A new book, by a Western scholar and convert to Islam, lauds the gathering of sayings about Muhammad
By B.C.
IN GREAT spiritual traditions, followers are often presented with two distinct phenomena: a supreme moment of divine revelation, and a tradition spanning many centuries in which teachers or clerics have distilled the contents of that revelation and delivered it to their contemporaries. Most people think of Islam, especially in the form that is now resurgent across the world, as skewed towards the first kind of religion. That is because of Islam's overwhelming stress on the unchanging text of the Koran which is believed to be God’s ultimate word.
Indeed, especially after 9/11, a new Western critique of Islam came into vogue. While other world religions, including Christianity, were said to have mellowed through generations of reflection and adaptation, it was argued that no such process had taken place among the Muslims. As part of this sceptical case, it was recalled that in the third century of Islam’s existence, it was widely proclaimed that the gates of ijtihad—the struggle to solve ethical or legal problems with the aid of human reasoning—had been closed; all outstanding issues were seen as settled. In other words, Islam might once have been on the brink of spawning an evolving, dynamic tradition, but instead it fossilised.
This critique is all wrong, according to a new book "Misquoting Muhammad" by Jonathan Brown, a professor at Georgetown University and convert to Islam. He begins with a point that is true as far as it goes. While no Muslim questions the centrality of the Koran as God’s message to mankind, the religion could not exist without its other main feature: the tens of thousands of hadiths or sayings which generally refer to something said or done by Muhammad. From the Ramadan fast to procedures for prayer and personal hygiene, many of the basic rules of Muslim life derive from hadiths, not the original holy text.
And if you accept Mr Brown’s passionately argued view, the collection, sifting and interpretation of hadiths has been a noble and necessary task, undertaken by endless cohorts of devoted scholars. If Islam and its culture have spawned a rich and time-honoured intellectual “tradition”, it lies precisely in the work of combing through the hadiths. In his book, Mr Brown traces the story of hadith collection up to the present day, and takes the reader to the great places of Muslim learning, such as al-Azhar in Cairo (pictured above), where these sacred sayings have been pored over and reinterpreted.
A former Episcopalian Christian, he also makes striking comparisons between theories of knowledge in Islam and other religions, but insists rather provocatively that the “depth and breadth” of the early Muslim scholars’ achievement in assessing the authenticity of saying and texts “dwarfed” that of the fathers of the Christian church.
It can be quite difficult for a non-Muslim to understand the importance of hadiths, or to make sense of the idea that gathering and studying them is a sacrosanct duty. Some can sound inspiring—such as the famous one which attributes to God the words: “My mercy prevails over my wrath.” Others, as the book acknowledges, seem bizarre to modern minds. One recommends that if a fly lands in your drink, you should push it in, then toss the dripping creature away, then gulp—because the disease carried on one of the wings will be neutralised by the “cure” on the other.
From a Muslim viewpoint, the very strangeness of some hadiths makes it all the more necessary to have a devoted class of interpreters who somehow soften the religion’s hard edges, for example its rules on punishment. Some of the capital and corporal penalties laid down by Islam are intended to highlight the enormity of the crime, not to be imposed in practice, Mr Brown insists, while making an argument that depends on copious reference to the hadiths.
Mr Brown takes particular issue with The Economist for predicting that the information age will undermine the authority of old-time scholars and revolutionise the way in which ideas about Islam’s core teachings are formed. Given his fascination with long intellectual traditions, the author insists that nothing good can come of people going straight to texts which can foster extremist ideas unless they are leavened by scholarly wisdom.
In our defence, it is an already observable fact that electronics are making it much easier for ordinary Muslims, or self-taught “experts”, to bypass the older authorities and come to their own judgements on what their holy texts say and how they should be read. And as The Economist writing on the subject has made clear, this change can have bad consequences as well as good. Amateur theologians, bent on bypassing the professionals, can come to enlightened conclusions or appalling ones, such as the gimcrack theology used to justify acts of mega-terror by al-Qaeda or Islamic State.
However it's also worth pointing out that neither conscientious scholarship nor participation in a centuries-old chain of editing and learning are foolproof guarantees of moderation. True, scholarly activities like hadith-sifting can sometimes help to mellow a religion. But remember, too, that the leaders of the Iranian revolution, who raised the standard of militant political Islam in the modern world, included many conscientious scholars.
