Trusting Those That Came Before Us | Dr. Ovamir Anjum & Mufti Abdul Wahab Waheed

Our Deen Is the Deen of Truth

There is no way to do justice to those events and the sources in this short time. I want to only, in fact, take this time to warn people that our deen is the deen of truth — not facts, not feelings. You may feel that you want to attribute something to the Prophet ﷺ because it sounds good, but you can't attribute it to the Prophet ﷺ — the Prophet ﷺ must have said it.

That is one of the greatest sins in Islam. As you know, whoever lies about the Prophet ﷺ deliberately —

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 110; Sahih Muslim, Book 1, Hadith 4)

"Whoever lies about me deliberately, let him take his seat in the Fire." The truth about the Prophet ﷺ and the truth about what happened — this is a really, really crucial part of our deen. This is not how many other religions and other people think about their religion; they make up stories.

In our deen, we have to know what happened, what the Prophet ﷺ said, whether it's a matter of law, virtue, or something else. This is how we preserve our Qur'an — it is preserved through the truthfulness of the community's verbal, oral transmission. We trust our salaf, our predecessors and ancestors, because they were truthful people and they believed in this truth.

The Fitna of Fabrication

A lot of lying became very common in the time of fitna — in the time when people disagreed — and massive fabrications were circulated, both about the virtues of Ali and Ahlul Bayt and the virtues of Mu'awiyah رضي الله عنه. Sometimes the lying got so bad that it got completely out of hand. We have volumes and volumes of fabricated hadiths about virtues that the ulama later spent their lives and generations to distinguish — to figure out that these were lies and how to separate right from wrong.

The reason I'm talking about this is well known; every scholar knows this. All ulama know that this was the fitna of lying, and therefore the religion had to be saved — just as it had to be saved from the hands of Abu Jahl in Mecca, and the munafiqeen and others in Medina and their other enemies. It had to be saved from the hands of the kadhdhābūn — those liars.

Is this not perhaps one of the reasons — for the audience to know — that even the concept of sanad (chain of narration) became dominant? Abdullah ibn Abbas رضي الله عنهما actually said this: that prior to these fitna and these lies, they were not as worried about where something came from and who said it, because everyone was telling the truth and no one would lie about the Prophet ﷺ. But only after these differences rose and these fabricated narrations came to light did they clamp down on it. From then on, we have to figure out where everything is coming from.

The Problem with Narrations About Karbala

The reason I mention this problem is that many of the stories you'll hear about Karbala were written over 100 to 150 years after the events. And often they have no sanad — especially the details have no sanad. They are told by people whose credibility is questionable. In particular, most of these stories come from really one or two narrators.

Abu Mikhnaf Yahya ibn Lut is one of the main narrators. A lot of the emotional stories that you hear about what happened are all made up. And then they are exaggerated, century after century, so that what was attributed to Abu Mikhnaf in the 2nd century is much more manageable by comparison.

To give you an example: you have a small book about Maqtal al-Husayn — the death of al-Husayn — that appears in the 2nd century from Abu Mikhnaf. But then 7 centuries later, you have a much bigger book with far greater detail about what was happening, and the exaggeration is staggering. In one version, for example, al-Husayn or some companion has killed 5 men; later it becomes 500 men that he was single-handedly killing. The exaggeration is just a snowball effect — people think they can exaggerate in order to increase emotional impact.

What often happens is that when we are talking to Sunni or Shia — even Shia scholars of hadith criticism, by the way — they recognize that all of this is later material. This isn't just the Sunnis saying so. Anyone who is a historian or a hadith critic recognizes that all of this is coming later.

Separating Authentic Virtue from Fabrication

The reason I am mentioning this is that whether you are reading about some of the great virtues of Mu'awiyah or of other members of the Ahlul Bayt, you should be aware of the isnad. In general, this is the saying of Ibn al-Qayyim: that most of the narrations about the virtues of Mu'awiyah are fabricated. He is a Sahabi — there is no doubt about that — but most of those hadiths were fabricated by the Nawasib and the people who were partisans of Mu'awiyah. Likewise, many of the hadiths about the virtues of Ali, Hasan, and Husayn are fabricated.

But after you remove all the fabricated hadiths on both sides, there still remain many authentic hadiths and virtues of Ali, Hasan, and Husayn that we — the Sunnis — circulate and must know. The exaggeration, however, can destroy our sense of balance, can destroy our deen. And this kind of exaggeration takes over so much that the actual message of the Qur'an and the Sunnah is lost.

So this, I think, is perhaps a more important reminder than a history lesson — which may be too short a time to go over right now.