Description
In these times of widespread attacks against Islam and its prophet, but also against his followers, it became urgent to give voice to Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. For if some aphorisms of Jesus are well known in the West, sometimes even turned into proverbs such as the expression: “No man is a prophet in his own country”, who in our country is able to quote a single word of the prophet of Islam? However, Muslim traditionalists have compiled them into hundreds of collections that include tens of thousands of these words called “hadith”.
The hadith, therefore, refers to a word – or, more rarely, to an act of the Prophet or his tacit approval – communicated by one of his companions. The content of the hadith collections is thus similar to that of the four Gospels, which record the words and deeds of Jesus, except that the plan of the Gospels follows the course of Christ’s life, whereas the hadith collections are generally classified by subject matter.
However, there is a major difference between the hadith collections and the Gospels: the “chain of transmission”. While we do not know the lives of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, let alone those who transmitted their texts to us, each hadith comes to us with a list of the men who transmitted it, from the companion who heard it from the mouth of the Prophet to the one who recorded it in his collection.
One of the particularities of Islam is, in fact, what is known as “hadith sciences”, which study the authenticity of a given hadith by analyzing the probity and rigor of the various persons who contributed to its transmission. If one person is missing in the chain, or if one of the reporters lacks probity or rigor, the hadith is rejected.
The best known hadith collections are those of al-Bukhari (810-870) and Muslim (817-875), whose authenticity is unanimously accepted by Muslims to the point that it can be said that al-Bukhari and Muslim are to Muslims what Matthew, Mark or Luke are to Christians. In other words, their works are the gospel for them. Therefore, in order to present the reader with the most authentic traditions, we have drawn essentially from these two collections the hadiths proposed here. In addition, we have taken a number of traditions from the works which, in terms of authenticity, immediately follow al-Bukhari and Muslim, namely the collections of Abū Dawūd, Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah, Nasai, and Imam Ahmad. These seven hadith compilations are today considered by Muslim scholars to be the most accurate and reliable.
Following the example of the Muslim traditionists, the hadiths have been classified by subject, more specifically into five main subjects:
First topic: dogma. In this first part, hadiths related to the Muslim faith and doctrine are mentioned, beginning with the belief in the Oneness of God, the central dogma of Islam, and continuing with topics as diverse as the love of God, angels, predestination and the Last Day. The titles of the first chapters of this part: Oneness of God, Love of God and Hope in God, are to be compared with the three Christian theological virtues of faith, charity and hope.
Second theme: good behavior. This part concisely presents some aspects of Muslim morality: love for one’s neighbor, respect for parents and elders, kindness towards the weak. It also lists the qualities that every Muslim should possess: modesty, mercy, humility, sincerity, etc.
Third theme: good deeds. By good deeds we mean the various religious practices of Islam, starting with ritual prayer, followed by legal almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage.
Fourth topic: prohibitions. This section lists the main prohibitions of Islam, focusing on moral prohibitions rather than, for example, dietary prohibitions. It includes some of the deadly sins of Christianity: greed, anger, envy and pride, the most serious sin, which God cannot forgive, being polytheism or idolatry.
The fifth part brings together various hadiths relating, for example, to the daily life of the Muslim, but also prophecies and parables of Muhammad or stories of past nations, transmitted by the Prophet of Islam to his companions.
Sometimes several topics are dealt with in a single hadith, such as “Fear God wherever you are, follow a bad deed with a good deed, He will erase it, and behave in the best way with your neighbor,” which deals with faith, good deeds, and good behavior. The hadith is then integrated into one or the other of these parts.
Those who read these sayings of the Prophet will sometimes be astonished by their similarity, in content rather than in form, to certain words attributed to the prophets, to Jesus in particular, or to certain passages of Scripture. This is not surprising, since the prophets were sent by the same God with a single message that can be summarized as follows: worship God without associating anything with him, a message insisted upon in the Old Testament, and love your neighbor, a teaching omnipresent in the New Testament. Did not the Prophet say: “The prophets are blood brothers, their mothers are different, but their religion is one”?
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