Debate: Why do some people completely reject hadith?

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

First of all, to those who haven't noticed, ameen is note responding to my last post. In fact, he has ignored the post ENTIRELY! Here is that post:
http://www.islamicboard.com/567539-post303.html

So if ameen is not continuing this discussion in a coherent fashion (i.e. response-counter response- counter counter response, etc.) the question is...what is ameen responding to??

The answer is that ameen is responding to HALF of one of my points in a post from 4 weeks ago. Yes, that's right, only HALF of a point. In order for ameen to feign a response, he needs to cut a very carefully selected fragment out of its larger context in my post and then respond to that. So here is the post that he is cutting this quote from:

Ameen,

This thread is debating the authority of Hadith as a source of Divine Law in Islam. You are yet to prove, USING THE HOLY QUR'AN, that Allah has given the Hadith such Divine authority.

First of all, why are you selectively responding to my post?? I said A LOT MORE in response to that claim of yours and you only quoted ONE of my points and omitted ALL the others! WHY? You can't respond to my points on Usûl? Here they are AGAIN:

This is why I continually urge you to educate yourself on the basics of Usûl al-Fiqh, brother. The specificity of the sabab does not enable takhsîs on the generality of the statement. In fact, even common sense is enough to expose the absurdity of the notion you are advancing! Is it logical to suggest that if the Prophet saws gives us directives regarding war booty we are religiously obligated to obey, yet when he provides us with any other instructions we can disobey the Messenger of Allah?!​

Stop ignoring this point. Do not respond to my arguments selectively quoting 1 piece here and there so you can respond easier.

Secondly, I expected this objection on your part to my citation of the narration. The problem with your position is, when we go on quoting what has been reported of the sahâba's understanding of this verse, and then those after them and then those after them - you claim that they didn't understand the verse this way. So at which point did the entire Muslim ummah suddenly change and start reinterpreting the verse?? Even hadith-rejectors are not rash enough to claim that their views are the traditional views. They KNOW that the acceptance of the hadith and the interpretation of these verses in this manner is the way of the millions of Muslim scholars for almost 1 and a half millenia! Hadith-rejectors know this, they just claim that this traditional view is wrong, as you yourself have said only three posts ago.

This verse, which you think proves the authority of Hadith, says that the Prophet is the 'judge in disputes between the people.'

So like Companion, when you realize your previous claims have all been crushed, you move on to making new claims about a new verse!

This verse states that the Prophet saws was the judge in all the dispute of the people, every dispute they had was to be referred back to him. It is impossible for someone to claim that this referred only to the Qur'an since the verdicts about all the disputes of the people are not included in the Qur'an. This verse commands people to defer such affairs to the Prophet as the Qâdî, in whatever disputes they have including social and societal affairs. This verse cannot possibly be restricted to the Qur'an since it tells the Prophet saws "and find in themselves no resistance against your decisions" and yet the Qur'an is not a compendium of decisions on societal affairs! The language of this verse clearly establishes the Prophet saws as one in whom divine authority has been vested to issue rulings and one who must be obeyed as we also saw with the verse from surah Hashr which I cleared of your feeble response. For the compelte linguistic analysis of this verse refer to Al-Bahr Al-Muhît.

Here is proof of the Prophet's saws independent capacity of religious directives:

48:18 Indeed, Allah was pleased with the believers when they gave their Bai'a (pledge) to you (O Muhammad SAW) under the tree, He knew what was in their hearts, and He sent down As-Sakinah (calmness and tranquillity) upon them, and He rewarded them with a near victory,

Here the pledge that the Muslims gave the Prophet saws at hudaybiyyah is being praised in the Qur'an, yet not directive exists in the Qur'an to take such a pledge on this occasion. When the Prophet saws recieved news that 'Uthman rd may have been killed by the Quraysh he decided to take this pledge from the muslims, and yet he made this decision and the surah about Hudaybiyyah (Fath) was revealed after.

There are other verses which refer to the Qur'an as the response to the intellectual disputes of the various religious groups of the time, but they do not make reference to the Prophet's decisions. ALL of the Prophet's decrees are to be accepted as Allah swt negates the faith of anyone who rejects the decrees of the Prophet saws. The Prophet's teachings are the judge for us in all matters in our life, we are to accept his sunnah fully and completely.

Also, Companion and Ameen, stop ignoring the challenges that Ahmed and I have been repeating to you. You keep trying to give your imaginative 'tafseer' on different verses while skirting our arguments and challenges.

Interestingly enough, four weeks ago I was taking him to task for the same thing. Notice above I challenge him on why he is selectively responding to my posts. Also in the above post, what are we discussing? An ayat from Surah Al-Hashr proving the authority of the sunnah. Ameen tried to respond by cutting out only a part of my post, so in the post above I expose his tactic and show the part of the post that he ignored (in brown). He never responded.

Now he comes up with the same question of which verses from the Qur'an confer authority on the sunnah - is that not dishonest for him to conceal what I already provided and ignore it completely and then repeat the same question? Of course it is dishonest and deceitful, but that is exactly ameen's only hope in this debate. I have been quite open in this debate going through the posts of my opponents thoroghly and examining each point one by one. Ameen, on the other hand, ignores entire posts and disects a comment from one of my previous posts before he is able to respond to it. So everyone can clearly see who is the real perpetrator of deceit in this debate.

So what was the context to the comment ameen quotes? If you look at the post I quoted above, we were arguing IN THE CONTEXT OF VERSE 4:65. Ameen claimed that when it said for believers to accept all the judgements of the Prophet Muhammad saws in their disputes, ameen claimed that all such judgements were found in the Qur'an so the verse is just redundantly stating to accept the Qur'an.

I refuted this claim of his by pointing out the treaty of hudaybiyyah - here we have a clear example of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh making a judgement in response to the dispute over the Qurayshi position. The Prophet pbuh called all the believers to take the oath under the tree and they all obeyed him as Allah swt commands. And to prove that this decision was correct I quoted the verse from the Qur'an where Allah swt endorsed the judgement of the Prophet saws.

Now with THIS context in mind, let's proceed to see what ameen has now written:

you will see clearly that Allah did actually enjoin the pledge:

You just PROVED my point! Here we have an obvious example of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh making a decision which you admit that Allah enjoined even though this decision is not in the Qur'an!! Ayat 4:65 tells the believers to accept the decisions of the Prophet saws in ALL their disputes and you initially erroneously claimed that this just refers to accepting the decrees in the Qur'an. But we have in the treaty of hudaybiyyah a case where the decision was NOT in the Qur'an but was still "ENJOINED BY ALLAH" - by your own testimony!

So, either you find it impossible to keep track of this discussion or you are just really good at refuting yourself!

This means that your statement above is actually not true, when you said: '..the pledge that the Muslims gave the Prophet saws at hudaybiyyah is being praised in the Qur'an, yet no directive exists in the Qur'an to take such a pledge..'

Please stop trying to deceive people into your sectarian beliefs.

THis is your only response to what you quoted from me? You have no rational objections? Just the ad hominem of "stop trying to decieve people" ?? SHOW ME where is the Qur'an the directive is from the Prophet pbuh to take this pledge from the believers. If you can find no such directive then you concede to the fact that Allah ENJOINED (your word!) commands that the Prophet pbuh conveyed to the people which they had to accept though such injunctions were not found in the Qur'an. In short, you have conceded the authority of the sunnah thus answering your own question:

show us a single verse from the Qur'an which makes the Hadith sacred and authoritative.

As everyone can see now, not only have I shown you such verses but you have yourself conceded the arguments!


To summarize the argument of hudaybiyyah for those who are having difficulty following this long drawn-out discussion: there is no directive in the Qur'an for the Prophet pbuh to take the pledge of hudaybiyyah. Yet this was something enjoined by Allah swt and something that the Prophet Muhammad pbuh did and all the believers obeyed him in this. And their complete obedience to him was praised in the Qur'an and the pledge itself was endorsed. So the Prophet Muhammad pbuh clearly has divine authority vested in him to make such decisions as He is inspired by Allah swt. So the claim that the Qur'an is the only authority falls flat on its face since the Prophet pbuh had the authority to take the pledge at hudaybiyyah even though there was no command in the Qur'an for him or for the believers to do so. In conclusion, the Prophet Muhammad pbuh is an authority in this religion as he is inspired by Allah swt and his verdicts and teachings are only the truth. Therefore, no believer can deny the sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad saws.

 

[Ansar Al-'Adl]

In my last post I showed how the hadith-rejectors have abandoned complete responses entirely and instead of contributing anything to the discussion they cut out carefully selected small snippets from a comment and then feign a response to that and repeat the exact same claims that were debunked before. Just in this thread we had to post from kadafi's Ahadeeth Myths almost a dozen times and people still kept ignoring it and repeating the same claims without providing any criticism on the article whatsoever. Its fine for someone to voice their opinion, but in a discussion when someone responds to that it is expected that you will provide at least some for of criticism to the response. If you just repeat your original comments again, that is not a dialogue, that is a monologue!

After 330 posts and the failure of 5 hadith-rejectors to answer the arguments, it is clear that this thread isn't going anywhere. We've given ample opportunity for people to formulate some coherent arguments to support their view but instead they play games by quoting bits and pieces here and there and repeating the same material over and over. With such an attitude it is clear that the discussion is never going to get anywhere. In a debate it is expected that you critically analyze the views of your opponent; simply repeating material is what we call argumentum ad nauseum.

This is exactly what happens with anti-islamists. They come on the forum solely with the intention to slander the Qur'an and the Prophet, they don't listen to any responses and just comment on what is most convenient for them, and so within a short period of time they wind-up banned.

There was a question regarding one member who was banned yesterday - he was banned because he stopped talking about the topic of this thread entirely and went into a long emotional tirade about how he didn't like the antagonstic approach towards him. I'm sorry but if you can't emotionally tolerate your claims being subjected to vigorous criticism, then perhaps factual debate is not for you. Read the title of this thread: this is a debate on hadith, not a debate on why you thought the admin was hostile. If you have personal issues like that then use pm. That's what it says in the rules. You chose the wrong outlet to vent your frustration and you suffered the consequences.



:threadclo