PART 4 Attribution contradicts the concept of Testimony A murder suspect stood in court and the first witness was called out, the judge asked him: Did the accused confess his crime to you? The witness said: I didn’t hear it myself but my brother told me he confessed. The judge dismissed him and called his brother to ask him, the brother said: I didn’t hear his confession myself but my father told me about it. The judge dismissed him as well and called his father to the witness stand, the father said: I didn’t hear his confession myself but my father told me right before he died yesterday. It was only natural that the judge released the accused and kicked out all the witnesses because they were no witnesses. To be a witness who is fit to testify you have to see or hear the event directly. Of course this is a symbolic story which confirms that Attribution/Ascription based on verbal tales throughout different eras have no foundation and cannot be considered by any judicial system. Al-Bukhari didn’t live in the era of the Prophet (Pbuh) and none of the narrators preceding him did. The Companions of the Prophet we lived in his Era were so busy with the conquests, seditions and disputes to report anything from the Prophet. And even if they reported any Hadeeths, how can we be sure of what they reported? We don’t have a single living witness from their timeline who survived two centuries then he wrote down what he heard with his own ears and saw with his own eyes!! Even if there was such a witness, it is our right to doubt what he said because of old age and weak memory “And among you there is he who is brought back to the miserable old age, so that he knows nothing after having known quite a few things” (Al-Hajj # 22: 5). Attribution/Ascription through generations of dead people contradicts legal testimony; accordingly it is injustice for Islam to base its regulations, which is the foundation of laws, on false testimonies doubted in its truth. Therefore real sacred regulations must only come from the Wise Book (Quran) which is immune to perjury and falsehood with the emphasis that the Way (Sunnah) of the Prophet is in applying Quran according to its era. Herein we go back to the Quran in the issues of Attribution/Ascription and Testimony and give two quick examples: 1. Testimony from the Quran’s point of view is seeing and hearing with human senses while living the events, it is a fundamental part of regulation in the Quran In bearing witness to debts, Quran mandates that it is written down even in the easiest of transactions “You should not become weary to write it whether it be small or big for its fixed term” (Al-Baqarah #2, 282), so can the witness regulation in Quran and its rules be applied to using attributed statements to the prophet as a foundation for laws and rules across generations of dead narrators who lived between the Prophet’s era and the era of writing the Hadeeths while they neither saw nor heard anything? 2. The Glorious Quran told the story of prophet Joseph when he accused his brother of stealing. Prophet Joseph orchestrated accusing his full brother of stealing so that he may keep him to his side. On their second trip to Egypt, prophet Josephs brothers pressed their father prophet Jacob to allow them to take their little brother with them, so when prophet Joseph, the ruler of Egypt, held him under the accusation of theft, his brothers lost hope in retrieving him so the eldest brother said: “Return to your father and say, ‘O our father! Verily, your son has stolen and we testify not except according to what we know, and we could not know the unseen!” (Joseph # 12: 81) This means that their eldest brother said to them to testify with what they saw when they found the stolen items in their brother’s container, and that they couldn’t know the unseen. This was the testimony of people who lived throughout the event and they testified to what they saw, and in spite of living and attending the event as it happened, they acknowledged that there might have been other unforeseen things of which they have no knowledge. Testimony as per Quranic understanding is to testify with what you yourself had seen and heard while stating that you know nothing but what you witnessed yourself, what was kept from you is known only to Allah who knows and sees everything. If we apply this concept of testimony to the process of Attribution/Ascription the contradiction becomes evident to us between the true testimonies which must be based on audible and visible truth by the present witness, and the apparent perjury of Attribution/Ascription, in which there is neither real testimony nor witnesses whatso ever, how can the dead testify? Or how can the living reports an event which he didn’t see nor live?
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 22:54:25 +0000
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