Islams Reformers

into discussion provided they will observe the rules of discussion
and decency. Yet nothing can be so out of place and so funny as
for a reformer who knows nothing about the eloquence of the
Qur’ân, to slander az-Zamakhsharî’s tafsîr.
7- The reformer says:
“False hadîths were made up. Everybody knows that there are
many mawdû’ hadîths.”
Nobody can be so unjust as to speak ill of the knowledge of
hadîth which was based not on reason or experience but on
relation and narration. I wonder how many hadîths the reformer
knows to speak like that. Can he say a single hadîth with its
documentary references? He only knows the word mawdû’ that
he has heard by chance. The great scholars of Islam have written
thousands of books not only on the knowledge of hadîth but also
on how to find out mawdû’ hadîths among the sahîh ones. If they
had not written these books, the reformer would not even know
the word mawdû’. The scholars of hadîth very strictly forbade to
say “a hadîth” for a saying if it was not for certain that Rasûlullah
(’alaihi ’s-salâm) uttered it, no matter how good or useful it was.
In fact, there have been people who attempted such a very
dangerous lie as to make up hadîths. But Muslim scholars have
worked without getting tired and bored, looked for such
falsehoods, found them and discarded them from books. If it had
not been for these continuous studies of Muslim scholars, could
such religiously ignorant reformers ever distinguish one mawdû’
hadîth? Muslim scholars have accomplished such a delicate and
difficult study of recognizing hundreds of thousands of hadîths
together with their narrators and evaluating the soundness of
each. As for the reformer, he confuses those who have made up
hadîths with those who have found out and discarded the madeup
hadîths, arouses suspicion among Muslims by talking ill of all
of them and tries to undermine the confidence in the Hadîth. The
harm caused by those who made up hadîths has not been greater
than that caused by the clamours of reformers. By putting forth
the harm of making up hadîths to attribute the fall of the
Ottoman Empire to it, he slanders unjustly against Islam by
implying that the real cause of the fall of the Ottoman Empire
was Islam.
8 - The reformer says:
“In order to make sure the correctness of hadîths, Hadrat al-
Bukhârî travelled through Islamic countries in Asia and Africa for
many years. At nights, he used to get up ten or fifteen times and
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