The Only Way out Guide for Truth Seekers

THE ONLY WAY OUT 327
to insidious subjective inclinations and urged them to exercise
extra self-scrutiny. In this regard, Ruth Stellhorn Mackensen
wrote:
"Among the devout there seems to have been a quite
sincere feeling that the desire to write books was based on
sinful pride, and they sought to avoid the appearance of
producing anything which might detract from the unique
position of the Koran. This applied to the writing of traditions
more than to any other type of literature, probably owing in
part to the fact that traditions contained words of the Prophet,
which might easily be regarded as of equal interest and
authority with those of the sacred book. This attitude
continued far down in the history of Moslem literature" (1) .
(1)
Mackensen, Ruth S. (1936) Arabic Books and Libraries in the
Umaiyad Period, The American Journal of Semitic Languages and
Literatures, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Jul.), p. 253, Published by The University of
Chicago Press. Allow me to digress for a moment here. David Hume
(1711 -1776) in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
attempted to spell out a methodology for criticizing narrated traditions
which, many centuries before Hume was born, has been thoroughly
developed by early Muslim Sunni scholars of Hadith. Hume, for
instance, emphasized the need to investigate possible contradictions
among the testimonies of eyewitnesses, the need to scrutinize their
integrity, making sure whether such eyewitnesses (or broadly
'relaters') had an interest in what they report, or whether such relaters
were prone to narrate prodigies and events which starkly contradicted
reason. In fact, Hume articulates a ruling which has long been held by
Hadith scholars as a maxim. He says, "A man delirious, or noted for
falsehood and villainy, has no manner of authority with us". All these
parameters and much more have been discussed in great detail by the
prominent scholar Abū 'Amr ibn al-Ṣalāḥ (1181-1245) in his seminal
work Introduction to the Science of Hadith.