It has been related to Abu-Sa`id al-Khidriy that the Holy Prophet said...

It has been related to Abu-Sa`id al-Khidriy that the Holy Prophet said, ‘You must erase anything that has been recorded about me except the Holy Qur’an.’[^3] From the expression of the first text ‘My father collected the Hadith,’ it can be noted that Abu-Bakr recorded the Hadith after the Holy Prophet’s demise, especially the text affirmed that he had quoted them from other narrators, ‘I anticipated that I would die while I still have this collection among which there might be reports of a man that I deemed trustworthy while he was the opposite; therefore, I would be the narrator of such false reports.’ Abu-Bakr’s anticipation that such texts would be falsely related to the Holy Prophet does not agree with the supposition that the Hadith had been collected during the Holy Prophet’s lifetime; otherwise he could show the collected texts to the Holy Prophet for scrutiny.

If it is claimed that the idea of showing such texts to the Holy Prophet for scrutiny had just slipped away from Abu-Bakr’s mind, the answer should be that, firstly, it is unreasonable for Abu-Bakr to miss such a thing, especially that he had a close position to the Holy Prophet in addition to the fact that doubt regarding these collections was rooted in his mind.

Secondly, it is unlikely that Abu-Bakr had overlooked neglectfully such an important issue until a time close by his death, whereas the Sahabah used not to neglect asking the Holy Prophet about even the most trivial questions and whenever they had felt any suspicion.

The question of setting fire to the collections of Hadith and Abu-Bakr’s concern about attributing them to the Holy Prophet and that he ‘would be the narrator of such false reports,’ since death was about to knock his door—this question proves that Abu-Bakr had collected the Hadith in the last of his reign and that he had never heard even one Hadith directly from the Holy Prophet; lest it would be extremely odd for him to set fire to Hadiths that he had heard from the Holy Prophet directly!

What is more is that had Abu-Bakr collected such Hadiths during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet, historians and biographers would have certainly referred to this issue and he would never have spent that night restlessly plus `Ā’ishah would have narrated that her father had collected the Hadith during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet or any alike statement.