Islam - Part 14: The Hadith

Muslims know (for the most part) that it was a long time after Muhammad died before anybody wrote down much of anything about his life. But people never stopped talking about him. For over two hundred years, stories about the Islamic prophet were passed along by word of mouth, person to person (oral tradition). Mixed in with the true accounts were a lot of made-up ones. By the time somebody finally tried to sort through them all, there were over five hundred thousand accounts of Muhammad’s life going around, and most people figured the vast majority of them were false.

Which accounts of Muhammad’s life are trustworthy? In the field of uloom al-hadith - which means "the science of Muhammad’s sayings" - Muslim scholars grade each account based on things like how well-known it was and who the people were that passed it along.

The most trustworthy hadith get graded sahih, which means "true" or "authentic". The weakest ones get labelled daeef ("weak") or even maudu ("fabricated").
Imam Bukhari and his student Imam Muslim were two highly respected scholars in the third century after Muhammad.  They only collected the hadith they considered sahih and beyond dispute.  Most Muslims figure their collections are above reproach. 

Using the hadith they approved, one could hope to see that Muhammad was the noble and peaceful man Muslims have always been taught, and that there were no problematic accounts in his life. Unfortunately, problematic accounts are still evident in the sahih collections. In fact, every single account in the previous chapter was either from the Quran or from the sahih collections of Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim.

An online search, to see how other Muslims responded to the criticisms will show that many were willing to accuse even the sahih collections of containing fabricated accounts, finding ways to dismiss those accounts that were considered authentic by the great Muslim scholars of old.

They were essentially finding ways to cherry pick... pick and choose from the ancient records which accounts were reliable and which were not, creating a Muhammad that they felt comfortable with. An historical investigation should prove to be more reliable. 

What were the earliest accounts written about Muhammad, and how soon were they written? There were some shocking facts that I will cover in the next part.