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How Do We Obey The Prophet And Should We?
My stance on the question…….
(4:80) Whoever obeys the messenger, has surely obeyed God; to whoever turns away: We have not sent you as a guardian over them. (4:81) And they say: “[We pledge] obedience!” Then, when they are no longer in your presence, a group among them plots during the night against what you say. But God records what they plot during the night. So turn away from them and put [your] trust in God. God suffices when it comes to trust. (4:82) Why do they not reflect upon the Quran? If it were from other than God, they would have found in it numerous contradictions.
The verse does not tell us to reflect about the Quran and hadiths delivered by the prophet Muhammad, but simply to reflect about the Quran because it is a message without any contradictions, unlike any message delivered by any human being, including the prophet Muhammad.
This implies that the religious message that the last prophet delivered was the Quran, the whole Quran, and nothing but the Quran. Muhammad’s own imperfect sayings would have at times interfered with the flawless divine revelation. I will prove this by quoting the Quran that even though Muhammad was a messenger of God, he was a very imperfect man;
(33:37) Recall that you said to the one who was blessed by God, and blessed by you, “Keep your wife and reverence God,” and you hid inside yourself what God wished to proclaim. Thus, you feared the people, when you were supposed to fear only God. When Zeid was completely through with his wife, we had you marry her, in order to establish the precedent that a man may marry the divorced wife of his adopted son. God’s commands shall be done.
(66:1) O you prophet! Why do you prohibit what God has made lawful for you, seeking to please your wives? God is Oft Forgiving, Merciful.
In 33:37, Muhammad made a catastrophic mistake as he knew about God’s command regarding the right to marry the wife of an adopted child after a divorce, but did not divulge it because he was more afraid of people than God! A similar sin is mentioned in 66:1, as Muhammad prohibited what God had made lawful, seeking to please his wives.
In spite of several verses of the Quran showing that Muhammad was just an imperfect human being just like everybody else.
Ok now even if we had had authentic hadiths from him written at the time he was alive (other than those cited by the Quran), following them and some of their mistakes would have been a scenario of disaster for the Muslim world.
– (1) Now that the prophet Muhammad is dead, we still can obey him following all the authentic hadiths and examples found in the Quran, which is the only authentic and reliable collection of hadiths that was left to us. This is why every time we obey Muhammad reading the Quran and follow his good example, we obey God directly since he is the one who designed the Quran and chose which hadiths of messengers (and human beings in general) should be used as examples (4:80).
– (2) We have to obey God and the messenger’s perfect teachings and hadiths that are perfectly preserved directly in the Quran and certainly not the unreliable fables written down 200 years or more after his death: We pointed at earlier that there are 332 such authentic hadiths of the prophet in the Quran, which is every time God orders to Muhammad to “say” [Qul! = “Say!”, second person masculine in the imperative] a specific sentence. The Quran is a conversation between Allah and the holy prophet. In addition to the 332 “qul!” (Second person singular, imperative form), God speaks to the prophet in the second person singular hundreds more times (for example: 15:87, 96:1, 108:1, 112:1…).
When Muhammad was alive, the believers had the obligation to obey him as a messenger of God, as a head of state and as a commander in chief. Incredibly, nothing of what Muhammad said when he was alive was ever written down, except sayings which God ordered him to recite and decided would directly be part of the Quran. It is very disturbing for hadiths followers that some hadiths classified as the most authentic (Muslim & Ibn Hanbal) tell us that Muhammad himself had in reality forbidden any of his sayings to be written down, except those chosen by God to be part of the Quranic revelation. No one dared to disobey Muhammad at the time, and it is the only logical explanation why we had to wait for at least 200 years to start seeing ignorant people like Bukhari and Muslim attempt to collect sayings that had been forbidden to be collected in the first place:
Abi Saeed Al Khudry may God be pleased with him reported that the messenger of God may God exalt him & grant him peace said: “Do not write anything from me except the Quran. Anyone who writes anything other than the Quran shall erase it.”!!! (Muslim, Zuhd 72; Ibn Hanbal 3/12,21,39)
Furthermore, the language of the Quran is very specific and we are never told to “follow God and follow Muhammad” literally, but instead to “follow God and follow the messenger”. This is because when the prophet was alive Muslims had to follow him directly as a messenger who was reciting and following strictly the perfect Arabic Quran. When the prophet died, the Quran replaced Muhammad as a messenger since we find many of the last prophet’s authentic sayings and actions, as well as those of so many humans (messengers or not) in the history of mankind. In addition, we are left with a complete revelation which stands as a testament.
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