Abstract
Stood up against Islam fierce enemies who led a vicious psychological war that aimed to raise questions and spread suspicions about the prophethood of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and isolate people from him. when the prophet stood up to their deceit and challenged them, they resorted to violence and declared war against him by the might of their swords and tried to assassinate him, but Islam triumphed over their swords and schemes, and its light spread all over the horizons. the people accepted the religion of Allah as individuals, groups and nations, and the Islam established a wonderful distinct human civilization that lasted more than a thousand years, until the bond between Islam and Muslims unraveled, letting-in weakness and calling for the enemies who broke the unity and dispersed the togetherness, and occupied the homes, and looted the goods and wreaked havoc on the land. this brutal, unjust force was not contended by the major military success, but sought to destroy the culture of the Islamic nation and erase its identity, obliterate the historical glories, and replace them with cultural dependency and incorporate frustration and defeat, weakness and despair into the built of the individual and the society. while impossible to strip the nation of its faith, Orientalists of the west and the likes of them, aimed their arrows to the sources of sharia law, to undermine the structure of Islam, and the demolish its built, and break its base, they threw suspicions on the Sunnah, and claimed it had not been preserved, and questioned its authenticity and authority. They were faced by dignified Muslim scholars, who made clear the falsity of these suspicions, and revealed truth, and broke with irrefutable arguments, the false claims which they called scientific evidence but was, when scrutinized, weaker than a house of cards, and all their attempts ended at absolute failure, and the Sunnah stood tall and fixed. The efforts of Muslim scholars in the defense of the Sunnah by responding to its opponents have formed a great wealth of knowledge that produced a new science called the science of the history of the Sunnah, which cares about proving the authority of Sunnah, and the history of writing it and the stages which recording it had passed through, and its classified books, and methods of prominent imams who served this field, and the branches that originated from this science, and refuting the suspicions raised by Orientalists and those influenced by them and associate themselves with Islam. Those efforts have provided a valuable service to the science of history of Sunnah, and constructed a forte that crushed before its walls; the suspicions of Orientalists and opponents of the Sunnah. But this is still a new science and research in it continues, and the outcomes are fruitful. This paper came to highligh the efforts of the Scholars in the service of this science, and present the most important problems.