By: Dr. Mohammed Hamidullah
- Al-Bukhari narrates that ‘Abdallah ibn Abi Awfa, Abu Bakrah and al-Mughirah ibn Shu’bah taught Hadith by correspondence: If anyone desired information about the Prophet, they would reply in writing. They even took the initiative of communicating, to officials and friends for instance, decisions of the Prophet which bore on the problems of the day.
- The following report is more instructive and has been preserved by numerous sources (such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr’s Jami’ Bayan al-Ilm): ‘One day a pupil of Abu-Hurairah told him: Thou hadst told me such and such a thing. Abu-Hurairah, who was apparently in his old age with enfeebled memory, refused to believe the Hadith, yet when his pupil insisted that it was from him that he had learnt it, Abu-Hurairah replied: If thou hadst learnt it from me, it must be in my writings. He took him by his hand and conducted him to his house, showed him “many books on the Hadith of the Prophet,” and at last he found the narration in question. Thereupon he exclaimed: I had told thee that if thou hadst learnt it from me, it must be found in my writings.’ It should be noted that the story employs the expression “many books.” Abu-Hurairah died in the year 59 H. To one of his pupils, Hammam ibn Munabbih, he dictated (or gave in writing) an opuscule of 138 traditions about the Prophet. This work, which dates from the first half of the first century of the Hijrah, has been preserved. It enables us to make a comparison with later compilations of the Hadith and to confirm the fact that the memoirs of the ancients on the Hadith have been preserved with great care for the benefit of posterity.
- Adh-Dhahabi (Tadhkirat al-Huffaz) reports: The caliph Abu-Bakr compiled a work in which there were 500 traditions of the Prophet, and handed it over to his daughter Aishah. The next morning, he took it back from her and destroyed it, saying: “I wrote what I understood. It is possible however that there might be certain things in it which did not correspond textually with what the Prophet had uttered.” As for ‘Umar, we learn on the authority of Ma’mar ibn Rashid that during his caliphate, ‘Umar once consulted the companions of the Prophet on the subject of codifying the Hadith. Everybody seconded the idea. Yet ‘Umar continued to hesitate and pray to God for a whole month for guidance and enlightenment. Ultimately he decided not to undertake the task, and said: “Former peoples neglected the Divine Books and concentrated only on the conduct of the prophets. I do not want to set up the possibility of confusion between the Divine Qur’an and the Prophet’s Hadith.” Latest research shows that formal reports testifying to the writing down of the Hadith concern not less than fifty companions of the Prophet. The details would be too long to elucidate here.
Interdiction on the writing down of Hadith - The last two narrations regarding Abu-Bakr and ‘Umar are important inasmuch as they explain the real implication of the tradition which says that the Prophet forbade to write down his sayings. If there really was a general interdiction, these two foremost companions of the Prophet would have not dared to even think of the compiling of the Hadith; and when they renounced the idea of recording the Hadith, they would not have invoked a reason other than the interdiction of the Prophet to silence those who remained in favour of the idea. As far as we know, the only narrators who are reported to have said that the Prophet had ordered not to write down anything other than the Qur’an are Abu-Sa’id al-Khudri, Zaid ibn Thabit, and Abu-Hurairah. Neither the context nor the occasion of this direction is known. One should note that Abu-Sa’id al-Khudri and Zaid ibn Thabit were among the younger companions of the Prophet — in the year 5 H., they were scarcely 15 years old. However intelligent they might have been, it is comprehensible that the Prophet prohibited them in the early years after the Hijrah from noting down his talks. As to Abu-Hurairah, we have just seen that he had himself compiled “many books on the Hadith.” He is known in history as a very pious man, puritan and rigid. And it is unthinkable that a man of his character would have violated an express prohibition of the Prophet if he had not heard later from the Prophet himself of the lifting of that prohibition. Abu-Hurairah came from Yemen in the year 7 H. to embrace Islam. It is possible that in the first days after his conversion, the Prophet ordered him to write down nothing but the Qur’an; and later, when he had mastered the Qur’an and was able to distinguish between the Divine Book and the Hadith, the reason of the interdiction ceased to exist. An important fact is that Ibn ‘Abbas is also reported to have said, as his personal opinion, without reference to the Prophet, that the Hadith should not be compiled in writing. Nevertheless, as we have seen above, through his prolific power of writing, he surpassed those companions of the Prophet who had consigned the Hadith in writing. The contradiction between the word and the deed of those who are nevertheless known for their piety and scrupulous observance of the directions of the Prophet confirms our supposition that the injunction against writing down of the Hadith had a certain context which has not been preserved to us in the narrations, and that it had a limited scope. We must therefore seek to reconcile between the two contradictory orders of the Prophet rather than reject them both.
- Three possible explanations come to our mind: (1) The interdiction might have been individual, and concerned those who had newly learnt the art of writing, or those who had newly embraced Islam and were hardly able to distinguish between the Qur’an and the Hadith. The interdiction was waived in case of the proficiency later acquired. (Abu-Hurairah, for instance, came from Yemen, and it is probable that he mastered the Musnad of Himyarite script and not the so-called Arabic script prevalent in Mecca and from thence to Madinah.) (2) It might have aimed only at forbidding writing of the Hadith on the same sheets of paper which contained chapters of the Qur’an, in order to avoid all possible confusion between the text and the commentary. Abu-Sa’id al-Khudri alludes to it; and we possess the formal injunction of the caliph ‘Umar against this particular way of writing Hadith. (3) It might have concerned some particular discourses of the Prophet, for instance, the occasion when he made prophecies regarding the future of Islam and its great spiritual and political conquests; the injunction being motivated by the desire that the belief in predestination may not lead certain people to abandon the spirit of endeavour.
- Other explanations may be illustrated, but these will suffice for the present.
In later centuries - In the beginning, the compilations of the Hadith were short and individual, every companion recording his own recollections. In the second generation, when students attended lectures of more than one master, it became possible to collect several memoirs in larger volumes, noting carefully the difference of the sources. A few generations later, all the memoirs of the companions of the Prophet were collected, and still later an attempt was made to classify these traditions according to subject matter and deduce juridical rules and other scientific usages. It was required to learn by heart every Hadith, as in the case of the Qur’an, and to aid the memory, one utilized the written texts. Learning from qualified and authorized teachers was also a condition sine qua non. This triple method of preservation and security was rigorously observed by some, and less so by others. Hence the relative importance of the different masters and their trustworthiness.
- Not long after the Prophet, the reporters of the Hadith adopted the habit of mentioning not only the name of the Prophet as the ultimate source of the knowledge in question, but also the means, one after another, of obtaining that information. Al-Bukhari, for instance, would say: “My master Ibn Hanbal has said: I have heard my master ‘Abd ar-Razzaq saying: My master Ma’mar Ibn Rashid told me: I heard my master Hammam ibn Munabbih tell me: My master Abu-Hurairah told me: I heard the Prophet saying” such and such a thing. For every single report of a few words upon the Prophet, there is such an exhaustive chain of references relating to successive authorities. In a single chain of the narrators, which we have just cited, we find reference made not only to the Sahih of al-Bukhari, but also the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal, the Musannaf of ‘Abd ar-Razzaq, the Jami’ of Ma’mar, and the Sahifah of Hammam dictated to him by Abu-Hurairah, the companion of the Prophet. We find the reports of this chain in all these works (which luckily have all come down to us) in exactly the same words. In the presence of a succession of such authoritative sources, for instance it would be a foolish presumption and slanderous to suggest that al-Bukhari had invented the narration and attributed it to the Prophet or fabricated himself the chain of the narrators, or simply collected the folklore, the hearsay of his epoch, and attributed it to the Prophet.
Conclusion - It is by this triple safeguard, viz. committing to memory as well as preserving at the same time by writing and studying the same under qualified teachers (in which each method helps the other and makes the integrity of the reports triply sure) that the religious teachings of Islam have been preserved from the beginning down to our present day. This is true not only for the Qur’an, but also the Hadith which consists of the memoirs of the companions of the Prophet, and concern the sayings, doings and tacit approval by him of the conduct of his companions. It may be remembered that as a founder of religion too, the Prophet Muhammad had had immense success. In fact, in the year 10 H., he was able to address at ‘Arafat (Mecca) a gathering of Muslims (numbering some 140,000) who had come for pilgrimage (without counting many others who had not come to Mecca that year). The biographers of the companions of the Prophet affirm that the number of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad who had reported at least one incident of the life of the Prophet exceeds 100,000. There are bound to be repetitions, but the very multiplicity of the sources recounting one and the same event does add to the trustworthiness of the report. We possess in all about 10,000 reports (eliminating the repetitions) of the Hadith, on the life of the Prophet of Islam, and these concern all aspects of his life including directions given by him to his disciples in spiritual as well as temporal matters. (to be cont.)