Hadith Transmission is not like Chinese Whispers / the Telephone Game
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
There is a popular attack given on hadith as well as orally transmitted history in general (even outside of Islamic civilization) that it is unreliable because it is like the telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers). For those unfamiliar, the telephone game is when a group (usually of children) sit in a circle. Then, someone starts off with a message and whispers it into the ear of the next person. That person then whispers it into the ear of the next person, and so on until the circle is complete and the last person says the message out loud. It is then compared to the original message, and usually totally off. This supposedly proves how oral transmission is unreliable.
But this is an absurd comparison. A better comparison would be for the original person to say out loud to an entire group of people a phrase, and then have them say it back to him. How “off” do you think the original message would be if that happened?
When oral history transmission takes place generally, and when hadith takes place in particular, it is not through whispers. Each link in the transmission clearly receives the message. For this reason, oral transmission, especially when it comes to the essential components of a story, should be considered reliable in its broad strokes.
Let’s take for example the founding of the United States. Imagine for a moment we had no written records – would people not know from their ancestors who George Washington was? Would people not know that the war was between the British, whose land came from across the sea to the East, and the Americans who descended from them? Surely they would. Alongside that, you may have some myths develop which are in the form of embellishment, but the key facts and figures would be more or less accurately passed on.
This is what we see with the majority of human history, including the story of Troy all the way down to various Aboriginal creation myths which still include a “great flood” (referring to Noah’s flood.)
That said, the broad strokes are not good enough, which is why hadith transmission was often more stringent than this, especially past ~100 AH. As more links were being added to chains, and contradictory reports were emerging, hadith scholars began to more meticulously track and memorize, and develop a methodology to ensure correct transmission. This is why, unlike mere stories that are orally transmitted, hadiths tend to be more reliable (when not intentionally fabricated) than mere hearsay. That said, hadith transmission is not perfect and often hadiths are quoted by meaning rather than literally, which is why we often see the most famous hadiths having multiple synonyms being used in place of one another, or a version of the hadith with a snippet added or removed. (Again, sometimes things are added or removed intentionally to distort the meaning of the hadith, but that’s the subject of another discussion. My point was merely that sometimes failures in memory mean that one person elaborates more than another, or one person uses a synonym in place of an original word).
In conclusion, when you hear that oral history in general and hadith transmission, in particular, is equivalent to Chinese whispers, you should see this for the preposterous analogy that it is.
