{"id":6775,"date":"2010-07-03T23:30:51","date_gmt":"2010-07-04T03:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=6775"},"modified":"2010-07-03T23:30:51","modified_gmt":"2010-07-04T03:30:51","slug":"why-reforming-the-hadith-is-so-difficult-elie-elhadj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/why-reforming-the-hadith-is-so-difficult-elie-elhadj\/","title":{"rendered":"“Why Reforming the Hadith is so Difficult,” Elie Elhadj"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/strong>

This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation. Not exactly the same, but... it's changing the theological foundations of the religion Fadi Hakura, Turkey expert, Chatham House<\/p><\/div>\n

A Turkish Martin Luther: Can Hadith be Revised<\/strong>?
\nBy Elie Elhadj<\/a> – July 3, 2010<\/p>\n

The BBC reported on February 26, 2008 that Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University’s School of Theology to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith. An adviser to the project says some of the sayings can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died to serve the purposes of contemporary society (BBC, February 26, 2008<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Turkey is taking the lead in trying to usher the Muslim world into the modern age. However, the challenge is formidable. Islamists will undoubtedly accuse the reformers of heresy and apostasy; this will be especially true in the Arab world. Arabs act as guardians of Isalm by virtue of their Arabic tongue. The Quran states that they are the \u201cbest people evolved to mankind\u201d (3:110). What is more, the Prophet, His companions, the Quran, and the Sanctuaries in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem are all Arab.<\/p>\n

To open the door of Hadith revision is to step into a swamp, where claims of truthfulness and authenticity are hard to substantiate.<\/p>\n

Following the death of the Prophet in 632, the caliphs were faced with conditions in the conquered lands of Roman Syria, Iraq, and Egypt and of Persia that were very different from those of the desert peninsula where the Quran and its laws emerged. Of the 6,236 Quranic verses, less than 10% deal with legislative matters, primarily marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The rest deal with theological matters.<\/p>\n

By the end of the ninth century the ulama succeeded in enshrining the Sunna traditions as a source of law equal to the Quran; notwithstanding, that the Quran never made the Sunna a source of law. The Quran contains every thing mankind needs to know.<\/p>\n

The basis for elevating the Sunna was the belief that it was a manifestation of God\u2019s will, a guide on matters on which the Quran was silent. Incorporating the attributed sayings and actions of the Prophet into the Islamic Sharia made the Prophet more than the deliverer of God\u2019s message. He became the exemplar for the Muslim to emulate faithfully. In so doing the coverage of Quranic law was expanded; thrusting the ulama into the tiniest details of Muslims\u2019 daily lives. As an example, Ahmad Bin Hanbal (d. 855), founder of the orthodox Hanbalite School of jurisprudence, \u201cis alleged never to have eaten watermelon because he was not in possession of any Prophetic precedent on the subject\u201d (Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, 1999, 71).<\/p>\n

\"\"Hundreds of thousands of often contradictory and partisan traditions in favor or against every imaginable thing affecting the individual, the family, the tribe, the city, the mosque, religious rituals, personal conduct, personal hygiene, business affairs, etc., were put into the mouth of the Prophet by thousands of sometimes dubious transmitters. Each transmitter claimed that he had been told by x, that y had told him, that z had told him, that f had told him, etc., claiming the Prophet had said this or done that.<\/p>\n

We are told that leading scholars diligently verified the authenticity of every word of every attribution and the integrity of every attributer into every chain of attributions. Eventually, a few thousand traditions were accepted as authentic, with six collections elevated to canonical rank by Sunni Muslims.<\/p>\n

The most revered and authoritative collection is that of Muhammad Bin Ismail Al-Bukhari (d. 870). Al-Bukhari selected out of 600,000 traditions he collected from 1,000 sheikhs in the course of 16 years of travel and labor in Persia, Iraq, Syria, Hijaz and Egypt 7,400 traditions (Hitti, History of the Arabs, 1970, 39). His book, titled Sahih Al-Bukhari, is classified according to some 100 subject matters. Al-Bukhari\u2019s collection is considered by most Sunni scholars second only to the Quran in authenticity. A close second in importance is the collection of Muslim Bin Al-Hajjaj (d. 875) of Naysabur, Iran with 7,600 traditions. The other four collections are those of Ibn Maja (d. 886); with 4,300 traditions, Abi Dawood (d. 888); with 5,300 traditions, Al-Tirmithi (d. 892); with 4,000 traditions, and Al-Nasai (d. 915); with 5,800 traditions. Repetitiveness exists in the collections individually and among each other.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the reported integrity of the collectors and the care that they must have taken to ensure the credibility of the thousands of attributers and the authenticity of the hundreds of thousands of Prophetic traditions that grew over more than 200 years, it remains impossible to know with absolute certainty whether every word and comma in every attribution by every memorizer was perfectly authentic and reliable and in the true chronological order in which the Prophet had announced and acted. What is known, however, is that during the first two-and-a-half centuries following the death of the Prophet, the generations of Hadith attributers and collectors were witnesses to momentous doctrinal, legal, and political conflicts.<\/p>\n

Aside from the great Arab conquests, which established one of the world\u2019s largest empires in a relatively short time, major intra-Muslim conflicts erupted during that era. There were four civil wars, seven state capital cities, and numerous violent political and religious rebellions. These events spilled rivers of blood and divided the nascent Islamic nation into many factions and sects. Under such circumstances, it is fair to say that some attributors, not to mention the collectors, had financial, political, career and other personal interest in the outcome, or they might have simply forgotten what was said or heard.<\/p>\n

The first Muslim civil war was from 656 to 661 between Ali and Muawiyah. The second civil war (680-692) was during the reigns of Muawiyha\u2019s four successors against another claimant of the Caliphate, Abdullah Bin Al-Zubair, who in 683 was recognized as a rival Caliph to the Umayyads in parts of Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, until he was killed at Mecca in 692. The third civil war culminated in 750 with the destruction of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus and the advent of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. The fourth civil war (811-813) was between Al-Amin and Al-Mamoun, the two sons of the famed Caliph, Haroun Al-Rashid (786-809). Eventually, the former was killed and Al-Mamoun reigned from 813 to 833. Additionally, there was the cataclysmic event in 680 that eventually shook the foundations of Islam and caused a permanent split between Shiites and Sunnis to this very day: namely, the rebellion and the resulting killing of Imam Hussain Bin Ali at Karbala, Iraq.<\/p>\n

The first capital of the Muslim State was Medina, the Prophet\u2019s adopted city in 622. Medina remained the capital during the rule of the first three Caliphs (632-656). In 656, Ali, the fourth Caliph, made Kufa, Iraq his base. Muawiyah made Damascus his capital in 661. Damascus remained the capital of the Umayyad dynasty\u2019s fourteen Caliphs until the Abbasids destroyed the Umayyads Caliphate in 750. The Abbasids moved the capital to Iraq, transitionally to Al-Hashimiyyah before Baghdad was built, starting in 762. In 836, the eighth Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mu\u2019tasim (833-842), moved the capital to Samarra (a short distance north of Baghdad on the Tigris River). The sixteenth Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mu\u2019tadid (892-902), moved the seat of government back to Baghdad in 892. Meanwhile, Cordova became in 756 the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, rivaling and eventually outlasting the Abbasids in Baghdad.<\/p>\n

To uncover the truthfulness of hundreds of thousands of Prophetic sayings and actions, which supposedly had occurred ten generations earlier, must have been a daunting task. The monumental size, the old age, and the great significance of the issues involved raise questions regarding the genuineness of some of the Traditions.<\/p>\n

To put this challenge into perspective, the assertion that Al-Bukhari (810-870) examined 600,000 traditions means that, even if he had spent forty years of his sixty-year life exclusively on the one and only task of compiling the Sahih, working 14-hour a day without taking a vacation, a sick day, or working on anything else; be it to earn a living or compose other books, he would have had to investigate an average of more than forty traditions every single day, or one tradition every 20 minutes. But, Al-Bukhari wrote 21 books in addition to the Sahih. If we take Professor Hitti\u2019s statement that Al-Bukhari spent 16 years of travel and labor in order to produce his Sahih, then he would have had to investigate the provenance of an average of 103 traditions every single day; or, a tradition every 8 minutes. In addition to confirming the exact text of every Hadith, Al-Bukhari had to ensure the personal integrity of the thousands of attributers over ten generations who reported the Prophet\u2019s sayings and actions. Even if the number of the traditions involved were half as many; or one tenth, the likelihood that every tradition in Sahih Al-Bukhari is perfectly authentic requires a great act of faith to accept. Was Al-Bukhari aided by assistants? The answer is unlikely. The nature of the task was such that Al-Bukhari alone could have judged the integrity of the attributer(s).<\/p>\n

The volume of traditions attributed to some memorizers is bewildering. \u201cAbu-Huraira, a companion of the Prophet . . . and a most zealous propagator of His words and deeds, reputedly transmitted some 5,374 Hadiths . . . Aisha transmitted 2,210 traditions, Anas bin Malik; 2,286, and Abdullah, the son the caliph, Omar Bin Al-Khattab; 1,630\u201d (Ibid., 394). Other transmitters with large volumes of attributed traditions include: Ibn Abbas; with 1,710, Jabir bin Abdullah; 1,540, Abu Saiid Al-Khudari; 1170, Ibn Masud; 748, the caliph Omar; 537, and the caliph Ali; 536 (Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature, 1977, 26-27).<\/p>\n

Some of these figures are in dispute. Less than fifty years earlier, one scholar, Ghundar bin Jaafar (d. 808) \u201calleged to have said that bin Abbas did not hear more than nine traditions from the Prophet, while Yahya bin Saiid Al-Qattan (d. 813) believed this figure to be ten\u201d (Juynboll, 1983. Muslim tradition. Studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early Hadith, 1983, 29). Al-Ghazali \u201cmaintained that Ibn Abbas heard no more than four traditions from Muhammad\u201d (ibid.). Whether these disputations are true or false, whether the Prophet\u2019s teenager wife Aisha, who when the Prophet died was 18 years of age, possibly 15 years, could have remembered accurately all 2,200 traditions is impossible to tell.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the six canonical collectors lived under Abbasid rule during the turbulent decades of the 800s. The Abbasid Hadith transmitters, upon whom the six collectors relied, were in turn reliant on transmitters who had lived for almost one hundred years under the rule the Abbasids\u2019 great nemesis, the Umayyads (661-750). Abbasid politics and fervent hatred of the Umayyads could have played a role in choosing or ignoring attributers, as well as altering certain attributions considered pro-Umayyad.<\/p>\n

To add to the controversy, Shi\u2019a Muslims disregard the Sunni Hadith collections. They have their own. Shi\u2019a collections differ from the Sunni collections in that they emphasize the Prophet\u2019s naming of Ali as his first successor, a claim disputed by the Sunnis. Also, while the Sunnis record the sayings and actions of the Prophet, the Twelver Shiites, the great majority of the Shiites today, record the sayings and actions of not only the Prophet but also those of the twelve Imams. Additionally, for a tradition to be credible it must be transmitted through one of the Imams. Shi\u2019a Muslims denounce the first three caliphs, Abu Bakr (632-634), Omar (634-644), and Uthman (644-656) as usurpers of the caliphate from Ali (656-661). Shi’ites do not consider Abu Bakr, Omar, or Uthman, along with the Prophet\u2019s companions who supported these caliphs, as reliable transmitters of traditions.<\/p>\n

The Indian Islamic thinker Muhammad Ashraf observed that it is curious that no caliph or companion found the need to collect and write down the Hadith traditions for more than two centuries after the death of the Prophet (Guillaume, Islam, 1990, 165). Ignaz Goldziher concludes \u201cit is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is none in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing Isnads\u201d (Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 1890, Vol. II., 44). John Burton observes, \u201cthe ascription of mutually irreconcilable sayings to several contemporaries of the Prophet, or of wholly incompatible declarations to one and the same contemporary, together strain the belief of the modern reader in the authenticity of the reports as a whole\u201d (Burton, An introduction to the Hadith, 1994, xi).<\/p>\n

Leaders of Turkey\u2019s Hadith project say successive generations have embellished the text, attributing their political aims to the Prophet Muhammad (BBC, February 26, 2008).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Turkish Martin Luther: Can Hadith be Revised? By Elie Elhadj – July 3, 2010 The BBC reported on February 26, 2008 that Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University’s School of Theology to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith. 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