Alsiraj Official Website
Sayings (Hadiths) of Prophet Muhammad
Memory could be trusted for preservation of knowledge
Nor was memory an unreliable means for the preservation of Hadith for the Holy Quran itself was safely preserved in the memory of the Companions of the Holy Prophet in addition to being committed to writing.
In fact, had the Holy Qur’an been simply preserved in writing, it could not have been handed down intact to future generations. The aid of memory was invoked to make the purity of the text of the Qur’an doubly sure. The Arab had a wonderfully retentive memory, and he had to store up his knowledge of countless things in his memory. It was in this safe custody that the beautiful poetry of the pre-Islamic days had been kept alive and intact.
Indeed, before Islam, writing was but rarely resorted to, and memory was chiefly relied upon in all important matters. Hundreds and even thousands of verses could be recited from memory by one man, and the reciters would also remember the names of the persons through whom those verses had been transmitted to them. Asma’i, a later transmitter, says that he learned twelve thousand verses by heart before he reached his majority; of Abü Dzamdzam, Asma’i says that he recited verses from a hundred poets in a single sitting
Sha’bi says that he knew so many verses by heart that he could continue repeating them for a month ; and these verses were the basis of the Arabic vocabulary and even of Arabic grammar. Among the Companions of the Holy Prophet were many who knew by heart thousands of the verses of pre-Islamic poetry, and of these one was ‘A’isha, the Prophet’s wife. The famous Bukhari trusted to memory alone for the retention of as many as six hundred thousand hadith and many students corrected their manuscripts by comparing them with what he had only retained in his memory.
|
|
|