In Search of ‘Mutawatir’ News
Regarding the quality and truth of Mutawatir hadiths, the ulema have agreed it is \'dharury\', an obligation to accept the truth of the information as if they had witnessed the event.
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Over a thousand years ago in Greece, Plato (427-347 BC) told a story known as “The Allegory of the Cave”, about several men trapped in a cave.
In Politeia, (The Republic) sections 514a-517a, as quoted by A Setyo Wibowo (2010), Plato describes that one side of the cave’s walls reflect light from a fire behind the trapped men. Because the men in the cave are chained so that they are unable to turn their heads to the left, right or back, they wholly believed that the shadow on the wall of the cave was real.
It was not until one of them freed himself and looked back that the true reality was discovered, not its shadow on the wall.
From the allegory, Plato then defined four levels of knowledge. First, the knowledge of shadows on a wall, which he called conjectural knowledge or assumption.
As with the freed man who saw the reality directly, but was still inside the cave, the second and third levels of knowledge still contained doxa (opinion) or pistic (belief). For Plato, if the freed man was willing to work hard, he would attain true knowledge, or in Plato’s terms, noetic.
Even so, the noetic is not easy to attain, because man must see the shadows first as a symbol of analytic and mathematical knowledge. So, at the visual level (inside the cave) based on the visible objects (shadows or real objects), man has a kind of understanding, but only conjectural understanding, or doxa. Meanwhile, at the intelligible level (outside the cave), man can attain rational knowledge.
The Platonic allegory reminds me of the flow of information on the social media timeline such as on Facebook – which incidentally also uses the term “wall” – which I view as the shadow cast on the cave’s wall by the fire, while Facebook users are the men trapped inside the cave.
Netizens are quick to accept and view every piece of information as knowledge. In fact, the information still contains doxa. Not many people work hard to free themselves from the timeline. Consequently, the knowledge they attain does not develop to the intelligible level.
Mixing fact and fiction
This is the era when fact and fiction are so mixed that neither can be clearly defined. Mass support could turn lies into truth. In contrast, truths with few defenders could become lies. Driven by the fact that the world is currently shrouded in haze, the Oxford Dictionary chose “post-truth” as the Word of the Year in 2016.
According to Wisnu Prasetya Utomo (2017), the use of this term in 2016 increased 2,000 percent from 2015. In the post-truth world – as interpreted by Reza AA Wattimena (2017) of the post-truth era – truth is no longer important.
What is sought is temporary excitement. Politicians win regional elections not because they speak the truth but rather, because they can amuse people with lies and superficial drama.
Thus, Reza said, “Facts and data are not important. What is desired is sensation that stirs up the emotion. News on social media is more influential than data and facts on truth. This becomes a justification for laziness and shallow thinking.”
What Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) foresaw in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1896) with his idea on the “army of metaphors”has come to pass. For Nietzsche, what we see as truth is no more than an illusion of something that has been stripped of its true self. Nietzsche uses the analogy of a coin whose value has become distorted as a simple metal object, because the images on its surface have worn off so it has become unrecognizable as a coin.
Meantime, what causes truth to become mere illusion, according to Nietzsche, is “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms...”, which in today’s digital era could be called a “cyber army” or “buzzing troops” that focuses on distributing information every day in order to create a particular perception for a particular interest. Consequently, like the coin, which has become mere metal, truth is degraded into mere perception and opinion.
Escape
So, is it still possible for us to escape from the Platonic cave, the trap of the timeline or wall of social media?
I remember a class during my study at a madrassa in a remote area of Sumatra, in particular a discussion on the Mutawatir hadith. The basic meaning of mutawatir is similar to “attatabu’u”, which means “sequential or in sequence”.
Mahmud Thahhan (2007) explained that Mutawatir hadiths are hadiths for retelling to all thabaqat (generations) which, based on logic and tradition, will find it impossible to collude and create lies.
From this definition, A Qadir Hassan (1966) then defined several requirements for Mutawatir hadiths. First, there must be numerous sanad (the narrators who retell the hadiths from their original source, the Prophet Muhammad). Ulema have different opinions on the quota of narrators and decided they should number at least 10.
Second, the number of narrators must be balanced from one generation to the next. For example, if there are 50 narrators in the current sanad, then the previous generation must have also had 50 narrators, and so on back through time to the original generation that heard the hadith directly from the Prophet.
Third, throughout all generations of the sanad from the very first one, rationally and customarily, it was impossible that they created lies together.
Fourth, the retelling refers to the five senses, or empirical experience, marked by the phrases “ra-ai-na” (we have seen) and “sami’na” (we have heard). This means the earliest narrators were directly present at the original source of the hadith. If even one of these requirements is unmet, the hadith is no longer deemed mutawatir.
Regarding the quality and truth of Mutawatir hadiths, the ulema have agreed it is dharury, an obligation to accept the truth of the information as if they had witnessed the event. All Mutawatir hadiths are maqbul, or can be accepted on a legal basis.
This strict, measured and centuries-old verification method used among the Ulumul-Hadist is useful for sorting and filtering news on social media. Such “mutawatir” news can save us from being held hostage by doxa and the army of metaphors in this post-truth jungle.
Damhuri Muhammad, Philosophy Lecturer, Darma Persada University, Jakarta; Expert Staff, UKP-PIP
