Claim that the Sunnah cannot be trusted

This
is the view of some heretics and misguided people, both in the past
and nowadays. In modern times, those who expressed this view include
Saalih Abu Bakr in his book al-Adwaa’
al-Qur’aaniyyah; Husayn Ahmad Ameen in Daleel al-Muslim al-Hazeen; Ahmad Ameen in Fajr
al-Islam; ‘Abd-Allaah al-Na’eem in Nahwa Tatweer al-Tashree’ 
al-Islaami; Sa’eed al-‘Ashmaawi in Haqqeeqat
al-Hijaab; Saalih al-Wardaani in his misleading book Rihlati
min al-Sunnah ila al-Shee’ah; ‘Abd al-Jawaad Yaaseen in al-Sultah fi’l-Islam; Nasr Abu Zayd in Imaam
al-Shaafa’i; Zakariya ‘Abbaas Dawood in Ta’ammulaat
fi’l-Hadeeth; Hawlat Nahr in Diraasaat
Muhammadiyyah; Maurice Bucaille in  Diraasat
al-Kutub al-Muqaddisah; Murtada al-‘Askar in Khamsoon
wa Mi’ah Sahaabi Mukhtalaq; Dr. Mustafa Mahmood in Maqaalaat
‘an al-Shafaa’ah.

We
say: it is true that there were fabricators and liars who made up words
and attributed them to the Messenger of Allaah
(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), but the matter is not quite
so simple as imagined by those doubters who also spread doubts among
others. They are unaware of the facts about how the Muslims took care
of the Sunnah. Alongside the fabricators, there were great numbers of
narrators who were trustworthy and highly skilled, and a large number
of scholars who surrounded the hadeeths of the Messenger of Allaah
(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) with a strong barrier which
was difficult for the liars to penetrate. By means of their vast knowledge
and deep insight, these muhaddithoon (scholars of hadeeth) were able
to spot the liars and understand their intentions and motives, and they
were able to detect everything that was falsely attributed to the Messenger
of Allaah (peace and blessings
of Allaah be upon him). These fabricators were not given free rein to
do as they wished with the ahaadeeth of the Prophet
(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), and they were given no
room to penetrate the ranks of trustworthy narrators of ahaadeeth without
being detected.

Who
else exposed the lies of these kaafirs, heretics and extreme innovators?

Who
were the ones who gave us the definition of what is fabricated, the
reasons for fabrication, different types of fabrications and the signs
by which a fabricated report may be recognized?  Who wrote so many
books on this issue?

They
are the guardians of Islam, the vicegerents and troops of Allaah on
His earth. They are the brilliant scholars of whom Haaroon al-Rasheed
spoke when he arrested a heretic and ordered that he be executed. The
heretic said, “Why are you executing me?” Haaroon al-Rasheed said, “To
rid the people of you.” The heretic said: “O Ameer
al-Mu’mineen, what will you do about the thousand ahaadeeth
– according to one report, four thousand ahaadeeth – which I have fabricated
and spread among you, in which I made what is halaal haraam and what
is haraam halaal, of which the Prophet uttered not one letter?” Haaroon
al-Rasheed said to him: “What will you do, O enemy of Allaah, about
Abu Ishaaq al-Fazaari and ‘Abd-Allaah ibn al-Mubaarak? They will go
through them and sift them letter by letter.” (Tadhkirat
al-Huffaaz by al-Dhahabi, 1/273; Taareekh
al-Khulafaa’ by al-Suyooti, p. 174).

Professor
Muhammad Asad said: “The existence of fabricated ahaadeeth cannot be
taken to prove that the entire system of hadeeth is not to be trusted,
because these fabricated ahaadeeth never deceived the muhadditheen as
some European critics claimed, oversimplifying the matter, and as was
echoed by some who claim to be Muslims.” (al-Islam ‘ala Muftaraq al-Tareeq, p. 96)

We will end this
discussion by quoting what was said by Imaam Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah:
Imaam Abu’l-Muzaffar al-Sam’aani said: “If they say: there are too many
reports in the hands of the people and they have become confused, we
say: no one is confused except those who are ignorant. Those who have
knowledge of them (the reports) check them as stringently as those who
deal with money check dirhams and dinars. So they single out (and discard)
the false reports and keep the good reports. If there happens to be
a narrator who made a mistake, this will not go unnoticed by the brilliant
scholars of hadeeth. These scholars listed the mistakes made in both
the isnaad (chain of narrators) and matn (texts) of  reports; so
you can see that for each narrator they made a list of the mistakes
that he had made and the letters that he had mispronounced. If the mistakes
of the narrators – in both the isnaad and the matn – did not go unchecked,
then how could the fabricated ahaadeeth manufactured by the heretics
have slipped past those brilliant scholars?  How could people have
narrated ahaadeeth from heretics without the scholars noticing? That
is the view of some heretics, but no one would say such a thing except
one who is ignorant, misguided, an innovator and a liar who wants to
undermine the saheeh ahaadeeth and true reports of the Prophet
(peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and confuse ignorant people
by means of this lie. There is no evidence for rejecting the reports
of the Messenger of Allaah (peace
and blessings of Allaah be upon him) that is weaker or more impossible
than this. The one who voices this view deserves to be silenced and
expelled from the Muslim lands.