Refuting Tom Holland and murtad munkar I hadith propaganda against sunnah,or hadeeth.(5 days prayer not imported from zoroastrians.)

Examples Of First Century Hadith Collections

The Sahifa Of Hammam bin Munabbih: This is perhaps one of the earliest known hadith collections. Hammam bin Munabbih was a student of Abu Hurrairah and well-known among the scholars of the hadith to be trustworthy. According to the book Arabic Literature To The End of Ummayyad Periodt:

An example is the Sahifah of Hammam bin Munabbih, (d. 110/719), a Yemenite follower and a disciple of companion Abu Hurrayrah, (d. 58/677), from whom Hammam wrote this Sahifah, which comprises 138 hadith and is believed to have been written around the mid-first AH/seventh century.[1]

The author went on to say:

It is significant that Hammam introduces his text with the words: "Abu Hurrayrah told us in the course of what he related from the Prophet", thus giving the source of his information in the manner which became known as "sanad" or "isnad", i.e., the teacher of chain of teachers through whom an author reaches the Prophet, a practice invariably and systematically followed in Hadith compilations.[2]

We can see that of the 138 narrations in the Sahifa, 98 of them are faithfully witnessed in the later collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, both through narrations of Abu Hurrairah and witnessing narrations from other Companions.

We also see that all but two of the narrations are found in one section of the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, again witnessingthe preservation of hadith and that earlier works were faithfully rendered in later documents.[3]

Using the first century Sahifa of Hammam bin Munabbih as a "control group" Marston Speight compared it (i.e., the Sahifa) with about the 1500 variant readings of the same ahadith found in the collections of Ibn Hanbal (Musnad), al-Bukhari (Sahih) and Muslim (Sahih); the last three collections date from 3rd/9th century. Speight says:

... the texts in Hammam and those recorded in Ibn Hanbal, Bukhari and Muslim with the same isnad show almost complete identity, except for a few omissions and interpolations which do not affect the sense of the reports. On the other hand, the same ahadith as told by other transmitters in the three collections studied show a rich variety of wording, again without changing the meaning of the reports.[4]

Further he comments about the reports of Hammam found in the later compilations of Ibn Hanbal, al-Bukhari and Muslim by saying that:

... I have found practically no sign of careless or deceptive practices in the variant texts common to the Sahifa of Hammam bin Munabbih.[5]

In other words, it shows the meticuluous nature of hadith transmission as well as high moral and upright characters of the transmitters as well as collectors of the hadith; a fact that Islamic traditions had always asserted and now the western scholarship endorses it.

The Musannaf of `Abd al-Razzaq al-San`ani:[6] An article by Harald Motzki appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies that mentioned about the the Musannaf of `Abd al-Razzaq al-San`ani as a source of authentic ahadith of the first century AH. Since the article is quite huge (21 pages), we will deal with only the conclusions of the author.

While studying the Musannaf of `Abd al-Razzaq, I came to the conclusion that the theory championed by Goldziher, Schacht, and in their footsteps, many others - myself included - which in general, reject hadith literature as a historically reliable sources for the first century AH, deprives the historical study of early Islam of an important and a useful type of source.[7]However, such extreme views have been somewhat alleviated by, firstly, the availability of new sources that are "pre-canonical" such as the Muṣannafs of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī and Ibn Abī Shayba or ʿUmar bin Shabba's Tārīkh al-Madīnah (Schacht had no access to earlier sources); and secondly, the development of isnād and matn analysis of the aḥādīth that resulted in the investigation of textual variants of the aḥādīth. Using this technique, aḥādīth have been shown to have very early origins going back to the first century of hijra.[As discussed above, Holland’s approach is inherently biased as he unjustifiably rejects the entire corpus of the Islamic tradition, including the oral Prophetic traditions. Patricia Crone asserts in the documentary that with oral traditions “you remember what you want to remember”. With this assertion Holland attempts to undermine the entire science of Hadith (Prophetic traditions). The science of the Prophetic traditions is based upon scrutinising the isnad (chain of narrations) and the matn (the text). Nabia Abbot, a prominent academic who has conducted extensive study on the Prophetic traditions, explains how the growth of these traditions was as a result of parallel and multiple chains of transmission which highlights that these traditions are trustworthy and a valid source of historical information. She writes:

“…the traditions of Muhammad as transmitted by his Companions and their Successors were, as a rule, scrupulously scrutinised at each step of the transmission, and that the so called phenomenal growth of Tradition in the second and third centuries of Islam was not primarily growth of content, so far as the hadith of Muhammad and the hadith of the Companions are concerned, but represents largely the progressive increase in parallel and multiple chains of transmission.” (7)

Harald Motzki, an academic on Hadith literature, has similar sentiments. In an essay that appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies he concludes that the Prophetic traditions are an important and useful type of source concerning the study of early Islam:

“While studying the Musannaf of `Abd al-Razzaq, I came to the conclusion that the theory championed by Goldziher, Schacht and in their footsteps many others – myself included – which in general, reject hadith literature as a historically reliable sources for the first century AH, deprives the historical study of early Islam of an important and a useful type of source.” (8)

Hence, even a sceptic like Motzki couldn’t resist the strength of the preservation the Islamic Prophetic tradition. On what basis then people like Holland reject the entire Islamic literary corpus?