ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Restatement of the History of Islam and Muslims Who Wrote the History of Islam and How? History, it has been said, is the propaganda of the victorious party. What this means is that in any conflict, the victor can manipulate history just as it pleases him, and there is nothing that the vanquished can do about it. The victorious party can cook up a story and broadcast it as the absolute truth without any fear of being challenged by anyone.

It has not only the power to cook up its own story; it also has the power to spike the story of an opposing party. M. Shibli, the dean of India's Sunni historians of Islam, writes in his famous biography of , Sira-tun-Nabi, volume I, 4th printing, published by the Maarif Printing Press, Azamgarh, U.P., India, in 1976: “Among all those extraneous forces which affect and influence the writing of history, none is more powerful than the government.

But it will always be a source of pride for the Muslims that their pen was never subdued by the sword. Work on the compilation and collation of Hadith was begun in the times of the Banu Umayya. For full 90 years, from Sind in India (Indo-Pakistan) to Asia Minor and Andalusia in Spain, Ali and the children of Fatima were cursed from every pulpit in every mosque after every Friday sermon.

Thousands and thousands of hadith (traditions; statements of the Prophet) glorifying Muawiya, were manufactured, and were put into circulation. In the times of the Abbasis, hadith were invented foretelling the birth and the excellence of each (Abbasi) khalifa by name. But what was the result of all this stupendous effort?

The traditionalists (the collectors of the statements of the Prophet) declared publicly at the same time (during the caliphates of the Umayyads and the Abbasis) that all these hadith were spurious, and they rejected them. Today, we are proud to say that the science of hadith is free from all that filth and garbage.” Almost but not quite! In the case of innumerable hadith, the attempt to excise a false report from hadith literature, or to correct it, never caught up with the original untruths.

Even after expurgation, if there was one, that part of the hadith literature which relates to the personal life of Muhammad, the blessed Prophet of Islam, is full of the quaint, the curious, the fanciful and the false.