Muslim Scholar Dr Yasir Qadhi admits the Hadith are ACADEMICALLY DISCREDITED!

On July 9, 2025 Dr Yasir Qadhi was invited onto a YouTube channel called "Skepsislamica" to talk for two hours about his new book "Understanding Salafism". At about one hour and 40 minutes into the program, one of the interviewers, Roxanna Ivani, asked Dr Qadhi what the Salafists (those who follow the example of the prophet the closest, and are considered by most as the more radical Muslims today), would do with the latest historical difficulties surrounding those who compiled what Muhammad did and what Muhammad said (i.e. the Hadith, Sira, Tafsir and Takhrik compilers), which most Muslims know as the "Islamic Traditions". Dr Qadhi admitted that this was a difficult question to answer, especially a man in his position, because he belonged to the two camps which are debating this very problem, which created a kind of schizophrenic problem for him. He not only graduated from possibly the best Islamic institution in the world in Medina, Saudi Arabia (that's the Madrassa camp which supports Muhammad's historicity), but in 1995 he received a PhD from Yale University, possibly one of the best Western Academic institutions in the world (that would be the Academic camp, which "discredits' Muhammad's historicity). Dr Qadhi said that because he belongs to both camps, he had to be careful what he said in each. When with the Muslims in the Mosque or the Madrassa he would use Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari in order to give himself authority for what he was saying, because Muslims go to them primarily in order to know how to "walk, talk, eat, drink, and live". But when he is with his Academic friends, he never refers to either Sahih Muslim nor to Sahih Bukhari, because, as he noted in this interview "Nobody in the academy affirms the Muslim Science of Hadith. It is considered to be COMPLETELY DISCREDITED"!! He then noted that there is "No Commonality" between these two camps because they use a completely different "Epistemology" (how we know what we know). In anguish, he then stated "I would love for someone to say that we can prove the Hadith using the historical Method, and if they did, I would buy their book" Basically what he was saying in this interview was that while he still believed that there had to be a prophet named Muhammad, and that he had to believe what he did and what he said, he could no longer prove what he believed historically, because everything we know about this prophet were written hundreds of years later, and were redacted back on to someone named Muhammad, proving that none of those who wrote down his actions and his words ever knew him personally, or even lived in the century he lived. What an admission! And to say so publicly for the whole world to see and hear. In this video Hatun and Jay go through this interview piece-by-piece, and unpack the significance of what he is saying, and then move on to what Dr Qadhi doesn't yet know, the newest historical studies which suggest that even his acknowledgement is possibly just brushing the surface of what we now know about that which Muhammad is purported to have done and said. They then look at just how late the extant manuscripts for the Islamic Traditions really are, suggesting that all we have to go on concerning what Muhammad did and said comes from documents which went through many iterations (i.e. accretions and deletions) until they were finally compiled into the documents we have today, but not in the 9th and 10th centuries, as Dr Qadhi still believes, but from the 11th - 16th centuries, yet mostly compiled into their present forms by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Watch this video and then comment on what you think is happening here, and where Islam is now going. Back in June of 2020 in an interview with Mohammed Hijab Dr Qadhi "Threw the Qur'an under the bus". Now here, 5 years later, he is "Throwing the Traditions under the bus" (and it just makes our job easier and easier). The original 2 hour interview can be viewed on "Skepsislamica" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2_LwiS8sBQ © Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, July 17, 2025 (120,330)