![]() ![]() Many do not know that Muslim scholarship has, in fact, rejected the reliability of most Ahadith to ever exist. Classical scholarship, in reality, was much more stringent and critical with the hadith corpus than is claimed by skeptics. The Telephone Game analogy often misrepresents classical Muslim scholarship’s attitude towards hadith, as it implicitly presents traditionalists as an assembly of dogmatists who desperately authenticated Prophetic traditions in an attempt to salvage anything they could find. Then, I will analyze an authentic Prophetic tradition in light of the claims made by proponents of the Telephone Game analogy. In this article, I shall evaluate the argument in light of its premises and assumptions. The appeal to the analogy embodies several subtle unverified premises along with several blatantly fallacious claims. If a report at the end of the isnad embodies multiple accretions, omissions and mutations that have drastically distorted its contents, how can we rely upon the process of transmission in the hadith corpus? The reality of the matter, however, is that this analogy is a false analogy that fundamentally misrepresents the transmission of hadith, ultimately strawmanning classical Muslim scholarship. ![]() The primary motive behind the appeal to Telephone Game analogy is to discredit the reliability of the transmission of hadith. At the end of the game, the initial message is compared with the final redaction reproduced by the final player, and the discrepancies are then humorously observed and pointed out. As the message is disseminated through multiple intermediaries, errors in transmission eventually accumulate, and the original message relayed from the first player is mutated. The Telephone Game (also known as Chinese Whispers) is a children’s game where a message is initiated by a player and consequently whispered through a series of players. A common argument today that attempts to undermine the reliability of hadith is the claim that the transmission of hadith is analogous to that of the Telephone Game. ![]()
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