Re: [IN URDU] Will History repeats itself ?
Assalamu Alaykum,
I am claiming that Quran suffices for my salvation, this is the claim of Quran itself. All our beliefs also come from the Quran. Having said that, I am not rejecting this narrative, I am merely saying that I do not blindly accept it, and we must be cautious in accepting it. However, if a day dawned when actually prophet Jesus (pbuh) did come, I would not be surprised.
As for this narrative, I must let you know that Imam Maalik’s Muwatta, the first collection of narratives of the Prophet (pbuh) and also the first book on fiqh, is devoid of any mention to coming of Jesus (pbuh). That means that a scholar as esteemed as Maalik did not either know, or he rejected this concept in his collection of Hadith.
It is not my belief because Quran does not mention it clearly, and we know that narratives ascribed to the Prophet (pbuh) have falsely been created too. A vast number of narratives were rejected by Imam Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmizi, Abu Dawood, Maalik and others to arrive at what, in their opinion, were the correct narratives. Even then, we find differences of opinion and the same narrative that has been classified as ‘sahih’ by one scholars is outrightly rejected by the other. Many narratives were later found to be incorrect.
This is not because we doubt that Holy Prophet (pbuh) gave us the right information. We have full respect and regard for him and indeed if he was living with us today, he would be our only source of guidance of God’s law. However, it is those false narratives that people attempt to ascribe to the Prophet (pbuh) that we have to find and cut out. Muslim scholars have discussed in detail how narratives were crafted by hypocrites and what problems scholars of hadith had to go through in order to sift out the more reliable ones. In addition, since a narrative was a person to person transfer, it is often seen in the books of hadith that the same narrative coming from different chains of narrators often has different wording, some part missing or added and so forth. It is also for the same reason that these narratives have never been accepted as source of law by some scholars such as Abu Haneefa, except in a few cases. I do not wish to start a discussion on authenticity of hadith, if we want to discuss that, we can do that on a separate thread, but I need to explain some basics about the hadith literature before discussing this hadith.
Having mentioned this, I firmly believe that narratives ascribed to the Prophet (pbuh) cannot be taken independent of Quran because of the possibility of their weakness. It must be taken along with Quran if we must build a belief out of it. Secondly, if God really wanted us to believe in this concept, then why would it not be presented in Quran. Once again, I do not reject Hadith, but we all know that everything that we take from Hadith has its foundation in Quran: prayer, fasting, poor-due, pilgrimage, laws of inheritance, interest; pick a topic and it has its foundations in Quran.
Combined this with the fact that some scholars such as Malik may have missed or rejected this concept, I think there is no confusion in my mind that this is not a belief of mine. I also firmly believe that Quran is what Muslims should also base their beliefs on.
Best wishes,
Omer Iqbal