from the creation of a 'prophet' starting with a twisted interpretation of 'The Year of the Elephant', which happened in 552 and not in 570
as it is alleged in the Islamic tradition. Such dating confines the whole oral transmissions into the field of myths more than that of history.
All pertinent links and sum up were given in:
viewtopic.php?p=94550#p94550" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
viewtopic.php?p=95686#p95686" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
So is everything related to Muhammad in the so-called Medina period... As we've also seen, the whole traditional account of Muhammad
was built from the Abbasids to out-rule the former Umayyad dynasty. The best way to prove this is looking into its codification of laws...
Joseph Schacht (1902-1969; Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 1950)
http://www.answering-islam.net/Books/Sc ... uation.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The oldest school of law is said to be the Hanifi one, founded by Abu Hanifa (689-767?) but it's not the one prevailing in... Arabia !The whole concept of Medina as the true home of the Sunna turns out to be a fiction of the early third Century and as yet unknown to the end of the second. This direct evidence of our sources enables us to draw conclusions which we could not draw with anything like the same certainty if we had to apply our historical intuition or personal prejudice to the historical tradition which is notoriously weighed in favor of Medina and against the Umayyads. (...)
According to the ancient schools, traditions from the Prophet as such do not as yet possess an overriding authority; only Shafi'i, obviously under the influence of the pressure group of traditionists, upholds consistently the doctrine that when there exists a tradition from the Prophet, no other argument is valid. Shaf'i's work is full of monotonous repetitions of this essential doctrine of his, and it is clear that this doctrine was a startling innovation in his time. It is certain, too, that the great mass of legal traditions which invoke the authority of the Prophet, originated in the time of Shafi'i and later(see below); we can observe this directly by following the successive stages of legal discussion and the ever-increasing number of relevant traditions incorporating gradual refinements. It can further be shown that legal traditions from the Prophet began to appear, approximately, in the second quarter of the 2nd century A.H. (i.e. 750, thus from the emerging Abbasids......)
Instead of relying on individual traditions from Companions, the several schools adopted rather one or the other Companion as their eponym, or I might say patron saint, putting their doctrine as a whole under his aegis, and referring to him as their authority in general terms. (...) In other words: even the general reference to Companions (or to Successors), a stage which preceded the technical and formal reference to individual traditions from the Prophet, date only from about the year A.H. 100. We must therefore abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet. (...) in general we can say: the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition. (...)
As regards the biography of the Prophet, traditions of legal and of historical interest cannot possibly be divided from one another. The important point is that to a much higher degree than hitherto suspected, seemingly historical information on the Prophet is only the background for legal doctrines and therefore devoid of independent value. For instance, the Medinese regarded the marriage concluded by a pilgrim as invalid, the Meccans and the Iraqians regarded it as valid. The Medinese projected their doctrine back to Ibn 'Umar and, with spurious circumstantial details, to 'Umar himself.
The opposite doctrine was expressed in a tradition to the effect that the Prophet married Maymuna as a pilgrim. This tradition was countered, on the part of the Medinese, by another tradition related by Sulaiman b. Yasar who was a freedman of Maymuna to the effect that the Prophet married her in Medina, and therefore not as a pilgrim, and by more explicit tradition to the same effect related by Yazid b. Asamm, a nephew of Maymuna. We see that even the details of this important event in the life of the Prophet are not based on authentic historical recollection, notwithstanding the family isnads; but are fictitious and intended to support legal doctrines....
A considerable part of the standard biography of the Prophet in Medina, as it appeared in the second half of the second century A.H., was of very recent origin and is therefore without independent historical value...
They differ upon their recognized chain of transmissions, each one having -as said above- their own patronizing alleged sources.
But wait... we have -nothing- directly from Abu Hanifa! What we have comes from his 'pupils' Abu Yusuf (d.798) and Muhammad
al-Shaybani (d.805) and they differed with Hanifa from traditions unavailable to the earlier scholar! i. e. They weren't yet fabricated!
And, we've seen before how 'his' Fiqh Akbar I is without reference to the Koran, I guess another 'tradition' unavailable to Abu Hanifa...
The Shafi'i school of law is said to have been founded by Imam ash-Shafi'i (767-820?), yet the oldest biography we have about him is,
according to wikipedia, that of Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi (died 327H/939) and is no more than a collection of anecdotes, some of them
fantastic. The first real biography was made by Ahmad Bayhaqi (died 458H/1066) and is filled with... ''pious legends''....
