Interested in the religion of Islam? Feel free to add me to msn messenger at
[email protected] or ask your questions here (I'd prefer MSN)
I've heard alot of silly untrue stuff being said about lots of religions here so I thought I might at least clearify some things if I can. True Qur'anic Islam, rather than the modern religion which relies on man made books called "Hadiths"
Here is some information on Hadith's from Wikipedia and why I reject them:
The earliest biography of Muhammad known is a collection of hadith: the Sirah Rasul Allah or, the Life of the Apostle of God, by Ibn Ishaq, who was born about 717 and died in 767. He thus wrote his biography well over one hundred years after Muhammad died. He would not have been able to speak to any eyewitnesses, only to those who had heard their accounts, or accounts of their accounts. Ibn Ishaq's work is contained in fragments quoted in a compilation of anecdotes and traditions composed by Islamic historian Ibn Hisham (???-834) and al-Tabari (838-923).
Other sources for biographies of Muhammad are: the military chronicles of Waqidi (745-822); the biographies of Ibn Sa'd (783-845), a student of Waqidi; later histories; Quranic commentaries; and collections of Prophetic hadith. These texts were recorded more than a century, and often several centuries, after the death of Muhammad. Some passages in the Qur'an are believed to shed some light on Muhammad's biography; however, they require a great deal of interpretation to be useful.
Bernard Lewis states that 'the collection and scunity of Hadiths didn't take place until several generations' after Muhammad's death and that 'during that period the opportunities and motives for falsification were almost unlimited'. Besides the problem of oral transmittion for over a hundred years, there were furthermore motives for deliberate distortion. The Muslims themselves at an early date realized that many Hadiths were fabricated and thus developed a whole science of criticism to distinguish between genuine Hadiths and pious or impious frauds. However modern critics have pointed out many defects in their approach. [5] Some skeptical scholars (Wansbrough, Cook, Crone, and others) have raised doubts about the reliability of the Islamic sources, especially the hadith collections. They note for instance that the earliest biography of Muhammad of Ibn Ishaq does not contain any dates or explicit details; yet, later Islamic narratives have progressively more dates, with minute details of Muhammad's life being inserted into their accounts as successive generations of scholars relay the story, such that by the time we arrive at contemporary renditions of Muhammad's story, dates and details have exploded exponentially without explanation. These skeptics believe that many hadith and other traditions were manufactured, or doctored, to support one or another of the many political or doctrinal factions that had developed within Islam in its first century or later. The life of Muhammad was believed to be the exemplar for all Muslims; hence the importance of showing that Muhammad said or did something proving that a particular faction was right. If the skeptics are right, and if much of the early material cannot really be trusted, then all that is factually known is what is contained in the summary above.
[This message has been edited by Abrahim (edited 09-01-2006).]
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