Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Religion - the Muslim kind
Who should Muslims believe?
Apparently, it's not an easy answer...
Apparently, it's not an easy answer...
At the Washington Post, Omar Sacirbey asks, "Did Muhammad Really Say That?":
"Muhammad commanded followers not to record what he said to guard against the possibility that they would confuse his words with God's. Instead, Muslims kept the sayings alive orally.
By the early 9th century, about 200 years after Muhammad's death, as many as 700,000 sayings were circulating across the Muslim world. Many were of questionable credibility and some were even fabricated to support political or economic policies.
Leading scholars decided that the sayings should be collected and verified. Using a painstaking process, they traced the chain of narration and scrutinized the character and memory skills of the individual reporters.
The two preeminent hadith scholars, Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, collected 2,602 and 9,200 hadith, respectively, all of them considered sahih, or "sound," authentic and indisputable. Other collections exist, but they include sayings with weak links or other defects."
