The modern Wahhābīs being, for the most part, followers of Ibn Ḥanbal, attach great importance to the teaching of the Traditions, and have therefore caused a revival of this branch of Muslim literature. [[WAHHABI].]
We are indebted to Sir William Muir’s Introduction to the Life of Mahomet, for the following:—
“Mahometan tradition consists of the sayings of the friends and followers of the Prophet, handed down by a real or supposed chain of narrators to the period when they were collected, recorded, and classified. The process of transmission was for the most part oral. It may be sketched as follows.
“After the death of Mahomet, the main employment of his followers was arms. The pursuit of pleasure, and the formal round of religious observances, filled up the interstices of active life, but afforded scanty exercise for the higher faculties of the mind. The tedium of long and irksome marches, and the lazy intervals from one campaign to another, fell listlessly upon a simple and semi-barbarous race. These intervals were occupied, and that tedium beguiled, chiefly by calling up the past in familiar conversation or more formal discourse. On what topic, then, would the early Moslems more enthusiastically descant than on the acts and sayings of that wonderful man who had called them into existence as a conquering nation, and had placed in their hands ‘the keys both of this world and of Paradise’?
“Thus the converse of Mahomet’s followers would be much about him. The majesty of his character gained greatness by contemplation; and, as time removed him farther and farther from them, the lineaments of the mysterious mortal who was wont to hold familiar intercourse with the messengers of heaven, rose in dimmer, but in more gigantic proportions. The mind was unconsciously led on to think of him as endowed with supernatural power, and ever surrounded by supernatural agency. Here was the material out of which Tradition grew luxuriantly. Whenever there was at hand no standard of fact whereby these recitals may be tested, the memory was aided by the unchecked efforts of the imagination; and as days rolled on, the latter element gained complete ascendancy.
“Such is the result which the lapse of time would naturally have upon the minds and the narratives of the As-háb or ‘Companions’ of Mahomet, more especially of those who were young when he died. And then another race sprang up who had never seen the Prophet, who looked up to his contemporaries with a superstitious reverence, and who listened to their stories of him as to the tidings of a messenger from the other world. ‘Is it possible, father of Abdallah! that thou hast been with Mahomet?’ was the question addressed by a pious Moslem to Hodzeifa, in the mosque of Kufâ; ‘didst thou really see the Prophet, and wert thou on familiar terms with him?’—‘Son of my uncle! it is indeed as thou sayest.’—‘And how wert thou wont to behave towards the Prophet?’—‘Verily, we used to labour hard to please him.’—‘Well, by the Lord!’ exclaimed the ardent listener, ‘had I been but alive in his time, I would not have allowed him to put his blessed foot upon the earth, but would have borne him on my shoulders wherever he listed.’ (Hishâmi, p. 295.) Upon another occasion, the youthful Obeida listened to a Companion who was reciting before an assembly how the Prophet’s head was shaved at the Pilgrimage, and the hair distributed amongst his followers; the eyes of the young man glistened as the speaker proceeded, and he interrupted him with the impatient exclamation,—‘Would that I had even a single one of those blessed hairs! I would cherish it for ever, and prize it beyond all the gold and silver in the world.’ (Kâtib al Wâckidi, p. 279.) Such were the natural feelings of fond devotion with which the Prophet came to be regarded by the followers of the ‘Companions.’
“As the tale of the Companions was thus taken up by their followers, distance began to invest it with an increasing charm, while the products of living faith and warm imagination were being fast debased by superstitious credulity. This second generation are termed in the language of the patriotic lore of Arabia, Tâbiûn, or ‘Successors.’ Here and there a Companion survived till near the end of the first century; but, for all practical purposes, they had passed off the stage before the commencement of its last quarter. Their first Successors, who were in some measure also their contemporaries, flourished in the latter half of the same century, though some of the oldest may have survived for a time in the second.
“Meanwhile a new cause was at work, which gave to the tales of Mahomet’s companions a fresh and an adventitious importance.
“The Arabs, a simple and unsophisticated race, found in the Coran ample provisions for the regulation of all their affairs, religious, social, and political. But the aspect of Islam soon underwent a mighty change. Scarcely was the Prophet dead when his followers issued forth from their barren peninsula, armed with the warrant of the Coran to impose the faith of Mahomet upon all the nations of the earth. Within a century they had, as a first step to this universal subjugation, conquered every land that intervened between the banks of the Oxus and the farthest shores of Northern Africa and of Spain; and had enrolled the great majority of their peoples under the standard of the Coran. This vast empire differed widely indeed from the Arabia of Mahomet’s time; and that which well sufficed for the patriarchal simplicity and limited social system of the early Arabs, became utterly inadequate for the hourly multiplying wants of their descendants. Crowded cities, like Fostât, Kufâ, and Damascus, required an elaborate compilation of laws for the guidance of their courts of justice: new political relations demanded a system of international equity: the speculations of a people before whom literature was preparing to throw open her arena, and the controversies of eager factions upon nice points of Mahometan faith, were impatient of the narrow limits which confined them:—all called loudly for the enlargement of the scanty and naked dogmas of the Coran, and for the development of its defective code of ethics.
“And yet it was the cardinal principle of early Islam, that the standard of Law, of Theology, and of Politics, was the Coran and the Coran alone. By it Mahomet himself ruled; to it in his teaching he always referred; from it he professed to derive his opinions, and upon it to ground his decisions. If he, the Messenger of the Lord, and the Founder of the faith, was thus bound by the Coran, much more were the Caliphs, his uninspired substitutes. New and unforeseen circumstances were continually arising, for which the Coran contained no provision. It no longer sufficed for its original object. How then were its deficiencies to be supplied?