Muhammad in His Own Words: The Forgotten Wisdom of the Prophet

By Abdul Haqq

Allah commands all Muslims to obey and imitate the Prophet Muhammad, who is the founder of Islam and the world's model for righteous behavior. They are to do so by following the hadiths, written records of what Muhammad said and did, including even the smallest details of how he lived. Muslims consider sahih hadiths to be the m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evaluation Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781736827659

Abdul Haqq

Abdul Haqq is a scholar of Islam with a Master of Arts in Islamic Studies. He has taught in universities in the Middle East, Africa and the United States. He is an attorney, an author, and a world traveler. He has lived in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

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Muhammad

in His Own Words

The Forgotten Wisdom of the Prophet

Abdul Haqq

© 2023 Abdul Haqq. All rights reserved.

Published by Evaluation Press

P.O. Box 790103, San Antonio, Texas 78279.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

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All citations, quotations and excerpts appearing in this book are either public domain, open source, or fair use under section 107 of the US Copyright Act.

Because of the dynamic nature of the internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-7368276-4-2

ISBN: Epub 978-1-7368276-5-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023914584

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - INTRODUCTION

Chapter 2 - SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Chapter 3 - WOMEN

Chapter 4 - RITUAL

Chapter 5 - VIOLENCE

Chapter 6 - THE AFTERLIFE

Chapter 7 - MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION

Chapter 8 - RACISM, SLAVERY AND NON-MUSLIMS

Chapter 9 - SATAN AND SPIRITUAL BEINGS

Chapter 10 - ANIMALS

Chapter 11 - HYGIENE

Chapter 12 - MISCELLANEOUS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Muhammad

For more than two billion Muslims in every corner of the globe, no name elicits such honor and reverence as Muhammad. It is perhaps the most given name among boys in the world. Muhammad is the founding prophet of Islam and the Messenger of Allah. For Muslims, the prophet Muhammad embodied perfect wisdom, keen judgment, knowledge of the unseen, and extraordinary leadership. He was also kind, humble, generous, loving, and supremely merciful. Muslims consider him to be the most exemplary model for all humanity. They believe imitating him as closely as possible is an act of obedience to Allah. Thus, Islam considers knowledge of how the Prophet Muhammad lived more than 1400 years ago to be essential for righteous living today.

Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, or Muhammad, was born around the year 570 AD in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. His father died before his birth, and his mother died when he was about six years old. Ultimately, his uncle Abu Talib raised him. Once Muhammad was old enough, he began working on his uncle’s caravans. By the time he was twenty-one, he had developed a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness. In his early twenties, a wealthy widow named Khadija hired Muhammad to do business for her in Syria. She later married him when he was twenty-five years old and she was forty.

Given Khadija’s wealth, Muhammad no longer needed to work the caravans. He began the practice of retiring to quiet and secluded places around Mecca to contemplate life’s bigger questions. He was troubled that the surrounding empires were so advanced and prosperous, and he noted they were monotheistic. The Arabs of that time, however, were backward and polytheistic. While in a cave one day, the angel Gabriel came to him and pressed him into the ground so forcefully that he thought his chest might collapse. Gabriel released the pressure and commanded him to Recite!¹ Muhammad replied, What am I to recite?² After repeating this process twice more, the angel Gabriel finally revealed to Muhammad the first of many verses that would eventually be gathered into the holy book of Islam, the Qur’an.

After this incident in the cave, Muhammad was extremely agitated and depressed. He thought he might be possessed by jinn, the rough equivalent of demons.³ He exclaimed, "There is nothing I despise more than the majnoon," meaning those, usually poets, whom the jinn possessed and helped in writing their poetry. Muhammad returned home and asked Khadija to cover him with a blanket. He told her what happened and she reassured him that he was a noble person that Allah would not dishonor by jinn possession. Muhammad and Khadija went to visit her first cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, an Ebionite Christian priest. Waraqa also reassured Muhammad the spirit⁴ that had appeared to him was sent from Allah, and not from the devil. Still, Muhammad was unconvinced. Khadija decided to run a test.

She had Muhammad lay his head on her right thigh. She asked him, Do you see the spirit? Muhammad said yes. She uncovered her bosom and asked him the same question again. This time he said no. She assured him the spirit was from Allah, presumably because an angelic spirit would not remain in the presence of an unclothed woman.⁵ Muhammad became convinced he was Allah’s apostle to the Arab people.

Over the next twenty-three years, Gabriel returned often. He revealed to Muhammad a few verses at a time from an eternal book in heaven containing God’s actual speech. Muhammad recited these verses to the people of Mecca, calling them to belief in only one God and acceptance of him as God’s messenger. The people rejected Muhammad’s message and his claim to prophethood. The Prophet and his small band of followers migrated from Mecca to Medina. Thereafter, Muhammad’s fortunes changed.

The Prophet grew in wealth and power through alliances with Arab tribes and raids on Meccan caravans. His followers were called Muslims. Muslims are those who submit to Allah as the one true God, to Muhammad as Allah’s final prophet, and to the religion of Islam. The Muslims grew in number until they were eventually able to conquer the tribes of Mecca and attain dominance in the region. Upon Muhammad’s death, his successors in leadership (caliphs) and their warriors expanded Muslim-controlled territory across the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and parts of Europe. To this day, Muslims are the majority in most of these regions.⁶

Tawhid

In the first decades of Islamic rule over the lands they had conquered, Muslim rulers left in place the legal systems of those prior empires. But one important aspect of Islamic theology required a change. Tawhid is an Arabic word meaning indivisible oneness or divine unity. The doctrine of tawhid meant that Allah had revealed in the Qur’an everything humanity needed for a prosperous and peaceful civilization, including a legal system. Islam needed a legal system to replace the human laws of the lands Muslims now ruled.

Sharia

Muslim scholars examined the Qur’an to locate and codify the law of Allah, which became known as the sharia. But a problem arose. The Qur’an is rich with instruction on doctrine and belief but says very little about legal matters.⁷ The scholars and judges needed a more robust source for sharia than they found in the text of the Qur’an. They found it in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

Allah says in the Qur’an that The Messenger of God is an excellent model for those of you who put your hope in God and the Last Day and remember Him often. ⁸ Allah also says: Whoever obeys the Messenger obeys God.⁹ You who believe, obey God and the Messenger. . . ¹⁰ And, When God and His Messenger have decided on a matter that concerns them, it is not fitting for any believing man or woman to claim freedom of choice in that matter: whoever disobeys God and His Messenger is far astray.¹¹

Given Allah’s view of His messenger Muhammad, it follows that the Prophet would have lived his life in strict accordance with the Qur’an. Allah would have inspired his words. The Qur’an’s truth would have regulated his actions. Nothing errant from Qur’anic instruction would have taken place within his presence that he would not have corrected. Muslims call the comprehensive body of knowledge about the lifestyle of Muhammad the sunna, or tradition. Muhammad’s sunna was read into the Qur’an and became equivalent to, or just subordinate to, the text of the Qur’an.¹² The sunna of the Prophet became an additional source for sharia law. In practice, Islamic scholars and judges were able to discern the Qur’an’s revealed truth in matters of law from the words and deeds of the Prophet. But what had he said? What had he done? How were sharia judges to determine what was a part of the sunna?

Islamic society was largely oral as opposed to literate, meaning knowledge was passed down in verbal form from one generation to the next. The sunna was comprised of hundreds of thousands of traditions concerning what the Prophet said and did. Muslims passed down these traditions through the centuries beginning with the companions of the Prophet who heard his words and observed his behavior. They related what they heard and saw to others, who passed down that information through the generations until the ninth through eleventh centuries AD when the sharia scholars and judges were discovering Islamic law in the sunna.

Yet another question remained. How was one to determine which traditions were true and which were false? Nothing less than Allah’s revealed law was at stake. To address this issue, a new type of scholar arose, one that specialized in evaluating which of the traditions about Muhammad’s life were authentic and which were fabricated. These scholars traveled the breadth of the Islamic world gathering these traditions and writing them down. Once written, these sayings became known as hadiths. Scholars recorded more than 770,000 hadiths over the course of several centuries.

These Muslim scholars evaluated a hadith by examining its chain of transmission, or isnad, and its text, or matn. In evaluating a particular hadith’s chain of transmission, the scholar first evaluated the orthodoxy and reputation of every person within the chain. If they all passed that test, the scholar proceeded to evaluate the timing and location of each step in the chain. For instance, if within the chain a man named Ahmad was said to have transmitted the hadith to a man named Abdullah, the scholar ensured that Ahmad and Abdullah were alive at the same time and were in the same location at least once in their lives. This ensured the transmission was possible. If Ahmad died before Abdullah was born, the scholar might doubt the hadith’s claim of authenticity. But often, the transmitter of a hadith would transmit to multiple people at the same time creating multiple chains of transmission. An error in one chain did not mean the hadith was not authentic. Scholars had the most confidence in those hadiths with the greatest number of intact chains.

Matn or Content Criticism

A part of evaluating the authenticity of a hadith was evaluating the meaning of the text. Since the Prophet could never err or state a falsehood, and could only behave in an exemplary manner, no authentic hadith could contain false or illogical material. Suppose Muhammad prophesied a future event. As with other hadiths, scholars would evaluate the tradition concerning that prophecy. What if scholars determined the hadith was authentic by virtue of its chains of transmission, but the prophesied event did not happen? The scholars had to conclude the hadith was fabricated but could not admit they evaluated the text of the hadith. Who were they to question the Prophet’s words, and by extension, the words of Allah? Thus, the scholars disguised their evaluation of the hadith’s meaning by only evaluating its chain of transmission. When scholars needed to reject a hadith due to its content, they would find a defect in the chain of transmission which justified the hadith’s rejection.¹³

Eventually, scholars divided hadiths into one of four categories. They categorized them as either sahih, hasan, da’if, or munkar:

Sahih: meaning, true, pure, valid, or exact

Hasan: good or adequate; in other words, sahih but with slightly less certainty¹⁴

Da’if: weak; still judged authentic but with less certainty than hasan

Munkar: rejected as forged, or mawdu

Sahih, hasan, and da’if hadiths are used as the basis for sharia rulings.¹⁵ Although hadith scholars occasionally disagree on the grades given a few hadiths, all agree there are about 7,700 sahih hadiths.¹⁶

In addition to providing a basis for sharia rulings, the sunna, as embodied in the sahih, hasan and da’if hadiths, provides the authoritative guidebook for the greatest part of Muslim faith and practice. The hadiths teach:

exacting rules for the proper performance of Islamic religious rituals

proper moral and ethical practices, both in public interaction and private family affairs

how to live daily life including how to eat, brush one’s teeth, and use the toilet

how to view non-Muslims

the details of expected experiences in paradise and hell

various ways to please or anger Allah

The hadiths teach these and thousands of other details concerning almost every area of life. In most cases, a Muslim does not read hadiths. Rather, they absorb the hadiths’ instruction through observation of their family, the Muslim community, and through informal instruction from elders and Muslim leaders. As the Qur’an commands, faithful Muslims live their lives according to hadiths, and thereby live according to the precise example set by the Prophet Muhammad.

Why this book?

Many sahih hadiths of the Prophet remain shrouded in mystery. Muslims rarely teach or follow these sahih hadiths. As a practical matter, these hadiths do not exist. It is the goal of this book to remedy this situation. More than 700 of these forgotten sahih hadiths, almost ten percent of the total, are collected here in chapters according to theme.¹⁷ Knowledge of the hadiths in this book will produce a more complete and well-rounded view of the Prophet Muhammad, one of the most influential spiritual and political leaders in world history.

Notes for the reader

A few hadiths appear in more than one chapter when the subject matter of the hadith relates to more than one theme. Notes at the end of each chapter provide source references for the hadiths cited. These references provide multiple ways to access the hadiths. Each note provides the hadith collection from which the hadith is cited, the hadith number when the hadiths from the collection are numbered consecutively, the Arabic language