Muhammad Ibn ‘Umar al-Waqidi as a Narrator

by Syed Suleman Nadvi

1. Introduction:

One of the well known early reporters of the Sirah is Muhammad bin Umar al-Waqidi widely known to the students of Islamic history as al-Waqidi. He was born in Madinah in 130 A.H./747 C.E. He settled in Baghdad where he attained the high rank of “qadha” during the caliphate of al-Mamun (198 A.H./813 C.E. – 218 A.H./833 C.E.). He died in 207 A.H./822 C.E. in Baghdad. He belongs to the early group of writers on “sirah” and his famous book on the subject is “Kitab al-Maghazi” in which he has described the campaigns of the prophet.

Refuting Wesley and Tariq on Complexion of the Prophet

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله وحده و الصلاة و السلام على من لا نبي بعده و على آله و أصحابه أجمعين

by Waqar Akbar Cheema & Gabriel Keresztes Abdul Rahman Al-Romaani

This is a response to the falsehood being spread by Wesley Muhammad of the Nation of Islam cult, and Tariq Berry, a self styled amateur ‘scholar’. Please use the table of contents below for easy navigation in this rather long response.

Table of Contents

The Problem of Enormous Numbers of Hadith

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله وحده و الصلاة و السلام على من لا نبي بعده و على آله و أصحابه أجمعين

This is reproduction of APPENDIX II from Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa Azmi’s work “Studies in Early Hadith Literature” Suhail Academy, Lahore 2001 pp. 301-305

There are references to hundreds of teachers from whom al-Thauri, Ibn al-Mubarak, al-Zuhri, etc. had written ahadith. In the works of biographers we find a long list of teachers and students of eminent scholars. There are at least fifty students of al-Zuhri who made their written collections from him. If, on average, every one of them had written only five hundred traditions from him, then this number would have been 25,000. If we go a step further and assume for example that every student of al-Zuhri had only two or three students, then this numbers of traditions might have increased at the end of the second century to some 75,000, and in the time of Bukhari and his contemporaries they have been in hundreds of thousands.