Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 88
Murder in the Name of Allah. The obstinate response of the opponents to this most logical and. humane stance was that they positively rejected the prophets' position and stuck to their claim that the prophets had no right to change the faith of their people. If they did not desist from this course, the prophets were to be ready to accept the penalty for apostasy which was (in the opponents' opinion) no other than death or exile. . The Holy Prophet's sa struggle with his opponents was consistent with the practice of all prophets of the past. How can any sane person deny the lifetime mission of the Holy Prophetsa and challenge his firm stance on this fundamental principle? The Holy Quran, the practice of the Holy. Prophetsa, and the other traditions provide ample contradiction to the tradition in question. One cannot over-emphasise the utter unreliability of this tradition. . Reliability of the sources and narrators. Prima facie, the tradition refuted here has been authenticated by the reputable compilers Bukhari, Tirmidhi, Abu Daud, Al-Nasai and Ibn. Majah; it is included in five out of the six generally accepted compilations of hadith. But there ends its claim to authenticity. . For a tradition to be declared authentic it is not enough for it to be found in an authentic compilation. There are other established measures which are applied to every tradition. The most important among these measures is the examination in depth and detail of the reputation and character of the narrators forming the links in the chain of narrators. . There are scholars who have devoted their whole lifetime to such studies and, thanks to their most painstaking and thorough investigations, we are today in a position to examine every link of the chain of narrators in any compilation. Let us turn our attention to the tradition under consideration. This hadith falls into the category of ahad gharib (i. e. , a tradition in which there is only one chain of narrators connected to the same single source) because all the five books of hadith derive their chain of narrators from Ikramah as their ultimate source. . The late Maulana Abdul Hayy of Lucknow specifically refers to. Ikramah, pointing out that merely because Bukhari had included him in his compilation, others followed suit without carrying out independent research. 15. A tradition may be authentic and reliable even if it is quoted through a single chain of narrators. However, it cannot be regarded as being as reliable as traditions which have more than one chain of reliable narra88