Jesus, Prophet of Islam - The Islamic Bulletin

264 Jesus, Prophet of Islam

The most reliable sources of the Hadith were those people who
loved and feared God and His Messenger the most. After a rela­
tively short time, most of the Hadith which had been transmitted
orally were recorded in written form, induding the details of who
all the people in the human chain of transmission were. The more
reliable the people in any particular chain of transmission were,
and the more different chains of transmission there are for the same
hadith, the more reliable any particular hadith is considered. At a
later stage, usually during the lst or 2nd centuries after the death
of Muhammad, in 632AD, large collections of the Hadith were gath­
ered together, in order to ensure that they were not lost.
Among the most important collections of the Hadith are those
made by Imam al-Bukhari and Imam Muslim, which were compiled
about two hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad's death,
may the peace and blessings of God be on him, and which describe
and record every aspect of his life and knowledge. Thus the Hadith
fonn an essential part of the record of the teaching and the history
and the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, being as they are
reliable contemporary eyewitness accounts. Thus, as Iftekhar Bano
Hussain points out in her book, Prophetsin theQur'an,Volume Two:
The Later Prophets:

Accordingly any quotations concerning sayyedina 'Isa

from any of the Gospels, or from any other ancient

source, cannot be given the same weight or accepted

with the same confidence as a reliable, fully authenti­

cated hadith, no matter how compelling its words may

be -although of course sometimes the truth of what is

said is so self-evident that it cannot be ignored. This is

probably particularly true of those traditions which were

transmitted by the very early Unitarian followers of Je­

sus whose descendants eventually embraced Islam dur­

ing the 7th and 8th centuries CE.

For as weil as those hadith of the Prophet Muham­

mad which refer specifically to sayyedina 'Isa, may the

blessings and peace of Allah be on them, there are also

many other Muslim traditions which give accounts of

the sayings and deeds of sayyedina 'Isa. These traditions

were originally gathered together by the early follow­

ers of sayyedina 'Isa, especially those early Unitarian fol­

lowers who spread to Arabia and North Africa. When

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