Blindspot!
From Issue: 1022 [Read full issue]
Hadith Content
The leading Companions, such as Abu Bakr, and Umar and the Prophet's wife Aishah, were well aware that assessment of narrators' characters was not the true criterion on the basis of which to accept or reject hadith accounts. They realized that such decisions had to be based on the Quran, and on the hadith accounts that they knew with certainty to be trustworthy and reliable. This decision-making process required that they examine the actual content of the hadiths (matn), and not just their chains of transmission (isnad). Focusing on hadiths' contents and comparing them to the teachings of the Quran would provide a kind of natural protection against allowing falsehoods to infiltrate the Sunnah.
This is not to say that we should reject the isnad as a means of hadith verification. However, examination of the isnad is meant to be merely a first step in the process of sifting through hadiths, the second step being to measure the conclusions reached through the first step against the yardstick of the Quran. If the contents of a hadith with an acceptable isnad are confirmed by the Quran, it will stand; otherwise, it should be eliminated. What happened, however, was that the first step was allowed to expand until it took up nearly all of hadith collectors' time and energy, and the Sunnah was taken captive by ilm al-rijal, the science of narrator assessment.
By advocating this approach I am not, like some, issuing a call to abandon the hadith collections that have come down to us. Such a step would be unacceptable according to both the teachings of the Quran itself and the demands of academic inquiry. At the same time — bearing in mind the need for our approach to harmonize with both Quranic imperatives and the scientific method — we must not view the hadith collections we have been bequeathed by Islamic tradition in a hierarchical fashion, considering some to be "authentic" and others "more authentic." Rather, it should be remembered that every one of them contains both authentic and inauthentic hadiths.
The scholars who recorded the Sunnah compilations which have come down to us made no claims to have critiqued the contents of the accounts they contained. Nor did the author of any of the Sunnah collections claim to have compared hadiths one by one to the contents of the Quran. Their task had been limited to the collection of hadiths via the science of narrator assessment. Moreover, although some of them referred to what they had collected as "well-authenticated", they were defining the term "well-authenticated" in terms of the criteria they themselves had adhered to in their processes of collection and selection. For if they had been striving for absolute reliability, how could the same report be deemed "well-authenticated" by one scholar, and "weakly authenticated" by another? This could occur because the hadiths contained in these "well authenticated" compilations had not been subjected to both isnad criticism and matn criticism. After all, these very compilations also contain reports that have been classified as "strange" (gharib), that is, as hadith one tier of whose chains of transmission contained only one narrator. If we were to compare reports in this category with the Quran, we would be certain to find disparities and contradictions between them. Indeed, not a single hadith compilation is free of reports belonging to this category.
Compiled From:
"Reviving The Balance: The Authority of the Quran and the Status of the Sunnah " - Taha Jabir Alalwani, pp. 196-198