format_quote Originally Posted by
abu_hurriya
Hadith like these are touted among non-Muslims to highlight the supposed abusridty of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in particular. These are a great stumbling block for me, and I cannot wrap my mind around how these should be viewed. Please give me your feedback as to the validity and interpretation of these hadith.
Some ahadith are weak, others authentic. Depending on the chain of narrators, if they were trustworthy - then the hadith can be relied upon. If the narrators are weak however, maybe due to them having a weak intellect, or because they made many mistakes, or even if they were known to be fabricators - then the narration is likely to be weak, or fabricated. So this means that we do not accept every narration, however - there are certain hadith collections which are known for having trustworthy authentic ahadith. So we accept them.
Narrated 'Amr bin Maimun: During the pre-lslamic period of ignorance I saw a she-monkey surrounded by a number of monkeys. They were all stoning it, because it had committed illegal sexual intercourse. I too, stoned it along with them.
Sahih Bukhari 5:58:188
Question:
I read in Sahîh al-Bukhârî that some monkeys stoned another one for adultery. Does this mean that adultery is sinful for animals? This sounds really silly to me. Can you explain this?
Answered by the Fatwa Department Research Committee - chaired by Sheikh `Abd al-Wahhâb al-Turayrî
The account in question is narrated from `Amr b. Maymûn – a Companion – in
Sahîh al-Bukhârî (3849):
I had seen in the days of ignorance before Islam, some monkeys who surrounded a she-monkey who had committed unlawful sexual intercourse and they stoned it, so I stoned it along with them.
In
Fath al-Bârî, Ibn Hajar al-`Asqalânî gives a more detailed narration of this event from `Amr b. Maymûn:
I was in Yemen tending the sheep of my people up upon an elevation. A male monkey came with a female and laid his head on her hand. Then a smaller monkey came and beckoned towards her, so she gently slipped her hand out from under the cheek of the first monkey and followed him. He mated with her while I looked on. Then she returned and gently tried to slip her hand back under the cheek of the first monkey, but he woke up suddenly, smelled her, and cried out.
Then the monkeys gathered round and he began screaming while pointing towards her with his hand. The monkeys went all about and came back with that monkey that I recognized. They dug a pit for the two of them and stoned them both. So I had witnessed stoning being carried out by other than Adam’s descendants.
This is not a hadîth of the Prophet (peace be upon him). It is not even something that `Amr claims he told to the Prophet (peace be upon him). It is just `Amr’s personal account of some things `Amr b. Maymûn saw some animals doing. It is merely his interpretation that those monkeys were stoning the other one as a punishment for adultery. There is no way that he could have known their true motives.
There is no Islamic teaching to be gleaned from this account.
Ibn Hajar writes in
Fath al-Bârî :
It is not necessary that an event that looks like adultery and stoning was really a case of adultery and capital punishment. He merely described it that way because it looked like these things. It does not mean that legal accountability was being applied to animals.
And Allah knows best.
Abu Huraira reported: The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) said. When any one of you awakes up from sleep and performs ablution, he must clean his nose three times, for the devil spends the night in the interior of his nose.
Sahih Muslim 2:462
Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Allah loves sneezing but dislikes yawning; so if anyone of you sneezes and then praises Allah, every Muslim who hears him (praising Allah) has to say Tashmit to him. But as regards yawning, it is from Satan, so if one of you yawns, he should try his best to stop it, for when anyone of you yawns, Satan laughs at him."
Sahih Bukhari 8:73:245
These matters are in regard to the unseen, if Allaah has said that the angels look in a certain way, i.e. if it is in the revelation that angels do really have wings, we believe in it even if we cannot see it. This is part of the believers faith, and since the major core aspects of our beliefs make perfect sense to us, the other issues which we can't comprehend - we should believe in them too. The same way we believe that hell and paradise exist, although we cannot comprehend them - it is part of our faith that we accept it.
Yes, they may be. If people expect to get their medical degree off a science teacher, then they should go to the people who have the correct and true understanding of that field to clear up their misconceptions and doubts.
Don't expect to know chemical engineering if you haven't even sat with the teachers of that study, because if you don't study it with them - you're going to cause more confusion and maybe even harm than benefit. That's because you need to know the foundations in order to move forward and understand. Just because something isn't understandable at a novice level, it does not mean that it isn't correct. And even if it is correct, you still won't be able to understand unless you place that specific piece of knowledge within its context.
Try pondering over that.
Peace.