Toronto Imam Shabbir Ally is intervened in 2017 about hadith that predict future events.
I’m Aisha your host. In today’s segment we will continue our discussion on taking a balanced approach to Hadith, with a focus on Hadith relating to the future. How much of a critical lens should we apply towards these Hadith? As always let’s discuss with our expert Dr. Shabbir Ali.
Imam Shabbir Ally: For example, if somebody in the past noticed that children are not respecting their parents and we know that it is a Quranic prescription that we respect our parents. If they coined a statement showing that the Prophet PBUH said that the time will come when children will not respect their parents, obviously depicting this as a bad thing. So that is credited to the Prophet PBUH, even though he did not say it. But he could have said something like that. In any case, the Quran said it. If that is using our modern times it’s not difficult for anyone. But what happens is when we have things like Hadith depicting a black flag rising over Syria. We know that there was commotion among Muslims in that time following the death of the Prophet PBUH. Mu’awiya [The Second Fitna was a period of general political and military disorder and civil war that lasted 12 years.] had set up his Caliphate in Syria, counter-Caliphate to that of Ali. And there are all kinds of hadiths about the pious people of Syria. Hadith praising people of different regions and having some relevance to the conflicts that arose among Muslims at that time. Then it is conceivable that some of these narratives are actually later inventions that were credited back to the Prophet PBUH as though he said these in advance… But what this means for me in sum is that it shows how Muslims could have developed a narrative about the prophet PBUH, crediting things back to him which he could not have said because if he gave all of these descriptions about the Dajal there is no way that the companions would have thought that this Jewish boy in Medina could have been the Dadjal.
So just as we briefly wrap up, what do you think this problematic Hadith relates to specifically. For example the Dadjal is impacting problems that we are seeing today, for example, radicalization?
Imam Shabbir Ally: Well, but it’s actually impacting us in two ways, One is that, when Muslims are thinking about these futuristic Hadith, they’re thinking that, okay, eventually something will be the solution to our problems. The Dajjal or Jesus will come back, kill the Dajjal, establish a reign of peace, and whatever. So we’re futuristic in our thinking. So we leave things lying as they are, thinking that doesn’t matter. If we have the problems now, we don’t have to solve them. Somebody else will come to solve our problems in the future, either the Maddi or Jesus, or in some other way. The second thing is this radicalization you’re talking about. Now when we require of Muslims to believe in both of these narratives, as the Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani tries to do. Then it’s too much for the modern mind. The modern mind goes two ways. Either the modern mind rejects this altogether and says okay I’ll be a Muslim in a superficial way but I won’t, you know, go deep into this because it’s obviously problematic to the core. The other reaction, the other fork in the road, is for someone to say, yes, it looks odd and it looks unbelievable, but I believe it. And this attitude leads to a kind of strictness, a radicalization, an attitude that says we are right and we know that we’re right. We don’t care who says that we are wrong. Their reasoning and their intelligence must be bad. So this traditionalism and radicalization now is something that leads the Muslims to think that we need to impose Islam on people because there’s no way people are going to believe in all of these. Everything that we know to be Islam is too convoluted, too self-contradictory and too fantastic, incredible. People are not going to believe in this if you just preach it to them. So when I am going to preach it to them, we’re just going to impose it on them. We are going to set up an Islamic state and force those who don’t want to believe to just simply conform to the dictates of the Islamic State. In the meantime, we will be the true believers. This is the radicalization that we’re seeing in modern times. It has many different causes and roots. This to me is one of the causes the kind of traditionalism and anti-intellectualism that has characterized the path that we choose to follow in the face of these contradictory narratives. Complete Video
