Something that I try to engage in is empathy. I like to put myself in the shoes of others and wonder how they think. I’ve been talking to a lot of Muslims lately. I want to see where they stand in regards to the Hadith. I’m not talking about apologists or scholars. I’m talking about the average Muslim who grows up in the West or in a Muslim country.
Obviously in a Muslim country, they’d have better access to Islamic education but Islamic education is available in the West as well. It seems like Muslims are taught the Quran and a few major Hadith. Muslims, if I’m wrong, feel free to correct me.
I was recently talking to a girl from Somalia. She said that she reads the Quran quite a bit. I asked her about how often she reads the Hadith. She said that there were so many Hadith and unless you’re a scholar it’s hard to determine which ones are authentic or not. It was as if she was just throwing her arms in the air and saying “I give up”!
Western converts certainly don’t know anything about the Hadith when they convert. Most Western converts don’t know about how to cure a stomach ache, what to do if a fly falls in your drink, or contracting a temporary marriage. Muslims from Muslim countries may be vaguely familiar with these Hadiths but they don’t think about them much.
My experience with the Quran is this. It affirms that Allah has no partners and tells a bunch of stories about prophets from previous times. That’s the core message of the Quran. There is other stuff on the periphery but it’s not the core message. Most of the practice of Islam is in the Hadith. While the Muslims know and respect the Hadith, it seems to be not studied in large part by the average Muslim.
If one goes to a dawah booth, they’re usually handing out free Qurans. This is what Muslims want non-Muslims to read. If you ask most people in the West who become Muslims why they converted, they’ll usually give two reasons. They like Tawheed over the Trinity and the Quran is preserved while the Bible isn’t. On a surface level, this might seem alright but the more one studies, the more this rational falls apart. When you study the Hadith, Allah is revealed to have physical body parts like a human being. Tawheed doesn’t look so good anymore. The Hadith also shows that portions of the Quran are missing. There goes the other argument. I suppose they can give themselves peace and just say they’re weak Hadith. Or maybe it’s impossible to know?
This is what I’ve found in my studies. If you’re a former Muslim and you’d like to share how much Hadith knowledge you were raised with, feel free to comment. If you’re currently a Muslim I’d be interested in hearing what you were raised with as well. If you’re thinking about converting, I’d like to hear from you as well.
When I read the Koran (which I have a couple of times) the core message of the Koran appeared to me to be that Allah is the One True God and that Mohammed is his prophet…….and woe betide you if you don’t go along with this.
You are quite right about the Hadith. Islam and its doctrine are self-defeating and only the ignorance of its adherents can sustain it.
The Hadith is one hell of a read. Not only it wrecks key Islamic doctrines (including Tawheed), but also contains ample evidence that even the “authentic” Islamic traditions are not so authentic after all. The conversation between Abu Sufyan and emperor Heraclius, Abdullah ibn Salaam’s “test” of Muhammad’s prophetic claims, the “citations” from the “original” Torah and Injeel are all clear indications that the authors of these stories had no idea what they were talking about. This affects the Quran as well, given that a good deal of its content makes no sense without the Ahadith.
Hi Orangehunter,
You are most correct. That’s why I believe that the Hadith is ignored. I’d like to talk to some Muslims who come from Muslim countries. They would have to learn that stuff in school, but how much Hadith? I don’t know. Obviously the main ones but how about the oddball ones.
I was watching one of the Islamicize Me videos(can’t remember which one). Some guy who claimed to be an atheist and was born and raised in a Muslim country said that everyone knew about the embarrassing Hadiths but never brought them up because even the most devout Muslim knew they were ridiculous. They’d be showing that the emperor had no clothes.
God bless,
Allan
People say they want freedom and independence, but in practice many people like and prefer the security of structures and limits imposed by authorities above them. They may talk like adults, but their emotions and psyche are like children.
That being said, Islam is a religion for children while Christianity is for adults.
Islam tells you everything you can or cannot do down to the minutia. It has a simple concept of deity. It teaches not to question, merely accept and obey. It even has a holy book that was duly pared down, edited and recensioned so that all those annoying variants (including in all likelihood the original wordings) are deleted. All these lend to the kind of mindset we saw at the Woods-Hijab debate – mindless mob mentality running on emotion.
Christianity gives you the ‘heart’ of a moral code and asks you to make mature decisions about individual scenarios. It has a complex concept of deity in many ways (which ironically attests to its truth). It teaches to test and think and investigate and ponder. Its holy book was spread freely, requiring a lot of legwork and brainwork to identify the original wording – but giving confidence that the original is there.