Answer
Asalamu Alaikum,
Thank you for contacting About Islam with your question.
Dr. Shabir Ally, from Let the Quran Speak, addresses this question in the video below:
Transcript:
Aisha Khaja: Dr. Shabir, the question that we have is: how can we reconcile what authenticity of hadith and what we know about the Quran and Islam in general?
And to give you some back story, the viewer just mentioned that they came across YouTube and online websites and had just came across information that was completely contradictory to what they knew in terms of in understanding the hadith. So can you comment a little bit on that?
Dr. Shabir Ally: Yeah some of these YouTube videos and websites take an approach that says, “Okay, we’re going to follow the Quran only!”
And sometimes they go to verses of the Quran which seem to indicate that the Quran is complete, it is a detailed revelation, and it’s as if nothing else is needed apart from the Quran in order to follow the guidance from God.
Now that that is an extreme response to what has happened in Islamic history in that Muslims tended to follow not only the Quran but detailed information about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, things that he said about very minute issues.
And they made all of that precedent for Islamic law so that the Islamic law became very, very much detailed, right down to the very finer points of how to do things.
So, now we have the two extremes: we have the classical Islamic law that we had assumed worked out and now we have a response to it that says, “Let’s throw away all of that law and just go with the Quran alone.”
Well, in between there is a balanced approach and that’s the approach that we have to find; an approach that says, “Okay, the Quran is primary. We should use that as our primary document and we should not sacrifice anything the Quran clearly says for something that is outside of the of the Quran.”
And at the same time, the Quran seems to indicate that we need to do certain things, but the Quran does not give all of the details about how to do those things.
We find those details in the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and indeed the Quran itself also tells us to follow the Prophet, peace be upon him.
So what would it mean to follow the Prophet, peace be upon him, as the Quran repeatedly tells us to do if it only meant to follow the Quran? The Quran should have just simply said, “Follow the Quran. Follow the Quran. Follow the Quran.”
But the Quran is saying, “Obey Allah and obey His Messenger. Follow the Quran but also follow the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.”
So, the balanced approach then is to follow the Quran and also look at that sort of detail about the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, which is clearly from him in authentic reports and reports which do not contradict the clear instructions in the Quran itself.
Aisha Khaja: There’s a bit of conversation as well about the actual authenticity of some hadith, right? Some are weaker, some are stronger. How do you reconcile that as well?
Dr. Shabir Ally: Yes you have to differentiate between strong and weak, and what that just simply means is that you have a hadith which is basically something the Prophet, peace be upon him, said or did—a report about him—and then you have a chain of narrators through whom the hadith was transmitted, from one person to another.
In the early stage, it was transmitted mostly by word-of-mouth and in the later stage, mostly in writing.
Now, when things are transmitted by word-of–mouth, you know, it’s like Chinese Whispers: one person tells another, who tells another, and then they become something else at the end. So, we have to watch for this variation.
So, we differentiate between the strong and the weak by taking the strong that has a good chain of narrators more.
So, we want to make sure that we don’t go with a single line of narrow narration, but multiple lines which confirm the same thing and give us more confidence that this is authentical, so nobody made it up.
I hope this helps answer your question. You can also check out more from Let the Quran Speak at the link here. Please keep in touch. Walaikum Asalam.
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