Recordings › Dr. Shehzad Saleem | the Preservation of the Quran & the Problem of Qira'at | MindTrap with Mufti#26 · 19 Jun 2020 › Segment 8 of 25

Is the hadith that the Quran was revealed in seven ahruf authentic, and what does it mean?

salat salaah namaz prayer salaat namaaz as-salah al-salah salawat hadeeth ahadith ahaadeeth hadis ahaadith sahih saheeh sahih hadith saheeh hadith sound hadith muftis mutawatir mutawaatir mass-transmitted koran quraan al-quran sura soorah surat suwar soora ayah aya ayat ayaat aayah aayat wahy wahi wahee sahabah sahabiyyah sahabiyat ahl al-sunnah ahl as-sunnah ahlus sunnah ahl al-sunna sunnis ulama ulema ulamaa bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim bismillahir rahmanir rahim bismillahi bismillah al-rahman al-rahim

The hadith that the Quran was revealed in seven ahruf: forty interpretations, unsound reports, and reports that cancel each other

DiscussionRecorded 19 Jun 2020MindTrap with Mufti Abu Layth Segment 8 of 25 in the recording2020-06-19-S08

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This segment36:47 to 41:59 · 5 min 12 sGeneral teaching

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The guest says the seven-ahruf hadith is ambiguous, as al-Suyuti admitted, that its forty-odd interpretations are inconsistent and its versions unsoundly reported and contradictory, so they cancel each other out. He refrains from guessing what the Prophet originally said.

In more detail

Mufti Abu Layth asks about the hadith everyone brings up, that the Quran was revealed in seven ahruf: is it baseless, or does it have another interpretation? The guest first cites al-Suyuti, who counted it among the mutashabihat, ambiguous narratives whose meaning is yet to be known. In a chapter of his book he lists some forty explanations of the word ahruf, examines seven or eight major ones and shows that they are inconsistent and do not match the Arabic of the word; he has also shown that none of the versions is soundly reported, while allowing that so many reports from so many companions suggest some kernel of truth. Mufti holds up the section of the book dealing with the ahruf, the chains and the versions. Asked whether it is simply made up, the guest says not necessarily: the Prophet may have said something about the Quran that was misrepresented and misinterpreted, as with the return-of-Jesus narratives he is now working on, which more than twenty-five companions narrate; more than twenty companions does not make tawatur, and he follows the usulis' definition of tawatur as a very large number rather than the hadith scholars'. Mufti adds that the early hadith scholars did not have the term tawatur, which was introduced much later. The guest says he deliberately refrained from offering his own interpretation, since any explanation would be guesswork and would focus the debate on his reading of the Prophet's words; he restricts himself to showing that the famous versions, Umar's narrative in al-Hakim's Mustadrak and Ubayy ibn Ka'b's, have many problems and contradict one another, and that under the scholars' own rule contradictory reports that cannot be reconciled cancel each other out and must be dropped.

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Transcript

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