🧵 on #HCMfallacies on Hadith literature:
A fundamental claim of HCM (Historical Critical Methodists) is that Hadith literature was invented at a later date and back-projected to the Prophet ﷺ to support the mainstream narrative. I will give 2 examples here to disprove this.
A fundamental claim of HCM (Historical Critical Methodists) is that Hadith literature was invented at a later date and back-projected to the Prophet ﷺ to support the mainstream narrative. I will give 2 examples here to disprove this.
From the outset, I want to make it clear that there are 2 types of hadith rejectors from the HCM crowd: (1) Those who have a sectarian agenda to tarnish the hadith legacy. They cloak their sectarian bigotry under the garb of Western academia. I won’t name them out of courtesy.
(2) Secular historians who don’t know enough of the Islamic tradition/record (like Donner, Crone et al) who throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water based on incomplete information that they find in the historical record.
HCM protagonists very arrogantly proclaimed recently (rather brought to the mainstream) that the second part of the Kalimah (I.e. “Muhammadur Rasulullah”) was a later development and that earliest record of the Shahadatayn is ~ 50 years after the Prophet ﷺ demise.
Multiple HCM scholars have parroted this line as if it were a matter of fact. They base this on the fact that the first ENGRAVED record of the Shahadatayn is found on a coin dated 685 CE (Prophet ﷺ died in 632 CE).
Consider that HCM scholars make this bold claim without having exhaustively studied the entire archaeological evidences at our disposal. In fact, barely 3-5% of the archaeological record has been dated and studied thus far!
Who is back-projecting now?
Who is back-projecting now?
Yet, with this incomplete information a huge claim is made just to try and make the hadith sound suspect. It is only recently that an inscription found on a rock with the full shahadatayn (including “Muhammadur Rasulullah”) was found in the Hijaz.
This engraving is dated to the earliest period and attributed to a Sahabi who died just 3 years (635 CE) after the Prophet ﷺ - Alqamah Ibn Talha. See in tweet below.
Definitively disproving the tall claim made by HCM that there was no record of the Shahadatayn before 685 CE. Now you tell us who is “back-projecting” their biases on the historical record? All in a desperate attempt to shatter Muslims’ confidence in their traditions.
Let’s look at the second example now. Here is a pic of an inscription that HCM propagandists have used to show that the Shahadah did not consist of the second part (I.e. “Muhammadur Rasulullah”).
As I pointed earlier in this thread, there is record of the Shahadatayn earlier than this. But what HCM propagandists end up unwittingly doing here is that they confirm the textual integrity of ahadith! The pic in the tweet above is a masnun dua that Muslims recite.
The above has a script style similar to that of 1st century AH engravings. One of the earliest records of this dua found in the hadith literature is in the Musannaf of Muhammad Ibn Abi Shaybah (died 235 AH or 856 CE) as @skvnvhb notes below.
@skvnvhb So here we have a CLEAR example of a dua found in a later hadith compilation that is VERBATIM what we see in the engraving above (I.e. at least over 100 years before Ibn Abi Shaybah’s compilation). This engraving, too, was recently found!
@skvnvhb These are just 2 examples of how HCM is terribly wrong in its conclusions about the hadith literature and Islam in general. As more of this archaeological record undergoes paleographic rigor, we will disprove many other ludicrous conclusions of our folks as HCM.
@skvnvhb Now you tell me who is “back-projecting” their agenda on Islam? Is it not clear from this that these arrogant HCM scholars should at the very least make the caveat that they haven’t studied the full historical record? This is why I say they are mainstreaming conspiracy theories.
Know who these ppl are. Know what background they come from. I don’t say all of them are insincere, but some of them have clear sectarian agendas. They have Muslim sounding names and they are cloaking their sectarian bigotry with their Western degrees. Beware of them.
You will never see them using HCM against their own sectarian biases. That alone ought to tell you about where they are coming from. They will only attack Sunnism because that’s what they have always done. Long before West had universities. To them I say, “Bring it on!”
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