Did Quran and Hadith come from the same source?
Last updated
Last updated
Sunnis love to claim that the Hadith and the Quran came from the same source; therefore, it doesn’t make sense to accept one and reject the other. There are numerous problems with this argument. Foremost, unlike the Hadith, the Quran has God’s divine guarantee that it will be preserved.
[15:9] Absolutely, we have revealed the reminder, and, absolutely, we will preserve it.
(٩) إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا ٱلذِّكْرَ وَإِنَّا لَهُۥ لَحَـٰفِظُونَ
Secondly, the Quran is the most massively transmitted scripture in the history of the world. No other text has been memorized by so many people generation after generation throughout history. This is not the same for the Hadith. Not only was Hadith not written until the second century, but no Hadith would even be considered mutawtir except for the Quran.
The Companion Wathila b. Asqa‘ had admitted that sometimes the early Muslims even confused the exact wording of the Quran, which was universally well-known and well-preserved. So how, he asked, could one expect any less in the case of a report that the Prophet had said just once? Al-Hasan al-Basri is reported to have said, If we only narrated to you what we could repeat word for word, we would only narrate two hadiths.
Hadith Muhammad s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World p. 24
In addition to the oral recitation, there has been a deliberate effort throughout history to preserve the Quran. This was not the case for the Hadith. Not only was there zero effort from the earliest Caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali to preserve the Hadith, but they actually went out of their way to reduce the spread of Hadith and pressured people to follow only the Quran.
Even if we look at the historical manuscripts. We have many manuscripts of the Quran that date to the life of the prophet, but the earliest manuscript of the Hadith is a single page of the Muwatta by Imam Malik dating to ~179 AH. When it comes to Bukhari, the oldest Arabic manuscript of his Sahih is dated 407 AH (1017CE) and only contains books 65 through 69, with book 65 being incomplete. The oldest full manuscript is a version narrated by Abu Dharr al-Heravi (d. 1043CE) and is kept at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, and is dated to 1155CE / 550 AH. Another complete manuscript version is kept at Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland (no. 4176). It was copied by Ahmad bin Ali bin Abdul Wahhab and was dated 28 November 1294CE / 8 Muharram 694 AH.
