Early version. Transcripts and tags are labelled by accuracy tier. A position is shown only after two independent reviews have found it in his own words.
Mufti Abu Layth ArchiveBeta

Recordings › Salman Rushdie & The Satanic Verses | Mufti Abu Layth · 19 Aug 2022 › Segment 16 of 21

machine

Why did Ibn Hajar say the satanic verses story has some basis?

salat salaah namaz prayer salaat namaaz as-salah salawat haj pilgrimage hadj hadeeth ahadith ahaadeeth hadis hadees ahaadith saheeh sahih hadith saheeh hadith sound hadith authentic imam bukhari sahih bukhari saheeh al-bukhari saheeh bukhari imam al-bukhari qadi ayyad qadi iyaad al-qadi iyad shafi shafei shafiite shafi'i school muftis sunna sunnat sunan prophetic practice mursal hadith rawi raawi ruwat narrator ulama ulema ulamaa

Ibn Hajar's defence: many weak chains, mursal reports and hadith dogmatism

LessonRecorded 19 Aug 2022Segment 16 of 21 in the recording2022-08-19-S16

Play from 1:18:40 The video loads from YouTube only when you press play. Click a time in the transcript to seek.

Watch this part

Open on YouTube at 1:18:40

The player starts at 1:18:40, the beginning of this part.

This segment1:18:40 to 1:26:29 · 7 min 49 sGeneral teaching

What this part covers

machinesummary, machine-written

Mufti Abu Layth says Ibn Hajar wrongly argued that the many weak chains give the story a basis, and attributes the mistake to passion for the hadith project rather than malice.

In more detail

Mufti Abu Layth says the problem arose with Ibn Hajar, centuries later, whom he calls a hadith dogmatist with an issue with the school of Qadi Iyad and Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi. He says the canonisation of Sahih al-Bukhari to its present unquestionable status came later, through Shafi'i scholars, first Ibn al-Salah and above all Ibn Hajar, who held that a sound chain settles a matter, and he stresses that he does not think Ibn Hajar acted from malice but from passion for the hadith project. He says that in Fath al-Bari, reacting to Qadi Iyad, Ibn Hajar argues that the many chains show the story has an origin even though they are weak, which Mufti compares to trusting five liars because there are five of them, something nobody would do with a bag of money. He adds that Ibn Hajar says he found three chains with narrators of the Sahih that do not reach the Prophet and argues that the Malikis accept mursal reports, which Mufti calls a clear, blind mistake made out of love for the hadith project.

Position stated

correctedChecked by two independent reviews, not by the channel

Mufti Abu Layth says Ibn Hajar was wrong to argue that the many weak chains give the satanic verses story a basis, a mistake he attributes to passion for the hadith project rather than to malice.

In his words

“this is ibn hajjar's clear blind mistake that he it's and i'm not saying he he i'm not saying he did this out of malice he didn't”

Category: method

Report an error

Kind: general teaching

Transcript

machine1:18:40 to 1:26:29 · click a time to seek · dotted terms open the glossary
1:18:14

what about these that are utterly weak and unacceptable and fabricated so that's something this is why i want to bring these i'll show you some of these discussions we you can see here now one of the problems was some people like was a problem here you see ibn hajj for no reason hundreds of years later 700 years we're talking after the prophet salallahu and after we're talking you

1:18:52

know one two centuries after khadiyah then avocado arabi and all these people and he has issues with you see it's not he doesn't have necessarily issue with quality or a workhorse but here's an issue with that school of thought the school of thought that is a hadith relativist why because ibn hajjar is an utter hadith dogmatist in fact the canonization of sahil bukhari to become the

1:19:31

what it is today the the the way the makam that it has the kind of cannonity of it it didn't exist before like in uh obviously sahil bukhari existed in the yards so let's say 4th century islam 5th century islam these books are there and people respect them they highly rate them it's not that they don't but it hasn't emerged to the phenomenon that people that it later becomes it becomes this it is utterly kind of

1:20:08

bulletproof in a way that really happens by just two people and they shafe because the shafa is hadith dogmatist they believe that if the chain is sahih nothing else matters if you bring me a sahih chain throw everything else against the wall it is it is now a fact just because one from one from one and these people are verified and the people who concretize this method who really crystallize this is first of all ibn salah but then after salah ibn salah the

1:20:48

real person is even he is so invested in the hadith project so invested and with sure he's got great intentions i'm not saying he's malicious or he's malignant or he's trying to spread venom he's committed to the hadith project sure and that's you know more power to you you've got a passion but sometimes you know just sometimes that as it says that mean

1:21:26

sometimes some passions lead you to your own destruction and i'm not saying it led ibn hajj to his destruction but this point of his was very destructive out of a kind of zid a stubbornness being upset at the yard for saying in the shift that these things are battle and even if they brought a chain throw it against the wall like we don't accept any chain that tries to disrespect our prophet he in reaction to that writes this in his fatal body he says

1:22:08

he says that look many chains show that this hadith has an origin so he just say look these people don't accept it however he says if a chain hadith has multiple chains even if they're weak we this shows it has a solid thing why

1:22:45

if i get that's the equivalent of that is saying if i got five peop if i got one person who's a liar and he says something now five people who are liars say the same thing it must therefore be right because there's five people saying but they're untrue they're not trustworthy say but now there's five but there's five untrustworth

1:23:13

you know if i've got a bag of money here and i say well you know i'll leave it with one but here there's five of them that is like but this but they're unreliable they're not trustworthy so how can you take unreliable people and untrust non-trustworthy people and accept them for the messenger of allah and you wouldn't accept them if they were unreliable on something let's say something very material like money but you accept these people are

1:23:52

unreliable but you throw a number in there now we'll accept them about allah and his messenger never now and he's upset that abu bakr ibrahim arabi and qaddad attacked the hadith kind of project on that so he says he says that i found three chains where they have the narrators of the people of the sahih india

1:24:25

but they don't they're not connected to the prophet now check this this is his thing back at the malik he says and then he says and he says in another point as well um that that these people accept mursal are the other accepts more because the mother of malik accepts morsel mursal is where the chain isn't connected to the prophet but the taba e says something about the prophet but he doesn't tell

1:25:04

you who he heard it from so he's kind of saying well these people accept mursal so why are they accepting this this is ibn hajjar's clear blind mistake that he it's and i'm not saying he he i'm not saying he did this out of malice he didn't what's ironic is he did this out of sheer passion and love for his com and his commitment to hadith the hadith project that he was so committed to the hadith

1:25:43

project that he didn't realize what he's saying or maybe he realized but didn't realize what he's actually saying here the absurdity the irony so you see this and just to show we'll kind of quickly go through some of these and suti does the same thing and siyuti's wording is very misleading he says

1:26:19

some of them the chain is but it's not you see it's just that the rijal are of the sight the sunnah there isn't a single one with the sun at sahi and there's been a lot of criticism of this sentence because he says oh and some of them the sahi no it isn't it's in the synod of people of the sahih but it's a cut chain and that too will bazaar the this one that he's trying to um that he's referring to so you can see these shafa is like ceoti is a big chef

Paragraphs overlapping 1:18:40 to 1:26:29. Full text on the recording page.

Cite this segment

Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.

Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2022-08-19-S16, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/t0phqrnjjby/s/16/ (accessed 1 November 2026)

APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2022, August 19). Why did Ibn Hajar say the satanic verses story has some basis? [Video, segment 2022-08-19-S16, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/t0phqrnjjby/s/16/
Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2022. "Why did Ibn Hajar say the satanic verses story has some basis?" Video, segment 2022-08-19-S16, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded August 19, 2022. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/t0phqrnjjby/s/16/
BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2022-08-19-S16,
  author = {Mufti Abu Layth},
  title = {{Why did Ibn Hajar say the satanic verses story has some basis?}},
  year = {2022},
  month = {8},
  date = {2022-08-19},
  howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/t0phqrnjjby/s/16/}},
  url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/t0phqrnjjby/s/16/},
  organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive},
  urldate = {2026-11-01},
  note = {Segment 2022-08-19-S16, auto-transcribed, may contain errors}
}
Something wrong here?

Tell us what is wrong and it will be checked against the recording. Nothing changes until a person has reviewed it.

Sending a note needs JavaScript, which is off or unavailable in this browser. Nothing has been sent.

No name, email address or account is asked for or stored, and the inbox does not store your IP address. For rate limiting it keeps an unreadable fingerprint of your connection for 48 hours, and our database provider's own logs record connections as every website's do. Only your note, its kind, the page and the moment in the recording are kept, for review.