Sublime

nearly one sixth of all “reliable” hadith can be traced back to Muhammad’s wife Aisha.

For this reason, selective filtration, the whole body of hadith is inherently flawed: They contain only those accounts that multiple generations of early Muslims each chose to save.

for those who follow the Messenger—the unlettered prophet they find described in the Torah

In other words, the earliest biography of Muhammad’s life was reputed to contain fabrications, disgraceful material, and distressing facts.2 What we have today has been filtered many times, both for fabrications and for difficult truths.

happy

This not only led to him becoming a revered spiritual guide, but also a soldier who commanded his army during a revolutionary struggle, a statesman who established, governed and expanded a new state, a lawmaker who formed and implemented a completely new legal system and an encyclopaedic thinker who, as well as providing general spiritual guidance,

While some hadith may in fact contain an authentic historical core that can be traced back to the Prophet and his earliest Companions, the truth is that the Sunna is a far better reflection of the opinions of the ninth-century Ulama than of the seventh-century Ummah. After all, to quote Jonathan Berkey, “It was not Muhammad himself who defined the