Aslam

Praise be to Allah.This

is the view of some heretics and misguided people, both in the past

and nowadays. In modern times, those who expressed this view include

Saalih Abu Bakr in his book al-Adwaa’

al-Qur’aaniyyah; Husayn Ahmad Ameen in Daleel al-Muslim al-Hazeen; Ahmad Ameen in Fajr

al-Islam; ‘Abd-Allaah al-Na’eem in Nahwa Tatweer al-Tashree’

al-Islaami; Sa’eed al-‘Ashmaawi in Haqqeeqat

al-Hijaab; Saalih al-Wardaani in his misleading book Rihlati

min al-Sunnah ila al-Shee’ah; ‘Abd al-Jawaad Yaaseen in al-Sultah fi’l-Islam; Nasr Abu Zayd in Imaam

al-Shaafa'i; Zakariya ‘Abbaas Dawood in Ta’ammulaat

fi’l-Hadeeth; Hawlat Nahr in Diraasaat

Muhammadiyyah; Maurice Bucaille in  Diraasat

al-Kutub al-Muqaddisah; Murtada al-‘Askar in Khamsoon

wa Mi’ah Sahaabi Mukhtalaq; Dr. Mustafa Mahmood in Maqaalaat

‘an al-Shafaa’ah.

We

say: it is true that there were fabricators and liars who made up words

and attributed them to the Messenger of Allaah

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), but the matter is not quite

so simple as imagined by those doubters who also spread doubts among

others. They are unaware of the facts about how the Muslims took care

of the Sunnah. Alongside the fabricators, there were great numbers of

narrators who were trustworthy and highly skilled, and a large number

of scholars who surrounded the hadeeths of the Messenger of Allaah

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) with a strong barrier which

was difficult for the liars to penetrate. By means of their vast knowledge

and deep insight, these muhaddithoon (scholars of hadeeth) were able

to spot the liars and understand their intentions and motives, and they

were able to detect everything that was falsely attributed to the Messenger

of Allaah (peace and blessings

of Allaah be upon him). These fabricators were not given free rein to

do as they wished with the ahaadeeth of the Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), and they were given no

room to penetrate the ranks of trustworthy narrators of ahaadeeth without

being detected.

Who

else exposed the lies of these kaafirs, heretics and extreme innovators?

Who

were the ones who gave us the definition of what is fabricated, the

reasons for fabrication, different types of fabrications and the signs

by which a fabricated report may be recognized?  Who wrote so many

books on this issue?

They

are the guardians of Islam, the vicegerents and troops of Allaah on

His earth. They are the brilliant scholars of whom Haaroon al-Rasheed

spoke when he arrested a heretic and ordered that he be executed. The

heretic said, “Why are you executing me?” Haaroon al-Rasheed said, “To

rid the people of you.” The heretic said: “O Ameer

al-Mu’mineen, what will you do about the thousand ahaadeeth

– according to one report, four thousand ahaadeeth – which I have fabricated

and spread among you, in which I made what is halaal haraam and what

is haraam halaal, of which the Prophet uttered not one letter?” Haaroon

al-Rasheed said to him: “What will you do, O enemy of Allaah, about

Abu Ishaaq al-Fazaari and ‘Abd-Allaah ibn al-Mubaarak? They will go

through them and sift them letter by letter.” (Tadhkirat

al-Huffaaz by al-Dhahabi, 1/273; Taareekh

al-Khulafaa’ by al-Suyooti, p. 174).

Professor

Muhammad Asad said: “The existence of fabricated ahaadeeth cannot be

taken to prove that the entire system of hadeeth is not to be trusted,

because these fabricated ahaadeeth never deceived the muhadditheen as

some European critics claimed, oversimplifying the matter, and as was

echoed by some who claim to be Muslims.” (al-Islam ‘ala Muftaraq al-Tareeq, p. 96)

We will end this

discussion by quoting what was said by Imaam Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah:

Imaam Abu’l-Muzaffar al-Sam’aani said: “If they say: there are too many

reports in the hands of the people and they have become confused, we

say: no one is confused except those who are ignorant. Those who have

knowledge of them (the reports) check them as stringently as those who

deal with money check dirhams and dinars. So they single out (and discard)

the false reports and keep the good reports. If there happens to be

a narrator who made a mistake, this will not go unnoticed by the brilliant

scholars of hadeeth. These scholars listed the mistakes made in both

the isnaad (chain of narrators) and matn (texts) of  reports; so

you can see that for each narrator they made a list of the mistakes

that he had made and the letters that he had mispronounced. If the mistakes

of the narrators – in both the isnaad and the matn – did not go unchecked,

then how could the fabricated ahaadeeth manufactured by the heretics

have slipped past those brilliant scholars?  How could people have

narrated ahaadeeth from heretics without the scholars noticing? That

is the view of some heretics, but no one would say such a thing except

one who is ignorant, misguided, an innovator and a liar who wants to

undermine the saheeh ahaadeeth and true reports of the Prophet

(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and confuse ignorant people

by means of this lie. There is no evidence for rejecting the reports

of the Messenger of Allaah (peace

and blessings of Allaah be upon him) that is weaker or more impossible

than this. The one who voices this view deserves to be silenced and

expelled from the Muslim lands.