Were Bukhari and Muslim Driven by Politics? — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2026/01/were-bukhari-and-muslim-driven-by-politics/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as a comment on r/MuslimAcademics, in the thread “Muslim and bukhari, their hadith were not free from political motive & alliances that do not aling with quran message. Dr KAEF”, copied here as written.
Imagine trying to reduce the entire Sunnah corpus to the political motivations of the narrators and even claiming riwayat about fada’il al-a’mal are wholesale so Ummayyad “authoritarians” can justify their soldiers massacring people.
This is so silly and intellectually dishonest it almost doesn’t warrant a response but alarmingly a lot of people are agreeing with this.
How does he explain many of these same narrations making it into Shi’a hadith collections, that had decidedly anti-Ummayyad political leanings?
Why is it not possible these hadith were fabricated for business reasons and not political ones, since we are speculating? Actually the hadith about Hajj is because the Arabs wanted people to travel to Makkah & Madinah for commerce. And the hadith about forgiveness of sins in Ramadan is about the Arab grocers/butchers wanting people to purchase more food for extravagant iftars. And the hadith about praying 5 times a day washing the sins away is because the prayer mat sellers wanted people praying more.
It’s one thing to take a more critical lens of hadith or matn criticism. It is another thing to blindly speculate on entirely opaque political or financial or other motivations. This is why the muhadithun attempted to develop a neutral historiographical method for determining the reliability of the hadith.
Without the sanad anyone can just say anything they want, and that’s exactly what we see here.
Posted January 14, 2026. Read it on Reddit.
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