Hadith in Islam, the Necessity and Mystery of

Introduction

Hadith play a central role in Sunni Islam, and if we were to ask the obvious next question “how important?”: The simplest answer is “50/50”. The way that Sunni Islam is set up today, the Qur’an cannot make do withouth the hadith nor vice versa, they are the two stilts/crutches/legs on which Islam stands or falls (I don’t mean it pejoratively). We also require to make the important observation that “hadith” should not be taken to merely mean that which is found in designated hadith colections. They also include the sirah-maghazi lilterature, the biographical literature of Muhammed, and other genres ilke legal writings. Muslims could say very little about Muhammed’s life without the Hadith. They could also say very little about how they were to lead their own religious lives without them. That’s quire broad brush, but its only meant in the way of introduction.

How hadith were verified and the obvious problems

Hadith came to be associated with their own chain of transmission. The criteria used for verifying hadith were related to the reliability of the transmitter (s), and the orthodox-ness of the text itself.

At the very onset we are going to point out the obvious problems with this model of verification, even though the religious reasons for employing it are understandable. Even if it is true that the hadith had been put to writing at an early stage (and we know that there was severe opposition to this), the exercise of verification is being done only in the third Islamic century, so the verification itself is retroactive.

Personal reliability is established from criteria piety. Dr. Little notes that pious persons are not above lying for reasons of misplaced piety, we know that all sorts of things have been done in the name of piety. Who is to judge as to whether personal piety is superficial or not, and who is to ascertain to what extent a particular religious piety translates into standard norms of morality that look down upon lying, for instance. Neither can be taken a priori. Further if only the orthodox hadith are accepted then one os presuming both the orthodoxy of the Qur’an as well as a certain interpretation of it as orthodox, a priori. What if a reliable person transmitted an unorthodox passage- there’s no answer to this sort of question in such a model.

This means that the following is required in order to fabricate a hadith. Working forward, I think its not hard for a political-military machine to prevail upon its intelligentsiae to propose certain advantageous viewpoints, thereby also prevailing upon and winning over the populace in their regard. This is taught in schools, taken down in lecture notes and so on, much in the same way that left wing agendas like gender ideology and atheism might be propagated as gospel in many American centres of learning. There comes a point when the actual beginnings become clouded, like the involvement of so called “eugenists” like Margaret Sanger, such that they become lionized. This happens all the time, we have people idoising monsters like Lenin and Stalin and persons in countries as far away as India naming their children after them. Obviously if Lenin had transmitted a hadith, these persons would consider him “reliable”, even excessively so.

Working backwards, the same principle could come into effect, but in this case, a historical person needed to have done enough, or to have have had little enough, or the right enough parts of their life preserved so as to give the impression of reliability or piety.

As Motzki therefore states, this “leads inevitably to the question of the origin of isnads, that is, of when it became a custom for transmitters to name their source or informant” (xxiv), and he notes “the division of the Muslim community after the murder of Uthman…”

Issues with Isnads

An isnad, which is a chain of transmission is required when a document is transmitted orally, whether through time or space. This is similar to evidence collected at a crime scene- it is necessary to have documentation of the transferrence from the site to the forensic lab. This means that narrations with longer chains in time circulated orally for longer than those with shorter chains of perhaps on one or two transmitters. If the same tradition then, is received with both the types of isnads, then we can infer that any additional material in the one with the longer isnad is likely to have been added later, because we would know that the shorter version was circulating earlier.

At the point at which the material is written down, there is no longer any need for extending the chain, just like once the sample reaches the lab.

Why is there branching in the chains?

Now these chains, as it turns out, tend to branch out in time. This is again a sign of oral transmission, usually when one person x is reciting to several listeners u/v/w, all of whom are going to say to their own listeners: “I heard from x, that the Prophet said…”, but their students a/b/c, if they are merely lay persons, will merely say “u/v/w heard from x, that the Prophet said…”, without necessarily adding their own names a/b/c to the chain. Anyway, that was to demonstrate how branching takes place in the chains, its not just a case of multiple lay listeners involved in an oral transmission, rather it occurs, or should occur when some among the listeners become independent religious authority figures.

Western scholars have in recent times been employing a rather revolutionary method of analysing hadith which is the “isnad cum matin” (ICM) analysis, pioneered by Harald Motski among others, perhaps Juynboll and Schacht. In short, hadith, in the extant form we have today appear in several versions, all with their own isnad. The analysis involves analysing the complex inter-relation between the isnads, textual and form criticism of the variations in the text and the inter-relation between the two.

What happens with the Gospels?

The Gospels don’t have “isnads” because they are not orally transmitted. hadith only isnads upto the point that they get written down. Ideally an event is recorded by the person that sees that event and that’s it, that’s the book. I think the reason that the hadith do not find their way into a book at the outset is because Muhammed never asks his followers to do anything of the sort. In fact the Qur’an has a verse which explicity advises against the collection of any hadith: Surah 45:6 reads “These are the verses of Allah which We recite to you in truth. Then in what statement after Allah and His verses will they believe?”. Arabic readers will read statement of English as “hadithun” and memorise it as such too. Other verses emphasize the self-sufficiency of the Qur’an like 6:114, 29:51, 39:27 and 25:30. On top of that there is a hadith in which Muhammed advises the Muslims not to collect hadith!:

“Abu Sa’id Khudri reported that Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said: Do not take down anything from me, and he who took down anything from me except the Qur’an, he should efface that and narrate from me, for there is no harm in it and he who attributed any falsehood to me-and Hammam said: I think he also said:” deliberately” -he should in fact find his abode in the Hell-Fire.” (Muslim 3004, Bk.55h.92, Eng.bk.42,h.7147)

If you compare this to the Gospels, the reliability is based perhaps mainly upon the fact that the reading of the letters and Gospels was public, as well as the rituals and liturgical practices associated with them. Christians had a much smaller corpus of material to deal with, because the Old Testament was already standardised in the Jewish community and more or less invariate and inviolate at this point, and further, individual Churches might not have been using all of the Gospels, and certainly not all of the epistles in the earlier centuries. The addressees were simply reading the Letters of Paul that had been addressed to them, for example, and presumably circulating them among some of the other churches regionally to begin with. The Gospels and especially the Epistles perhaps, are really not amenable to memorization, being quite complex and not in verse, so they were always circulated written, and this is perhaps what protexted the the most. SO although we cannot perhaps prove who the author of Mark was by pointing to a passage in Mark that said “Mark wrote this”, the whole of Mark which we have today, would have to be circulating in toto from the early church in order for it to gain acceptance.

You could say that Luke gives a pretty good “isnad”: “many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, ³ I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account”. He’s citing eye-witneses and obviously he would not have believed someone he knew to be unreliable. He’s only writing a few decades after Jesus so this is only been handed down once at the most if that.

Perhaps the question is how many handles does a particular mode os transmission offer for manipulation. With the Gospels, since there is pretty good evidence that from the earliest times Jesus was being worshipped even in the pre-Pauline churches like Rome, Corinth and Phillipi, material pertaining to Jesus’ divinity would have to have been accepted quite early anyway. But what of the apparent distinction of John from the others? So there is a Church worshipping Christ, and a Gospel is written, in which there is material that has not been heard yet, but only enhances the divine claims of Jesus. This would seem acceptable to the community given that John died late and perhaps a student wrote for him, if not John himself. In a sense there are two Gospels: the Synoptic and the Johanine, one early, one late, nothing affecting doctrine.

The hadith have a different type of problem. The Gospels and Acts (as do most of the books of the OT as a very rough average) have around a thousand verses each, that number halving in the largest two epistles. Each is transmitted in toto, akin to a hadith collection from as early as we know. They were arguably never intended to be otherwise, since they are in narrative style. The hadith are 100s of 1000s of verses transmitted not just individually, but each with several versions, each with varying numbers of elements. So the handles are different.