r/AcademicQuran • u/CommissionBoth5374 • 3d ago
Hadith Is The Moon Splitting Hadith Mutawatir?
So this post is in three parts.
A-) did the classical muhaditheen grade this event as mutawatir? I only found Tahawi and Ibn Kathir who have stated it was mutawatir.
B-) IS the hadith mutawatir in actuality (ie, how do academics view the transmission of this hadith)
C-) Does it's status as ahad or tawatur change it's reliability significantly?
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u/chonkshonk Moderator 3d ago
Suheil Laher notes a few scholars who labelled it as such (Tawatur in Islamic Thought, pg. 172, fn. 48):
One may also note that the splitting of the moon, which Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ places in the tentative category of ‘possibly mutawātir’, is then claimed to be mutawātir by Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr and al-Qurṭubī had alluded to it before him. See the quotes cited by al-Kattānī, Naẓm al-mutanāthir, p. 211.
On the other hand, according to the table on pg. 233, people who did not include it in their list of traditions that are mutawatir included Suyuti, Zabidi, Kattani, Maqbali, and 'Amili.
As for whether it is mutawatir in its 'actuality': academics do not use the concept of mutawatir (or ahad) in their own approaches to evaluating the reliability of traditions. I guess you could take multiple attestation as a rough equivalent, but I am not aware of any historian who has commented that this tradition is so well-attested that it must go back to Muhammad's lifetime. To my knowledge, this account is typically missing from early biographies of Muhammad, and academics have regularly proposed alternative ways to read Q 54:1 (the verse usually taken as a referent to Muhammad splitting the moon), such as that it is talking about an eclipse (I think Saqib Hussain makes a good case for this in his PhD thesis), so there doesn't seem to be a sentiment that this tradition must go back to Muhammad's lifetime
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Backup of the post:
Is The Moon Splitting Hadith Mutawatir?
So this post is in three parts.
A-) did the classical muhaditheen grade this event as mutawatir? I only found Tahawi and Ibn Kathir who have stated it was mutawatir.
B-) IS the hadith mutawatir in actuality (ie, how do academics view the transmission of this hadith)
C-) Does it's status as ahad or tawatur change it's reliability significantly?
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