robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

But with Muhammad held up as an exemplar, the Hadith became political weapons in the hands of
warring factions within the Islamic world. And as is always the case with weapons in wartime, they
began to be manufactured wholesale. The early Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Shihab az-Zuhri, who
died in 741, sixty years before the death of Malik ibn Anas, complained even in his day that the “emirs
forced people to write hadiths.” 17 Even the caliph al-Mahdi (775–785) was known as someone who
fabricated hadiths. 18
Some of these were useful in justifying the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire, by placing its manifest
destiny in the mouth of Muhammad. One such hadith describes an incident during the siege of Medina by
the pagan Quraysh of Mecca. After ordering his followers to dig a trench around the city, Muhammad
jumps in with a pickax to help out with a particularly large rock. Three times when he strikes the rock,
lightning shoots out from it. 19 Muhammad then explains: “The first means that God has opened up to me
the Yaman [Yemen]; the second Syria and the west; and the third the east.” 20 In another version of the tale,
he says the lightning indicates that the Muslims will conquer “the palaces of al-Hirah” in southern Iraq
“and al-Madaiin of Kisra,” the winter capital of the Sassanian Empire, as well as “the palaces of the pale
men in the lands of the Byzantines” and “the palaces of San‘a.” 21 In another, Muhammad predicts that “the
Greeks will stand before the brown men (the Arabs) in troops in white garments and with shorn heads,
being forced to do all that they are ordered, whereas that country is now inhabited by people in whose
eyes you rank lower than a monkey on the haunches of a camel.” 22
Muslims also fabricated hadiths in the heat of political and religious controversies that they hoped to
settle with a decisive, albeit hitherto unknown, word from the prophet. Abd al-Malik at one point wanted
to restrict Muslims from making pilgrimages to Mecca, because he was afraid one of his rivals would
take advantage of the pilgrimage to recruit followers. Accordingly, he prevailed upon the hapless az-Zuhri
to fabricate a hadith to the effect that a pilgrimage to the mosque in Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis) was just
as praiseworthy in the sight of Allah as one to Mecca. Az-Zuhri went even further, having Muhammad say
that “a prayer in the Bayt al-Maqdis of Jerusalem is better than a thousand prayers in other holy places”—
in other words, even better than going to Mecca. This hadith duly appears in one of the six canonical
Hadith collections that Muslim scholars consider most reliable: the Sunan of Muhammad ibn Maja (824–
887). 23
Factionalism and the Hadith
Sometimes hadiths were manufactured in order to support one party or another among early Muslim
factions. The caliph Muawiya had supplanted the last “rightly guided caliph,” Muhammad's son-in-law
Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Ali's son and chosen successor Husayn, and he continued to struggle against the
nascent party of Ali (shiat Ali), which ultimately became the Shiites. Muawiya is presented in a hadith as
having told his lieutenant al-Mughira: “Do not tire of abusing and insulting Ali and calling for God's
mercifulness for Uthman [Ali's predecessor and Muawiya's cousin], defaming the companions of Ali,
removing them and omitting to listen to them; praising, in contrast, the clan of Uthman, drawing them near
to you and listening to them.” 24 Accordingly, a hadith appeared in which Muhammad declared that Ali's
father and Muhammad's guardian, Abu Talib, was burning in hell: “Perhaps my intercession will be of use
to him at the day of resurrection, so that he may be transferred into a pool of fire which reaches only up to