i wished to confirm whether iv'e paraphrased the sunni position correctly. as no one has objected, so far, can i assume that i have? jazakAllah. Wassalam.
someone asked imam abu hanifa a ruling and he answered. a hadith scholar was also present and he asked the imam, 'where did you get this ruling?' the imam said, 'from those 10 hadith i heard from you.' the hadith scholar was amazed and remarked, 'we are the pharmacists [who only have the medicine] whereas you [the fuqaha] are the physicians [who put the medicine to use]' --- so, the hadith scholar knew all 10 hadith but couldn't derive the ruling. we may have a lot of hadith at our fingertips but if people think that's enough to derive rulings, they are beyond help.
comments please. @Haqbahu: yes that's him. no matter how i twisted his name i just couldn't make it bad enough so i left it
Sunni contention: No one disputes the fact that the ahadith are essential for our guidance and that it is a great bounty of Allah('azzawajal) that he has made them reach us through all these intervening centuries. He gave us men of such caliber that they invented an entirely new science in order to preserve the sayings and actions of their beloved Prophet(peace be upon him) and to separate the substance from the chaff that kept on mixing with it in every age. Indeed it is a stupendous, unparalleled achievement, unique only to this blessed ummah, of which we are immensely proud and which makes us stand tall among all the other nations of the world in regards to safeguarding the life histories of their founders and leaders for posterity. But having said all that, we must realize that ahadith are not the word of God. The very fact the there are gradations in their authenticity shows us that the divine protection afforded to the ahadith was of a different nature than that of the Quran. This is why we do not rule a person apostate if he rejects any hadith other than a mass-transmitted (mutawatir) narration. On the other hand, anyone who rejects a single letter of the Quran is immediately ruled as a kafir. It is a common practice to say "aw kama Qaal" after narrating a hadith but anyone who says so after reciting a verse, that is he expresses even a minute doubt about an ayah, he becomes a kafir. Apart from these, there are several other ways in which the ahadith differ from the Quranic text in regards to the preservation of their contents. On the issue of ahadith getting lost: Imam Ahmed alone is variously reported to have known a 1-1.5 million ahadith by heart. Needless to say, there have been greater huffaz before him. But if we look at the body of hadith literature that has reached us, we find that even if we count ahadith of all grades in all the books they do not add up to more than a hundred thousand or so. So what about the rest of the ahadith? How many of those that have not reached us were sahih? A good example is the hadith-e-noor attributed to the musannaf of Imam abdur-razzaq, which is found in several books except the musannaf itself. During the tatar inavsion and then again during the crusades entire libraries were burnt down, manuscripts were thrown into the seas and every attempt was made to deprive the ummah of the sources of guidnace. But, " They scheme and Allah plans. And the best of planners is Allah". So we see that though many sahih ahadith were lost forever, their benefits were not. They reached us in the form of the fatawa of the imams of the madhhabs! So those who boldly turn away from the rulings of these imams, and take refuge in the rulings of men of meager knowledge and weak intellect and whose purview is limited to a small pool of texts, should worry about the number of sahih ahadith they are turning away from due to their ignorance and arrogance! Related to this is the issue that in the sihah sittah* we mostly find ahadith that affirm the rulings of the sahfi madhhab. This is because the compilers of these works were themselves shafis and so they mostly recorded those ahadith that they themselves acted upon or found to be more reliable as per the principles of their school. This doesn't mean that they were bigots but they were simply expressing and documenting the proofs of their school. In the light of all the above it becomes clear that it's a myth that people today know as much as, if not more, than all the past imams put together and are therefore in a better position to derive rulings from ahadith since they have been given the exact same protection as the Quran. It is a dajjalic attempt to mislead and confuse the ummah and turn it away from Prophetic guidance present in authentic well researched rulings. It is the will of Allah(azzawajal) that only four of the several schools that existed at the time of the salaf, survived and thrived and today, what with a good number of ahadith lost forever, these four madhhabs are the only recourse available to anyone who truly wants to follow the Quran and the Sunnah. This also shows that though it's theoretically possible for an individual to attain the rank of a 'mujtahid mutalq' in this era, it's practically close to impossible for the sources available to him are far and few compared to those available to the salaf. And Allah ('azzawajal) knows best. *thanks brother aqdas
The wahhabi contention: Allah(azzawajal) has informed us in the Quran that He will protect the Quran form corruption. And He (azzawajal) says that falsehood cannot come nigh to it. We know that the ahadith are the explanations/commentaries/exposition of God's word. Therefore we should realize that this promise of protection extends to the ahadith too. This means that even though people have fabricated ahadith or modified them, the true words of RasulAllah (sallallahualayhiwasallam) have still reached us in perfect form due to the meticulous techniques employed for their preservation. Thus, to say that the salaf or the four imams knew more ahadith than us and were therefore in a better position to derive rulings from the sunnah is not just a sign of gross ignorance but also a sign of denying the word of God! Mr. Nasiruddin Albani, the late, self-styled muhaddith of the wahhabis, cleverly pre-empts any accusation of idealism that may arise as a result of the heaps of incontrovertible historical evidence against such a position by saying that this does not mean that every single word of the Prophet (peace be upon him) has reached us intact but that everything that was essential for us to know, as regards doctrine or jurisprudence, has definitely reached us in the form of 'sahih ahadith' (a term employed by the najdis to refer to those select ahadith which appear to agree with their preconceived notions of right and wrong.) What this position entails can be understood from the following statement made by a popular najdi orator from India (who evidently has a dark heart lost in darkness and whose ignorance outstrips both of these in its repulsiveness) 'Some people have difficulty understanding how we in this century can be greater than the four imams. So think about this, Einstein was a great scientist but the world has advanced much since his death so today my 10 year old son, for example, knows some things in the field of science that even Einstein didn't know simply because they hadn't been discovered during his time. This doesn't mean that my son is a bigger scientist than Einstein. Likewise, today due to technological advancements we have all the ahadith at our finger-tips, even those that did not reach the some or all of the four imams. So in the light of these ahadith we arrive at rulings different to those of the imams. This does not mean that we're better than them but only that we know more than them.' The above statement should suffice to make us realise the amount of lunacy that is passed off as 'scholarship' these days! We seek refuge with Allah.
