Sunni Hadiths and Sirah: Proofs of Historical Reliability

By Ammar Adil

One of the most common talking points raised by non-Muslims and one of the most common contentions raised against Islam by the Western scholars of Islam is the reliability of Islamic historical records, the Hadiths and the Sirah. There are some books on this topic in English focused on responding to critics of Islam but none on positive arguments for the historical reliabiltiy of the Hadiths and the Sirah. This should not be the case since the Islamic historical records are the most reliable historical records known to mankind. In this book, I prove this claim using various arguments. These arguments range from using stylometric lingusitic anaylsis on the Hadiths to arguments based on criteria accepted by Western histroians such as the criterion of dissimilarity. Moreover, I use archaeological and early material evidence for Islam to establish the historical reliability of Hadiths. This book also focus on the historical reliability of the isnads and establishes the isnad as a reliable historical source. I also deal with all the common contenions made against the reliability of Islamic historical records in great detail. This book is the single resource you need for the question of the historical reliability of the Hadiths and Sirah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ammar Adil
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224578177

Ammar Adil

I am an independent researcher in topics related to existence of God and Islam. I done years of research on topics such as Existence of God, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Proofs for Islam being from God, Historical Jesus, Quran Preservation, Reliability of Hadiths and Sirah etc. My debates and videos are uploaded on https://youtube.com/@refutingorientalists?si=2Q8ZzGfsupml-IeQ and you can contact me on my twitter account at https://twitter.com/qadissiyah636

Book preview

Important Terms

Hadith

This typically means reports of the sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ but in this book when I mention Hadith, I am also including reports regarding the lives of the companions and the events in the 30 years following the passing of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. I will sometimes use the terms historical records interchangeably with Hadiths.

Matn

This is the part of the Hadith which mentions the historical information.

Isnad

This is the part of the Hadith which mentions the chain of transmission or the sources of the Hadith.

Sahih

The Hadiths which are classified as authentic by Muslims.

Mawdu

The Hadiths which are classified as fabrications by Muslims.

Stylometry

A method of authorship detection using various methods.

Hazrat

A term of respect written before the names of prophets and companions of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Orientalists

Western scholars of Islam and Islamic history, from the past 200 years.

Sihah Sittah

The main six books of Hadiths. These are Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan an-Nasa'i, Sunan Ibn Majah, Sunan Abi Dawud, Jami Tirmidhi.

RA

This is an English representation for Radiallahu Anh. Muslims usually say this after the names of companions of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

AS

This is the English representation for Alayhi Salam. Muslims usually say this after the names of prophets before Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Sahaba

The companions of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. There is a difference of opinion on exact definition but any Muslim who saw Prophet Muhammad ﷺ alive is classified as a companion. The singular of Sahaba is Sahabi.

Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Part One: Arguments for Hadith Reliability

  Section One

  Stylometric studies showing Sahih Hadiths have one author

  Stylometric differences between Sahih and Mawdu Hadiths

  Section Two

  Reliability of military historical and political narratives

  Reliability of military logistical narratives

  Prophecies of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

  Hadiths praising Hazrat Ali RA and his family

  Stories that can be used against Muslims

  Section Three

  Younger Companions narrating the most Hadiths

  The weakness of the isnads of Shia Hadiths

  Reliability of transmissions from Imam Zuhri

  Section Four

  Islamic narrative of Uthmanic recension of the Qur’an

  Companion mushaf readings

  Archaeology and early sources

  Historical solar eclipses data from NASA

  Section Five

  Reliability of Arab oral tradition

  The massive numbers of Hadiths

  Part Two: Contentions against Hadith Reliability

  Prior probability and supernatural explanations

  Late sources

  Contradictions

  Late origin of isnads

  Early usage of the term Sunnah

  Absence of Hadiths in early sources

  Rapid numerical growth

  Retrojection or raising of Hadiths

  Ages of Sunni scholars

  Artificial literary elements

  Reliability of Imam Awza’i

  Conclusion

Introduction

The reliability of Sunni Hadiths has been something that has been questioned and challenged by Orientalists and Christians for centuries. This skepticism has taken various forms and ranges from mild skepticism relating to the reliability of some Hadiths to the claims that the entire corpus of Sunni Hadiths is pure fiction and that Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did not exist.

Although most Orientalists will not make this claim because it is impossible to defend the claim that Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did not exist, most of the Orientalists and Kuffar, in general, will indulge in hyper skepticism and try to claim most, if not all, of the Hadiths and Sirah is unreliable.

The purpose of this book is to establish the reliability of Sunni Hadiths beyond reasonable doubt and to show the weakness, dishonesty, and desperation of the numerous false claims made against the reliability of Hadiths in general and Sunni Hadiths in particular.

What I mean by reliability in this context is that these records are historically accurate and depict real events. This reliability meets the criteria Western historians themselves use. I also want to emphasize that based on the arguments given in this book, Islamic historical records are more reliable and accurate than any other historical records.

This reliability will be established using numerous arguments and the criteria used by the people arguing against the reliability of Hadiths themselves, thus showing their dishonesty and double standards. This book will be different from earlier works on this topic because those books focus on the reliability of Hadiths from the framework of traditional Islamic scholarship. Moreover, most of those books focus on refuting the contentions of the Orientalists. There are almost no books in English focused on giving positive arguments for the reliability of Hadiths. The arguments presented here will be simple and powerful and can be understood by a scholar and a layman. However, this book will not focus on whether Muslims should follow Hadith, as that topic has been addressed by earlier Muslim authors.

One more thing that I would like to mention concerning this topic is that, for some reason, Muslims and Orientalists both tend to assume that the burden of proof is entirely on the Muslims arguing that Sunni Hadiths are reliable and that the Orientalists and the Kuffar, who are arguing that Hadiths are not reliable do not have any burden of proof for any of their claims.

This approach is baseless. No rational person should take this approach. A better approach is that no side bears any extra burden of proof and that both sides arguing for and against the reliability of Hadiths should have to justify their claims and give evidence for their positions. It seems a better approach than assuming Hadiths are reliable or unreliable and keeps the debate on this topic fair.

In this book, you will see many arguments that you will not have seen in earlier works because I intend to introduce some arguments and methods of argumentation that, in my opinion, have been neglected by Muslims and underutilized due to a variety of reasons, chiefly being that the Muslims have become very defensive with regards to this topic. Insha Allah this book will be a means for changing that mentality and for Muslims to realize that our historical records are as reliable as our scholars have claimed for 1400 years.

The first part of this book focuses on arguments for the reliability of Hadiths. This part is split into sections grouping similar arguments so the reader can understand the underlying logic behind similar arguments and see how all these arguments complement each other.

I recommend you read this book in order, as I will mention concepts in each chapter that will be important in the chapters after it. I will also deal with the most common contentions to each of the arguments because I want you to see for yourself how powerful these arguments are and how weak the contentions to each of these arguments are. Insha Allah, this book will prove the reliability of Sunni Hadiths and the dishonesty of Orientalists and other critics of Hadiths.

After going through all my arguments for the reliability of Hadiths, I will go through the common contentions against the reliability of Hadiths. The purpose of doing this is to show you how weak and dishonest the contentions against the reliability of Hadiths are and to give you a chance to compare the arguments for and against the reliability of Hadiths.

There is a useful resource for contentions to the reliability of Hadiths. An orientalist scholar from Oxford University, Joshua Little, has made a 3-hour video gathering 21 arguments against the reliability of Hadiths. I will use that as my resource for contentions against the Hadiths. However, many of his contentions are similar and interrelated. I will not make separate refutations of each contention since many of them will be covered in other chapters.

Moreover, there are some specific contentions that I will cover in addition to the video I mentioned. These are extremely important and will expose the double standard and blatant dishonesty of the Orientalists. Also, many of the contentions mentioned in the video will be covered in the section on arguments for the reliability of Hadiths, so another chapter on them will be redundant.

Part One

In this section, we will be looking at all the arguments for the reliability of Sunni Hadiths. These arguments are of a variety of types and are grouped with similar arguments in each section.

Section One

Arguments based on the language and linguistics of the Hadiths.

Stylometric studies showing Sahih Hadiths have one author

This is the first argument for the reliability of Hadiths, and it is one of the most powerful proofs for the reliability of Sunni Hadiths. This argument uses the words of the Hadiths to argue that the Sunni Hadiths are the literal words of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Stylometry is a method of determining the author of a book or text. It can be applied to written texts to identify if they have one author or multiple authors. It can also be used to compare two different texts to see if they have the same author or different authors. It can also be applied to pieces of art to determine if two pieces of art are the work of the same artist or not.

Stylometry has been used in many famous instances of questions of authorship and has even been used in legal cases. I will give two examples of the use of stylometry. Theodore Kaczynski was an American mathematician and a domestic terrorist. He killed 3 people and injured 23 people by sending them bombs via mail. In 1995 he anonymously published a famous manifesto. Using stylometry, he was identified as the work's author among various suspects.[1]

Double Falsehood is an English play written in 1727. The authorship of this book has been widely contested throughout history. The two main people thought of as authors were William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. In 2015 stylometric evidence established Shakespeare as the author. There are many other examples of stylometry applications.[2]

Stylometry is a type of linguistic analysis. Linguistic analysis is used in Western historiography. I will give one example of this from Biblical scholarship. In the New Testament, there are 13 books attributed to the Apostle Paul. 7 of these are considered by consensus to be authentic. There is a dispute regarding the other books because of their linguistic and literary style. The biblical scholar Bart Ehrman states:

"First there are the three Pastoral epistles. These are the letters allegedly written to the pastors Timothy (1 and 2 Timothy) and Titus, that provide instruction on how these companions of Paul should engage in their pastoral duties in their churches. For a variety of reasons, most critical scholars are persuaded that these letters were written not by Paul but by a later member of one of Paul’s churches who wanted to appeal to his authority in dealing with a situation that had arisen after his death. As we will see, the arguments revolve around whether the writing style, vocabulary, and theology of these letters coincides with what we find in the letters that we are reasonably certain Paul wrote, and whether Paul’s own historical context can make sense of the issues that the letters address."[3]

My argument is based on numerous stylometric studies done on the sayings of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ recorded in Sahih Bukhari. These studies have shown, using numerous different methods of analysis, that the sayings of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in Sahih Bukhari have one author, meaning that they are the words of one person. The following is a reference from one of those stylometric studies:

"Author discrimination consists in checking whether two texts are written by the same author or not. In this investigation, we try to make an author discrimination between the Quran (The holy words and statements of God in the Islamic religion) and the Hadith (statements said by the prophet Muhammad). The Quran is taken in its entirety, whereas for the Prophet’s statements, we chose only the certified texts of the Bukhari book.

Thus, three series of experiments are done and commented. The first series of experiments analyzes the two books in a global form (the text of every book is analyzed as a unique big text). It concerns nine different experiments. The second series of experiments analyzes the two books in a segmental form (four different segments of text are extracted from every book). It concerns five different experiments. The third series of experiments makes an automatic authorship attribution of the two books in a segmental form by employing several classifiers and several types of features. The sizes of the segments are more or less in the same range (four different text segments, with approximately the same size, are extracted from every book). It concerns two different experiments.

This investigation sheds light on an old enigma, which has not been solved for fifteen hundred years: in fact, all the results of this investigation have shown that the two books should have two different authors....

Results of all experiments have led to two main conclusions:

  First, the two investigated books should have different authors;

  Second, all the segments that are extracted from a unique book appear to have a certain stylistic similarity."[4]

This scholar has published many different papers using different methods to test the authorship of the Qur’an and the Hadiths in Sahih Bukhari and all those tests establish comparable results. Here is one more reference to another stylometric study done by this author:

"In this investigation, two visual analytics based clustering approaches have been employed to make a visual authorship clustering of 25 religious text segments.

In the first approach (Hierarchical clustering), the resulting dendrogram shows two separated sharp clusters (the Quran cluster in the right and Hadith cluster in the left). We can see that there is no intersection between the different clusters and that the final linkage is extremely weak since the corresponding distance is very large. This result shows that there are probably two authors: Quran Author and Hadith Author.

In the second approach (Fuzzy C-mean clustering), which is an automatic clustering technique, the resulting 3D representation shows two main clusters: a Quran cluster located at the top right area and Hadith cluster located at the bottom left area of the 3D representation. Although the Quran cluster is more condensed, the two sets of text segments have been automatically organized into 2 sharp clusters (with different symbol markers), showing that there are two main authors: Quran Author and Hadith Author and that the two authors are different."[5]

There are a lot of things we can conclude from these studies, but the most important thing is this, the Qur’an has one author/source, the Hadiths have one author/source, and those two authors are not the same. The part that is relevant to