Does the Hadith have a Solid Historical Basis?

All Muslims, even including those who champion the Hadith, accept the fact that after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, false hadith reports about or attributed to the Prophet Muhammad “mushroomed” into hundreds of thousands. The compilations that were made more than two centuries after the Prophet’s death were done after sorting through mountainous piles of individual hadith reports. Bukhari, for example, made a selection of some seven thousand traditions (including repeated ones) out of reportedly six hundred thousand he found in circulation – roughly one out of every one hundred. That means that he discarded all but a tiny fraction of the hadith in circulation as false. This factor alone leaves open the question whether his selection has been foolproof. — Abdur Rab Editor’s note: This is all the more important at a time when Jihadis are stealing our children away from us and turning them into sacrificial goats in their war of supremacy over other sects on the basis of patently concocted and fabricated Ahades. One of the funniest I found in a manifesto of a Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir-based terrorist organization Al-Badr claiming that the Prophet (PBUH) said that Jihad against India is Jihad-e-Afzal, that is greater in importance and reward than even the Jihad against the Meccan enemies of Islam that the Prophet himself fought. But apparently our children, some of them even the most highly educated and intelligent ones are not able to differentiate between a correct and a fabricated Hadees. The moment you ascribe a quotation to the Prophet, it acquires a certain sanctity in the eyes of a devout Muslim. However the knowledge of the fact that authentic compilers like Bukhari and Muslim discarded hundreds of thousands of Ahadees should help Muslims understand that they just cannot attach much sanctity to Ahadees unless they find that they are merely elaborating an injunction of the Quran while maintaining the same spirit inculcated into us through the Quran. This makes Mr. Abdur Rab’s study very valuable.

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