How Hadith Insult the Prophet

The Quran testifies to a Prophet of great moral character and mercy to the worlds - the hadith literature then buries that Prophet under narrations he would never recognise.

I. The Prophet the Quran Gives Us

Before weighing a single narration, fix the standard by which every narration must be judged. The Quran is the one contemporary, God-authored testimony to Muhammad, and its verdict on his character is not faint praise but the highest a man can be given:

"You are blessed with a great moral character." (68:4)

It calls him a mercy - not to his tribe, not to his century, but to all creation:

"We have sent you out of mercy from us towards the whole world." (21:107)

And it forecloses in advance the very suspicion the later literature would trade in: that he was unbalanced, deceived, or moved by private appetite.

"Your friend (Muhammad) was not astray, nor was he deceived." (53:2)

Of his very speech the Quran records that he was not "speaking out of a personal desire" (53:3) but spoke by "divine inspiration" (53:4). This is the man to whom the narrations must answer. Wherever a report drags him beneath the character God certified, it is the report that stands accused, never the Prophet. What follows is a defense of him against his own supposed admirers, for the corpus assembled in his name insults him twice over - dragging him below his station in some pages, and hoisting him above it in others.

II. They Said He Was Bewitched

Begin with the charge the Quran rebuts by name. The soundest books of the tradition report that the Prophet fell under a sorcerer's spell:

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated Aisha: "Once the Prophet was bewitched so that he began to imagine that he had done a thing which in fact he had not done." (Sahih Bukhari 4:53:400)

Sahih Muslim - Reported by A'isha: "A Jew... cast spell upon Allah's Messenger with the result that he felt that he had been doing something whereas in fact he had not been doing that." (Sahih Muslim 26:5428)

Read what is being claimed. The man entrusted with the final revelation to mankind is, in these reports, so overpowered by a magician that he loses track of what he has and has not done. Yet the Quran already told us where the word "bewitched" belongs. It is not God's description of His Prophet; it is the sneer the disbelievers threw at him, who accused him of being a man bewitched (17:47, 25:8). The hadith takes the taunt of his enemies and files it as fact in the books of his friends - against the plain testimony already set down above, that he "was not astray, nor was he deceived" (53:2).

III. They Said He Despaired

The same instinct that makes him a victim of magic makes him a man broken by doubt. When revelation paused, Bukhari has him repeatedly seeking his own death:

Sahih Bukhari - "After a few days Waraqa died and the Divine Inspiration was also paused... the Prophet became so sad... he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains." (Sahih Bukhari 9:87:111)

Set aside that suicide is among the gravest sins in the religion he preached; the portrait fails on its own terms. The chapters revealed to console him in exactly such a pause say the opposite of despair - that his Lord had neither abandoned nor forsaken him, and that with hardship comes ease (93; 94). A Prophet whom God was actively reassuring is here made to climb mountains in order to hurl himself from them. The mercy to the worlds (21:107) is recast as a man the world had already defeated.

IV. The Powers He Denied Having

A large class of narrations runs in the opposite direction, and insults him by flattery, loading onto him a knowledge and a power he explicitly disclaimed. He is made an authority on medicine and cosmology:

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated Abu Huraira: "If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease." (Sahih Bukhari 4:54:537)

Sunan Abu Dawud - "Do you know where this sets? I replied: Allah and his Apostle know best. He said: It sets in a spring of warm water." (Sunan Abu Dawud 4:32:3991)

And a worker of wonders whose spittle heals and whose person the very stones salute:

Sahih Bukhari - "I saw the trace of a wound in Salama's leg... This was inflicted on me on the day of Khaibar... the Prophet puffed his saliva in it (i.e. the wound) thrice, and since then I have not had any pain in it till this hour." (Sahih Bukhari 5:59:517)

Sahih Muslim - Jabir b. Samura: "I recognise the stone in Mecca which used to pay me salutations before my advent as a Prophet." (Sahih Muslim 30:5654)

Every one of these collides with words the Quran places in his own mouth. He was ordered to say that he holds no power over benefit or harm even to himself, and no knowledge of the unseen:

"Say, "I have no power to benefit myself, or harm myself. Only what GOD wills happens to me. If I knew the future, I would have increased my wealth, and no harm would have afflicted me. I am no more than a warner, and a bearer of good news for those who believe."" (7:188)

He was to disclaim the treasures of God, the future, and any nature above the human, and to claim nothing beyond the revelation he was given:

"Say, "I do not say to you that I possess the treasures of GOD. Nor do I know the future. Nor do I say to you that I am an angel. I simply follow what is revealed to me." Say, "Is the blind the same as the seer? Do you not reflect?"" (6:50)

And when his people demanded of him precisely the marvels the hadith would later supply, the Quran recorded the demand together with God's answer. The demand began:

"They said, "We will not believe you unless you cause a spring to gush out of the ground." (17:90)

It ran on through orchards, a house of gold, and a ladder to the sky (17:91-92); and the reply God gave him was not a miracle but a question - "Am I any more than a human messenger?" (17:93). The corpus that turns his saliva into a cure and the pebbles into his worshippers has not honoured him. It has contradicted the Quran to his face.

V. The Idol They Made Him Into

If some reports drag him below his station, others hoist him above it, which is the same insult in finer clothes - for the one thing the Prophet consistently refused was to be magnified beside God. The literature has him demand a love that outranks a man's own family and all mankind, and recite a catalogue of privileges given to no one else:

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated Anas: "None of you will have faith till he loves me more than his father, his children and all mankind." (Sahih Bukhari 1:2:14)

Sahih Bukhari - "I have been given five things which were not given to any one else before me. 1. Allah made me victorious by awe... 2. The earth has been made for me... 3. Booty has been made lawful for me... 4. I have been given the right of intercession. 5. Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind." (Sahih Bukhari 1.331)

The Quran's Muhammad claims none of this for himself. His standing instruction was to level himself with the people he addressed:

"Say, "I am no more than a human like you, being inspired that your god is one god. Those who hope to meet their Lord shall work righteousness, and never worship any other god beside his Lord."" (18:110)

No prophet, the Quran says, was ever granted scripture and prophethood in order to tell people to become servants to him (3:79); and God draws no distinction among His messengers (2:285), which is why the same books, in a more honest moment, have the Prophet forbid anyone to rank him above Moses. To inflate him into a rival of the God he worshipped is not devotion. It is the exact reversal of his message.

VI. Cruelty the Mercy to the Worlds Would Not Command

The gravest insults are moral. A mercy to all creation is made to issue commands of gratuitous cruelty - to burn men alive, to slaughter animals wholesale, to run down a fleeing man:

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated Abu Huraira: "If you find so-and-so and so-and-so, burn both of them with fire." (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:259)

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated 'Abdullah bin 'Umar: "Allah's Messenger ordered that the dogs should be killed." (Sahih Bukhari 4:54:540)

Sahih Bukhari - Narrated Salama bin Al-Akwa: "An infidel spy came to the Prophet... The Prophet said... Chase and kill him." (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:286)

The Quran's Prophet is the very pattern God holds up for imitation:

"The messenger of GOD has set up a good example for those among you who seek GOD and the Last Day, and constantly think about GOD." (33:21)

And the Book he delivered made a single murder the equal of killing all mankind (5:32) and forbade the taking of the life God rendered sacred except in the course of justice (6:151). A messenger sent as mercy to the worlds (21:107) does not order the burning of the living or the killing of every dog in the street. These reports do not describe the Prophet. They describe what his enemies wished him to be.

VII. The So-Called "Satanic Verses"

The most audacious insult of all is preserved not as a saying but as a story: the episode the later biographers and some commentators call the "satanic verses," in which the Prophet is said to have recited, at the devil's prompting, words praising the pagan idols, before the passage was corrected. It is offered as history. The Quran treats it as exactly the kind of interference God does not permit to stand. The Book grants that the devil may cast something toward a messenger's wishes, and then settles the matter in the same breath: "GOD then nullifies what the devil has done" (22:52). What reaches the people is only what God perfects, never what the devil slips in. Of the Prophet's own utterance the warning is absolute - "Had he uttered any other teachings" (69:44), God would have seized him and stopped the revelation to him (69:45-47). A tongue that God guards that jealously did not broadcast praise of idols and wait to be corrected.

The same anxiety about the integrity of what he delivered produced a smaller but revealing report, in which the Prophet is thanked for recalling a verse he had let drop:

Sahih Bukhari - "The Prophet heard a man reciting (the Qur'an) in the mosque. He said, 'May Allah bestow His Mercy on him, as he made me remember such and-such Verse which I had missed in such-and-such Sura.'" (Sahih Bukhari 6:61:558)

But God undertook the remembering Himself. He promised to make His Prophet recite and not forget (87:6-7), and pledged over the whole revelation, "we will preserve it" (15:9). The keeping of the Quran was never left to a man's memory to mislay. To say he lost a verse until a stranger reminded him is to accuse God of breaking His own guarantee.

VIII. The True Muhammad

Put the two directions of error side by side - the Prophet demonised as magician, suicide, and tyrant, and the Prophet idolised as wonder-worker and near-divine - and a pattern emerges that the Quran named long before the collectors were born. It warned that the enemies of every prophet are permitted to "inspire in each other fancy words, in order to deceive" (6:112), and it told him to disregard them and their fabrications. A corpus that at once debases and deifies him, in flat contradiction of the Book he brought, reads less like the memory of his friends than the fulfilment of that warning.

The defense of the Prophet, then, is not to guard these narrations but to release him from them. The Muhammad worth loving is the one God described: of a great moral character, a mercy to the worlds, a human messenger who spoke only what he was inspired to speak and claimed nothing beside it. That Muhammad is preserved perfectly in one place, the Quran, and nowhere else. On the standing of his example and the true meaning of obeying him, see Obey God and Obey the Messenger; on the corpus that slanders him, the companion studies below.

Companion studies: The Only True Hadith, Contradictions with the Quran, and The Prophet Prohibited Hadith.