Hadith

You know,

from the earliest times after the death of the Messenger,

there were those who thought that from that point

laws could only be based on the Qur'an.

Yet at the same time, everyone knew that the Qur'an cannot be understood without the Sunna.

It was delivered in the language of the Messenger,

and woven into his life experience and that of the community around him.

The Messenger explained the Reading,

and in Islamic civilisation, the Sunna has framed the Qur'an,

explaining it,

shaping, specifying and adding to the Revealed Book.

And the main unit through which the memory of the Sunna is preserved,

transmitted and understood,

has been the hadiths.

But the hadiths include much more than the words of the Messenger,

because they also include the Seera,

the life of the Messenger,

to explain the context of words spoken.

The hadiths included what was spoken and what was seen,

where and when,

the words and deeds,

habits and preferences of the Messenger,

and the historical context of the Messenger's life.

The Reading spoke directly to the community,

but for those not part of that original community,

the hadith can give a broader idea of what was going on.

Much of the Reading may be timeless,

needing only the context of human experience to engage with,

but it is also the case that much cannot even remotely be understood

without knowing its historical context.

Then, of course, the hadiths contain the Messenger's Tafsir,

explaining the deeper meanings of the Reading.

That first community would have been fascinated by the Messenger,

both those who opposed him and those who followed him.

But amongst his followers he would have been constantly surrounded

by people hanging on his every word

and watching his every move,

and what was seen and heard would soon spread

to the market place and meal time conversations.

And of course many would do their best to copy his behaviour.

Amongst his followers, the Messenger of God

was inevitably seen as the most worthy of humans to be followed.

But of the thousands around him

few could be his intimates,

and inevitably most would have only a passing closeness,

a distant admiration.

Most of what most people knew about him

would have come from word of mouth.

There was no electronic media,

no print on paper,

and despite the Messenger's encouragement of literacy,

most information

would be shared through conversation.

It was an oral culture,

and the accuracy of reportage was loose and personally evaluated.

You knew how much you trusted the person you were talking to,

and if something seemed important

you might check for a second opinion.

And the most important questions actually covered quite a narrow range,

the essential requirements of the Ibadat,

washing and praying and fasting,

with that human concern for minute detail

imprinting a precise pattern to their practice in the community,

strong enough to survive to the unity of practice today.

Then there were concerns about financial and property transactions,

inheritance rights,

and of course the Messenger's Tafsir,

explaining the new way of life

that sprang from the words of the Reading

The Messenger showed concern for the truth and falsity

of what he heard of what people were saying,

approving or disapproving,

and word would also spread if he showed pleasure or displeasure

at the behaviour of those around him.

As people shaped and established this new Deen,

it was on everyone's tongue.

There was no need to write it down.

And out of this ongoing twenty-three year conversation

spring large portions of the Islamic Legal, Theological and Popular religious traditions.

And that primacy of verbal communication

still applied through much of the first century

when many Companions were still alive

to pass on what they saw and heard.

But the empire spread and their word was spread thin,

and when they died, all that was left of contact with the Messenger was a communal memory.

And then, as now, memories of the Messenger were used in many different ways,

as a teaching example by parents raising children,

as entertainment by travelling storytellers,

as source material for those trying to shape communal laws,

and as a religious skin for the duplicitous,

and that range of different purposes inevitably developed a range of different hadith to suit them.

And geographical dispersion led to local versions of traditions,

with different and distinct lineages of communication in different regions,

such as Makka and Madina,

Basra and Wasit,

Syria and Egypt,

and Kufa,

and it soon became clear that not all the reports being passed on agreed with each other.

So questions of authenticity were inevitably raised,

who actually said what

and who heard what from whom,

and so began various systems of criticism of those reports,

beginning a very modern approach to critical history,

examining both the content of hadiths,

the Matn,

and the chains of transmission,

the Isnad.

As direct memory of the Messenger slipped into the past and vanished,

many scholars began to look at the variety of hadith in circulation

and examine them for signs of fabrication,

considering the origin and sources of such possible fabrications

and the different reasons they might have arisen.

It was recognised that Hadiths could have been invented to support

one side of political differences,

racial or local geographical prejudice,

factions concerning issues of faith,

or fabulous elaborations by storytellers or ignorant ascetics.

They could be imagined by hypocrites with malicious intent,

zandaqa,

or by muslims with the best of intentions for a perceived defense of Islam,

or incorporating traditional wisdoms under the umbrella of the Messenger's imprimatur,

or any number of personal motives.

And as the muslim community moved through its second century,

the expanding criteria for hadith criticism acquired a new terminology,

a new set of technical terms.

Over the 200's and 300's,

scholars developed a whole language of classification of Hadith

by levels of reliability and reasons for weakness.

Concerning the Matn,

hadith could be rejected as forged,

Mawdu',

or lies as intentional fabrications,

Kadhib,

or classified as a range of unintentional mistakes

Raf, Ziyada, or Mudraj,

There were even more classifications, with regard to the Isnad,

from Sahih and Hassan

through various types of weakness such as

Da'if, Mursal, Munqati', Shadhdh, and Munkar.

Al-Ittisal was the study of the contiguity of transmission,

Tadilis of obfuscation,

and Ilal the comparison of Isnads to check a Matn.

And there were also technical terms with regard to

how the hadith was transmitted from teacher to student,

Haddathana, Akhbarana, or Sami'tu.

There were criteria of reliability of the hadith transmitters themselves,

with biographical studies being produced for cross referencing,

and during the 300's

the terminology with regard to those transmitters was also more or less agreed,

with eight levels from the most reliable to those considered liars.

But by this time, the length of Isnads

was becoming a problem for those following the traditional oral transmission,

and hadith studies took on a different face as written texts began to take academic precedence.

The introduction of paper into the muslim world changed everything,

and made a greatly expanded literary critical academic approach possible.

There were always those who considered it acceptable to record the Sunna in written form,

but the expense of vellum and the fragility of papyrus,

coupled with the limited literacy of the community

had always made written texts less important than the spoken word.

What were known as books could even be a single page,

or no more than a few vellum sheets sewn together.

But with paper those books grew in size and scope.

There were the Musannaf,

books arranged by topic,

but not necessarily limited to the speech and actions of the Messenger.

For example The Muwatta of Imam Malik contains a mix of

527 Hadith of the Messenger,

613 of the Companions,

and 285 from the Successors,

plus notes on the practice of the scholars of Madina

and his own opinions.

For the Musannaf books,

no full Isnad was considered necessary or even possible, for agreed authority,

but there were other books,

Musnad,

which focussed specifically on chains of transmission,

but were not necessarily limited to what the compiler considered to be authentic.

They were seen as storehouses for all reports,

and collections could be vast.

Ibn Hanbal's Misnad contains 27,700 hadiths,

of which between a quarter and a third are repetitions.

But eventually the Musannaf and Musnad books were brought together in the Sunan and Sahih collections.

The Sunan would be arranged by topic,

without full Isnads, but with stress on authenticity agreed by scholars,

and this stress on authenticity naturally led to the Sahih collections

Sahih Bukhari was the result of 16 years of devoted study,

his vision of law and dogma

as expressed through hadiths he considered reliably authentic.

It was a monumental work

containing 7,397 traditions of which 2,602 are repetitions.

Sahih Muslim, equally monumental was arranged differently,

with many more traditions, but sharing 2,326.

These two collections,

known as the Sahihayn,

were the first containing only Sahih hadiths,

and at first the ahl-al-hadith scholars rejected them as being too restrictive,

the law up to that point being based on a much wider range of traditions.

But over the years, the ahl-al-hadith came to agree on a number of books

that comprised a canon of authentic traditions,

sometimes known as the Four, Five or Six Books,

or the Authentic Books, depending on the scholar.

The Six books contain approximately 19,600 traditions,

but many others could still be found,

often in smaller books devoted to a single topic,

such as pious excellency, Zuhd,

or the excellence of the character of the Messenger.

By this time it was generally considered

that systems of criticism of faulty hadiths had reached the stage

that there was no possibility of further development in that direction,

and the field of study became a rabbit warren of interconnected studies,

encompassing all manner of ramifications in different areas of muslim thought and behaviour,

but it was pretty much assumed that all that could be said about validity had been said.

By the mid 300's,

Muhaddithun, Hadith scholars, transmitted Hadiths before audiences of hundreds, and even thousands,

on occasions known as Amali,

dictations.

in the great mosques of Syria and Iran,

So by the mid 400's

when al-Bayhaqi declared that all reliable Hadith had been documented,

that didn't stop devoted muslim men and women

from coming up with a wide variety of new and different collections and commentaries.

There were Mu'jams

on common themes,

and Mustakhrajs

using an existing collection as a template

but providing shorter Isnads,

or there were collections associating hadith with the history of a place

and its local transmitters,

or collections of Forty,

an idea originally based on an apocryphal hadith,

but a very popular format even to today.

And of course there were the Hadith Qudsi,

in which the Messenger quotes God

speaking in words other than the Qur'an.

There were Digests,

relying on the Isnad of the original collectors,

and Supplemental collections,

and Mega-collections

trying to aggregate all the Hadith ever recorded.

There were Atraf

Indices providing varying chains of transmission for different traditions,

and Ahkam al-Hadith

collections of Hadith specifically used in Shari'a law.

By the late 400's,

there were even Mawdu'at

collections of Hadith that had been rejected because of their content.

So for many of the community,

it was understood that the Messenger's authority

to definitively interpret the Qur'an and instruct muslims

was sustained by the community itself,

that community being represented by Ulema,

whose agreement was seen as heir to the Messenger's authority,

Ijma making their opinions equal to both the Sunna and the Reading itself,

and giving Divine authority to laws not mentioned in either.

The Shi'a community saw things differently, however,

their approach to hadith tradition being through the teaching of the Imams,

recognising that the Messenger's authority was passed on to 'Ali,

and through their shared blood, through his holy family,

the offspring of 'Ali and Fatima,

eventually the infallible authority of the Messenger being inherited through the chain of the Imams.

So Shi'a hadith collections contain sayings of the Imams as well as the Messenger.

But Imams could die without having a clear successor,

and most Shi'a consider the line to have ended with the twelfth Imam,

known as the Hidden Imam,

who disappeared in occlusion to return at the end of time,

since when the scholars have acted as the Hidden Imam's regents on this earth.

There are hundreds of notebooks, Usus,

containing the sayings of the Imams,

the most noteworthy being that of Jaf'ar al-Sadiq,

but as with the spread of all the Messenger's hadith,

even some Shi'a scholars doubt the authenticity of many early books of hadith.

Nonetheless, the community have always been eager

to elaborate a clear doctrine, ritual and law

in the absence of the Imam.

The Usul books were selected and organised into compendia, Jamami,

and books by topic, Mubawwab,

comparable to the Musannaf and Sunan books,

and over the 300's and 400's

four books became seen as the Shi'a canon,

arranged quite differently to the Sunni Sahih collections,

and representing the distinctive Shi'a legal view.

The four books of the Shi'a canon,

by Al-Kulayni, Ibn Babawayh, and two by al-Tusi,

were never seen as infallible however,

and they were always open to criticism and challenge.

But in the same way as with the Sahih,

after those 4 books

previous collections became legally obsolete.

Of course that didn't stop the production of numerous other collections,

mega-collections and commentaries,

over the following centuries,

including the Nahj ul-Balagha,

the Path of Eloquence,

the wonderful speeches of 'Ali Abi Talib,

as well as collections looking at the lives of the Imams,

such as the vast collection of traditions by Shahrashub.

Then again, there were those dealing with more niche interests

like the late challenges of the Akhbari school.

Prior to the 12th Imam's disappearance,

there was no need for a critical approach to hadith,

as the Imam was there to answer questions,

but after that scholars realised the need

for critical examination of transmitters, Isnad and Matn.

In the early centuries of the muslim community,

Hadith were widely shared and distributed between Sunni and Shi'a,

and were not always seen as so distinct.

A shared love for the Messenger's family could be found in the Sahih collections,

including in Sahih Muslim

“Indeed I am leaving you with two things of great import

you will not go astray as long as you hold fast to them,

the Book of God and my family”,

and such instructions make plain

that although to a great extent,

the critical, intellectual, academic approach to Hadith was expanded

to give a justifiable basis for sharia law,

the hadith are to do with so much more than law.

The Hadiths are also crucial to an aspect of Islam that is necessary even before law.

The Shari'a has no justification if not for Theology.

The existence of a Divine Law depends for its existence on a Divinity,

and Theology is how we find ways to understand what we mean by the word God.

God may be beyond our understanding,

but trying to understand is what humans do,

so we take the name and try to find ways to approach it,

and Theology does that using the mind and its ability to imagine,

to read the names that Adam named,

to experience, analyse and rationalise.

In the early 200's

the Mu'tazilite rationalist Al-Jahiz said

“If not for reason, religions would never be upheld for God,

and we would never have been able to distinguish ourselves from the atheists,

and there would be no distinction between truth and falsehood,

affirming an omnipotent and unknowable Creator”.

Of course there were also those who felt that too much thinking was pointless,

and if you accepted that the Reading was the actual words of God

speaking to you,

it was surely enough, in fact preferable,

to just take them at their face value

and not try to analogise their literal meaning.

But in the 300's,

Al-Ashari found a way to merge the Literalists and the Rationalists,

since when generations of legal scholars have done the same.

Nonetheless,

the rejection of analogical reason

and the insistence on literal meaning

has always had its proponents,

right up to many Salafis of today,

seeing a purity of religion in the simplicity of those words.

But even more than analogy,

those early literalists might share with their modern counterparts

an utter rejection of that other distinct tradition that can be found across the muslim world,

also tracing its roots back to the Messenger from today,

the Sufi orders.

Whereas

law applies its understanding to the limits of human behaviour,

and theology applies the mind to the nature of God,

Sufism passes on a spiritual experience

that can be spoken of but is beyond words.

In the early years, the modern orders were not thought of as such,

but in the 200's

followers would gather around Al-Bistami, and Al-Junayd

who made clear that

“Our science is bounded by the Qur'an and the Sunna”.

Of course, sufi “states” could put them at odds with the law,

as was the case with Al-Hallaj,

who died refusing to change his expressions of his experience.

But in the 400's

this dichotomy between Shari'a and Sufism

received its most famous bridge in the life of Al-Ghazzali,

who from his position as a renowned Shari'a lawyer

documented his journey through the sciences of Sufism.

But there were no Sufis who did not recognise

the Hadith traditions describing the Sunna,

and this century is also known for a famous 40 collection

compiled by the Iranian sufi Al-Sulami.

So over the centuries there were many saintly people

along the spiritual chain leading back to the Messenger,

with groups of followers that eventually coalesced into the sufi orders,

many of which came to prominence in the 600's,

the time of Ibn Al-Arabi and Rumi.

It seems strange nowadays

to think of Hadith collections

accepting Hadiths that were derived from someone's dreams of the Messenger,

but it was not just Sufi giants like Ibn Al-Arabi who would rely on them,

and in the 700's

even the rather more straight laced Ibn Taymiyya

was prepared to make judgements on the basis of his.

But Ibn Al-Arabi also vouched for Hadiths he had received in visions or 'states'.

These inspired visions, known as Kashf,

unveiling,

could be considered reliable reports,

though they were not considered acceptable for matters of law.

But the intellectual restrictions of the law

were not seen as capable of limiting the sufi spiritual experience.

As Al-Bistami said

“You take knowledge dead from the dead,

but I take my knowledge from the Living One Who does not die”.

These arguments as to the authenticity and acceptability

of the various approaches to Islamic knowledge and understanding

still recognised the spiritual nature of humanity

and the essentially intangible nature of the creation.

However,

when muslims had to face the more skeptical critical approaches of European thought,

those muslims preferring to give more weight to a strictly rational,

more materialist understanding,

were given considerable encouragement.

With colonisation came

new critical approaches to the hadith literature.

Colonisation imposed a western European non-muslim understanding of modernity on the muslim world.

For European historical criticism had, and still has, its own assumptions.

There is

an assumption of non-belief in God's interference in human life,

an assumption that the Messenger was just a man,

and that there are doubts about the entire hadith corpus.

And this critical study of Islam could be portrayed

as a simple drive to expand the world of knowledge,

or alternatively it could be seen as

colonial dictation of the terms by which

knowledge and truth are established.

Muslim hadith traditions

and western academic study of Islamic origins

have diametrically opposed approaches to evaluating authenticity.

Skepticism is not the default setting for muslims,

but European academics introduced HCM,

the Historical Critical Method,

a way of resetting the truths of the past

based on the principle of analogy,

an assumption that despite historical, geographical and cultural variety,

humans always function in the same way.

This allows projection back through history

to redefine its truth in modern terms,

and this is accompanied by the three basic assumptions of HCM,

that there has to be initial doubt

about the authenticity or reliability of any historical text,

that there has to be a general suspicion

of orthodox narratives presented in texts,

and the conviction that by analysing historical sources

a scholar can sift the reliable from the unreliable

by identifying which parts of the text served which historical agendas.

One of the earliest practitioners of this "orientalism" was William Muir of Edinburgh,

but more recently the banner has been carried in Europe

by Goldziher and Schacht,

and more recently still by academics like Michael Cook,

but the new Revisionist movement

takes things to an even more extreme position,

demanding skepticism towards the entirety of the accepted origins of Islam,

the life history of the Messenger,

the community around him,

and the story of the Revelation.

Muslims have to ask if an unrealistic burden of proof is being imposed on them,

as if a simple challenge is really enough

for them to completely re-evaluate their historical tradition,

to approach the truth of tales of their beginning

in such a different way.

Hadith used for law and dogma

were subject to strict criticism,

while non-legal hadith content

was dealt with in a much more lenient way,

and this somewhat lax approach was considered acceptable

for subjects such as good manners, Adab,

the virtues of people or acts, Fada'il,

pious preaching, Wa'z,

history, Maghazi,

the end of days, Malahim,

and the meaning of Qur'anic terms, Tafsir.

These were the areas in which muslims wanted answers,

but the answers western scholars consider more important

are political history,

apocalyptic visions,

and Qur'anic exegesis,

not priorities for sunni hadith scholars.

But as the muslim world faced colonisation in the face of European power,

its scholars had to face an uncomfortable fact.

If Islam is God's chosen religion,

how come it was powerless against the west?

In the 1100's

this triggered movements of revival and reform,

seeking to revalue and recover Islam's early greatness.

This began with abandoning taqlid

and embracing ijtihad,

and this movement was elaborated by Shah Wali Allah in Delhi,

Uthman dan Fodio in Nigeria,

and many others around the muslim world.

One of the most persistent movements

was that initiated by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab,

who broke with established rulings of the sunni schools of law

and performed ijtihad,

and tried to revive the Messenger's sunna through a narrow focus on hadith.

renewing interest in hadith studies with the aim of purging their impurities.

This Traditionalist Salafi movement is of course still highly active

and visible in the muslim world today.

But there was another Salafi movement

that arose in response to the European Orientalists,

the Modernist Salafis.

In the 1200's,

Chirargh Ali revived the idea of a Qur'an only basis for Islamic law and dogma,

and proposed reinterpreting them by means of humanist ideals,

such as rationality and science,

and non-religion based ethics.

This approach led to some revolutionary interpretations, however,

such as the suggestion

that rather than inhabitants of another dimension,

the Jinn had to be no more than another Semitic tribe.

This movement, disregarding the entire hadith corpus,

later developed into the Ahl-e-Qur'an,

but at the same time as Chirargh Ali,

and perhaps the most influential Modernist Salafi,

was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan,

who was also intent on rationalising Islamic dogma

and liberalising Islamic law.

In Egypt, however,

the Salafi banner was taken up by Muhammad 'Abduh,

who retained the idea of a necessary link to the sunna by means of the hadith,

but considered only acceptance of Mutawatir hadiths

as being obligatory on believers.

And along with his talks and writings,

the journal published by his pupil Rashid Rida,

regularly discussing which hadith require belief,

helped to carry the Salafi movement into the 1300's.

But it has to be wondered,

if the only reason for belief in the authenticity of hadith

is to justify Shari'a law,

perhaps it is time to disassociate Shari'a law from Divine authority,

freeing the entire hadith corpus from its rationalist demands.

If no hadith require belief,

a muslim's view of the sunna is recognised to be personal.

In the 1400's, living surrounded by Modernity,

what Islamic heritage do you embrace, abandon, or alter,

and how is it possible to judge what is truly Islamic.

In the 1400's

many modern western muslims

take a Qur'an only approach to re-evaluation of Islamic Law.

In the USA there are Scott Kugle and Amina Wadud discussing gender issues,

Islamic feminism also being at the heart of the Moroccan professor Fatima Mernissi,

who faced great controversy for her criticism of various Companions

apportioning them with human flaws and frailties.

But distant as some of these modern academics may seem

from mainstream traditional views in the ummah,

debates on hadith in the modern muslim world

have always echoed or recast debates

that occurred in the original formative period of Islamic thought.

In the study of hadiths

there have been challenges to all approaches

that claimed authenticity of orders and understandings

every step of the way from the Messenger until now.

But such challenges have not always been seen as acceptable,

and have frequently been terminated in the most brutal of ways.

Such brutality is a part of human nature,

and was particularly noticeable in the times of the Jahiliyya community

in which the seeds of Islam were sowed,

and it clearly lingered through all the inter-muslim conflicts that followed,

the context for the spread of hadith across the new empire,

and the eventual growth of hadith reportage and collection.

200 years after the Messenger,

Ibn Hanbal was publicly flogged for his opinions,

and in 309 al-Hallaj was put to death.

In recent years up to the present day, people have been jailed,

tortured, and often killed,

for refusing to accept the legal pronouncements

of establishment religious authorities.

But the foundations of such legal authority

have always been challenged.

Ways of thinking and understanding change.

In the 700's Ibn Taymiyya,

a bulwark of the modern Salafi movement

was prepared to form a judgement for the permissibility

of a woman to teach men religious studies in the mosque,

based on a dream of the Messenger.

In the 600's Ibn 'Arabi

based major works of spiritual knowledge on his experience of "states".

There have always been those who objected to such visions,

to the extent that Al-Hallaj was put to death

because he refused to deny the truth

of what he cried out while in a state of spiritual union.

Al-Ghazzali gave up his renowned legal standing

to take on the experiential approach of Sufism,

and that was enough reason for the works of one of Islam's greatest minds

to be banned from the bookshelves of some muslim universities

There are always those who in the quest for power and control

would like the law to be narrowly defined and restrictive,

but at the same time

hadith studies have always had a recognition that the field is so vast

as to be impossible to fit into a bottle.

The volume alone has always given challenge

to reports of the outlandish memory feats

attributed to the great Muhaddithun.

Bukhari was said to have selected his Sahih

from knowledge of 600,000 hadith,

and Ibn Hanbal was said to have memorised a million,

and these numbers do not do their credibility any favours.

Memorising one hadith a day

would take 3,000 years to reach a million,

and to write out 600,000 over 16 years

would mean recording over 100 hadiths per day,

leaving little time to study their validity.

When Ibn Sa'd gathered biographies of the early muslims,

it was an attempt to describe the human channels of reportage

for assessment of reliability of transmissions.

But in the 300's somehow all the Companions were considered beyond criticism,

but this was an assumption that Ibn Taymiyya felt free to challenge in the 700's.

By the time muslims were beginning

to look at the hadith corpus and its chains of transmission more critically,

those earliest critics did not know the Companions,

only the Successors,

so there was no way to really assess

their uprightness or accuracy.

In fact, no-one has ever been able to agree

on who should be called Companions,

the number of people included ranging from 12,300 to 100,000.

The hadiths in the Six Books are drawn from only 962.

And of course there have always been those

who consider only a tiny fraction of the Sahih books to be genuinely trustworthy.

The scale of the problem can immediately be seen

in the matter of Abu Hurayra,

who only lived near the Messenger's presence in Madina for 27 months,

and was clearly not part of his close inner circle,

yet has 5,300 traditions traced to him,

apparently nearly seven hadiths a day acquired from those 800 plus days.

This is strange,

especially as it is so many thousands more

than the 2,200 from the Messenger's wife Aisha,

and the 2,300 from Anas bin Malik,

his close personal servant

So it is assumed that Abu Hurayra heard these sayings from other people,

but we don't know who,

or if any of them really understood what they were hearing.

It is said that Aisha complained that he reported words without having heard the context,

and so without understanding,

and it is also reported that

Umar Ibn al-Kattab told him

that if he didn't let the Messenger's words alone

he would send him back to the tribal lands he came from.

With those obvious concerns for Abu Hurayra,

how is it that Bukhari and others didn't recognise the problem?

Perhaps it was just that people saw things in a different way.

In a largely pre-literate society,

knowledge was largely reliant on, and measured by a capacity for memorisation,

not critical analysis,

and that tradition persisted for centuries,

even when things were written down.

The requirement for a muhaddith was a good memory,

which does not necessarily go hand in glove with a critical mind,

analytical perception or imagination,

or even perhaps an inclination towards simple questioning.

This is not to disparage Al-Bukhari,

as he was not only a towering intellectual of his time,

but also renowned for his devotion.

But sincerity doesn't necessarily mean being right.

And of course,

the transformative aspect of the Sahihihayn

is that they were written down,

textually fixed and preserved,

which is very different

from the known imprecision of verbal transmission,

and an issue that was clearly recognised by the Companions themselves.

Because

what is reported from the Messenger

is what he said and not what he wrote.

Although he encouraged learning how to record by writing,

he himself did not read or write,

and he spoke as a man

like any other, day to day, during his life,

but then again, he also recited

what he read in the Book that God showed him,

and had scribes to write that part down.

The Reading was preserved in a way that would make it

available to humankind for the rest of time,

the rest of what he said wasn't.

The muslim community would have been well aware

of the differences between writing and speech.

After all,

with the Messenger's encouragement

they were trying to learn writing in large numbers,

but at the birth of the Revelation

there were only 17 people who were literate in Makka,

and there was not a lot to write on,

people having to use bits of bone

and leaf and stone.

Then as now,

they knew that writing records words but not intonation,

not the smile or frown of the speaker,

or their implied meaning,

their context,

and the state, capacity and need of the one spoken to.

The Messenger taught thousands of followers,

interacted with his community for 23 years,

and acted as judge and political leader for the last ten.

Trying to record and preserve his sunna in writing

would have been a monumental task,

even without concern for the inadequacies of writing for recording.

Oral cultures know that words change

like chinese whispers as they pass from person to person,

and early concerns for accuracy did not expect reports to be word for word,

but to accurately express the meaning of what was being said,

accepting that it might be partly paraphrased.

But even written reports were at the mercy of the inadequacies of the early Arabic scripts,

which didn't distinguish the short vowels or certain consonants from each other.

Text could rarely be more than an aide-memoire.

You really needed to know what it said to be able to read it,

and to know what was intended to understand it.

All of which made the hadiths very vulnerable to misinterpretation.

On the one hand, early Hadith scholars

almost never discussed the content of hadith,

as to whether they made sense,

assuming that the Messenger had access to knowledge that was beyond the rest of us,

and could know what was unknowable to others,

while on the other hand scholars could reject reports

due to their personal preconceptions of what was possible or permissible.

So although this fluidity was eventually tamed

and fixed into collections that could become canonical,

early scholars knew that all hadith

could not be extrapolated into general laws

because of both the insecurity of isnads,

and lack of knowledge of original context.

So from the earliest days,

just as centuries later,

there was a split between Ahl-e-Hadith,

based on the premise that reliable hadith were legally compelling,

and the Ahl-e-Qur'an,

who thought that laws should only be derived from God's words in the Qur'an.

But interpretation by analogy can only go so far,

and where representation of Divine will is concerned,

it is inevitably even more unreliable than the original sources.

So if the Reading has so few ayats that can be seen as acting as legal injunctions on the Messenger's community,

how can a universal legal expression of the Divine will be defined?

How many laws need to be defined?

Perhaps we need to look closer at the assumed need for that universal legal expression to begin with.

The Reading doesn't describe itself as a book of law,

but one of guidance,

good news and warning.

Surrender to God is a personal decision that can never be compulsory.

Right after the Ayat-ul-Qursi we are told

that there can be no compulsion in the Islamic Way of Life.

It is a personal choice.

But communal laws, or state laws,

are imposed by force and threat of punishment,

with the purpose of deterring those who would try to destroy communal harmony

and replace good with evil,

the individual having no say in the matter.

Such laws are not a matter of personal preference,

but submission to forceful authority.

So if we consider such matters as they relate to the need for hadith to be authoritative,

to bestow Divine authority on such compulsion,

if the only reason we need authority is for law,

but the Qur'an refutes the need for compulsion,

perhaps the perceived need for primacy of law as an expression of the Islamic Deen is in fact the problem.

This is not to make the Shari'a heritage irrelevant,

simply to strip away its assumption of Divine Authority.

It is the best we can do,

and as a human endeavour it is magnificent.

As the focus of muslim discussion and debate

concerning human understanding of morals

and ethical behaviour,

it has created a deep and subtle language of exploration,

and has been the mental arena for some of the greatest intellects of human history.

But there is more to Islam than Shari'a.

We know from the Eternity Well

that even considering the Shari'a's essential first source material, the Qur'an,

just how many widely varied ways of interpreting its verses there are.

For instance,

Al-Ghazzali divides the Reading into ten categories,

eight of which can be found in the Fatihah,

Divine Essence, Attributes and Works,

description of the Life to Come,

the Straight Path with both its sides,

purification of the soul

and making it beautiful,

descriptions of God's favour to friends

and anger towards enemies,

and description of the resurrection.

But after elaborating these issues,

Al-Ghazzali then points out that

“Only two divisions fall outside this sura,

namely God's argument with disbelievers

and the judgements of jurists,

two subjects from which the sciences of theology and jurisprudence stem.

From this it becomes clear that in reality

these two subjects fall into the lowest of the grades of religious sciences.

It is only the love of wealth and influence

which has raised them to a higher status”

Wealth and influence are functions of power,

and the power of a lawyer is to define laws that apply to other people,

inevitably attractive to some who might enjoy the exercise of that power

by imposing ever more laws and restrictions,

reducing personal freedoms,

and favouring threats of punishment over mercy.

But as Al-Ghazzali also says

“To walk along the straight path to God

by way of love,

and to perform actions of love,

are much better than to walk along the path of fear”.

All the religious sciences are there to help establish that link with God

through the words and example of the Messenger,

a personal connection through to the Messenger,

as with an Imam or sufi Sheikh

transmitting spiritual knowledge,

like a hadith scholar passing on the Sunna,

or like a parent showing a child how to pray,

the link to the Messenger is a direct contact,

person to person,

through nearly 1500 years of history.

But now, after all those years,

for a muslim raised in a Scottish rationalist culture,

it must be asked whether it is not time

for a new reappraisal of hadith literature,

to see how it stands up to modern intellectual approaches,

and whether new young muslims

might be able to shed new light on old discussions.

With the extrapolation of hadith into Shari'a law,

the understandings drawn from them slowly became more fixed and rigid,

and what was once arguable has become canonical

and unchallengeable.

But if we are to feel trust in that link

between ourselves and the Messenger,

all links in the chain must be open to question.

That way we can examine a point of view

and say whether we agree or not,

and from there, as earlier in history,

things are once again a matter of discussion.

The Sunna is what gives the Qur'an

its contextual meaning,

ties it to a time and place in history,

and endows a universe of understanding

to that historical event,

but the sunna is more than the hadith.

It is the communal memory of the Messenger.

So recognising the hadith

as simply part of the communal memoryof the Messenger,

with no legal authority,

does not deny the value of the life of the Messenger,

just recognises the humanity

of those who remember him.

What anyone draws from that memory

is a personal construct,

a personal truth,

a projection backwards,

just like the secular modernists

but relying on spiritual experience

rather than the skeptical assumptions

at the root of Historical Critical Method.

It is reported that the Messenger said

“I am but a man.

If I give you a command regarding religion,

then take it.

But if I make a statement out of my own judgement

then I am but a man

You are more knowledgeable about the matters of your world.”

Today we live in a very different world,

and see things in our world in a different way.

In a world where time and space are interconnected,

and time is understood to move both ways,

do we not need to re-evaluate theories of abrogation?

Does the Reading have a different meaning and relevance in our time

if we are to recognise it

as speaking to all times, places and people?

To understand the Reading now,

we also need to know how it was understood at the time when it was revealed.

But it has to be asked

if a scholarly academic approach to the hadith heritage

is our best connection to the Messenger.

The intellect may share information,

but the real links are in the imagination,

putting yourself in the Messenger's company,

and feeling the emotion of the heart opening

in the Messenger's presence.

Only by knowing the Messenger

can we imagine how the Messenger would deal with

any situation in which we find ourselves,

but the hadith literature is vast and varied.

Perhaps best to start with the Bountiful Reading,

where God tells us that Muhammad was only sent as a mercy to all beings.

So it is that the first hadith

traditionally transmitted from teacher to student is

“The merciful ones,

indeed the Most Merciful God has mercy upon them.

Have mercy in this earthly world,

and Hu that is in the heavens will have mercy on you.”