Margoliouth’s Muhammad and the Rise of Islam (1905)...

Margoliouth’s Muhammad and the Rise of Islam (1905), Brockelmann’s History of the Islamic People (1939), Arnold and Guillaume’s The Legacy of Islam (1931), Guillaume’s Islam (1954), von Grunebaum’s Classical Islam (1963), Arnold’s The Caliphate (1965), and The Cambridge History of Islam (1970) have completely ignored the event of Ghadir Khumm.

Why did these and many other Western scholars ignore the event of Ghadir Khumm Since Western scholars mostly relied on anti-Shi’a works, they naturally ignored the event of Ghadir Khumm. L. Veccia Vaglieri, one of the contributors to the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1953), writes.

Most of those sources which form the basis of our knowledge of the life of the Prophet (Ibn Hisham, al-Tabari, Ibn Sa’d, etc.) pass in silence over the ’s stop at Ghadir Khumm, or, if they mention it, say nothing of his discourse (the writers evidently feared to attract the hostility of the Sunnis, who were in power, by providing material for the polemic of the Shi’is who used these words to support their thesis of ‘Ali’s right to the caliphate).

Consequently, the western biographers of the (PBUH&HP), whose work is based on these sources, equally make no reference to what happened at Ghadir Khumm. (2) Then we come to those few Western scholars who mention the hadith or the event of Ghadir Khumm but express their scepticism about its authority-the second stage of the classical response of the Sunni polemicists. The first example of such scholars is Ignaz Goldziher, a highly respected German Orientalist of the nineteenth century.

He discusses the hadith of Ghadir Khumm in his Muhammedanische Studien (1889-1890) translated into English as Muslim Studies (1966-1971) under the chapter entitled “The Hadith in its Relation to the Conflicts of the Parties of Islam.” Coming to the Shi’as, Goldziher writes a stronger argument in their [Shi’as’] favour… was their conviction that the Prophet had expressly designated and appointed ‘Ali as his successor before his death…Therefore the Ali adherents were concerned with inventing and authorizing traditions which prove ‘Ali’s installation by direct order of the Prophet.

The most widely known tradition (the authority of which is not denied even by orthodox authorities though they deprive it of its intention by a different interpretation) is the tradition of Khumm, which came into being for this purpose and is one of the firmest foundations of the theses of Imam Ali party.