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HADITH COLLECTIONS

Nowadays, the attention of more and more people is focused on one of the most famous and particular religion in the world – ISLAM RELIGION. What makes this religion to be so famous and largely researched by many western scholars? The answer to this question can be delivered only by those 1, 8 billion Muslims from all around the world that makes Islam the second – largest religion in the world, after Christianity. Islam is known to be a monotheistic Abraham religion. The word “Islam” means submission and those people who are considered to be adherents of Islam are known as Muslims, meaning “one who submits to God”. All Muslims believe that God (ALLAH) revealed his message for them through the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which was selected by God to be his messenger. MUHAMMAD remained in Muslims mind like a religious leader, the most honored and respected, who founded the religion of Islam as a historical phenomenon. This prophet is also viewed like the last and the greatest in a series of prophets. This features make, maybe all the Muslim believers to see in his personality the perfection and the best example worth to be followed in each second of your life. Although he is described to be the possessor of all the virtues, he is a human being, not divine. This is maybe the most important difference between Christianity and Islam, because Muslims deny the Christianity doctrine of the Trinity. Islamic theology says that Jesus was just a man and not the son of God. Now I should say some words about the Holy Book of Islam, the Quran. Literally speaking the word “Quran” means recitation. Divided into 114 suras (chapters), the Quran represents for all MUSLIMS the speech of God (Allah), dictating without human editing. In the Quran the message is repeated, elaborated and illustrated with stories. These stories are written in an elliptical way, whose message is not a direct one. In order to understand the message of God, the believers should read it very carefully, with patience and also this message it is required to be respected during each day of their life.

HADITH DEFINITION. HADITH MAIN CHARACTERISTICS The Qur'an is distinct from Hadith, which are the sayings of Muhammad or a report about something he did. It is agreed that Muhammad clearly distinguished between his own utterances (hadith) and God's words. Researching by themselves, both the Quran and the Hadith Collections, Muslims had noticed that Qur’an  does  not  include  all the “explanations” related to their life, I mean all the rules that they should obey or all the  principles that should constitute  the starting point of  their life. That’s why they started to explain Qur’an stories by reading the Hadith Collections, which truly represents for Muslim community the best way to respect, first of all the person of Muhammad and also to be initiated in what means the message of God revealed through the prophet Muhammad. The Qu‘ran itself state: "Verily in the messenger of God you have a beautiful model for everyone who hopes for God and the Last Judgment and often remembers God" .(Sura 33/21) According to all the Muslim scholars and non-Muslim scholars the Hadith are translated as ”traditions” relating to the words and deeds of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As we have listened in our class presentations, Hadith Collections represent for the Muslim world the perfect book or source from which every muslim can read examples of the Muhammad’s life in order to follow this examples and to  live according to real way of life (sunnah). It is said that these “discrete anecdotes about the Prophet’s sayings and actions” were “passed down orally and later turned into written texts”. Maybe the main feature of the hadith is that it represents the clear evidence of the Muhammad’s life and also the perfect way to understand his life and to try to imitate this model of human behavior. Here we also could notice that appears a difference between the Christianity and Islam religion. We cannot clearly identify the Jesus behavior in his daily life, we do not know what was he doing during his free time, what was he eating, how he used to dress himself. Maybe we do not need all these details, because we can foresee them by reading only the Bible. Muslim people, we can say that they are more put to advantage at this chapter then the Christians. Thanks to Hadith Collections, those Muslims who are reading them can narrate the whole Muhammad’s life and his way to behave. The following sentences can prove what I have mentioned: “Muhammad was middle-sized, did not have lank hair or crisp hair, was not fat, had a white, circular face, wide black eyes and long eyelashes.[…] He was bulky. His face shone like the moon in the night of full moon.[…] The upper part of his nose was hooked; he was thick bearded, had smooth cheeks, a strong mouth and his teeth were set apart.[…] Muhammad was proportionate, stout, firm-gripped , even of belly and chest, broad - chested, and broad – shouldered. ” This physical description we can say that it is a general one, but none of us could imagine that Hadith collections are mentioning such details like the food that Muhammad liked the most. These features constitute also a model of human comportment for Muslim people. For example, “some people avoided certain foods such as garlic, mangoes, and melons, because he was reported to have disliked them, or because there was no record that he had eaten them. Honey and mutton were cherished because he cherished them; dogs were considered unclean because – according to a well – known hadith- ‘ the angel do not enter a house in which there is a dog or statues’; but cats were approved of because – as he is related to have said – they are among those animals that grace human dwellings.” HISTORY OF HADITH Of course it is not too easy to make an introduction in what means the history of hadith, it represents maybe to rewrite the Islam history from the beginnings. Despite of this fact, many scholars tried to write and to compile hadith collections, in order to give to the followers the opportunity to explore the authenticity of the hadith. More than a hundred years after Muhammad’s death, the hadith writers started  to foresee  the possibility to put them down. As they did not know at the beginning even to write, the oral way was the most reliable way to compose them. The majority of the arabs did not know to read or to write, and according to history so was Muhammad. There are only, some of the arabs that could do these things. Starting with the 7th century, that who first urged Muslims both to write down the Qu’ran   and the Hadith, was the caliph Uthman, the third caliph, who had formerly been Muhammad’s secretary.

This period coincide with the Abbasid dynasty, period characterized by its intelligent scholars, that tried to distinguish  “which hadith were to be trusted as narrations and which had been invented for various political or theological purposes. For this purpose, they used a number of techniques which Muslims now call the science of hadith.” Exactly about this subject I am going to speak now, about science of hadith.

Science of hadith “The science of hadith is a method of textual criticism developed by early Muslim scholars in determining the veracity of reports attributed to Muhammad. This is achieved by analyzing the text of the report, the scale of the report's transmission, the routes through which the report was transmitted, and the individual narrators involved in its transmission.” So generally, those who are applying the science of hadith are trying to understand the authenticity of the hadith, hadith text (matn), their  way of narration  (riwayah) and the isnad – the chain of narrators. These criteria are very important both for these scholars and for all the non-Muslim world, because  they constitue  a proof  that hadith collections are not only simple  inventions or speculations. Unfortunatelly, nowadays not only western research workers  are sceptic in the veracity of hadith, but also some of the Muslim scholars have come to doubt whether the methodology of writing the hadith is a reliable one. There have been noticed signs even from India. For example,“the modernist scholar Sayyid  Ahmad Khan began to question the authenticity of hadith in the nineteenth century.“   In the West  part of  Europe, there were such  scholars  as Ignaz Goldziher, Joseph Schacht, D. S. Margoliuth, Henri Lammens, and Leone Caetani. These scholars critised  many  features of  hadith, saying that they are  anachronistic, simple inventions or just simple  stories without any reliable background. Today, those Muslim who believe in what is written in hadith, do not pay attention at western opinions. They are considering them just a way to express the animosity, but also, sometimes brutal attacks, that can contribute to the relation damaging  between   cultures, religion and  nations, and this is only one more reason to complicate the actual situation among cultures.