Introduction-Hadith pdf

Like Christianity, Islam is a religion of the revelation. For the Chris-tian, the divine revelation resides in a person, the Word made flesh.The book, or Gospel, represents merely the personal reminiscences ofits human authors, in the form of anecdotes told years later about thelife and work, the acts and perhaps the words of the man whom theybelieved in and whom they followed in the hope of finding salvation. lso included in the Gospel are reports about the infancy and earlyorganisation of the movement founded to continue Christ’s work andteaching, stories of the acts and experiences of his disciples, and somecorrespondence from early Church leaders to groups of fellow believ-ers in different lands. By the fourth century, it had been decided whichwritings should form part of the authentic Gospel, while other booksregarded as pseudo-records were left aside as apocryphal. or the Muslim, the revelation is deposited in the Book. The Qurandid not result from divinely-inspired human authors recollecting pastevents. It was composed by God Himself. Its texts preserve the precisewords spoken by God, who told Muhammad exactly what to saythroughout the course of his mission to those among whom he lived,whose Arabic idiom God had selected for use in His address to man-kind, so that it should be understood, they should be in no doubt, andthey would be unable to plead ignorance.42 Muhammad was a meremortal who was chosen to be the conduit of this divine revelation.Being a mortal, he could not be expected to perform miracles. The ageof miracles had passed. They had been useful in bringing men tobelieve, but had proved useless in preserving the purity of belief anddoctrine. Let the fact of revelation be miracle enough. The Quran textis wholly and exclusively the Word of God. Every sentence, every wordoriginated in Heaven and was imparted to Muhammad by Gabriel, theangel chosen to deliver it to him.43 Thus, as Christ is to Christians, theQuran is to Muslims, the Word made Arabic.