A Shia let me look at her book
What do I think of Isnad chains? Well, to be honest I don’t know. In the late ninth century scholars like Bukhari were finally coming into an Islamic age of literacy. It was now time to put the traditions of Muhammad to paper(or vellum). Bukhari and others then went around the Muslim world collecting sayings of Muhammad and his companions.
Outside of the Muslims of this period, no one has ever used this historical method. Again, I don’t know if it’s good or not since we have nothing to compare it to. It doesn’t really bother me when I dialogue with Muslims. I’m willing to grant them the truth of their Hadith collections. It won’t save their prophet so I don’t worry about this and let them have it.
If you ask a Muslim why they don’t trust the Gospels but trust the hadiths they’ll say that every hadith has a chain of transmitters going back to Muhammad or one of his companions. Okay, fair enough. Imam Bukhari threw out thousands of hadiths with chains of narration as well. We’re really only going on Bukhari’s opinion. One can ask who made him the authority? Why should we trust him? Who says he knew what he was doing?
Even if we overlook this problem, a larger problem remains. Sunni Muslims aren’t the only sect of Islam; we have the Shia sect which makes up 10-15% of the total Islamic population. That’s between one and two hundred million people. Also, these Muslims are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, which are very traditional Muslim countries.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been asking many Sunni Muslims the following question: why don’t you accept Shia hadith collections such as Kitab Al-Kafi since they have isnad chains as well? Most of them are stumped. They tell me that Allah hasn’t blessed them with this knowledge. One told me that Shia Hadiths have week narrations. I asked if he had ever actually inspected the lines of narrators. He confessed that he hadn’t looked at even one line of narrators in any Shia Hadith.
There was one Sunni Muslim who gave the most thoughtful answer. He said that a Muslim is bound by any valid Hadith whether it be in any Sunni or any Shia collection. Okay, fair enough. However, if this is true, we should hear Sunni Muslims quoting Kitab Al-Kafi and other Shia Hadiths with authority as often as they quote Bukhari, but we don’t. We only hear them quoting from their own collections. It turns out this objective view is more of a theory than actual practice. I’ve never heard Mohammed Hijab, Shabir Ally, Zakir Hussain or any Muslim apologist quote any Shia hadith collections. Instead they’ll disregard Christian scripture and accept Bukhari because it has isnad chains.
I will ask all of the Sunni readers of my blog the same question. Why do you believe only in Sunni hadith collections when Shia collections have isnad chains as well?
I have stated over and over again on this blog that Islam is not from the Quran, it’s hadith. This makes this post more important. Why Bukhari and not Kitab Al-Kafi?
To be honest, there is also a tradition of historical criticism in Islam similar to what we know in the West (this is the subject of the book “Hanafi principles of testing hadiths” by Sheikh Atabek Shukurov) and Bukhari is also not the earliest collection of hadiths (there’s the Kitab Al Athar for example).
But all this is almost universally forgotten by Muslims in the West today because Islam in the West has been taken over by Petro-Islam. As Saudi Arabia and Qatar are basically the only Muslim states with money to spend on apologetics, all the personalities mentioned by Alan are very careful to please them.
There is a resemblance between the Protestants’ Sola Scriptura and Petro-Islam’s deification of a few hadith collections – Bukhari, Muslim, etc.
Except that Bukhari himself never claimed to be infallible or God-inspired. Ironically, Muslims today are doing with Bukhari and co the very thing that they accuse us of doing with Jesus.
IIRC Shabir Ally has leaned towards Quran-only in recent years, though I’ve only heard it said secondhand. Edip Yuksel is openly Quran-only, in fact he has his own self-done version of it.
Plenty of educated, Westernized Muslims also go Quran-only when they have to wrestle with the lateness, contradictions, barbarism and outright weirdness hat the Hadith entail!
–If you ask a Muslim why they don’t trust the Gospels but trust the hadiths they’ll say that every hadith has a chain of transmitters going back to Muhammad or one of his companions.–
We have our own, much shorter (and therefore reliable) ‘isnad chains’. Examples in the concise Cold Case Christianity diagrams here: https://www.apologeticscanada.com/2015/12/14/has-new-testament-been-corrupted/
Take for example, the chain of Jesus-John-Ignatius-Polycarp, the second of whom wrote his account of Jesus’ words and life (‘Hadith’ and ‘Tarikh’ and ‘Sira’) and the latter two who wrote countless letters affirming, citing and explaining those teachings (‘tafsir’ and ‘sunna’).
Our ‘isnads’ are better, especially if you consider that manuscripts of the New Testament writings from the 1st and 2nd Century are themselves a form of very early ‘isnad’!