600,000 hadith sifted, about 7,000 kept
UnrefutedNo good counter-argument has been published by Muslim scholars.
How much rests on the hadith
Almost all Islam knows of Muhammad comes from them. How to pray.
The five pillars. Aisha's age.
The events of his life. Even the story of how the Quran was gathered.
They were written down long after his death in 632.
What al-Bukhari faced
Al-Bukhari died in 870. He is said to have sifted some 600,000 reports.
He kept about 7,000, counting repeats. So the community itself made up false reports on a vast scale for two centuries.
Ignaz Goldziher, Joseph Schacht and G. H.
A. Juynboll then showed that chains were tidied up and pushed back in time.
The trap
Say the hadith cannot be trusted. Then Islam cannot say its own prayers, fix its pillars, or tell its prophet's life.
Say they can be trusted. Then Bukhari's hard reports stand too.
Aisha at nine. The spell.
Banu Qurayza. Deficient in mind.
Both doors cost something.
The Muslim answer, at full strength
This is serious work. Each narrator was weighed by his life story, in ilm al-rijal.
Chains were cross-checked. Reports carried by many are held to be certain.
Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami and Harald Motzki showed that Schacht went too far. Early written notes, such as the sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih, push the paper trail back near the first generation.
Jonathan Brown notes that the tradition listed false reports itself. And the 600,000 figure counts chain-variants, not separate lies.
How strong is this argument?
Strong for you, because it is a trap with no exit. No published answer keeps both halves.
Use it gently. Their care with the chains is real, and worth praising before you press.
What to say
"Your scholars built a careful science for this. Can I ask what you do with the reports it keeps?"
How they answer this — at its strongest
They say the sifting of the chains was the most careful ever built.
Muslim scholars answer that this is the most careful checking system in history. Each narrator was weighed by his life story. That science is called ilm al-rijal, the study of the men. Chains were cross-checked. Reports carried by large numbers are held to be certain.
Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami and Harald Motzki showed that Schacht's dating went too far. Early written notes push the paper trail back near the first generation. The sahifa of Hammam ibn Munabbih is one. Motzki's method reads chain and text together, and it verifies material Schacht threw out. Jonathan Brown notes that the tradition listed false reports itself, with a care Western critics only found later. And the 600,000 figure counts chain-variants, not separate lies.
The verdict
Strong for you: it is a trap with no exit, so press it gently.
The Muslim defence is serious work. But it sharpens the trap rather than escaping it. Every rescue of hadith reliability re-authenticates Bukhari's most damaging contents, which the same writers play down elsewhere. And every appeal to weak chains or context against those reports saws off the branch Islamic practice sits on.
The gap with the New Testament is one of size and of kind. It is 25 to 60 years against 150 to 250. It is continuous writing against chains held in memory. And it is public events that hostile witnesses could check.
As a dilemma it runs parallel to this site's centrepiece on tahrif, the claim that the Bible was changed. No published Muslim answer keeps both consistency and orthodoxy.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Criticism of hadith
- IlmGate — Analyzing Schacht's theory and two of his critiques (Azami, Motzki)
- ResearchGate — Hadith, Law, and Orientalism: a critical study of Schacht
- Jonathan Brown on historical criticism of Islamic primary texts
- Kerr — Comparing methods (hadith criticism)