THE MISSING FRIDAY SERMONS

The claimed Friday Sermon from the Hadith literature is an interesting notion that needs scrutiny. Needless to say, the Quran does not support this patently sectarian practice. Almost every organized religion comes prepacked with some sort of a sermon which is regularly delivered from the pulpit to "educate" its members. In practice, the sermon is a powerful brainwashing tool that has stood the test of times.

While the Friday sermon is ubiquitous in the Muslim world today, it may come as a shock to many that out of an estimated thousand or so sermons reportedly delivered by the messenger of God, not a single sermon was committed to memory. The thousands of attendees either failed to record these public events and pass them down to the subsequent generations or they never happened. Given the scale and reach of these supposedly regular sermons, it is more than strange that the famed memory champions of the time could not manage a single complete sermon. If they didn’t happen then why are there so man references to them, or are these reference also made up? And if they did happen then why are they missing from the popular collections?

Yes, there are dozens of Hadith informing us in titbit way what happened during these sermons but no recording of the actual sermon. These reports range from how to deal with nosebleeds during the sermons to how not to show up smelling of garlic. They even try to make the messenger into a rainmaker. There is a whole debate about when to sit and when to stand while delivering the sermon. Some reports go on to educate us about the etiquette of attending the Friday sermons. Some of these reports seem reasonable enough. They tell us not to be late, bathing instead of doing a mere wudu, even encourages sponging perfume from the wife and if you do arrive later not to jump over the necks of people. There is an extensive section on to how not to shush someone being disruptive but it is OK to throw pebbles at them. That is what it says.

True to the nature of these reports, it doesn’t disappoint when it comes to the customary over the top rewards for attending the sermons, complete with angels clocking you in and then for some strange reason they stick around and listen to the sermon. Again that is what it says.

The point is that everything except the actual sermons. If there ever was an opportunity to record a teachable moment in the "Hadith explains the Quran" cry, it was these sermons. So what happened?

So, either true to God's guidelines there were no sermons or if there were sermons, the problem facing the manipulators of Deen was that the opportunity to misreport a public event was that much more difficult as opposed to the convenience of single narrators. Thus, it is no surprise that well over 99% of all Hadith literature comprises of orally delivered and impossible to verify single narrations.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that whatever was said in these sermons, if there were sermons, to begin with, just didn't fit the sectarian bill. Hence, in all probability, they were so meticulously pruned out of the compilations that not one single complete sermon on the lines of the last sermon survived, Not one out of a thousand or so. Talk about photographic memories and the claims of how supposedly meticulous the process of recording the Hadith literature was. The evidence actually points to something nefarious.