurate and I would like to discuss this further with some references.
I will go through your answer, quote and response to the parts that I believe they are inaccurate, incorrect or misleading.
- "Unfortunately the scholarship of Islam suffers from the lack of reliable historical sources"
-- The above statement is not incorrect, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that Qur'an itself is derived from historical sources/says.
As you know there are numbers of Qur'an variants in hand in present-day and not all of the manuscripts are the same, therefore, the Qur'an has not been perfectly preserved. So in order to dismiss a Hadiths/historical say, referring it to the current Qur'an, is incorrect. since if you find a mismatch between them, you can not prove which one is reliable, if any of them is?
Also could you please let me know whether you believe that the original Qur'an is held with Ali ibn AbuTaleb and the current Qur'an we have is only one third of the original Qur'an?
- "We know that the Qur’an and the Established Sunnah have reached us through the consensus of generations of Muslims and are therefore reliable."
-- The first part of above sentence can be either true or false. Please note that, as mentioned above both Qur’an and the Established Sunnah have reached us via historical sources as well as Hadiths. You, as a scholar, can not fully rely on consensus of generations only for Qur’an and Sunnah but on the other hand, doubt the Hadiths which have been reached to us in the same way.
Unless you are speaking as believer, not a researcher without any bias?
- Killing a person (unless it is a man to man situation in a battlefield as a part of a religiously allowed war) is absolutely forbidden according to the Qur’an. There are only three exceptions:
.........
-- I highly doubt that an educated person like yourself, is not aware of the concept of 'The initial jihad'. The rules of 'initial Jihad' have been derived from Surah At-Tawbah ( سورةالتوبة) and specially verses number 11 onwards.
In Surah At-Tawbah, not only there is no pointing to 'defensive' war, but also according to the Descends of this verse, it's a proof of it's referring to offensive wars.
- "It is already a known fact among many scholars of Hadith that the story is not reliable at all. The story is reported by Ibn Ishaq and by Ibn Sa’d through al-Waqidi. It is not reported in any Hadith collection that is considered more reliable."
-- before I go to the facts against this claim, I hope by reading your own sentence above, you can see the logical problems in your own reasoning.
".... not reliable at all" vs "it is not reported in A MORE RELIABLE source"
I believe in your first sentence, you are intentionally trying to make readers believe that the source is not reliable (which is incorrect, if not a lie), but later on you tried to be more reasonable, but could not justify your first claim and it remained as a false claim.
Anyhow, I think you are one of the few Muslims who consider Maghazi book as a unreliable historical reference!
Other than 'the story is not reliable at all', do you have other evidences saying this story is not reliable?
Also, in addition refusing the terrpr of Asma Bint Marwan, do you have any evidences to refuse below terrors (Fatk - فتک) too?
- Ka'ab al ashraf (کعب الأشرف)
- Abu Afak (ابوعفک)
- Abu Rafi bin Haghigh (ابو رافع بن حقیق)
- "The chain of narrators ...."
-- It seems you are referring to Rejaal chain, but I am certain that you are already aware that Majlesi the highest referred and respected person of Islamic scholar, specially between Shia's) mentioned that not few of the narrator names provided in Islamic books are fabricated, and there is no problem with that since the writer's intentions was through Savab. So referring to elm-ol-rejaal or ravian-hadith to debunk it is either coming from your ignorance of this Majlesi's say (which I again doubt that), or you tried to give a dishonest answer based on incorrect information.
Also, could you please let your readers know about the validity of 'Abū ʽAmr Ḥafṣ ibn Sulaymān ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Abi Dawud al-Asadī al-Kūfī ' ?
According to Elm-Ol-Rejaal, this person considered as forgetful, therefore the Hadiths leading to him will be considered and invalid,
BUT please let your readers know that one of the most reliable Qur'an variants at this date (حفص عن عاصم), is the one told by same person.
So I suggest you don't use elm-ol-rejal for dismiss hadiths, doing so, you will put a big question mark on top of your holy book, Qur'an.
I am certain that you are well aware of different editions of Qur'an accepted by different countries/regions of Islam world, but I could not see it anywhere in your weblog. I believe it would be a very interesting and informative post. what do you think?
Thanks
Answer:
Hello and Salam,
Thanks for your message, please allow me to first let you know about some of my views that are not inline with the traditional Islamic views. then I will try to reply to your point:
1. I do not consider any religion to be the best or the most complete religion, including Islam. I believe in religious pluralism.
2. I do not believe that prophets of God were infallible. I do believe that they could commit mistakes or sins. However when that was against their mission of guidance then revelation would correct that.
With these in mind I now try to answer your comments, using blue to make it easier for you to see:
You wrote:
"I want to draw your attention to the fact that Qur'an itself is derived from historical sources/says.
As you know there are numbers of Qur'an variants in hand in present-day and not all of the manuscripts are the same, therefore, the Qur'an has not been perfectly preserved. So in order to dismiss a Hadiths/historical say, referring it to the current Qur'an, is incorrect. since if you find a mismatch between them, you can not prove which one is reliable, if any of them is?
Also could you please let me know whether you believe that the original Qur'an is held with Ali ibn AbuTaleb and the current Qur'an we have is only one third of the original Qur'an?"
I do appreciate that we cannot say for sure that the Qur'an is 100% preserved. However I do believe that the Qur'an is more reliable than Hadith. It is an obvious academic rule that you always check a less reliable evidence against a more reliable one. On the subject of killing, the Qur'an is very clear and there are no contradicting instructions in it. The variant Qur'ans that you referred to do exist, however I think maybe you do not know the extent of variations between them. The variations are mostly in vowels (grammar) and sometimes individual words. They are not varied any further than this limit. So which ever variations that you go for says pretty much the same thing about killing or not killing a person. Don't take my words for it, you can check it yourself from here: https://erquran.org/. Simply choose what reading (qira'ah) of the Qur'an you want to check and choose a verse, see how minor the variations are. As you know the versions of the Qur'an that have recently been found in Birmingham or the Yamani San'a version, both belonging to the early era of Islam, are not that different from what we have today. No I do not believe that story about the Qur'an of Ali ibn AbuTalib, and I do not know many scholars who hold that belief today, being Sunni or Shia.
You wrote:
" You, as a scholar, can not fully rely on consensus of generations only for Qur’an and Sunnah but on the other hand, doubt the Hadiths which have been reached to us in the same way."
Well, as I explained above, actually I can, because unlike what you wrote the Qur'an is not reached us through the same way that hadith has reached us. The Qur'an has reached us through consensus of generations, or to make it less debatable, I say the Qur'an has reached us through numerous narrators. This however is not the same for hadith. Each hadith has reached us through one or at most handful narrators in each generation. That is why it is called hadith al-Ahad (hadith that is narrated by one or few). Also while the Qur'an was being with Muslims from the early days of Islam, hadith only entered the scholarship of Islam more than 150 years after the prophet. So yes, I use a more reliable source to judge about a much less reliable source. This is what has been accepted by all Muslim scholars.
You wrote:
"I highly doubt that an educated person like yourself, is not aware of the concept of 'The initial jihad'. The rules of 'initial Jihad' have been derived from Surah At-Tawbah ( سورةالتوبة) and specially verses number 11 onwards.
In Surah At-Tawbah, not only there is no pointing to 'defensive' war, but also according to the Descends of this verse, it's a proof of it's referring to offensive wars."
I am very much aware of the concept of initial jihad (jihad al-ibtidayi), however I ask you to please read some of my writing in the website, you will then see that in my understanding the initial jihad is of two kinds, one that only applies at the time of the messengers and one that applies at all times. The first one, according to the Qurán, is against those direct addressees of a messenger who rejected him out of arrogance. This does not apply at our time. The second is to stop persecution. This applies at our time and is the only excuse that today UN considers as legitimate for approving a war. Please read the verses in the Surah Tawbah again, please note in particular verses 1-22. I am sure that you will see and appreciate that these verses instructed the prophet and the companions about the polytheists in Mecca at their time. If you see anything in these verses that suggest these instructions are for all Muslims at all time, regarding all kinds of polytheists at all time, then please let me know and I will look into it.
You wrote:
"... you can see the logical problems in your own reasoning.
.... not reliable at all" vs "it is not reported in A MORE RELIABLE source"
I believe in your first sentence, you are intentionally trying to make readers believe that the source is not reliable (which is incorrect, if not a lie), but later on you tried to be more reasonable, but could not justify your first claim and it remained as a false claim."
I do not see any logical problems. Due to the same procedure that I explained about transmission and collection of hadith, some hadith are less reliable than others, while all of them are less reliable than the Qur'an. So for instance a hadith that is in the books of Bukhari and Muslim is considered as more reliable ones for Sunni Muslims than those in some other books. This is simply due to the strict filters and rules that the authors of these books applied when including hadith in their collections. In comparison, the books of historical narrations are among the weakest when it comes to reliability. This is because the narrations in them often do not fulfill the accepted criteria in terms of chain of narrators. For instance the Sira of Ibn Ishaq that is officially the first sira of Muslims was written more than a century after the prophet and it is not even available today, what is available is what later people copied from it.
You wrote:
"Anyhow, I think you are one of the few Muslims who consider Maghazi book as a unreliable historical reference!
Other than 'the story is not reliable at all', do you have other evidences saying this story is not reliable?"
I am not sure where you found my comment on al-Maghazi but you are right in that I do not trust any of the books of history written by classical Muslim scholars. No historian today consider any of these books to be really a 'history' book. Having said that, al-Waqidi, the author of al-Maghazi is actually a controversial figure and many great Muslim scholars have strongly criticised him. You can find a list of those who criticised him (and those who praised them) here.
You are asking me if I have any evidence that the story is not reliable. Sorry but narration of stories work the other way round, meaning, if a person believes a story is reliable then it is that person's responsibility to prove it. Others do not have responsibility to prove that a story is not reliable. If this was the case our news agencies today would have had unthinkable load of work to do.
Having said that, I did actually provide two reasons: One that it is against the Qur'an, two that its narrators are very weak as I explained in my original post.
You wrote:
"do you have any evidences to refuse below terrors (Fatk - فتک) too?
- Ka'ab al ashraf (کعب الأشرف)
- Abu Afak (ابوعفک)
- Abu Rafi bin Haghigh (ابو رافع بن حقیق)"
My answer would be the same that I provided for that story.
You want me to comment on something that is reported 150 years after it supposedly happened, on an incident that supposedly happened 1400 years ago! Sorry but I cannot even establish if what I hear in the news today about what is happening in my own town, is 100% true.
You wrote:
"-- It seems you are referring to Rejaal chain, but I am certain that you are already aware that Majlesi the highest referred and respected person of Islamic scholar, specially between Shia's) mentioned that not few of the narrator names provided in Islamic books are fabricated, and there is no problem with that since the writer's intentions was through Savab. So referring to elm-ol-rejaal or ravian-hadith to debunk it is either coming from your ignorance of this Majlesi's say (which I again doubt that), or you tried to give a dishonest answer based on incorrect information."
Well between being called ignorant or dishonest, I really prefer the first, but allow me to let you know that your understanding about what Majlesi said is not correct. What Majlesi and many other scholars say is that if there is a hadith that instructs you to do something good (for instance help the poor) then it does not really matter if the hadith is weak because it still encourages you to do something good. I disagree with this, but as you see it is not what you thought Majlesi said. The science of rijal (narrators) and diraya (hadith study) is a well established science among both Shia and Sunni. Majlesi's collection of hadith (bihar al-anwar) itself is subject to this science and he also subscribed to it. As you can see in my original post I provided detailed analysis of the narrators from the books of Rijal. There is a reason that these books are written and there is a reason that those scholars are called experts in hadith.
Again this article from wiki can help you to read about the science of hadith and narrators and from there you can delve into more expert articles if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith_studies
You wrote:
"Also, could you please let your readers know about the validity of 'Abū ʽAmr Ḥafṣ ibn Sulaymān ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Abi Dawud al-Asadī al-Kūfī '?
According to Elm-Ol-Rejaal, this person considered as forgetful, therefore the Hadiths leading to him will be considered and invalid,
BUT please let your readers know that one of the most reliable Qur'an variants at this date (حفص عن عاصم), is the one told by same person.
So I suggest you don't use elm-ol-rejal for dismiss hadiths, doing so, you will put a big question mark on top of your holy book, Qur'an."
Firstly, let me put your mind in ease, I do not have any issues if someone proves to me that the Qur'an is for most parts unauthentic. What is important in every religion is for the followers of that religion to use the sources available to them to become spiritually better people. You see so many spiritually advanced personalities in many religions while their holy books are not reliable.
Second, I think you have misunderstood the story of collection of the Qur'an. It seems like you think that the narrators of the seven readings of the Qur'an each collected and documented the Qur'an on their own. This is not true. The Qur'an was already existing among Muslims, either in writing or in their memory. These narrators learned the versions that their teachers taught them and in turn taught that to others. In order for you to understand what this means, it is like a book of Shakespeare written at old times or memorised by people in old times, but with variations, and then a few experts take that and try to polish it and rewrite it to preserve it. This is what the seven qira'at is all about, and this is the reason that as I mentioned above, you will see very little variation between them. If you think Hafs was not good enough, there are six more, and in fact much more narrators other than him, all teaching their reading of the Qur'an, and what shows that altogether they all learned from a similar ultimate source is the very little difference that you see among them. In fact even if none of these narrators had done their job, today we still had the Qurán, and in different readings with minor variations. This is because the Qurán was not only written but was also memorised by many. Again, please check that website that I copied above. I would like to repeat, my argument is not that the Qurán that we have today is 100% authentic. My argument is that the Qurán is much more authentic than hadith.
You wrote:
"I am certain that you are well aware of different editions of Qur'an accepted by different countries/regions of Islam world, but I could not see it anywhere in your weblog. I believe it would be a very interesting and informative post. what do you think?"
Absolutely, why not. I accepted your suggestion and put that URL in my website so that every one can see and compare different variations of the Qur'an, and to see that these variations are minimal. I put it here: https://www.exploring-islam.com/educational-resources.html as you can see (second item) I clearly wrote "a source to see the variant readings of the Qur'an". I also provide here the website of a very famous and academic-driven project on the Qur'an manuscript and different readings by non-Muslim academia, that is Corpus Coranicum. I hope you and the readers find it interesting.
Thanks for getting in touch.
-------
Related Topic:
- Did Our Prophet (pbuh) Kill a Woman Who Was Breastfeeding Her Baby?
--------
Farhad Shafti
April 2023
