Hadith Polemic and the Muslim Psyche
Abdul H. Manraj
Introduction
The
late Fazlur
Rahman
(1919 - 1988) was undoubtedly one of the greatest Muslim thinkers of the twentieth
century, yet he was only truly appreciated in academic circles. This may explain
why he and intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl,
Abdullahi
Ahmed An
Na’im,
and others with similar credentials are seldom mentioned or even heard of in
mainstream Muslim discourses, which hardly ever rise above the level of
mediocrity. Fazlur
Rahman
bemoaned the decadence of Muslims worldwide and his profound influence extended
across academia and in scholarly publications. After teaching spells at Durham
University (UK) and McGill University (Canada), he returned to his native
Pakistan with high hopes. Rahman
tried in vain to make some progressive changes especially with regards to how
the Qur'an and Hadith are interpreted and applied. After threats against
his life, he ended up fleeing to the United States where he was an accomplished
professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago until his death. This
article is a summation of one of his early works (Islamic Methodology in
History). Other contributions from this remarkable scholar include “Islam,”
“Islam and Modernity,” “Major Themes of the Qur’an,” and “Revival and
Reform in Islam,” his last book which was never quite finished due to his
unexpected death in 1988. As Fazlur
Rahman
noted in his preface to "Islamic Methodology in History":
“The traditionist-minded Muslims are not likely to accept the findings of this work easily. I can only plead with them that they should try to study this important problem with historical fair-mindedness and objectivity. I, for my part, am convinced, as a Muslim, that neither Islam nor the Muslim Community will suffer from facing the facts of history as they are; on the contrary, historical truth, like all truth, shall invigorate Islam for – as the Qur'an tells us – God is in intimate touch with history.1
With
the exception of the “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” for the most part the
applicable sections of “Islamic Methodology in History” were used
verbatim in order to capture and synthesize the main themes for this article.
Admittedly, a summary cannot do justice to any of Fazlur Rahman’s
books, so readers are encouraged to study “Islamic Methodology in History”
in its entirety, since it includes the evidence and sources to substantiate his
research. As far as this synopsis goes, the focus will be on the role of the Sunnah
/ Hadith in the formative years of Islam, how the early Muslims understood
and applied the Sunnah
/ Hadith following the Prophet Muhammad’s death, and how the Hadith
subsequently became inflexible leaving little or no room for analysis,
reinterpretation, or any discussion. The result is that there is a profound level of anti-intellectualism that permeates Muslim communities
across the globe, with the majority of Muslims today believing that all of our “thinking” has been done for us centuries ago by
the early generations of Muslims, therefore we should just unquestionably accept what
has been passed down to us and nostalgically cling to the past, hoping that the
glory days of Islam will somehow miraculously reappear.
Methodology
Essentially
there are four basic principles of Islamic thinking which supply the framework
for all Islamic thought, viz., the Qur'an, Sunnah / Hadith, ljitihad
(independent reasoning), and Ijma (consensus). The
fundamental importance of these four principles – which, it must be
reemphasized, are not just the principles of Islamic jurisprudence but of all
Islamic thought – can hardly be overestimated. Particularly important is the
way these principles may be combined and applied; this difference can cause all
the distance that exists between stagnation and movement, between progress and
petrification.2
Sunnah is a behavioral
concept – whether applied to physical or mental acts – and further denotes not
merely a single act as such, but in so far as this act is actually repeated or
potentially repeatable. In other words, a sunnah is a law of
behavior whether demonstrated once or often.3 In early Islamic
history, two of the four principles (Ijtihad and Ijma)
were intimately bound up not only with one another but also with the concept of
Sunnah
which, starting from the Sunnah
of the Prophet Muhammad, became an ongoing creative process of interpretation
and elaboration and was given the sanction of ljma. This process
of creativity stopped, however, grinding slowly to a standstill when this
living Sunnah
began to be cast in Hadith form and attributed to the Prophet.4
Western
Islamic studies rejected the concept of the Prophetic Sunnah because
they have found (i)
that a part of the content of Sunnah is a direct continuation of the
pre-Islamic customs and mores of the Arabs; (ii) that by far the greater part
of the content of the Sunnah
was the result of the freethinking activity of the early legists of Islam who,
by their personal Ijtihad,
had made deductions from the existing Sunnah or practice
and – most important of all – had incorporated new elements from without,
especially from the Jewish sources and Byzantine and Persian administrative
practices; and, finally (iii) that later when the Hadith develops into
an overwhelming movement and becomes a mass scale phenomenon in the late second
and especially in the third centuries, this whole content of the early Sunnah
comes to be verbally attributed to the Prophet himself under the aegis of the
concept of the "Sunnah
of the Prophet".5
Fazlur Rahman posits (1) that
while the above story about the development of the Sunnah is
essentially correct, it is correct about the content of the Sunnah only and not
about the concept of the "Sunnah of the Prophet", i.e., the
"Sunnah
of the Prophet" was a valid and operative concept from the very beginning
of Islam and remained so throughout (2) the Sunnah – content
left by the Prophet – was not very large in quantity and that it was not
something meant to be absolutely specific; (3) the concept Sunnah after the
time of the Prophet covered validly not only the Sunnah of the
Prophet himself but also the interpretations of the Prophetic Sunnah;
(4) the "Sunnah"
in this last sense is coextensive with the Ijma of the
Community, which is essentially an ever-expanding process; and finally (5)
after the mass scale Hadith movement the organic relationship between
the Sunnah,
ljtihad,
and ljma
was destroyed.6
It
goes without saying that the Qur'an was taught as the nucleus of the new
Islamic teaching. But the Qur'an is obviously not intelligible purely by itself
– strictly situational as its revelations are. It would be utterly irrational
to suppose that the Qur'an was taught without involving in fact the activity of
the Prophet as the central background activity which included policy, commands,
decisions, etc. Nothing can give coherence to the Qur'anic teaching except
the actual life of the Prophet and the milieu in which he moved, and it would
be a great childishness of the twentieth century to suppose that people
immediately around the Prophet distinguished so radically between the Qur'an
and its exemplification in the Prophet that they retained the one but ignored
the other, i.e., saw the one as divorced from the other. Completely nonsensical
is the view of modern scholarship which makes the Prophet almost like a record
in relation to Divine Revelation. Quite a different picture emerges from the
Qur'an itself which assigns a unique status to the Prophet whom it charges with
a "heavy responsibility" and whom it invariably represents as being
excessively conscious of this responsibility.7
The
overall picture of the Prophet's biography – if we look behind the coloring
supplied by the medieval legal mass – has certainly no tendency to suggest the
impression of the Prophet as a pan-legist neatly regulating the fine
details of human life from administration to those of ritual purity. The
evidence, in fact, strongly suggests that the Prophet was primarily a moral
reformer of mankind and that, apart from occasional decisions, which had the
character of ad hoc cases, he seldom
resorted to general legislation as a means of furthering the Islamic cause. In
the Qur'an itself general legislation forms a very tiny part of the Islamic
teaching. But even the legal or quasi-legal part of the Qur'an itself clearly
displays a situational character. Quite situational, for example, are the Qur'anic
pronouncements on war and peace between the Muslims and their opponents –
pronouncements which do express a certain general character about the ideal
behavior of the community vis-a-vis
an enemy in a grim struggle, but which are so situational that they can be
regarded only as quasi-legal and not strictly and specifically legal. A prophet
is a person who is centrally and vitally interested in swinging history and
molding it on the Divine pattern. As such, neither the Prophetic Revelation nor
the Prophetic behavior can neglect the actual historical situation; God speaks
and the Prophet acts in, although certainly not merely for, a given historical
context.8
As
already noted, early Islamic literature strongly suggests that the Prophet was
not a pan-legist. For one thing, it can be concluded a priori
that the Prophet, who was until his death, engaged in a dire moral and
political struggle against the Meccans and the Arabs and in organizing his
community-state, could hardly have found time to lay down rules for the
minutiae of life. Indeed, the Muslim community went about its normal business
and did its day-to-day transactions, settling their normal business disputes by
themselves in the light of commonsense and on the basis of their customs which,
after certain modifications, were left intact by the Prophet. It was only in
cases that became especially acute that the Prophet was called upon to decide,
and in certain cases the Qur'an had to intervene. Mostly such cases were of an ad
hoc nature and were treated informally and in an ad hoc manner.
Thus, these cases could be taken as normative prophetic examples and
quasi-precedents, but not strictly and literally. Indeed, there is striking
evidence that even in the case of the timing for ritual prayers and the
detailed descriptions for such, the Prophet had not left a rigid model. For
example, the following hadith seems to point to a campaign for fixing
the standard times for prayers.
For times of prayers, see the Muwatta' of Malik, Hadith no. 1: "...Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz one day delayed a prayer. 'Urwah ibn al-Zubayr entered upon him and informed him that al-Mughirah ibn Shu'bah, while in Kafah, once delayed a prayer, but Abu Mas'ud al-Ansari came to him and said: 'What is this, O Mughirah! Did you not know that Gabriel came down and prayed and the Prophet prayed (with him): then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the next prayer) and the Prophet prayed (with him); then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the third prayer) and the Prophet did likewise: then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the fourth prayer) and likewise did the Prophet: and then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the fifth prayer) and so did the Prophet?' The Prophet then said, 'Have I been commanded this?' (On hearing this) Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz exclaimed, 'Mind what you are relating, O 'Urwah! Is it the case that Gabriel it was who appointed the times of prayer for the Prophet?' 'Urwah replied, 'So was Bashir, son of Abu Mas'ud al-Ansari in the habit of relating from his father'." Henceforward, whenever prayers are emphasized in the Hadith, the word "Salah" is almost invariably accompanied by the phrase "'ala miqatiha – [prayers] at their proper times."
It
was only on major policy decisions with regard to religion and state and on
moral principles that the Prophet took formal action, but even then the advice
of his major Companions was sought and given publicly or privately. In the
behavior of the Prophet, religious authority and democracy were blended with a
finesse that defies description. That the Prophetic Sunnah was a general
umbrella concept rather than filled with an absolutely specific content flows
directly, at a theoretical level, from the fact that the Sunnah is a
behavioral term: since no two cases, in practice, are ever exactly identical in
their situational setting – moral, psychological, and material – Sunnah
must, of necessity, allow for interpretation and adaptation.9
It
should be abundantly clear that the actual content of the Sunnah of the early
generations of Muslims was largely the product of ljtihad when this Ijtihad,
through an incessant interaction of opinion, developed the character of general
acceptance or consensus of the Community, i.e., ljma. This is why
the term "Sunnah"
in our sense, i.e., the actual practice, is used equivalently by Malik with the
term "al-amr
al-mujtama'
'alayhi",
i.e., Ijma.
Thus, we see that the Sunnah
and the Ijma
literally merge into one another and are, in actual fact, materially identical.10
The
Sunnah
of the Prophet was an ideal which the early generations of Muslims sought to
approximate by interpreting his example in terms of the new materials at their
disposal and the new needs, and this continuous and progressive interpretation
was also called "Sunnah",
even if it varied according to different regions. This is in stark contrast to
the later rigidity that came with the full development of the Science of Hadith.11
That
Hadith from the Prophet must have existed from the very beginning of
Islam is a fact which may not reasonably be doubted. Indeed, during the
lifetime of the Prophet, it was perfectly natural for Muslims to talk about
what the Prophet did or said, especially in a public capacity. The Arabs, who
memorized and handed down poetry of their poets, sayings of their soothsayers,
and statements of their judges and tribal leaders, cannot be expected to fail
to notice and narrate the deeds and sayings of one whom they acknowledged as
the Prophet of God.12
The
Hadith is nothing but a reflection in a verbal mode of the living Sunnah.
The Prophet's Sunnah
is, therefore, in the Hadith just as it existed in the living Sunnah.
But the living Sunnah
contained not only the general Prophetic Model but also regionally standardized
interpretations of that Model – thanks to the ceaseless activity of personal ljtihad
and ljma.
That is why innumerable differences existed in the living Sunnah. But this is
exactly true of Hadith also. This is because Hadith reflects the
living Sunnah.
Indeed, a striking feature of Hadith is its diversity and the fact that
almost on all points it reflects different points of view.13
But
the Hadith in the Prophet's own time was largely an informal affair,
since the only need for which it would be used was the guidance in the actual
practice of the Muslims, and this need was fulfilled by the Prophet himself.
After his death, the Hadith seems to have attained a semiformal status
for it was natural for the emerging generation to enquire about the Prophet.
There is no evidence, however, that the Hadith was compiled in any form
even at this stage. The reason, again, seems to be this, viz., that whatever Hadith
existed – as the carrier of the Prophetic Sunnah – existed for
practical purposes, i.e., as something which could generate and be elaborated
into the practice of the Community. For this reason, it was interpreted by the
rules and judged freely according to the situation at hand, and something was
produced in the course of time which we have described as the "living Sunnah."
But when, by the third and fourth quarters of the first century, the living Sunnah
had expanded vastly in different regions of the Muslim Empire through this
process of interpretation in the interests of actual practice, and as
differences in law and legal practice widened, the Hadith began to
develop into a formal discipline.
It
appears that the activity of the Hadith transmitters was largely
independent of, and, in cases developed even in opposition to, the practice of
the lawyers and judges. Whereas the lawyers based their legal work on the
living Sunnah
and interpreted their materials freely through their personal judgment in order
to elaborate law, the Hadith transmitters saw their task as consisting
of reporting, with the purpose of promoting legal fixity and permanence.
Although the exact relationship between the lawyers and the transmitters of the
Hadith in the earliest period is obscure for lack of sufficient
materials, what seems certain is that these two approaches represented in
general the two terms of a tension between legal growth and legal permanence:
the one interested in creating legal materials, the other seeking a neat
methodology or a framework that would endow the legal materials with stability
and consistency. It is also quite certain that in the early stages, the
majority of the Hadith did not go back to the Prophet, due to the
natural paucity of the Prophetic Hadith, but to later generations.
Certainly,
in the extant works of the second century, most of the legal and even moral traditions
are not from the Prophet but are traced back to the Companions, the
"Successors," and to the third generation. But as time went on, the Hadith
movement, as though through an inner necessity imposed by its very purpose,
tended to project the Hadith backwards to its most natural anchoring
point, the person of the Prophet. The early legal schools, whose basis was the
living and expanding Sunnah
rather than a body of fixed opinion attributed to the Prophet, naturally
resisted this development.14
By
the middle of the second century, the Hadith movement had become fairly
advanced and although most Hadith was still attributed to persons other
than the Prophet – the Companions and especially the generations after the
Companions – nonetheless a part of legal opinion and dogmatic views of the
early Muslims had begun to be projected back to the Prophet. But still, the Hadith
was interpreted and treated with great freedom.15 The evidence
clearly indicates the increasing power of the Hadith over and against
the living Sunnah,
whose very lifeblood was free and progressive interpretation. It was against
this background that Imam al-Shafi'i, the "Champion of Hadith,"
carried out his successful campaign to substitute the Hadith for the
living Sunnah.16
The
Hadith movement, which represents the new change in the religious
structure of Islam as a discipline and whose milestone is al-Shafi'i's
activity in law and legal Hadith, demanded by its very nature that Hadith
should expand and that ever new Hadith should continue to come into
existence in new situations to solve novel problems – social, moral, religious,
etc. The majority of the contents of the Hadith corpus is, in fact,
nothing but the Sunnah-Ijtihad
of the first generations of Muslims, an Ijtihad which had
its source in individual opinion but which, in the course of time and after
tremendous struggles and conflicts against heresies and extreme sectarian
opinion, received the sanction of Ijma, i.e., the adherence of the
majority of the Community. In other words, the earlier living Sunnah
was reflected in the mirror of the Hadith with the necessary addition of
chains of narrators. There is, however, one major difference: whereas Sunnah
was largely and primarily a practical phenomenon, geared as it was to behavioral
norms, Hadith became the vehicle not only of legal norms but of
religious beliefs and principles as well.17
Findings
It
is clear that al-Shafi'i's
notion of Ijma
was radically different from that of the early schools. His idea of Ijma
was that of a formal and a total one; he demanded an agreement which left no
room for disagreement. But it is precisely the living and organic relationship
between ljtihad
and Ijma
that was severed in the successful formulation of al-Shafi'i. The place of the
living Sunnah-Ijtihad-Ijma
he gives to the Prophetic Sunnah
which, for him, does not serve as a general directive but as something
absolutely literal and specific and whose only vehicle is the transmission of
the Hadith.18
Ijma, instead of being a process and
something forward-looking – coming at the end of free Ijtihad – came to be
something static and backward-looking. It is that which, instead of having to
be accomplished, is already accomplished in the past. Al-Shafi'i's genius
provided a mechanism that gave stability to our medieval socio-religious fabric
but at the cost, in the long run, of creativity and originality. There is no
doubt that even in later times Islam did assimilate new currents of spiritual
and intellectual life – for, a living society can never quite stand still, but
this Islam did not do so much as an active force, master of itself, but rather
as a passive entity with whom these currents of life played. An important case
in point is Sufism.19
Without
going into the details of the origins of Sufism, there is no denying
that (as in every society) there must have been among the Companions those in
whose temperament puritanical and devotional trends were stronger than purely
activist traits, so it must be admitted that Sufism, as it developed
from the second and, especially, third centuries, has little justification in
the pristine practice of the Community. Its original impetuses came from
politico-civil wars on the one hand and from the development of the law on the
other. Its earliest manifestations are excessive individualist isolationism and
ultra-puritanical asceticism. Furthermore, according to a Hadith in al-Bukhari,
Kitab
al-Jihad, the Prophet is represented as recommending that one should go
"into a mountain cavity (shi'b), and leave people alone."
That this Hadith should occur in the Sahih of al-Bukhari
in the very chapter devoted to Jihad is a remarkable evidence both of
the growing power of the Sufi movement and the catholic spirit of the Ahl
al-Sunnah.
But there are also equally powerful and extremely interesting counter-Hadiths.
These Hadiths strongly recommend the earning of livelihood (against the
extreme interpretation of the Sufi concept of Tawakkul) and
condemn uncompromising indulgence in devotional piety.20
While
we are not concerned with analyzing the content of Sufism historically
and tracing its elements to foreign sources, it need not be denied and, indeed,
it is convincing that the Sufi movement came under certain fundamental
influences from without, especially in its later stages of development.21
It is also a historical fact that Judeo-Christian religious lore (what came to
be called "Isra'iliyat")
had begun to find its way into Islam at a very early date chiefly through the
activity of popular preachers (qussas) who wanted to make their
sermons as effective as possible.22
That
there were already in the Middle East equivalent attitudes spread by other
religions – notably Christianity and Buddhism – and that influences from these
must have come into Islam at some stage, must be accepted. Out of the failure
of political life to meet adequately the proper inner aspirations of the
people, Messianism
developed rapidly in Islam. In one form, these Messianic hopes simply took over
the doctrine of the "Second Advent" of Jesus from Christianity. The
orthodoxy in the course of time adopted it. In another form, which seems to
have taken birth in Shi'i
circles but came into Sunnism
through the activity of early Sufis, these millennial aspirations are
expressed in the doctrine of the Mahdi – the figure who will finally effect the
victory of justice and Islam over tyranny and injustice. That this doctrine
came into Islam through the Sufis is made certain by the fact that the
beginnings of Sufism are clearly connected with the early popular
preachers – known by various names – who used Messianism in their
sermons to satisfy the politically disillusioned and morally starved masses. In
the beginning, the two doctrines – that of the reappearance of Jesus and that
of the Mahdi – are quite distinct, since their historical sources are quite
different, but later the two figures are brought together, although not
entirely successfully.23
Since
the twelfth century, the best and most creative minds of Islam have been
drifting away from the orthodox system of education to Sufism. One has
only to pick up any collection of Sufi biographies to see how many
people "left formal, external education" and joined the Sufi
ranks. The 'Ulama'
(scholars) were left with little more than dry bones, the real currents of life
having escaped their system and taken their own way.24 Now we have
the Shaykh
and his authority, an endless mythology of saints, miracles, and tombs,
hypnotization and self-hypnotization and, indeed, crass charlatanism and sheer
exploitation of the poor and the ignorant.25
The
World of Islam and Islamic scholarship are by now familiar with the proposition
that "the gate of ljtihad
(fresh thinking) in Islam was closed". Nobody quite knows when the
"gate of ljtihad"
was closed or who exactly closed it. There is no statement to be found anywhere
by anyone about the desirability or the necessity of such a closure, or of the
fact of actually closing the gate, although one finds judgments by later
writers that the "gate of Ijtihad has been closed." It may,
therefore, be safely concluded that whereas the gate of ljtihad was never
formally closed by anyone – that is to say, by any great authority in Islam –
nevertheless a state of affairs had gradually but surely come to prevail in the
Muslim World where thinking on the whole, and as a general rule, ceased.26
The
denial of ljtihad
in practice has been the result not of externally over-strenuous qualifications
but because of a deep desire to give permanence to the legal structure, once it
was formulated and elaborated, in order to bring about and ensure unity and
cohesiveness of the Muslim Ummah.
We have pointed out recurrently in the earlier part of this work that the Hadith
movement launched by al-Shafi'i
in the domain of law was itself a bid for uniformity amidst what threatened to
be legal and dogmatic chaos. Subsequently, as Iqbal tells us, after
the destruction of the Baghdad Caliphate and the breakup of the political unity
of the Muslim World, the religious leadership concentrated all the more on ensuring
the unity of the Ummah
through law and other institutions. Such unity has, no doubt, reigned
in the Muslim World but at the cost of inner growth, as the Muslim World
suddenly discovered under the impact of the foreign powers during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But at the theoretical level the door of Ijtihad
has always remained open and no jurist has ever closed it. To the causes
enumerated by Iqbal
must also be added the gradual deterioration of intellectual standards and the
impoverishment of the intelligentsia of Islam over the years through a gradual
narrowing down of the educational system.27
Although
the "gate of Ijtihad"
was never formally closed, 'Taqlid' (blind acceptance) of mere
authority became so rampant that ljtihad became practically
non-existent. 'Taqlid'
was originally recommended for the common man although it was long conceded
that even the common man has the power of discernment enough to decide between
conflicting views. Later, however, 'Taqlid' enveloped
almost all members of the Muslim society. Voices against this have been
arising, particularly since the appearance of Ibn Taymiyah, and 'Taqlid'
and closing of the door of Ijtihad
have been imputed to the immediately earlier generations ever since.
Proportionately, the emphasis on the necessity of ljtihad has
increased particularly since the Islamic reform movements of the eighteenth
century. The Muslim Modernist has espoused Ijtihad all the more
and with all the greater sense of urgency since the impact on Islamic society
of the new forces in all its forms.28
If
the study of early Hadith materials is carried through with constructive
purposiveness under the canons of historical criticism and in relation to the historico-sociological
background, they take on quite a new meaning. A Hadith, say, in al-Muwatta,
that Umar did so-and-so, when read as mere Hadith, i.e., as an isolated
report, remains a blank and yields little; but when one fully comprehends the
sociological forces that brought the action about, it becomes meaningful for us
now and assumes an entirely new dimension. There is only one sense in which our
early history is repeatable – and, indeed, in that sense it must be repeated if
we are to live as progressive Muslims at all, viz., just as those generations
met their own situation adequately by freely interpreting the Qur'an and Sunnah
of the Prophet – by emphasizing the ideal and the principles and re-embodying
them in a fresh texture of their own contemporary history – we must perform the
same feat for ourselves, with our own effort, for our own contemporary history.29
There
are examples of Umar demonstrating this creativity with the Sunnah. When it came
to dividing up conquered land among the Companions, what Umar and those who
agreed with him – and ultimately everyone had to agree – felt most strongly was
that the Prophet was acting within a restricted milieu of tribes; that,
therefore, you cannot carry on the same practice where vast territories and
whole peoples are involved; otherwise you violate the very principles of
justice for which the Prophet had been fighting all his life. One thing is
certain: that although Umar obviously departed formally from the Sunnah
of the Prophet on a major point, he did so in the interest of implementing the
essence of the Prophet's Sunnah.
We know also that Umar suspended the punishment for theft when there was a
scarcity of food. Indeed, there are few men in history who have carried on the
mission of the Prophet so creatively, so effectively, and so well. But these
are the choices and the decisions which every living society has to face almost
incessantly but particularly at times when massive new factors enter into it.30
Umar
also curtailed the "rights" of slave-owning men and even went against
a Sunnah
in order to keep the bases of the Sunnah alive, strong, and progressively
prosperous.31 The evidence demonstrates beyond any shadow of doubt
that our earliest generations looked upon the teaching of the Qur'an and the Sunnah
of the Holy Prophet not as something static, but essentially as something that
moves through different social forms and moves creatively. Islam is the name of
certain norms and ideals which are to be progressively realized through
different social phenomena and setups. Indeed Islam, understood properly, ever
seeks new and fresh forms for self-realization and finds these forms. Social
institutions are one of the most important sectors of the Islamic activity and
expression. Social institutions, therefore, must become proper vehicles for the
carriage and dispensation of Islamic values – of social justice and creativity,
etc. This is the clear lesson that we learn from the early development of the Sunnah.
Umar
changed the form of the Prophet's Sunnah of war in certain fundamental
aspects and yet that very Prophet's Sunnah was all the
more prosperous because of this change. The Muslims, indeed, changed the Qur'anic
law of evidence and, instead of insisting on two witnesses, began deciding
cases on the basis of one witness and an oath. They knew that what the Qur'an
was after was to establish justice and not two witnesses. If we can now have a
recorded self-confession (provided its authenticity is established beyond
doubt), may we not even dispense with conventional modes of evidence in a given
case? But all these are problems that must be answered now, and they must be
answered from the depths of the Islamic conscience, not from a mimicry
of the past. If the right and successful answer emerges now from the Islamic
conscience, therein shall live the Sunnah of the
Prophet.32
Conclusion
Something
that cannot be emphasized enough and which must be made absolutely clear is
that Fazlur
Rahman
is not advocating that Muslims completely discard the Hadith. As he
points out, if all Hadith are given up, what remains is but a yawning
chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet. And in the vacuity of
this chasm not only must the Qur'an slip from our fingers under our subjective
whims – for the only thing that anchors it is the Prophetic activity itself –
but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur'an and, indeed, the
existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth.33
Perhaps
to the annoyance of some readers, Hadith, although it has as its
ultimate basis the Prophetic Model, represents the workings of the early
generations on that model. Hadith, in fact, is the sum total of
aphorisms formulated and put out by Muslims themselves, ostensibly about the
Prophet although not without an ultimate historical touch with the Prophet. The
very aphoristic character of Hadith shows that it is not historical. It
is rather a gigantic and monumental commentary on the Prophet by the early
Community. Therefore, though based on the Prophet, it also constitutes an
epitome of wisdom of classical Muslims.34
The
genesis of some of the important political, theological, and moral doctrines
showed how doctrines, which had originated in the "living Sunnah"
as a product of Islamic history acting on the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah,
were transformed, through the medium of the Hadith, into immutable
articles of Faith.35
The
religious history of Islam is that Islam has always been subjected to
extremisms, not only political but theological and moral as well. The Ahl
al-Sunnah
wa'l-Jama'ah
(a group that claims to be adherents to the Sunnah) whose very
genesis had been on an assumed plea of moderation, mediation, and synthesis –
which is an ongoing process – and who, indeed, actually functioned as such a
force in the early stages, themselves became, after the content of their system
had fully developed, authoritarian, rigid, and intolerant. Instead of
continuing to be a synthesizing and absorbing force, they became transformed
into a party-among-parties with all its rejecting and exclusivist attitudes.36
Sunnah for the early
generations of Muslims was not just the Sunnah of the
Prophet but included all the legal points, decisions, etc. deduced from it by
rational thought.37 It is a sheer
delusion to imagine that by stifling free, positive thought, one can save
religion; for by doing so, religion itself gets starved and impoverished. The
result was that after a few centuries, the real "Dark Ages" of Islam,
the orthodoxy was left with little more than an empty shell; a threadbare
formal structure with hardly any content.38 The
purity of pristine Islam has been compromised with un-Islamic accretions both
in doctrine and practice.39
What
is needed is not just a simple "return" to the Qur'an and the Sunnah
as they were acted upon in the past but a true understanding of them that would
give us guidance today. A simple return to the past is, of course, a return to
the graves. And when we go back to the early Muslim generations, this process
of a living understanding of the Qur'an and the Sunnah is exactly
what we find there.40
Should
a society begin to live in the past – however sweet its memories – and fail to
face the realities of the present squarely – however unpleasant they may be –
it must become a fossil; and it is an unalterable law of God that fossils do
not survive for long: "We did them no injustice; it is they who did
injustice to themselves." (Q11:101; 16:33, etc.).41
This
calls for a relentless process of hard, clear, systematic, and synthetic thinking,
which is not yet visible in the Muslim World. By and large, and in effect, we
are still suffering from intellectual indolence and consequently, for all
practical purposes, are experiencing the two extreme attitudes born of this
indolence, viz., (a) a laissez-faire attitude towards the new forces
which makes us simply drift, and (b) an attitude of escape to the past which
may seem emotionally more satisfying immediately but which is, in fact, the
more obviously fatal of the two attitudes.42
The
research and evidence can be summarized with the following salient points:
1)
Sunnah
for the early generations of Muslims was fluid, dynamic, and creative, and not
just the Sunnah
of the Prophet but included all the legal points, decisions, etc. that the Companions
and successive generations deduced from it by rational thought based on
interpretations of the Prophetic Sunnah.
2)
The Prophet was not a pan-legist neatly regulating the fine details of
human life from administration to those of ritual purity. He was engaged in a
severe moral and political struggle against the Arabs and in organizing his
community-state, and as such could hardly have found the time to lay down rules
for the minutiae of life. Even the prayer times were not inflexible until after
the proliferation of the Hadith.
3)
Hadiths and counter-Hadiths were created by assorted groups as
they vied for supremacy over each other in sectarian and political spheres. The
majority of the Hadith did not go back to the Prophet due to the natural
paucity of the Prophetic Hadith, but to later generations. However, in
order to give provenance to the Hadith, they were projected backwards to
the Prophet.
4)
It is a historical fact that accretions from Arab culture along with
pre-Islamic beliefs and practices including Buddhist, Persian, Byzantine, and
Judeo-Christian found their way into Islam at a very early date and ultimately
the Hadith collections (examples include the second coming of Jesus and
the Mahdi, stoning to death for adultery, punishment in the grave, second class
status and segregation of women, niqab, hijab, beard, etc.)
5)
'Taqlid'
(blind acceptance and following) was initially recommended for the layman
although it was long conceded that even the common man has the power of
discernment enough to decide between conflicting views. The gate of Ijtihad
was never formally closed but 'Taqlid' became so rampant that ljtihad
became practically non-existent. A movement that gained momentum and a sizeable
following as a result of Taqlid
is Sufism, especially with the aid of Isra'iliyat.
6)
Legislation from the Sunnah
/ Hadith (and even the Qur'an) is not meant to be immutable as rulings were
largely situational, so they must be continuously revisited / reinterpreted
with successive generations based on social and cultural considerations, as
well as scientific and technological advances. It should be obvious that if
rules are based on conditions that no longer exist, then the rules may no
longer apply. For example, if a predator invades a woman's home and rapes her,
and DNA evidence proves the presence of the man's sperm inside of the woman,
then only a fool or an extremist would argue that based on the Qur'anic
guidelines, four eyewitnesses must confirm that a crime was committed. This is
not the kind of justice that the Qur'an advocates.
7)
During the Prophet’s time, cultural practices were left intact unless they were
in flagrant violation of the Qur’anic
message, e.g., female infanticide, abuse of women and slaves, etc., Muslims
today seldom draw a distinction between what is religious versus cultural, so
for example, Muslims raised in the West must avoid western culture because
being western somehow contravenes being Muslim. In other words, western Muslims
must adopt an alien culture in order to be good Muslims.
Just
like the Quraysh
who refused to accept the Prophet’s doctrine given that it threatened their
establishment, and similar to Abraham’s people who rejected his message of
monotheism in favor of their idols because they found “their forefathers
worshipping them,” likewise many Muslims today will discard the premise of this
article as blasphemous. Their position will not be based on proof and logic,
but on the fact that they have been conditioned via centuries of “Taqlid”
to accept the majority (if not all) of the Hadith as infallible. This is
because there is a “Science of Hadith” and all of the validation and
categorization has already been done for us, so there’s no need to give the Hadith
any further scrutiny. Some even assert that the Hadith is revelation on
par with the Qur’an since everything uttered by the Prophet is divinely
inspired. What people fail to realize is that verification of a chain of
narrators does not necessarily mean that the initial source of the data is
authentic. For example, person “A” says that he heard something from the
Prophet or saw him do something, which could be misinterpreted or fabricated;
however, person “A” passes it on to persons “B”, “C”, and “D”. All four of
these then each pass the report to future generations, and once the chain of
narrators is verified back to the four sources even though the initial report
actually came from one source, then the report is deemed genuine from multiple
sources.
There
are many preposterous Hadith that deal with the belittling of women,
quack medicine, or urban legends like the Prophet’s open heart surgery at a
very early age (to name just a few examples). These Hadith insult the
human intelligence and are antithetical to the Qur’anic / Prophetic
message. Naturally many of these reported pronouncements and stories appeal in
large part to the naïve and the ignorant. A good rule of thumb is that if a Hadith
defies logic, and by extension is not in harmony with the Qur’anic message, then
it has no place in Islam. Some Hadith have nothing to do with the Sunnah
and in many cases are an affront to God and His noble Prophet. For example,
there are Hadith that would have us believe that everything in our lives
is predestined and we have no control over our decisions. The inference then is
that God has chosen to deliberately lead people astray and then punish them for
it, something that is unthinkable for any rational person.**
Fazlur Rahman urged Muslims to
indulge in critical thinking and not blindly accept what was passed down to us
over the centuries, but to return to Ijtihad as practiced
by the early generations of Muslims in order for us to continuously progress in
all aspects of life, as exemplified by some of the early Muslims who built
model civilizations. He believed that the Qur’an and authentic Sunnah
provide a foundational framework from which fresh vision and creativity can
materialize, given that knowledge is constantly developing and each new
generation and its environment are not frozen in time. Moreover, Fazlur
Rahman
advocated that our best thinking is not behind us, but ahead of us and will
only be realized through unremitting Qur’anic exegesis and judicious analysis of
the Hadith. This is the methodology that will lead Muslims away from
lethargy and towards a true understanding of the Qur’anic Weltanschauung
and authentic Prophetic Sunnah.
________________________________________________________________________
** Some
examples of nonsensical Hadith that deal with the degradation of women,
quack medicine, open heart surgery, and predestination, not to mention the
sadistic retribution allegedly meted out by one who was sent as a “mercy to
mankind.”
Narrated Abu Bakra: During the battle of Al-Jamal, Allah benefited me with a Word (I heard from the Prophet). When the Prophet heard the news that the people of Persia had made the daughter of Khosrau their Queen (ruler), he said, "Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 9:219)
The Prophet said, "I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 4:464, also 7.125, 7.126, and 8.456 have similar reports)
We went out and Ghalib bin Abjar was accompanying us. He fell ill on the way and when we arrived at Medina he was still sick. Ibn Abi 'Atiq came to visit him and said to us, "Treat him with black cumin. Take five or seven seeds and crush them (mix the powder with oil) and drop the resulting mixture into both nostrils, for 'Aisha has narrated to me that she heard the Prophet saying, 'This black cumin is healing for all diseases except As-Sam.' 'Aisha said, 'What is As-Sam?' He said, 'Death.'" (Sahih Al-Bukhari 7:591)
Narrated Abu Huraira: I heard Allah's Apostle saying, "There is healing in black cumin for all diseases except death." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 7:592)
Some people from the tribe of 'Ukl came to the Prophet and embraced Islam. The climate of Medina did not suit them, so the Prophet ordered them to go to the (herd of milch) camels of charity and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). They did so, and after they had recovered from their ailment (became healthy) they turned renegades (reverted from Islam) and killed the shepherd of the camels and took the camels away. The Prophet sent (some people) in their pursuit and so they were (caught and) brought, and the Prophet ordered that their hands and legs should be cut off and that their eyes should be branded with heated pieces of iron, and that their cut hands and legs should not be cauterized, till they die. (Sahih Al-Bukhari 8:794)
Anas b. Malik reported that Gabriel came to the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) while he was playing with his playmates. He took hold of him and lay him prostrate on the ground and tore open his breast and took out the heart from it and then extracted a blood clot out of it and said: That was the part of Satan in thee. And then he washed it with the water of Zamzam in a golden basin and then it was joined together and restored to its place. The boys came running to his mother, i.e., his nurse, and said: Verily Muhammad has been murdered. They all rushed toward him (and found him all right). His color was changed, Anas said: I myself saw the marks of needle on his breast. (Sahih Muslim 311, also Sahih Al-Bukhari 4.429, 5.227, and 9.608 have similar reports)
Allah's Apostle (peace be upon him) said: When the drop of (semen) remains in the womb for forty or fifty (days) or forty nights, the angel comes and says: My Lord, will he be good or evil? And both these things would be written. Then the angel says: My Lord, would he be male or female? And both these things are written. And his deeds and actions, his death, his livelihood; these are also recorded. Then his document of destiny is rolled and there is no addition to and subtraction from it. (Sahih Muslim 1216, also Sahih Al-Bukhari 4.430, 4.549, 8.593, and 9.546 have similar reports)
Works
Cited
1. Rahman,
Fazlur.
“Islamic Methodology in History (Islamic Research
Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1965). p.
vi
2.
Ibid. p. v
3.
Ibid. p. 1
4.
Ibid. p. 139
5.
Ibid. p. 5
6.
Ibid. p. 6
7.
Ibid. p. 9
8.
Ibid. p. 10
9.
Ibid. p. 11-12
10.
Ibid. p. 18
11.
Ibid. p. 27
12.
Ibid. p. 31
13.
Ibid. p. 74-75
14.
Ibid. p. 32-33
15.
Ibid. p. 34
16.
Ibid. p. 40
17.
Ibid. p. 44-45
18.
10. Ibid. p. 23
19.
Ibid. p. 24
20.
Ibid. p. 65-66
21.
Ibid. p. 106
22.
Ibid. p. 49
23.
Ibid. p. 109
24.
Ibid. p. 136
25.
Ibid. p. 117
26.
Ibid. p. 149-150
27.
Ibid. p. 172
28.
Ibid. p. 173
29.
Ibid. p. 178
30.
Ibid. p. 181-182
31.
Ibid. p. 183
32.
Ibid. p. 189-190
33.
Ibid. p. 70-71
34.
Ibid. p. 76
35.
Ibid. p. 87
36.
Ibid. p. 91
37.
Ibid. p. 130
38.
Ibid. p. 132-13
39.
Ibid. p. 142
40.
Ibid. p. 143
41.
Ibid. p. 176
42.
Ibid. p. 177
Posted August 17, 2012