Even so, there were still some companions who wrote hadiths and kept them without the knowledge of the Prophet. In addition, the spread of hadith is faster through the oral system or by conveying hadith from word of mouth.
The conclusions and theories built by Nabia are undoubtedly contrary to the attitudes of Western orientalists or scholars, especially Joseph Schacht with the projecting back theory. For Joseph Schacht, the Prophet’s hadith did not appear at the time of the Prophet but the tabiin. Therefore, he estimates that the Prophet produced the hadith around the first or early second century Hijri.
In other words, the Prophet’s hadith does not exist; instead, what is there in people’s comments after the companions or so-called tabi’in; then relying on the Prophet’s companions and finally leaning on the Prophet. So, this is the essence of the projecting back theory. Through this theory, Joseph Schacht concluded that the sequence of narrators in the study of hadith sanad was engineered by taking famous figures at each time.
What is alleged by Joseph Schacht cannot be justified because historically, there are hadith manuscripts written at the time of the Companions. Logically, if he wrote the hadith during the tabiin period, the hadith had not been reported at the companions’ time. And the evidence for the existence of hadith manuscripts comes from ‘Abdullah bin Amr al-‘As (died 684 AD), Abu Hurairah (died 678 AD), Abdullah bin Abbas (died 688 AD), and Anas bin Malik (died 712 AD).
Reference:
Idri, Hadith and Orientalists: Perspectives of Hadith Scholars and Orientalists on Prophetic Hadith, Kencana, Jakarta, 2017.