Question:

Assalamu Alikum Dear Shakyh Gibrill F Haddad.

Please see link below, this person has written against you many times on this forum, are you able to respond?

http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/showthread.php?72600-Christmas-Lessons!-Prophet-s-Birthday&p=637557&highlight=#post637557

Whatever the response be, you are one of the greatest shakyhs I ever come across ( I wish I can meet you!), May Allah forgive you, guide you and grant you Jannah!

Answer:

`Alaykum Salam,

Regarding the statement:

<<{Narrated as part of a longer hadith from Anas by al-Nasa’i with a sound chain}: Note, he does not mention who considered the chain of al-Nasa’i sound. Al-Nasa’i’s chain of narration contains two narrators that were criticised: Yazid ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Malik (d. 130 H) of whom al-‘Asqalani said “reliable, sometimes erring” (saduq rubama wahim) (Taqrib) and Ya’qub ibn Sufyan said “there is weakness in his hadith” (fi hadithihi lin), although other narrator-critics praised him.>>

This is an Albani-type selection of what fits their agenda in trying to discredit a hadith narrator. In reality Yazid b. `Abd al-Rahman b. Malik is “trustworthy” (thiqa) by general agreement, period. This was declared by Abu Hatim al-Razi, al-Daraqutni, al-Bazzar, al-Barqani, Ibn Hibban and al-Mundhiri so the lone aspersion by Ya`qub b. Sufyan should not
have been promoted as if it were the last word when in fact it is not taken into account. Hence al-Arna’ut in Tahrir al-Taqrib rejects Ibn Hajar’s verdict of “truthful, sometimes erring” and states: “Rather, he is trustworthy (thiqa) and a faqih.”

Then the objector goes on to try to discredit another narrator of the same hadith, Makhlad ibn Yazid — one of the narrators of al-Bukhari and Muslim. Such elementary mistakes are committed on a regular basis by self-made “analyzers” due to over-reliance on Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib, which was never meant to be a precise tool for narrator-criticism. (See Tahrir
al-Taqrib on Makhlad also.)

Hence al-Wallawi, the author of the 40-volume commentary on al-Nasa’i’s
Sunan entitled Dhakhirat al-`Uqba fi Sharh al-Mujtaba, graded this hadith as sahih.

There is more to say about the objector’s ignorance of hadith but the above is enough.

I had stated that “the prescription of the commemoration of the birth of Christ *was* prescribed in the early Christian Church,” to which that person objected:

“Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church…” The Encyclopaedia goes on to mention that the first time it was celebrated was two centuries after Christ.

So he admits that Christmas was celebrated two centuries after Christ, which means at the time of the early Christian Church, which is defined as the period from the first to the fourth century CE. Furthermore, the actual commemoration of the birth of Christ occurs even within the text of the Injil and actually forms 10% of the entire Gospel of Luke.

Hajj Gibril Haddad