Hadith were collected after several decades or centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s death.  Yet there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims shaping and spending their lives after the role model of the Prophet.  What were they practicing, certainly not the Hadith, as those did not exist?  What these hundreds and thousands of Muslims were living by is called Sunna.  Many a non-Muslims confuse the two!  They fail to make a distinction between Sunna and Hadith and Tom Holland is no exception, in his recent book, as he uses the word, ‘Sunna,’ for Hadith in the first paragraph quoted below.  One wonders when these non-Muslim experts on Islam fail to learn the basics, what else do they miss? See the book Our Teaching in Alislam for how Muslims of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community conceptualize the role of Sunna and Hadith in our lives.

Now, I quote from Tom Holland’s recent book, In the shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World, to show his misunderstanding:

It was hardly surprising that the great labour of fashioning the Sunna took Muslim scholars so long. Such was the compendious quantity of sayings attributed to the Prophet that only in the eleventh Christian century, some four hundred years after his death, could jurists plausibly claim to have bagged the lot. Even then, however, they could not relax. An even greater challenge awaited them: defining precisely what it was that God, speaking through His Prophet, had bestowed upon the Muslim people. Naturally, fathoming the purposes of an omnipotent and omniscient deity was no simple matter. As one ninth-century scholar, in a tone of awed defeatism, had put it: ‘Imagination does not reach Him, and thinking does not comprehend Him.’ In the event, it would take six hundred long years of bitter and occasionally murderous argument before scholars of the Sunna could finally be brought to agree on the nature of the Qur’an: that it was eternal, not created, and divine, not a reflection of God. There were certain problems altogether too critical, too sensitive, too awkward to be rushed.

Muslim theologians were not the first to wrestle with the implications of this. Long before the words of God manifested themselves in the mouth of Muhammad, Christians too had struggled to explain how a deity who transcended time and space might conceivably have descended from heaven to earth. That they identified this intrusion of the divine into the realm of the mortal with a person rather than a book had done nothing to lessen the challenge. Indeed, Christians had wrangled over the nature of Christ for quite as long as Muslim scholars would go on to debate the nature of the Qur’an. Admittedly, in the early years of the Christian faith, these arguments had hardly been such as to disturb the councils of nations; but during late antiquity, when emperors and kings started to wrestle with them too, whole empires were transformed by the arcana of such debates. Just as the civilization of Islam would be transfigured by the musings of philosophers, so would Christendom. East and west, much of the world was destined to bear witness to what had been, perhaps, the most startling controversy of late antiquity: that pondering how God might have manifested Himself on earth could serve to transform the way entire peoples behaved and thought.

Nevertheless, while Muslims and Christians faced very similar knots, their respective attempts to unravel these set them on radically different courses. Clearly, if God were to be identified with words in a book , then those words were bound to defy all attempts at rational analysis. Even to contemplate such a project was blasphemy. Devout Muslims were no more likely to question the origins of the Qur’an than devout Christians were to start ransacking Jerusalem for the skeleton of a man with holes in his hands and feet. This was because the nearest Christian analogy to the role played in Islam by the prophet’s revelations was not the Bible but Jesus – the Son of God.[1]

It is wrong to say that ‘the nearest Christian analogy to the role played in Islam by the prophet’s revelations was not the Bible but Jesus,’ as revelation is a well known concept in the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Additionally, the Holy Quran takes strong exception to anything that detracts from purest Monotheism and condemns deification of any person.  The Christians, bogged down by their dogma of Trinity and two natures of Jesus, like to befuddle and obfuscate issues and like to dwell on debates among Muslims about nature of the Quran, which mean nothing to present day Muslims.  It was only a one time historical error.  The Muslims of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, understand the Holy Quran to be literal revelation of All Knowing God to the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him.  We have all experienced a form of limited revelation in the form of dreams.  So, it is not hard for us to conceptualize verbal revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. Here I link one of my previous articles, True Nature of Divine Revelations.

In addition to the confusion between Hadith and Sunna, Tom Holland is trying to look at Muslim history through the centuries of confusion of early Christian history.  Donald Rumsfeld may have obtained some notoriety by his following brainy quote:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

References

1.  Tom Holland.  In the shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World.  Little Brown, 2012.  Page 30-31.