the story of imam bukhari and the 100 hadith is well-known. but some people bend over backwards to brand it as a myth. assorted orientalist literature scoffs at the phenomenal memories of hadith masters and present it as incredible and some go as far as to say that an idea of people having such memories is a wild fantasy. but when they themselves discover something similar to that, even in far lesser degrees: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080222/ap_on_re_us/memory_man they are flabbergasted. an informed muslim would say: so, what is new? move on, it is a part of our culture and learning. of course, 'evolution' has not been able to satisfactorily explain why we should have memories in the first place...but that is another story. ---- they make a hue and cry about someone memorizing the most number of digits of the decimal value of pi. have a look at this list: http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/lists/memo/index.html the highest number is by ONE chinese individual at: 67,890 now compare this with the mujizah of the qur'an. i rely on this webpage because i don't remember the figures from any book, nor did i ever count it myself; but i knew that the words are around 80k so i assume it is accurate: http://www.muslimtents.com/aminahsworld/Amazing.html. number of words: 77,701 number of letters: 323,671 difficult questions for muslims: - how many people have memorized all these 77,701 words verbatim - word-to-word in the same sequence? in other words, how many people have memorized the whole qur'an? - and if yes, are such memorizers found anywhere today? - one? two? ten? ten thousand? - what is the age of youngest such memorizer? --- i am sure you won't miss the huge disparity - pi digits are 10 unique symbols; whereas, the words in the qur'an are, as one source puts it, 2000 unrepeated words. if you want a letter count - you have 28 unique symbols. and we have not even mentioned the hadith masters whose word count rips through the roof. and what about the rijal memorizers? [those who memorize the names and ancestry of hadith narrators with dates and comments/critiques about them in jarH/ta'dil.] --- we are reminded of the observation by imam ghazali: the smallness of the human mind is that it denies that which it cannot comprehend.
