Have you ever thought about where Islamic teachings
really come from apart from the Quran? When Muslims
talk about guidance from God, most people immediately
think of the Quran. But in truth, the majority
of Islamic law and daily practice comes from
another collection of writings known as the Hadith.
Now here is an important question. Are all Hadith
collections the same? Not exactly. The Sunni
and the Shiite branches of Islam follow different
collections. Since more than 80 % of Muslims
in the world are Sunni, we will focus here on
the Sunni Hadith collections. Sunni Islam recognizes
six main collections of Hadiths. These were gathered
by Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Ibn Majah, al
-Tirmidhi, and al -Nasari. Among these, Bukhari's
collection stands above the rest. It is considered
the most authentic and respected by Sunni Muslims.
Right behind it in authority is the collection
made by Imam Muslim. But let's step back and
think about how far these works came after the
time of Muhammad. Imam Bukhari was born in the
year 194 after the Hijrah. That is more than
180 years after Muhammad's death, over a century
later than the earliest biographer Ibn Ishaq,
and around 28 years before the historian al -Tabari
was born. So we are already talking about sources
written many generations after the original events.
And yet these sources became the foundation for
Islamic tradition and law. Bukhari reportedly
collected over 300 ,000 sayings or hadiths attributed
to Muhammad. He personally memorized about 200
,000 of them. But even he admitted that many
were unreliable. Bukhari lived in a time when
false hadiths were being invented either to please
political rulers or to influence Islamic teaching.
Imagine the task before him. He had to separate
genuine traditions from fabrications. After years
of work, he ended up selecting only about 7 ,275
hadiths that he considered completely trustworthy.
Think about that for a moment. That means he
rejected over 97 % of what he collected as questionable
or false. So it is fair to ask, How much confidence
can we place in these remaining 3 %? After all,
Bukhari's standard of reliability was based mostly
on the reputation of the people who transmitted
each tradition. This link of transmitters is
called the isnad. The moral integrity of each
person in that chain is called their adalah,
or reliability. Based on these isnads, hadiths
are grouped into categories. A hadith called
sahih means sound, or highly reliable. Hassan
means good, but not as strong as Sahih. Daif
means weak, often because of missing people in
the chain or untrustworthy transmitters. And
Maudu means a hadith that is suspected to be
entirely fabricated. A hadith that appears in
several different Isnad chains is considered
more reliable and is called Mutawatir, meaning
corroborated. But even those have the same human
problems of transmission and memory. To give
an example of how short or long these chains
might be, Ibn Ishaq, the early biographer, often
had only three or four names in a chain of narration.
Tabari the historian often recorded five or more.
Yet, at the end of the day, each person could
only vouch for the one who told them the story
directly. What happened further down the chain
was never fully verifiable. And here we hit a
serious problem. If most of Islamic law depends
on these hadiths, then knowing who was a reliable
Muslim becomes essential. And how much information
does anyone really have about the honesty or
memory of people who lived centuries before?
The Quran itself even teaches that a woman's
testimony counts as half that of a man. This
is found in Surah 2, verse 282, as translated
by Pickthall. It says that if two men are not
available, then one man and two women may testify,
so that if one woman forgets, the other can remind
her. Now pair that with a hadith in Bukhari's
collection in Book 1, Volume 6, Hadith 301. In
it, Muhammad is reported to have told a group
of women that most of those in hell would be
women because they are ungrateful and that they
are deficient in intelligence and religion. He
explained that the witness of two women equals
that of one man and that a woman cannot pray
or fast during her menstrual period. When you
put these teachings together, They describe women
as spiritually and intellectually weaker. Yet
when you look through early Islamic sources,
many hadiths actually came from women, and in
some cases, from a woman alone. Aisha in particular
was the sole source for hundreds of hadiths that
later shaped Islamic law. According to historical
records, she transmitted more than 2 ,200 hadiths.
About 300 of those appear in both Sahih Bukhari
and Sahih Muslim. So if the system says that
a woman's testimony counts as half, then logically
those hadiths should be viewed as unreliable.
But they are not. Instead, Aisha is treated as
one of the most trusted transmitters. This creates
a serious inconsistency inside the very structure
of Islamic tradition. If gender invalidates one's
reliability in court testimony, then how can
the same gender serve as the foundation of countless
sacred sayings? And this raises a final question
for every listener to consider. If Muslims trust
these complex chains of transmission created
centuries after Muhammad's life, why do many
of them outright reject the New Testament? The
writers of the New Testament were either direct
followers of Jesus or close associates of those
who knew him personally. They lived in the same
generation or the one immediately after. Their
chains of transmission were much shorter and
far more traceable than those of the Hadith.
Ironically, even Imam Bukhari himself believed
that the Bible had been given by God and was
trustworthy in its original form. So we end up
with this fascinating contrast. The Hadith with
long and uncertain chains are accepted as the
foundation of Islamic life, while the New Testament
with short and verifiable chains is dismissed.
For anyone studying religion seriously, this
should make us stop and think. What standard
of evidence do we truly follow and why?