What’s that Hadith doing in my computer?

All religions revolve around a source, and for Islam, the sources are the Quran, which is a divine revelation, and the Sunna, which is defined as the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. However, it would be foolhardy to compare the contents and nature of the Quran with the Christian Gospels. The verses in the Quran represent a direct conversation between God and the reader, while the Gospels are narrations of the life, ministry and eventual death of Jesus Christ. In that sense, the Gospels most closely resemble the Hadiths, which are collections of reports detailing, sometimes in contradictory form, the Prophet’s Sunna. I would add that the only difference between the Gospels and the Hadiths is one of authenticity. While most of the surviving compilations of Hadiths have gone through a rigorous process of validation and authentication, the Gospels’ origins remain dubious at best.

There was a time, early in the history of Islam, when Hadiths were neither authenticated, nor checked for their accuracy. Purported sayings of the Prophet Muhammad were thrown about to justify just about anything. So dangerous was the potential for abuse in the hands of unscrupulous Muslims that Abu Bakr, the first caliph who led the fledgling Muslim community after the Prophet’s death, prohibited their transmission. However, as the generation who had witnessed the Prophet’s life and mission began to pass on, it became clear that the Sunna they had learnt from the Prophet and taught to the masses had to be preserved in more concrete form. The logic that prompted the early Caliph Uthman to expand the Quranic revelation from its original oral tradition to a textual one was also extended to the Sunna. As the study of religion coalesced onto a written text, the Hadiths too began to take on an increasingly vital role in the transmission of Sunna.

The word ‘tradition’ means literally handing over, but it also includes the object of handing over, which in our case, is practices and beliefs. The words or deeds of Muhammad and his followers, the Companions (al-Sahaba) and their Followers (tabi’un), were handed down to posterity in a kind of communication called ‘hadith’ (a tradition, literally a tale or a report)…[1]

While the oral tradition of both the Quran and Sunna never lost their places in Islam, the sacred teachings that had been etched out in writing attained an authority and permanence that was unmatched. What followed was a process of a standardization and consolidation. Then came the increased specialization in both the study and understanding of the sacred texts. This was especially significant since Islam was expanding well beyond the tiny borders of Mecca and Medina, into territories like Persia that had their own mature civilizations and often competing theological tendencies.

The new interest in Hadiths injected fresh impetus to those scholars who rightly feared that they could be abused to introduce heretical teachings. Some scholars undertook dangerous and harrowing journeys to track down Hadiths and their transmitters, right back to the original source. The personalities of each transmitter in the chain, called isnad, were unearthed and evaluated. From a body of millions of Hadiths, these scholars shaved off the untrustworthy ones, applying methods that were well-documented. Only a small number of Hadiths were found to survive the scholars’ rigorous sieves. Even so, the number was still considerable. Those Muslims who undertook the memorization of Hadiths, including the meticulous chains of transmission of each one, came to be immensely respected. Yet, Imam Abu Hanifa, the eminent jurist who founded the Hanafi School of Jurisprudence, remarked:

"You (the Scholars of Hadith) are the Pharmacists but we (the Jurists) are the physicians."

This is not merely wanton self-praise or even a case of academic one-upmanship. The apparent debate between the role of Hadith and Fiqh (jurisprudence) in the formulation of Islamic doctrines and law continues even today. Though the distinction between both is ambiguous,  present-day reformists gain from the tactic of driving a wedge between the two. A common refrain amongst reformists is the call for Muslims to return to the Quran and Sunna. Fiqh, especially those emerging from the four canonical Schools of Jurisprudence, is regarded as obsolete and in most cases, unnecessary. Hence, the current overplaying of the person who studies Hadiths exclusively.

Yet, a rote knowledge of the Quran and Hadiths are not enough to define and establish universal doctrines. Without a consistent method of assessing and applying Hadiths, especially those that hopelessly contradict one another, the muhhadith (memorizer of Hadiths) quickly becomes lost in a sea of confusion. Even a man like Ibn Wahb, who had compiled almost 12,000 narrations, was forced to confess:

"Were it not for Malik ibn Anas…I would have perished; I used to think everything that is (authentically) related from the Prophet must be put into practice." [2]

Notably, Imam Malik occupies a place very similar to Mark, the author of the first Gospel, in Christian history. Like Mark, Imam Malik had been one the earliest authorities to systemize interpretative principles that were later scrutinized and more importantly, affirmed and imitated. Ibn Wahb’s confession also brings up an issue that is all too easily forgotten- the deceptiveness of self-perception. While compilers of Hadiths like Imam Bukhari and Muslim had been paramount scholars in their own right, with access to tens of thousands of Hadiths; they too had had to submit to the fiqh of the canonical Schools.

Imam Ahmad Hanbal, the founder of one of the Four Schools, had related a narration from Muhammad ibn ibn Yahya al-Qattan that said:

"If one were to follow every rukhsa (dispensation) that is in the hadith, he would become a transgressor." [3]

This was related with good reason, for many of the Hadiths at that time were not only unverified, but also appeared to contradict one another, so that people without knowledge took from these Hadiths teachings and practices that was contradictory. And when they debated one another, it was without basis or recourse to what could ascertain the closest truth. This was where the fiqh of the Four canonical Schools would come to play a major part, for it was fiqh, literally understanding, that formulated the tests, conditions and limits that Hadiths played in delineating the Sunna.

In an apt illustration of this principle, a man who had come to Ibn Ugda asking about a particular Hadith was instead reprimanded:

"Keep such hadiths to a minimum for, truly, they are unsuitable except for those who know their interpretation." [4]

The great scholars of the past had addressed the vainglorious aspirations of some of the Hadith specialists of their time sternly. One of the best examples was the esteemed Sufyan al-Thawri, who used to describe the study and memorization of Hadiths as a disease that preoccupies people. He asserted that the,

"…explanation of the hadith is better than the hadith." [5]

A useful parallel would be the personal computer that sits on our desks. The Hadiths are like the raw binary data that the computer’s processor runs. A programmer might memorize strings of printed ones and zeros which make up the binary, so that he might recognize words and phrases. As is the wont of men, he might marvel at his ability to make out what the binary strings say. It impresses his friends and colleagues, but the sad truth is, without the computer’s processor, our programmer would never obtain the overall picture, the entire story that the data is trying to impart and how it relates to other data that is furiously coming in. Islam’s earliest scholars had warned of the use and application of Hadiths without the contextualization provided by fiqh because they knew, as Shaykh Ismail al-Ansari had once warned [6], that the Sunna is wisdom and wisdom is to place each thing in its right context.

Unfortunately, the mainstay of modernist Muslim thought remains devoted to the reformist agenda of tearing Islam from its historical and intellectual roots, which it blithely considers to be blameworthy and obsolete accretions, and returning it to its so-called roots. The role of fiqh and the Four Schools are considerably diminished. In its place is a steady profusion of individuals, books, tracts, lectures and websites that reach doctrinal conclusions through a criminally unmethodical use of Quranic passages buttressed by a selective reading of the Hadiths. Such attempts almost always result in two extreme positions that the early scholars of Islam had avoided like plague. The first is an overdependence on reason and and its inevitable offspring, the highly elliptical, metaphorical and pretentiously-modern interpretations of scripture which became the downfall of the Mutazilla sect early in Islamic history. The second is the overt literalism that some inheritors of Imam Ahmad Hanbal’s School had come into and the isolation and exclusivist behavior that it naturally encouraged amongst its cohorts. The more general effect, however, is the loosening of restrains that had traditionally kept Islam’s agenda from being set by deviants and rebels.

The evidence that such a phenomenon has already happened lies in the impressive glut of Muslim groups and factions that all stake their claim on true Islam, and dismiss as belligerents and even apostates those "Muslims" who do not share their ideology. Recent history has shown that the restraints has come off so completely that these rebels even attack and slay fellow Muslims, citing as their justification that wrong belief must be dealt with in the severest manner possible. Without exception, these exclusivist Muslims have an extremely narrow range of scholars from whom they claim to derive their central doctrines. Ibn Taymiyya is an oft-quoted scholar who lived in the thirteenth century, but there is strong reason to believe that where these deviants use him, they have done so in highly-selective and sometimes even in a deliberately misrepresentative manner. The clearest example of such mischief is in the way most of these deviants roundly and unconditionally condemn Sufi Muslims while conveniently forgetting the fact that their "Shaykh al-Islam" had in fact been a committed follower of a Sufi tariqa (path) himself.

---

Notes:
1. Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology: Traditionalism and Rationalism
2. Narrated by Ibn Asakir al-Bayhaqi, cf. Ibn Rajab, Sharh al-’Ilal
3. Ahmad, al-’Ilal
4. Narrated by al-Khatib, al-Faqih wal-Mutafaqqih
5. Ibn Abd al-Barr, Jami Bayan al-Ilm
6. As quoted by ‘Awwama, Athar

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