Friday, 11 October 2013

Abu Huraira by Ayatullah Sharaf ul Din Mousavi by Ayatullah Sharaf ul Din Mousavi

The books author is a Shia scholar who has done a pretty commendable job of explaining personality of Abu Huraira which maybe the first Maulvi of Islam. He comes into Islam during the last years of Mohammad's life as an improvised and destitute, always struggling for his next meal. He was one of the many 'people of the Suf' who were living on the largesse of the nascent Muslim community. He would routinely initiate a discussion on some Quranic Verse in order to try and win his next meal from mostly the Prophet of any other able companions. He was made the governor of Bahrain, only to be later removed by Umar on embezzlement charges. Later he was able to get closer to Hazrat Usman, and under an ageing Khalifa attains almost messiah like perception as he seemed to have sided with the killers of Hazrat Usman. After Usman Abu Huraira fell out of favour of Hazrat Ali but was rewarded for any disfavour during Muawiyyas rule, which sort of make sense as Muawiyya must be looking for religious justification for his rule after taking over from the extremely popular Ali. The ever imaginative Abu Huraira has come up with a number of Hadees during Muawiyyas period. Like, Allah has told me that there are only three amin (true to every word) individuals besides myself, Abu Huraira, Gibrail, and Abu Muawiyya.
There are also quite a few Hadees in strong favour of Hazrat Abu Bakr as the first rightful Khalifa. Any Shia will naturally feel slighted when these Hadith are taken at face value by Sunnis to justify rule by Hazrats Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman. Trouble is that very few Sunni scholars will actually present their side of the argument, preferring to hide behind the flimsy statement that all companions of the Prophet are equally venerable. Unfortunately this very weak statement does not hold in an age where knowledge is at the tip of the fingers. It's high time that a comprehensive logical study of the Hadith in order to ween out all the controversial. Instead of conducting such a study the Islamic scholars seem to following Abu Huraira's example of Hadith propaganda by churning out countless conspiracy theories in order to confuse the ordinary Muslims into disengaging with real event. Case in point is Malala's alleged shooting by the Taliban allegedly. Within weeks of the incident, the social media, TV, and print media were heaving with a number of almost credible stories about her shooting forcing sympathisers like me to disengage somewhat. Unfortunately, the Abu Hurairas if the world will always win as the power of propaganda is extremely powerful.

Most of the book is debunking Hadith by Abu Huraira one by one, I shall leave the reader to make up his own conclusions by going through the rather imaginative literary corpus on offer here. 

Are we ever going to grow out of this chaos?

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