Page:Maulana Muhammad Ali Quran.djvu/85

Rh Muslim, through a chain of narrators ending with Anas, that the Messenger of God, may peace and the blessings of God be upon him, said on one occasion (referring to man’s love of riches) that “if there were two valleys of wealth for the son of man, he would still desire to possess a third, and nothing but dust can fill the belly of the son of man, and God certainly repents on him who repents.” It will be seen that the words reported here to have been spoken by the Holy Prophet are exactly the same as are related to be a portion of a súrah in the report of Suwaid. Of the three men who vouched the truth and authenticity of this report, two, viz. Sa'id bin Mansur and Yahya bin Yahya, are expressly mentioned in the critical work of Zahabi, the Mizán-ul-I'tidál, as being trustworthy, while of the third it is related that nothing is known about him. This report, therefore, stands on a far firmer basis than that under discussion. As against a single man who has been pronounced a zindeeq, liar, untrustworthy, by the almost unanimous testimony of the collectors, we have here the evidence, furnished by Muslim himself, of three men, two of whom at any rate are admitted to be trustworthy, that the passage in question did not form any part of the Qur-án, but was only the word of the Holy Prophet himself. Three other reports are narrated by Muslim, each of which ascribes the utterance of these words to the Holy Prophet, and none asserts that they were portions of chapters of the Qur-án which were quite forgotten. In one of these reports, to Ibn-i-'Abbas, the first narrator in this case, are ascribed the words that he was not aware “whether it was or was not a portion of the Qur-án,” but these words are immediately contradicted by a second narrator, who does not mention the name of Ibn-i-'Abbas in connection with their utterance.

If we turn to Muslim himself, we find that of all the five reports which he has narrated relating to the passage, “If there were two valleys of wealth for the son of man, he would desire a third,” such being the heading of his chapter, he has given the least credit to the report related by Suwaid bin Sa'id, who makes the passage in question a remnant of a lost chapter. He begins his chapter with the report related by the three narrators quoted above, then follows it with three others, none of which makes the passage in question a portion of the Qur-án, and then relates the report in dispute, which, by placing it last, he himself hints to be the least credible of all and the lowest in authority. This is not a mere conjecture, for Muslim himself tells us in the introduction to his collection that under each heading he gives the priority in relation to those reports which he considers to be the more reliable. His words, literally translated, run as follows: “We have set this rule before ourselves, that we should mention first those reports which are freer from defects than others, and which on account of the reliability and righteousness of their narrators are purer.…And we follow reports of this class with other reports, among whose narrators are men who cannot be relied upon to the same extent as narrators of the first class of reports, because they are not marked by the same degree of truthfulness and the same good memory.” These words clearly show that Muslim considered the report under discussion to be the least reliable of all, and hence we should not have the least hesitation in condemning it as false.

I will now consider the internal evidence afforded by the report itself. In the first place, the style of the passage is remarkable. Any one who has any acquaintance with the Arabic language will see that it has no resemblance whatever to the style of the Holy Qur-án, and this consideration is alone sufficient to show that the passage never formed a part of the Holy Qur-án. Secondly, the words attributed to Abu Musa Ash'ari