Authenticity of Hadith
Dr. Omer Awass

A man from India emailed me a week or so ago, requesting my take on the question about the fabrication of hadith (prophetic traditions) and the later emergence of isnads (the chain of transmission of hadith), as problems proposed by the Western academic tradition. After briefly answering his query, I realized the topic is worth further exploration, especially since I will be giving a commentary on a few hadiths at my first OASIS seminar at the end of this month. The same questions about the content of my talks may be on my audience's minds as well, and I'll briefly address this concern before diving into the prophetic tradition I will explain.

For the sake of context, let me cite the questions that my interlocutor posed to clarify for the
readers the questions that are at hand:

I would be grateful for your perspective on whether the late emergence of isnads poses a
substantive challenge to the reliability of hadith literature. Several Western scholars have
argued that this temporal gap between the events described and the formal documentation of
transmission chains created conditions conducive to fabrication, potentially resulting in
widespread inauthenticity within the corpus.

Now that the problem has been posed, let me provide a little background on hadith for the reader so they can follow the discussion. First, what is a hadith? It is an account of something that the Prophet said, did, or consented to. Given that hadith literature is associated with the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), it has a normative quality that guides Muslim ethical and religious practice. Second, what is the structure of these reports? Historically, hadith have been comprised of two components:

1-Isnad (Chain): Chain of transmitters who orally reported the hadith from the Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh) until the hadith was documented in a written source.
2- Matn (Text): Textual content of Hadith containing the ethical and religious teachings.

With these preliminaries, the novice reader can have a better understanding of the foregoing discussion, which will address some of the direct concerns raised by my interlocutor and a few issues beyond those raised by the questioner. About the interlocuters question about the late appearance of isnads and what that may imply regarding that authenticity of hadith, the lack of existence of isnads in the first century was because there wasn't a necessity for them since many of the people who were eyewitnesses to the Prophet Muhammad were still alive and were reporting from firsthand experience (for example, if you were reporting information about your father, no one would question your connection to whom you are reporting about because they recognize your close relation).

However, by the end of the first century. the situation was rapidly changing due to the increasing death of direct eyewitnesses to the Prophet as well as the increasing political tensions that gave impetus for unscrupulous second-generation members of the Muslim community to fabricate statements about the Prophet to legitimate their political and religious positions. It is these circumstances that Muslim tradition tells us necessitated the need for the isnad to verify the authenticity of such statements. This fact was noted by the famous third-generation Muslim Muhammad ibn Sireen, who reportedly said at the end of the first century: Before the fitnah (i.e. the second civil war), we did not ask about isnads, but when the fitnah occurred, people began lying about the Prophet and thus we asked about the origin of the statements attributed to him [this is but a rough translation of ibn Sireen's statement]. So, isnads were born out of the necessity of later circumstances, in which it was not difficult for second- and third-generation narrators to remember the line of transmission of such statements and to document them in an isnad as the source of their information. So, backlogging isnads was not a ruse to purport the authenticity of certain statements, but an epistemic necessity to authenticate historical events.

However, I want to turn now to the broader question of Western scholars' skepticism about the inauthenticity of hadith literature, as implied by the question. Here, I want to talk more broadly about the general attitudes of Western historians towards past narrative accounts, specifically regarding sacred texts, before addressing their critical views on hadith accounts. Modern Western historians have approached accounts about the past with what can be called a hermeneutics of suspicion.

A hermeneutics of suspicion can be generally defined as the cynical dispositions that scholars adopt toward the assertions made within their subject of inquiry. In the field of history, this is exemplified by the skeptical attitude modern historians take toward the veracity of historical claims. More specifically, historical information that tends to ameliorate a historical personality or subject is viewed as suspect, whereas information that tends to diminish its subject is viewed as legitimate. What can be the source of such historical pessimism? What lies behind such a disposition towards history is an awareness that societies tend to exaggerate their own portrayals and those of their heroes in a positive light, and to omit those that would cast them in a negative light. This belief is no doubt a truism and a reason for caution for those who want to write history. Although this assumption should be considered when evaluating the historical veracity of reports, in my study of Islamic history, particularly the Prophetic biography, I have noticed that this presupposition is elevated to an overarching principle that colors the entire field. For instance, one can see this attitude in how the hadith literature as a whole is viewed with suspicion by many Western scholars and as a complete fabrication by others.

Ultimately, the general argument that I forward against such sweeping claims that the hadith literature is a fraud is whether such a conspiracy by Muslim hadith scholars would go to such lengths to mask such a forgery, even as they author thousands of volumes on the authenticity of isnads and their narrators. Would forgers have gone through the trouble fabricating thousands of chains of transmissions (isnads) and fix them to hadith texts in a coherent manner so as not to be detected? Would such forgers then compile voluminous biographical dictionaries containing information on lives of thousands of “ficticious” hadith transmitters to give credence to the “fiction” of isnads? Going to such lengths to cover up the fabrication of hadith means that such fraud occurred on a civilizational scale. That type of fraud seems to me untenable, as no civilization in human history has ever gone to such lengths to cover up its fraud. Rather, in most projects of fabrication, a person or a group merely concocts lies and spread them among the populace, and hopes for it to gain currency and be taken as true as it widely circulates without the active construction of historical devices indicating the source of that information. But to
assume that an entire civilization engaged in such large-scale fraud and undertook such an enormous effort to cover up that fraud is highly improbable.

What makes it all the more improbable is that no one has been able to locate voices of dissent from those periods when isnads and hadith were being forged, who would have noted such large-scale forgery of the very project of isnadification. Rather, the point is that no group/sect in early Muslim history wholeheartedly rejected the authority and authenticity of the circulating hadiths of that period. If there were such a program of massive forgery taking place requiring an entire collusion of a civilization as implied by the enormous corpus of writings (biographical dictionaries, traditional isnad and matn criticism, etc), one would expect that there would be voices from when this fraud was taking place who would point this out. There are no such voices, though, from this early period. Rather, you had Muslim scholars of different hues debating the veracity of particular hadiths and not a wholesale rejection of the entire hadith enterprise as a massive conspiracy by a certain group of its proponents.

But in the same vein as many Western orientalists were categorical in rejecting hadith under this rubric of hermeneutics of suspicion, I should not be categorical in painting Western historians of early Islam with the same categorical brush. Recently, there has been a growing number of scholars, such as Harald Motski, Gregor Schoeler, and others, who hold more revisionist views about the enterprise of hadith that run counter to the categorical claims of their predecessors. Take, for example, this statement by Motski that underscores this new attitude:

The fact that the traditions of the founder of Islam originated primarily in the circle of the
followers of this religion certainly increases the danger that the information could be
biased……should not lead to the a priori assumption that all the pieces of information are
necessarily biased or that among those that are biased, the unbiased ones cannot be detected (See
Hadith: Origins and Developments (2004) by Motski, pg.171).

This statement is a more measured attitude about the prophetic traditions. It represents a new orientation in this field that I call the hermeneutics of realism in Western scholarship on Islam. Motzki exemplifies this trend by demonstrating a realistic approach to the sources. He neither gullibly accepts the sources as they are, nor is he cynical about the reliable information that can be furnished. This change in attitude and approach to Muslim history represents an encouraging direction in Western hadith studies.