Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, (i.e. what most Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators).[1] While Muslim religious scholars had a highly developed "science" of hadith going back centuries to determine which of these records were authentic and which may be fabricated, academics approached hadith from a secular point of view which did not assume any legitimate hadith had been successfully passed down.
Modern academic study of hadith is thought to have begun with Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) and Joseph Schacht (1902–1969).[2][Note 1] The general sentiment has been that hadith do not constitute a reliable corpus of sources that go back to the historical Muhammad.[4] This includes the body of legal hadith, which was hard to trace back to a time before the end of the first century after the death of Muhammad.[5] According to Wael B. Hallaq, as of 1999 scholarly attitude in the West towards the authenticity of hadith has taken three approaches:
since Schacht published his monumental work in 1950, scholarly discourse on this matter (i.e., the issue of authenticity) has proliferated. Three camps of scholars may be identified: one attempting to reconfirm his conclusions, and at times going beyond them; another endeavoring to refute them and a third seeking to create a middle, perhaps synthesized, position between the two. Among others, John Wansbrough, and Michael Cook belong to the first camp, while Nabia Abbott, F. Sezgin, M. Azami, Gregor Schoeler and Johann Fück belong to the second. Motzki, D. Santillana, G.H. Juynboll, Fazlur Rahman and James Robson take the middle position.[6]
These figures believed that forgery began very early and such forged material went on to contaminate what would be collected into the authentic group of hadith,[Note 2] with only a small number of hadith actually originated with Muhammad or his followers.[Note 3] In his Mohammedan Studies, Goldziher states: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".[9] In general, historians have cast doubt on the historicity and reliability of hadith for several reasons, including that the hadith sciences:[10]
Also throwing doubt on the doctrine that common use of hadith of Muhammad goes back to the generations immediately following the death of the prophet is historian Robert G. Hoyland, who quotes acolytes of two of the earliest Islamic scholars:
Historian Robert G. Hoyland, states during Umayyad times only the central government was allowed to make laws, religious scholars began to challenge this by claiming they had been transmitted hadith by the Prophet. Al-Sha'bi, a narrator of hadith, when hearing of this, criticizes people who just go around narrating many prophetic hadiths without care by saying he never heard from Umar I's son ‘Abdallah any hadith from the Prophet except just one.[15][13] Hoyland vindicates Islamic sources as accurately representative of Islamic history.[16] Gregor Schoeler writes:
"He [Hoyland] shows that they [non-Islamic sources] are hardly suitable to support an alternative account of early Islamic history; on the contrary, they frequently agree with Islamic sources and supplement them.[17]"
The creation of politically convenient hadith proliferated. Even in the present day, and in the buildup to the first Gulf War, a "tradition" was published in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Nahar on December 15, 1990, reading: "and described as `currently in wide circulation`", and it quotes the Prophet as predicting that "the Greeks and Franks will join with Egypt in the desert against a man named Sadim, and not one of them will return".[18][19] [Note 4]
Reza Aslan quotes Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition`, which he (Aslan) calls "whimsical but accurate".[20]
Isnads are thought to have entered usage three-quarters of a century after Muhammad's death, before which hadith were transmitted haphazardly and anonymously. Once they began to be used, the names of authorities, popular figures, and sometimes even fictitious figures would be supplied.[21][22] Over time, isnads would be polished to meet stricter standards.[23] Additional concerns are raised by the substantial percentages of hadith that traditional critics are reported to have dismissed and difficulties in parsing out historical hadith from the vast pool of ahistorical ones.[24][25] This perspective casts doubt on traditional methods of hadith verification, given their presupposition that the isnad of a report offers a sufficiently accurate history of its transmission to be able to verify or nullify it[26][27] and the prioritization of isnads over other criteria like the presence of anachronisms in a hadith which might have an isnad that passes traditional standards of verification.[28]
Another criticism of isnads was of the efficacy of the traditional Hadith studies field known as biographical evaluations (ʿilm al-rijāl)—evaluating the moral and mental capacity of transmitters/narrators. John Wansbrough argues that the isnads are should not be accepted, because of their "internal contradiction, anonymity, and arbitrary nature":[29] specifically the lack of any information about many of the transmitters of the hadith other than found in these biographical evaluations, thus putting into question whether they are "pseudohistorical projections", i.e. names made up by later transmitters.[30][29]
In the 1990s, hadith historians developed a method known as isnad-cum-matn analysis (ICMA) as an alternative approach compared with traditional hadith sciences towards identifying the origins and developmental stages of hadith traditions. ICMA seeks to date and trace the evolution of hadith by identifying how variation in the text or content (matn) of a hadith correlates with the variation in the listed chain of transmitters (isnād) across multiple versions of the same report.[31]
Against critics claims that oral transmission of hadith for generations allowed corruption to occur, conservatives argue that it is not oral transmission that is unreliable but written transmission. In fact oral transmission was "superior to isolated written documents" which had "little value" unless "attested by living witnesses". In contrast, the reliability of oral transmission was "assured by the remarkable memories of the Arabs".[32]
Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the work of hadith scholars, these false hadith have been largely eliminated.[33] al-Shafi'i himself, the founder of the proposition that "sunna" should be made up exclusively of specific precedents set by Muhammad passed down as hadith, argued that "having commanded believers to obey the Prophet" (citing Quran 33: 21),[34] "God must certainly have provided the means to do so."[35]
Academic hadith studies in modern times is usually viewed unfavorably amongst scholars with more traditional inclinations or Muslim scholars operating out of madrasas. In Turkey, the first favorable reference to Western scholarship on hadith came from Zakir Kadiri Ugan (d. 1954), titled ‘Dinî ve Gayri Dinî Rivayetler’ (‘Religious and Non-Religious Narrations’), published in the Turkish journal Dârülfünûn İlâhiyat Fakültesi Mecmuası which operated from 1925 to 1933. This paper also represented the only significant academic work on hadith from Turkey in its time. Ugan criticized the lack of analysis of the content (matn) of hadith in traditional work, and criticized the doctrine of the 'collective probity of the Companions' (taʿdīl al-ṣaḥābah) as leading to an undue acceptance of the reliability of Muhammad's followers.[36]
Academic hadith work would be continued later by Muhammed Tayyib Okiç (d. 1977), who also established the tafsir and hadith faculties at Ankara University. Okiç did not believe that Western criticism was absolutely impartial, but he did believe that there were some who were moderate and unbiased. Henri Lammens was biased but, for Okiç, Ignaz Goldziher, was objective. He encouraging his students to familiarize themselves with Western work and the languages. One of his students, Talât Koçyiğit, went on to translate four papers by James Robson (d. 1981) into Turkish and critiqued Goldziher in one article. Koçyiğit also believed that some critics were impartial but took a dimmer view of Goldziher.
Okiç’s other student, Mehmed Said Hatiboğlu, followed Goldziher's conclusions and had limited qualms with the majority of hadith academics. Hatiboğlu influenced later modernist scholars who went on to establish the journal İslamiyat (1998–2007) and two publishing houses. In the second half of the 20th century, the Faculty of Theology at Ankara trained a generation of scholars that engaged with and in Western hadith studies. Works by Wellhausen, Goldziher, Schacht, and Montgomery Watt were translated into Turkish.[37] The number of theology faculties grew and, by 2017, there were 81 accepting students. This sizable growth concurrently led to a sizable growth of students in academic hadith and Islamic studies. Considerable translation of Western works occurred in turn, with several theses beginning to appear on the phenomena of Western academic studies, and a broader engagement with Western work in general.[38]
Today, the main camps can be divided into "Istanbul-based traditionalists; Ankara-based modernists; and finally Kur’ancılar (Ahl al-Qurʾān)" where the primary points of contention are the Sunnah (and its relevance to modern times) and the authenticity of hadith. The primary issue voiced by traditionalists is that rejections of the authority of the historicity of hadith will cause future generations to abandon the Sunnah; modernists rebut that this concern stems from a misunderstanding of the mission of Muhammad leading to an acceptance of statements attributed to him that could not be true.[39]
The hadith is "unknown" and of course turned out to be very untrue, but uses terms "Byzantines" and "Frank" used in early Islam. The date given—December 15, 1990—was after the anti-Sadam Hussein "coalition" forces had mobilized but before the war had been fought.)"Believing tongues these days are passing around an unknown tradition, whether it proceeded from the great Messenger [Muhammad] or not. An examination of [whether] the source is trustworthy and the transmitters reliable has occurred, and until now a large number of religious authorities have refused to confirm or deny the reliability of this tradition, [that it] came from the Messenger [of God] Muhammad. The tradition says: ‘The Messenger of God said: "The Banu al-Asfar [white people], the Byzantines and the Franks [Christian groups] will gather together in the wasteland with Egypt[ians] against a man whose name is Sadim [i.e., Saddam]-- none of them will return. They said: When, O Messenger of God? He said: Between the months of Jumada and Rajab [mid-November to mid- February], and you see an amazing thing come of it".’ "
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