Part Two
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
The Prophet of Islam Muhammad (P) passed away leaving behind two valuable assets as his religious legacies for his followers, viz., the holy Qur'an and his Descendants. He urged upon his people to adhere to them firmly and never to part with them.
The holy Prophet during his life-time had explained to the people all the Qur'anic truths, and, in the form of hadith, he had promulgated all the Islamic learning concerning faith, doc trines and tenets among all his followers. About the narration of hadith he had said, "May Allah bless a person who listens to hadith from me, receives it thoroughly and conveys it to those who have not heard it! There are a large number of people who communicate learning to the wiser and more intellectual persons than them ".
Now, we shall see what the members of the Islamic polity did to the holy Qur'an and to the holy Prophet's Descendants and how they carried out the orders concerning the hadith.
These people ousted the members of the holy Prophet's family from the general society and compelled them to live in seclusion. They subjected them (the holy Prophet's Descendants) to an inexpressible harassment.
And when they succeeded in snatching and wresting power, they tried to separate the holy Qur'an and the hadith which were the real interpreters of the holy Qur'an, in a bid to interpret the holy Qur'an as they desired and wished.
The holy Prophet's sayings and his mode of life, generally known as "Sunnah", were the main obstacles in the diplomacy of the Caliphs and powerful repeller of the attacks of the adversaries, so the Caliphate saw no other way out but to disarm its opponents of this powerful weapon.
In the beginning, Abu Bakr decided to get the possession of this weapon exclusively for himself. With this objective in view, he collected five hundred hadith of the holy Prophet (P), but after some time he found that that would not serve his purpose, because it was not possible to limit the hadith then, so he burnt up all these traditions.
In those days, it was indeed, impossible to restrain people from narrating or writing the hadith and to compel them to benefit from those hadith only which Abu Bakr had collected. For this reason, Abu Bakr saw no other alternative except to place a ban on the hadith of the holy Prophet so that people might not have access to this strong weapon; therefore the Caliph prohibited the Muslims to quote the hadith of the holy Prophet, and issued a proclamation to the effect that the people were not to quote the hadith of the holy Prophet and that they had to follow only the holy Qur'an.
The idea was that the holy Qur'an should be separated from the hadith, so that the Caliphs could interpret it as they wished.
Before his death Abu Bakr prepared a will deed by virtue of which he left the Caliphate to 'Umar.
There is no doubt that most of the Muslims who, having been deprived of the hadith of the holy Prophet, had a narrow vision, so they did not oppose the move.
Even 'Umar, during his rule, followed strictly the policy of banning the hadith. Once, however, he put before the people a proposal regarding the narration and the writing of the holy Prophet's hadith in order to get their opinion. The people, in general said that it was necessary to revive the practice of quoting and writing the hadith. With extreme cleverness, 'Umar, after having pondered over the problem for a month, discovered a way out of the narrow strait in which he had been placed. He went to the people and made the following pronouncement:-
"I very much wanted to write down the Sunnah of the holy Prophet (P) but I remembered the peoples of the past, who by writing some of the books and paying too much attention on them, neglected the heavenly book, so I decided not to mix up the holy Qur'an with anything else."
When He ('Umar) used to send out the holy Prophet's companions on official business, he emphasized upon them not to narrate any hadith, because that would make the people neglect the holy Qur'an. And if he came to know that any of them had disobeyed his orders, he would summon him to appear before him and used to detain him as long as he lived.
Besides, if some written hadith were discovered with the people he would collect and burn them up.
Thus ended the Caliphate of 'Umar, and 'Usman succeeded to the Caliphate with the help of an organized party that had come into being.
During the rule of 'Usman, the Caliphate authorities waged a severe war on the narration of hadith. If 'Umar used to harass the holy Prophet's companions and detain them in Medina and burn up their writings, 'Usman in order to stop the narrations of the holy Prophet's statements and descriptions of his ways of life, tortured or exiled some of the well-known companions of the holy Prophet (P). For instance, he exiled Abu Dharr from Medina and thence to Rabzah, until this notable comrade of the holy Prophet died on the burning sands of a strange land! Another companion of the holy Prophet, 'Ammar bin Yasir, was beaten so hard that he fell unconscious on the ground!
For twenty-five years during the rule of the first three Caliphs, the comrades of the holy Prophet and other sons of Islam passed their lives in tremendous frustration, until at last as a result of a general uprising, the Caliphate of 'Usman was overthrown and the Caliph was killed. After this the people turned to Imam Ali (P) and chose him as their next Caliph.
Imam Ali succeeded to the Caliphate at the time when Muslims, having passed a quarter of a century under the previous Caliphs, had become used to their ways of life, Imam Ali (P) has him self-described the situation prevailing at that time as follows
"The Caliphs before me did things wherein they consciously went against (the dictates) of the holy Prophet of Allah (P). They broke their covenant with him and changed his 'Sunnah '. Now if I force the people to give up those things and restore the affairs as they had been in the days of the holy Prophet, my army men will be scattered away from me, leaving me alone and helpless. At the most I shall have a small number of my adherents left at my side, these adherents who recognize my Imamat through the Book of Allah and the 'Sunnah 'of the holy Prophet.
"What do you think will be the result if I take the following measures? :
(a) Replace "Maqam lbrahim" (the standing place of Abraham) to where it had been ordered by the holy Prophet.
(b) Restore 'Fadak' to the next of kin of Fatima (daughter of the holy Prophet).
(c) Restore weights and measures as they were in vogue in the time of the holy Prophet.
(d) Restore the lands to those whom the holy Prophet had given.
(e) Cancel the cruel laws enforced by the Caliphs.
(f) Re-adjust Zakat on the original basis.
(g) Reformulate rules regarding ablutions and prayers.
(h) Restore the women who have been illegally separated from their husbands and given away to others, to their rightful husbands.
(i) Distribute money from 'Bait al-Mal' (state Treasury) equally among the deserving people as it was at the time of the holy Prophet not allowing it to concentrate in the hands of the rich only.
The money from the State Exchequer has so far been distributed on the basis of party politics.
(j) Repeal the land taxes.
(k) Declare all the Muslims equal in the matters of conjugal relations.
(l) Collect Khums (fifth part of the property) as tax according to the Command of Allah.
(m) Restore the holy Prophet's Masjid to its original structure, as it was at the time of the holy Prophet. Re-open the entrances to the Masjid, closed after the holy Prophet's death, and close them that were opened after him.
(n) Prohibit the wiping on the leather shoes
(o) Impose legal penalties and special punishments on the drinking of 'Nabidh ' and date wine.
(p) Legalize Mut'a of women and that of Hajj as they were in the days of the holy Prophet.
(q) Declare 'Takbir' (glorification of Allah) five times during the prayers over the dead.
(r) Make it compulsory for the Muslims to recite, 'Bismillah hir Rahmanir Rahim' loudly at the commencement of prayers.
(s) Order the divorce to be strictly in accordance with the practice during the holy Prophet's days.
(t) Order the treatment with the prisoners of war of various nationalities to be strictly in compliance with the commands of Allah and His Prophet.
"In short, if I try to make the people follow the commands of Allah and His holy Prophet, they will leave me and wander away.
"I swear by Allah that when I ordered the people not to offer congregational prayers in the Masjids in the month of Ramazan except the obligatory ones and explained to them that to offer commended prayers in congregation was a new method; a group of my army men who had once fought on my side, started shouting 'Ah! The tradition of 'Umar. O' Muslims, Ali wants to change the tradition of 'Umar and intends to stop us from saying commended (Mustahab) prayers in the month of Ramazan'. They raised such a hue and cry that I feared they would rise in revolt.
"Alas", continued Imam Ali (P), "what sufferings I underwent at the hands of these people who opposed me tooth and nail and obeyed their misled leaders, who were only leading them to Hell-fire."
Imam Ali had prepared a programme by which he wanted to proceed along the lines of the holy Prophet and against the practice of the Caliphs, especially in respect of hadith. He waged a perpetual war for the destruction of all traces of the Caliphs' tradition.
Practices were defaced and made topsy-turvey. Consequently the true Islam was completely changed into a new one.
The ruling parties officially recognized only this metamorphosed Islam. This Islam, the warp and weft of which had been prepared in the time of Mua'wiyah has, to this day, passed for the true faith. In our own days, things have come to such a pass that if the true Islam of the holy Prophet's days is presented to these people who have been used to the official Islam, they find it very difficult to believe that this is really the true Islam, because they have known their Islam from the pages of books containing false and fabricated hadith. By way of example we quote one hadith from the heap invented in Abu Hurayrah's work shop:-
"A group of people said to the glorious Prophet, 'O Prophet of Allah, shall we be able to see Allah on the Day of Resurrection?'. He replied, 'Don't you take pleasure when you look at the disc of the moon on the night of the fourteenth?'. 'We do', replied they. Again he said, 'Do you feel any trouble in sighting the sun which is un clouded?'. They replied 'No, O Prophet of Allah'. Then he said, 'You will see Allah in the same way'. On the Day of Reckoning, Allah will assemble all people and command them to follow those whom they used to worship. Those who used to worship the sun will follow the sun and those who worshipped the moon will follow the moon; and those who worshipped the devils will walk behind their gods. The only people left will be the Muslims including the hypocrites. Then Allah will appear to them in the form different from the one the people knew in the past and say, 'I am your Allah'. They will say, 'We seek the protection of Allah from thee' .We will remain here till our Allah comes to us and we shall recognize Him'. Then Allah will reappear before them in the same form that they had known before. Then they will cry out, 'Certainly Thou art our Lord', and they will follow Him".
It can be seen clearly that the hadith has spoilt the very base of the knowledge of Allah and the Islamic conception of Resurrection.
In another tradition it is narrated that on the Day of Judgement, the holy Prophet will request Allah thus: 'O my Allah, in return for my curses that I flung at the believers in anger bless and purify them."
Similarly it has been narrated that the holy Prophet (P) once said to the people, "Date palm doesn't need pollination", or, he said "Don't pollinate the date palm, it will be better for it". Accordingly the people didn't fertilize the date palms with the result that that year the date palms didn't flourish and when the holy Prophet came to know of this situation, he said, "I knew only that much. Don't ask me any further", or he said "About the worldly affairs you know better".
It has also been narrated that one day the holy Prophet, while leading prayers in Mecca, was reciting Sura Najm until he reached the verse "Did you see Lat, Uzza and the other third Menat". While he was reciting this verse, Satan put the following words in his mouth: "These are the eminent gods (gharaniq) like white birds and their intercession is hoped for". When the poly theists heard these words, they became happy thinking that the Prophet had after all, spoken well of their gods, and at the same time, all the Muslims and polytheists together fell down prost rate. Then Gabriel came down and drew the attention of the holy Prophet to this great lapse. The holy Prophet said that the devil had put those words in his mouth.
According to another narration Gabriel asked the holy Prophet to repeat the said verse, which the holy Prophet did, adding also the words "These are the eminent gods (gharaniq)". Gabriel told him that he had not revealed those words to him, and that it was Satan who had made him (the holy Prophet) utter them.
These narrations have been quoted in the famous and reliable commentaries of Sunni scholars like Tabari, Ibn Kasir, Suyuti and Allama Sayyid Qutub.
These people have narrated such a large number of fabricated hadith ascribed to the holy Prophet that they have concealed the true picture of the holy Prophet behind the screen of lies and false statements.
The portraits of the Quraishiite rulers and officers were also painted in false colours. Phantom qualities were invented for them, and their opponents were made targets of reproach to the extent that men like Abu Dharr Ghifari, Malik al-Ashtar, Ammar bin Yasir and others of their sort, were declared to be conceited and ignorant of religion.
Besides, they have cited many hadith regarding the attributes of Allah, Resurrection and Reckoning, Rewards and Punishments, Heaven and Hell, stories of the Prophets of the past, the beginning of the Creation, Islamic faith and tenets, but in fact their sources of information are the products of their own brains.
It has been estimated that the hadith of this sort fabricated in large numbers and the fields of narrations became so wide that all the religious truths were reduced to mere shadow and, instead, a new Islam emerged that of the Umayyid and Abbasid rulers, and it continued to be in vogue until the end of (The Turk) Usmani Caliphate.
Throughout the history of Islam there has been another group of people that opposed the fabricators of false hadith. Members of this group had been doing their best to give currency to the correct Sunnah of the holy Prophet even at the cost of their lives.
Abu Dharr, a great companion of the holy Prophet (P) is considered to be one of the leading figures of this group. One day he was sitting near the "Middle Devil" in Mina with a crowd of people around him. The people were asking him questions about the religion. Suddenly an evil natured official of the Umayyid government came to him and said "Haven't you been warned against answering people's questions?" Abu Dharr replied, "Have you the authority to keep a watch on me? ". Having said this, he pointed to the nape of his neck and said, "If you put the sword here and I may think that before my head severed off my body I can quote a few words that I have heard from the holy Prophet, I shall certainly do that ".
Rashid Hijri, another great man belongs to this group. At the time when Ziyad, the governor of Kufah cut off his hands and feet and he was sent home, a large number of people came to see him and started crying. Rashid said to them, "Stop crying, bring something with which to write, for I want to dictate you what I have heard from my master"; The people agreed, but when the news reached Ziyad, his (Rashid's) tongue was also ordered to be cut off.
Maisam Tammar, was also a valiant worker of this group. When Ibn Ziyad cut off his hands and feet and was going to hang him, (with much (difficulty) he stood up like a speaker on the pulpit, and cried, "Listen O' people, anyone who wishes to listen to the hadith that I have heard from Imam Ali (P), should come near me". People gathered around the gibbet and Maisam started speaking. When Ibn Ziyad came to know of this, he ordered his tongue to be cut off. After his tongue had been cut off, Maisam could not stand the agony more than an hour and gave his life at the gallows in a pool of blood!
We have seen that the influence of the Caliphate had gradually increased immensely in the realm, to the extent that they were able to change the commands of Allah and His holy Prophet concerning legal or illegal acts.
Eventually, things took such a bad turn that the orders issued by the Caliph were enforced as if they were Divine Commands!
However, this state of affairs did not last long after 'Usman's Caliphate. General uprings against that arbitrary rule put an end to it, until the tides turned to the side of Mua'wiyah with the help of a group of forceful propagators picked up from the fabricators of hadith, Mua'wiyah chalked out a programme to revert to the old practices
and regain the so called glories of the past. But the martyrdom of Imam Husayn (P) thwarted these designs forever and it was no longer possible for the Caliphs to revive the past practices. For this reason, the innovations and additions, that had separated true Islam from the official one, no longer made any headway. The succeeding Caliphs could not make any fresh innovations.
The martyrdom of Imam Husayn bore another fruit. The revengeful acts such as imprisonment, maltreatment, torture and murder against the followers of the actual Islam and the reproducers of the holy Prophet's hadith were toned down, because the later governments could not adopt such painful and inhuman measures. Therefore, they decided to put in every effort to select the correct hadith from among the thousands of fabricated ones manufactured by the workers of the previous Caliphs and make these hadith available to the Muslims.
With 'Umar bin 'Abd al-Aziz, having assumed reins of Caliphate the hundred-year old ban on the hadith came to an end, and with the advent of the second century Hijra the followers of official Islam got orders from their government to start writing down the hadith of the holy Prophet. Consequently a large number of books on the biographies of the holy Prophet and his Companions were compiled. The holy Prophet's hadith were also collected and compiled in a number of books, but, among thousands of them, only a few such hadith can be found as having come down through the sources of the real pupils of the School of Islam; but even those few hadith caused a headache to the so called intellectuals who had sold their conscience away to the government, so, in order to get rid of them they adopted two measures:
Firstly, in the science of the investigation about the narrators of hadith and the scrutiny of the hadith intellectually, it was decided that if there be a narrator, a well-wisher or an ally of Imam Ali (P), his narration would be considered weak and of no value.
Secondly, they compiled books on hadith that contained none of that type (narrated by the allies of Imam Ali).
The books on hadith that were thus compiled were called "Correct" (or "Authentic") and they were six in number. Among them, Bukhari was regarded to be the most reliable, because he had paid the highest attention to two things. He accepted the narration even from the Kharajites like 'Umar bin Khattab but he did not include any narration from Abu 'Abd Allah Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq.
In the same way he embodied all such hadith that related to the Caliphs, in spite of the fact that they were incomplete and disjointed. This is why the followers of the official Islam consider Bukhari's book as the most correct book after the Qur'an!
On the same basis, among the book son biographies and history, the history of Tabari has been counted as the most authentic of all the history books, because he has also toed the line of Bukhari. He has taken due care not to embody in his book a hadith that clashes in the least with the interests of those people who were considered respectable by the officials of Neo-lslam. On the other hand, he has quoted all such hadith that dealt with the justification of cruelties practised by the Caliphs! For this reason, Tabari narrated hundreds of hadith cooked up by the enemies of Islam, thus, totally distorting all the historical events relating to the period of the holy Prophet and the early Caliphs.
This is why that writer (Tabari), because of his staunch loyalty to the Caliphs and their associates, became so famous and was considered so reliable that he (Tabari) was called the leader of the historians. After him the other hisorians like Ibn Asir, Ibn Kasir and Ibn Khalldun based their histories of the holy Prophet's companions on his (Tabari's) writings.
After the fourth century Hijra onwards, the followers of the official Islam got the above six books published and declared that they were to be acted upon.
In history writing, only Tabari and his followers were regarded to be the main sources with the result that hundreds of books of history, hadith and commentary, that had been compiled by the writers, sank into oblivion!
In this way, the path of investigation and research about the true Islam which the holy Prophet had brought for mankind as a great gift, was closed for all and forever.
The later generations, after the fourth century hijra till today, have blindly followed the same writers, with the result that now, with the exception of followers of the School of the Descend ants of the holy Prophet, all the people know that the current Islam is the same official Islam that has come into being at the hands of the "Innovators of hadith". Consequently, we find that the fabrication of hadith is the greatest obstacle in the way of knowing the true Islam, its tenets, commandments, rules and rituals, history and life histories of the eminent personalities of the past.
In the light of what we have stated above, it is the pressing need of the hour that all the intellectuals and learned scholars of the world of Islam should make thorough investigations in order to get access to the true Islam which can be found only in the school of the holy Prophet's family.
This is the greatest need of the time and I have placed it before the intellectuals and learned scholars of the world of Islam: Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran and other countries. I hope that our Circles of Religious Knowledge and Learning that are the guardians of the holy Prophet's great legacy will pay due attention to my appeal and give a positive response.
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Author: Allamah Sayyid Murtadha Askari
