Salam,
Anybody knows if there is a more-or-less 'authentic' source of Muhammad's speech during his last sermon at Hajj? There is a submission article, which lists a number of contradictive hadiths regarding the Quran alone:
http://submission.org/Last_Sermon.html Thing is, I truggle to find most of these hadiths. For instance, googling Nu2408 mostly leads to the quran-alone and Islam-conspiracy sources. Muslim 15/19 indeed tells about Quran alone:
("I have left among you
the Book of Allah, and if you hold fast to it, you would never go astray"), yet it also narates that if women disobey:
("you can
chastise them but not severely".)
Source:
https://sunnah.com/muslim/15/159 I and I am sure most of you have seen other hadiths where there is not a single word on beating women, yet again, which also mention either Sunna or prophers Family besides Quran. Is there at least one source for it, which would
fully support the Quran-alone "logic" (such as not beating wives, following Quran alone and other important issue), and if there is, why would you trust it against countless of not-so-pleasant sources? I understand that most here would simply ignore hadiths, but then how would you explain how was the Quran (or any other Scripture) left for us to read if not as a historical text?
Thank you and peace
Edit: I briefly studied the subject once again, but not regarding the Sermon itself, but the overall problem of prophetic history. Here is a summarized data on historicity of Muhammad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad I also downloaded two books, cited in the article, which seem to be two nice bodies of historical literature:
[S._A._Nigosian]Islam: Its History, Teaching, and Practices and
[Tom Holland] In the Shadow of the Sword. I have yet to study these works, but Tom Holland is of particular interest as he thoroughly cites Ibn Hisham, the guy who supposedly narrated about Muhammad beheading 700 people during Invasion of Banu Qurayza.
My hypothesis on this so far is: history is fabricated as a study and as a "science". History is not a science but a liberal arts discipline/field, which contains none of the actual scientific methods, similarly to Political science or any type of humanities studies. There is literally nothing true about events which happened in the past, as their narration was always done by the people who were
never and will never be neutral in their political views. I would say the same about the 'authentic' war archieves - these too are written by people. Upon these days people still argue about Joseph Stalin...was he a tyran or a saviour of mother Russia? If you study the subject you will see how different sources (and all of them are purely political) view this figure. The same goes about Hitler. Was he a murderous maniac or a talented politician? The list goes on and on. There is virtually nothing all people would agree on in terms of past events.
Even now, when we live in the age of digital world of the media, we can clearly see how various world medias portray information differently, based on their biased political affiliation and financial support from either governments or government-associated ngo's. What is your stance on what happened in Yugoslavia (1999) or Ukraine (2014-)? What will you say will be based on the media you read/watch/trust. What unites all of the media is the fact that they all lie and distrot information. Years later teachers will 'teach' these fabricated articles of the media to young generations, when these won't be simply articles, but historical 'facts'. You just can't trust anything and never could.
I officially renounce history. For me, it does no longer matter which speech did Muhammad give during his last sermon, or if he existed overall, there is just not a single bit of information, which I would critically regard as an authentic one, does not matter if this informtion is pro-Quran alone or pro-Sunno, with the exception of information which comes directly from my faith. Faith does not need evidence, as it comes from heart.
