Have you ever talked into a microphone with the speaker facing you? That high pitch screech making you wince just thinking of it? Maybe you heard an annoying reverberation getting louder and louder till you unplugged the speaker or mic. That screech or reverberation is what happens when the microphone collecting the sound signal picks up the artificial echo of the original signal. This signal loop compounds and escalates the volume till it overwhelms the original sound, distorts it, and eventually drowns it out. In other words, the speaker is transmitting the sound back towards the source emitting that sound. This is called feedback. When feedback competes with the source, it’s called interference.

Similarly, we understand a hadith through the lens of the Quran. Not the other way around. It is an epistemological error to rely on a hadith (a created event) to interpret Revelation (an uncreated event). The result is a feedback distortion, an annoying reverberation caused by facing the speaker towards its source.

Someone reminded me recently about the unfounded belief that the chapter al-Fatiha implies that the Jews are “those who earned God’s wrath”.

Not just incorrect, it is anti-Quranic. It contradicts the Eternal Speech which frequently calls the Children of Israel “recipients of God’s blessings”, thus interfering with the source signal. It cancels the voice of al-Fatiha which strongly suggests the Children of Israel are “those upon whom God has bestowed blessings”.
The source of this discordant and interfering belief is of course the anti-Semitic whim of early polemicists who knew they could manipulate ahadith to inject unsustainable beliefs like this into the people’s minds. It found its way into an anomalous and strange (gharib) hadith in the uncorroborated collection by the hadith compiler Muhammad al-Tirmidhi. Even for hadithists, this collection is not foundational: it can only be used to corroborate stronger sources.

The strongest source – both methodologically and existentially – is the Revealed Speech. The Revelation is transmitted through a prophetic transducer, for all intents and purposes, a medium. The medium here being the prophet who is both transformed or altered by the Revelation, but also transduces the uncreated speech into the created world. It is critical to appreciate the artifacts of the medium in its transduction or transmission of the Revelation into the created world via his own created speech and actions. These artifacts are the contexts of his experience in this world and must not be mistaken for the signal itself.