Introduction
إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا الذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ
"Indeed, it is We who sent down the Qur'an and indeed, We will be its guardian" (Surat Al-Ĥijr:9)
This promise from Allah Almighty to protect the Quran is very important for us as Muslims in order to have confidence in the source of all our knowledge about Islam, the Quran.
However, the Hadith are not protected by Allah. We all know how the scholars of Hadith battled to weed out forged ahadith, but who can be sure that they were entirely successful? What is the real story behind the collection of hadiths?
Graph Comparison on Hadiths Collected and Published
From the graph one must ask, whose authenticity is in question here?
The "Prophet" or the "Compilers"?
Upon which verses rests your Faith or Imaan?
The "Al-Qur’an" or "Al-Bukhari and other Persian Scholars"?
A Study of the Qur’an, Brother Mohammed Abdul Malik:
To understand the background to the development of Hadith literature one must sift through the history of Islam from about 250 years after the time of our Prophet… during the first century of the Prophet's era no hadiths were written down… Stories circulated by word of mouth but they were never written down because the view was well known that the Prophet and the companions did not want anything of the kind to be done, and so there was a very strong feeling against the writing of any sort of 'Hadith' literature. The so-called 'Science of isnad' -- touchstone of a hadith's authenticity -- has tremendous flaws in it. How, then, can we go on giving credence to something that was not written down and yet which, some 250 years after the fact, Bukhari supposedly managed to trace back to its source (i.e. the Prophet) by establishing all the links in a chain which cannot possibly have been genuinely reconstructed! How he (Bukhari) managed to do this without written records, bridging a gap of about eight generations, and simultaneously establishing not only biographical data but also a compelling analysis of the mental faculties of his subjects defies belief! One can quote several hundred hadiths that not only contradict the Qur’an but also clearly do damage to the Prophet's good name.
Dr. Murad Wilfried Hofmann:
"..of course, while we know how much pious scholars like al Bukhari and Muslim battled to weed out forged ahadith, who can be sure that they were entirely successful? Doubts are justified, because the six orthodox hadith collections were all assembled by the same criteria. In particular, out of sheer veneration of the Companions of the Prophet, isnad (chain of transmission) and matn (text) critique did not go as far as it would have if modern linguistic and sociohistorical analysis had been applied. Given the fact that tens of thousands of fabricated hadiths circulated within two centuries of the Prophet’s death, we simply have to admit that the Sunnah is not as reliable as we would all wish it to be. Let us be cruelly sober: Someone clever and ruthless enough to fabricate the matn of a hadith – be it for political or “pious” reasons – would he not be clever and ruthless enough to also fabricate its isnad?.."
Hadeeth = Virus of the Muslim Ummah