 Save 10% with my code Bobby10 on raw, organic, grass-fed and grass-finished, freeze-dried organ meats from grassland nutrition. Link in the description box. All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby, guys. Today we're going to react to Dr. Shabir Ali with his video, Should We Follow All Hadith? Every single time I make a video about Hadiths, I have Muslims, especially Muslims that have been born into Islam telling me, just accept the rendezvous. Would be awesome if it was that easy, but as I explained in detail previously, for me coming from Christianity and seeing the corruption within certain texts in Christianity, I have to be skeptical. If it was easy for me guys, I would have already reverted to Islam. I wouldn't further research if it was easy. That's the whole point of the channel here. You saw somebody born into Orthodox Christianity. From there on, I experienced other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism and what not. Just to then to come back to Orthodoxy and for the first time in my life, really analyze it and see what it is truly about. Research the Trinity, research the Church Fathers, research the Theotokos, so on and so forth. And when that endeavor failed as well, I started exploring Islam and this is why you see me now going in depth yet again. Truly wanting to understand if Islam is the truth. If you want somebody that simply says, Yes, an Amen, then go to another channel. You're not going to find it here. With no further ado, let's have a look. Welcome to Ladakh or Anne's Speak. I'm Aisha, your host. Let's continue our series on taking a balanced approach to Hadith. In today's episode, we'll explore the idea of validity in Hadith. If we say that Hadith are sayings of the Prophet, then shouldn't we, as followers of the Sunnah and of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, accept the Hadith as we find them? Is this a problematic approach? Let's sit down with Dr. Shabir Ali to guide us through this discussion. Welcome to the show, Dr. Shabir. Pleasure to be on. So when we discussed taking a balanced approach to Hadith recently, we talked about in our last segment, we talked about why we cannot reject Hadith altogether. So the flip side is, shouldn't we accept it altogether? So what's your take on that? Yes, so now on the flip side, we want to talk about why we cannot accept the Hadith uncritically. This has been the approach of Muslims all the way back to the inception of Islamic teachings. We find even within the lifetime of our Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, there was a man who went to a certain region and he told people that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, gave me authority over you. And the story about this is that he wanted to marry a certain girl who was rejecting him. So by passing him off as acting on the Prophet's authority, he was setting himself up to, you know, propose and not be rejected. And that is really what I heard as well, that many people abused the power of Hadiths for their political interest. For example, every time they needed a specific ruling, they would refer to Prophet Muhammad that he truly said those things. Ultimately, though, they were forgeries. On the Prophet's authority, he was setting himself up to, you know, propose and not be rejected. And when this was reported to the Prophet, peace be upon him, he reneged, he repudiated that man's claim. And so we find that there is the kind of checks and balances to make sure we don't just simply accept anything that somebody said that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said. We find among the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, that Omar Adil Ahwan, the second caliph of Islam, he used to demand of people, bring witnesses if you're claiming that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said something. And other companions sometimes rejected what another one said, because what that person said may not have seemed reasonable. Ishar Adil Ahwan, the wife of the Prophet, peace be upon him, mother of the believers, may Allah be pleased with her, used to reject many sayings that she heard from some of the male companions. Sometimes she castigated the sayings as coming from them, and she saw some sayings as reflected a kind of misogyny that she credited not to the Prophet, peace be upon him, obviously, but to the people who were narrating these statements, so she rejected them. Sometimes she found that there are statements which are contrary to what is mentioned clearly in the Quran, and she would say, okay, they're saying that, but the Quran says this other thing, and it is the Quran that obviously rules for Muslims if there is an obvious contradiction between what people are narrating, that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said, and what the Quran actually says. Taking a cue from this, scholars have continued to look at Hadiths critically, like when we think of criticizing, people think finding fault. Well, that could be for a good purpose, as in the case of studying Hadiths, because while the Quran, as we've seen in the previous show, while the Quran directs us to follow the Prophet, peace be upon him, the Quran does not tell us to follow everything that people report about the Prophet, because some of their reports could be wrong. In fact, yes, absolutely. This is just common sense, and this is literally what it boils down to for me personally. How would I know? Yet again, I know people will say, in the same breath, people will say that if you don't trust Hadiths, you cannot trust history altogether. Guess what? I don't. History is told by the victors. Therefore, I'm very cautious what to believe and what not. Guys, I come from the Balkans. I am very well aware that I cannot trust anything at face value. It took me 32 years to understand who the Macedonians are. Before that, I simply listened to the history presented to me. By that default, we were descendants from Alexander the Great, a special group within the Balkans of 1.5 million Slavs. Of course, that is not correct. To find the truth, you really have to dig. The ninth chapter of the Quran specifically says that if an evil doer comes to you with information, then you should verify that information. Now, it says evil doer, but Muslim commentators on the Quran have said that regardless whether evil doer or good doer, anyone can make a mistake. So, if somebody comes to you with information, you should verify that information before you start making a big deal of it. Of course, we look at things practically because not all information is of such crucial importance and what the instruction is telling us to do could be something very minor. We probably just want to do it and get over with it rather than to go into a detailed investigation. So, for most people, if we find a hadith, we presume that this is part of the Islamic heritage and it tells us to do something. We just act upon it. But if it is of crucial importance, it has major implications for society, then it requires some investigation. And so, while the average person still may not have the acumen to make this investigation for himself or herself, it is incumbent on Muslim scholars today to use all of the available information, all of the empirical knowledge we have to go back and look at the hadiths that have been transmitted down through the ages and ask how much of this is genuinely from the Prophet peace be upon him. Because certainly, it's always been accepted and known among Muslim scholars that we cannot accept hadiths uncritically. So, obviously, scholars have a responsibility and they go in, they do the research, they have those skill sets. But what about the average person? I'm also thinking now within the context of social media and Google where we have access to Islamic information sometimes it's a lot to take in and it's very easy like, you know, I've come across sayings of the Prophet which I've never heard of before and so you want to go to the right resources to reference that. So, how do you go about that from an average person's perspective? It's not easy from the average person's perspective and to deal with this as an issue, many scholars are proposing now that the scholarly body needs to sift the hadith records one more time and to distill from the current collections of hadiths those ones which the scholars are confident. Does anybody know anything about this, especially when it comes down to Sahih al-Bukhari or Sahih Muslim? Is this really the case that they're going through all the hadiths yet again? Have applications for our present circumstances and that could be traced reliably back to the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. So we need like new collections of hadith but until that is produced and obviously it's a massive undertaking for which we do have the capability but do people have the willingness? This is another question but while we're waiting for such corpus to be produced how does the average person get around or navigate through these mazes of hadiths that are there available on the internet? Well, Muhammad Zubair al-Siddiqi in a book called The Hadith for Beginners which is sold in Muslim bookshops often annexed to mosques. It gives us some guidelines about how to recognize or how to know the kinds of hadiths which are problematic and how do we know these kinds of hadiths because historically it has been known that they're- This here again is interesting as well that you already have certain guidelines for hadiths. You don't have that guideline for the Qur'an. You can simply read the Qur'an and that's that. People who invented hadiths for some special purposes like for example there are those who invented hadiths for political purposes. Exactly. If they wanted to support a certain political leader they invented hadiths that either speak well of that person's locality or that person's trivial lineage or something like this. So that's a danger. Most likely favor this political figure over somebody else. People are corrupt. Sometimes there are hadiths which are demeaning to women. If a man wanted to put his wife in her place in his own thinking he wouldn't tell her directly because she wouldn't listen to him but he would circulate a saying into the community so that that saying would come back to his wife as a saying of the prophet not of her husband. So Shabir I just want to stop you here. So we're talking about so far we've talked about political categories that we need to be aware of ones where they demean women. Are there any other categories that we should be wary of? Yes the scholars including Mohammed Zubair said they have given lists of many other types of hadiths again and going by the general sense of the ways in which people forged hadiths and for what purpose is. They say that there were people with religious inclinations who wanted to encourage people to do good deeds and to stay away from bad deeds and so they invented hadiths for the purpose. Hadiths encouraging the doing of good deeds by promising great rewards for small deeds and the contrary also. And there's something I'm very skeptical of as well again guys with all due respect those reward claims. I didn't find them that explicitly within the Quran and I personally cannot help but believe that if God wanted to tell us about a certain reward he would have told us in the Quran. However if you look into the hadith literature you will find certain fantastic claims about rewards. You see it on YouTube as well of course in the commercials before the videos. Would you like to have a human jannah? When I see such things I see a human motivation behind it. It's promising tremendous punishment for very small misdeeds. So they say watch for these hadiths because they may not be genuine they're just inventions by people. Along these lines there are hadiths that give promised rewards for reciting certain portions of the Quran. And you might have a hadith that says if you recite this passage of the Quran you get such a great reward. This reminds me of Catholicism when you go to confession you simply go to confession you confess your sins and then you have to say 20 Ave Maria's for example and everything as well again. Obviously it was for the purpose of encouraging people to read the Quran but you have curiously a hadith which to me will encourage people to not to read the Quran because there's a hadith that says if you read the 112th chapter of the Quran that one little chapter which comprises only four verses you get the reward as if you read the entire Quran if you read that three times. Obviously you read that you don't have to read the rest of the Quran you see. So it can have the opposite effect and people have done things for good reasons and some people may have done it for bad reasons including as we've seen the political and women demeaning and so on. But more insidious than this it is known that in the early Muslim communities there were people who the Quran castigates as monothequn hypocrites. So a hypocrite could have actually invented anything because he is or she is not a genuine Muslim but passes off as a genuine Muslim within the society they could relate anything for for good or bad purposes and then it's taken by a genuine infiltration of the religion of face value because we don't know what's in the heart of a person. Another category of people has been referred to as Zindik or the Zanadeqah people who again were not really Muslims but they're they're passing off in the community they could circulate information misinformation in order to mislead others this is very deliberate and innocent Muslims would take that again as face value and circulated as though it is genuine information. Moreover sometimes Muslims themselves could have misconstrued certain actions of the Prophet peace be upon him and related his actions thinking that they're relating the truth based on their own observation but they have made an influence which is incorrect and they're passing off that inference as fact. People are flawed man happens all the time on error. So as you're talking I'm thinking of I remembered all Hadith within all of those categories just briefly as we wrap up when we look at Hadith for now you know there are terms like Asahi and etc so are there some terminology that the average Muslim right now can refer to to say okay if I refer back and this is narrated by this then it's valid if it's not. Unfortunately these labels do not give the final indication though there are actually some indication if a Hadith is classified as Maudu this means false obviously rejected and generally would not be found in the classical collections of Hadith because the scholars have already done a lot of work to remove the most obviously fraudulent ones others have been castigated as weak or da'if obviously those are to be avoided then going up the scale some are called Hassan which means good or sound even above that there is some there are some which are called Sahih which means authentic but something authentic here means that's absolutely true it was actually said or the thing reported actually happened but that's not what it means in Hadith terminology. Let me know what you guys think about this in the comment section here you have Dr. Shabir Ali and he says that even Sahih Hadiths are not to be trusted this is surely a controversial opinion let me know what you think. In essence is that it's past certain scholarly verifications one that that the scholars have seen that there is a connected chain of narratives and we trust the narratives and two that they did not find any fault with the with the narrative but the fact that they did not find any fault with the narrative does not mean that there is no fault with the narrative we may find a fault later on based on empirical knowledge and so on so one of the things that the scholars now advise us against is accepting a Hadith that goes against empirical knowledge you know something verifiably to be a fact and then the Hadith shows you the opposite well somebody may say well you know if God says it well then I believe it regardless of what my eyes see but in the case of Hadith it's not simply that God says it it's that somebody is reporting that the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said this and it's not only somebody is reporting somebody reporting somebody reporting that somebody reporting that somebody is reporting that the Prophet peace be upon him said this it's a long chain of narratives any one of them could have made a mistake along the way there's more to be said but we'll leave this for our next episode Arrest my case you're welcome all right guys and this is for today's video absolutely surprising to me personally I didn't expect this whatsoever this is literally my opinion just to clarify yet again I never said I want to reject Hadiths quite the opposite I'm interested in Hadith I want to find out more about them but the same time I cannot let go of my fear that they are obstructed and as you can see even Shabir Ali here says that yes of course even if there are Sahih still there are people in place here that have been narrating those chains and ultimately mistakes do happen human error human biases or more over human maliciousness could be at place here to obstruct those Hadiths for sinister goals of course how often have we seen people on the surface level seem nice seem trustable even further on the surface level they were priests but on the inside their heart was corrupted absolute darkness pure monstrous pure evil but many of those people get away with their acts during their lifetime sometimes they take it into their grave and nobody will ever find out and this is why only because we have a chain of narration of certain people that were reliable trustable still we will never know what was in the hearts of those people so therefore to wrap it up this video affirms my stance on Hadiths moreover it was very refreshing to see a Muslim that is critical of even Sahih Hadiths i believe that we have to stay critical in all endeavors of life and even the Quran asks us to reflect and think all right guys but this is it for today's video if you liked it leave the thumbs up if you haven't subscribed already guys please do so and if you want to support this channel via patreon for example all the links are in the description box below thank you so much for your ongoing support guys as always may god bless you all much love and peace