The Jewish Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher claimed that the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan had built the Dome of the Rock to prevent the people of Syria and Iraq from the Hajj (pilgrimage) to Makkah and in order to religiously justify this act, his friend Al-Zuhri fabricated the hadith of “Do not set out on a journey…” It does not need to be mentioned that this is indeed one of the wonders of lying, distortion and manipulation of historical facts. Naturally, the Christian missionaries get very excited when they see polemical material like Goldziher’s, and hence dutifully parrot it without checking for clarification. Hence, it is left to the Muslims to fill in the void of scholastic integrity left by the missionaries.
This study dismantles the al-zuṭṭ hadith polemic through close reading, lexicography, and narrative control. By restoring context to yarkabūn, examining transmission variants, and comparing Semitic parallels, it shows how innuendo translation exploits polysemy, suppresses closure, and manufactures scandal without historical warrant within disciplined philology and sober methodological limits alone here
Early Christianity lacked a single, unified theology. This article shows how later “orthodoxy” emerged through historical consolidation rather than original consensus.
The death of Muhammad ﷺ examined through Qur’anic language, hadith context, and history, exposing how poison claims rely on misreading sources.