Page 114 - Bigotry: The Dark Danger

Bigotry:
The Dark Danger

also sometimes led to a loss of meaning. For example, two people
came to Aisha (ra) and said to her that Abu Hurayrah narrates that
the Prophet (pbuh) used to say that ill fortune is to be found only in
women, horses and houses. At this Aisha (ra) replied: "By God Who
revealed the Qur'an to the Prophet! The Prophet never said this;
what he did say was that the People of the Ignorance hold this opin-

ion."

There is no doubt that the founders of the four schools were all
worthy Muslims and Islamic scholars. However, we need to know
that it was the hadiths in question that were instrumental in the
founding of those schools. The founders of the four schools based
those schools on the hadiths they personally selected.

The four imams founded their own schools by going beyond the
criteria employed by the hadith imams who wrote the collections of

hadiths in the Kutub al-Sittah. As we have already seen, Abu Hanifa,
the founder of the Hanafi school, the largest of the four, has been
criticized by other hadith imams, especially Bukhari, on the grounds
of having a weak knowledge of the hadiths and generally emphasiz-
ing his own opinions.

Despite such division among hadith scholars and schools, there

have also been those who have claimed that the hadiths are undeni-
able. Such people have spread the nonsensical idea that anyone who
denies even a single hadith in Bukhari and Muslim is an unbeliever.
Some people have gone even further, as we shall be seeing in detail
in due course, claiming that the hadiths supersede the command-
ments of the Qur'an. It is these terrifying irrationalities that underlie

the extremism that has spread throughout a great part of the Islamic
world.

Let us now see how different fabricated hadiths have given rise
to different sects with their own rules within Islam.

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