Hadith Analysis by D. Brown

[Zainab_M]

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The following chapter "The authenticity of Hadith" is taken from the book 'Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought' by D. Brown and has been approved and appreciated by the Digest of Middle Studies. The author, D. Brown, has done his own research on the authenticity of Sunnah as interpreted by present time traditionalists.  Though not all of Brown's perception are correct, he has presented numerous valid points much in agreement with many scholarly circles in the Muslim community who are interested to preserve the originality, truth and reputation of Islam as brought by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) at the inspiration of the Divine Power. 

From my view point, the matter is not about modernism or traditionalism, nor about convenience or blind following.  It is about TRUTH.  Failing to accept the truth as per the ethical norms elucidated by God Almighty as given, regardless of our personal feelings, is the root cause of innovations by human hands.

The compilations of the hadith took place in the 3rd century AH (i.e. beginning about 189 years after Prophet Muhammad's death, with the 6 books being complete about 280 years after his death), p83. In the eyes of most Muslim scholars sahih (reliable/authentic) hadith could with a high degree of confidence be considered to represent the actual words and deeds of the Prophet. On the other hand, few scholars would have argued the system was foolproof. Any information in the hadiths was no absolute truth, it had to be classified as conjecture. The opponents of the hadith at the start were a minority. It was not seriously questioned.

Ignac Goldziher was unquestionably the most important 19th century orientalist critic of hadith. He became the first scholar to subject the hadith to a systematic historical and critical method. His study was published in 1896.  Similarly, Joseph Schacht published his work on the analysis of haidth in 1950. Like Goldziher, he too concluded that few, if any traditions originated with the Prophet.

Even the Prophet recognised that there were people among his companions or those living during his lifetime were spreading lies about him. This is testified to in a hadith in Bukhari. There is documented evidence that the companions disagreed with each other and criticsed each other, for example Aisha and Ibn Abbas were reported to have criticised Abu Hurayra. A number of companions demanded evidence for the truth of reports passed onto them. Umar alledgedly questioned a report from Fatima bint Qays. Umar is also reported to have confined three companions to Medina to keep them from spreading traditions. Abu Huyrara was only with the Prophet for 3 years, yet he is alledged to have been the most prolific in transmitting hadith. Biographical literature provides ample material for criticism for Abu Huyrara's character, Umar called Abu Huyrara a liar for example. Aisha criticised Anas for transmitting traditions as he was only a child during the life of the Prophet.

The process of hadith transmission was primarily oral, at least through the first century. Even after written collections of hadith were compiled, oral transmission remained the ideal. Abu Rayya argues that the late date when traditions began to be registered in written form more than 100 years after the Prophet's death became a major obstacle to the fidelity of hadith. Emerged in final form only in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Transmitted in the oral form at least until the 2nd century. Both classical and deniers of hadith claim this. By the time the traditions were gathered into the collections during the 3rd century, the corpus of hadith was damaged beyond any reasonable hope of restoration. Many draw parallels between this situation and the alledged corruption of the Gospels. If Muslims distrust the Gospels which were recorded within a 100 years of Jesus' death, how much more should they distrust hadith?

Those who argue that Muhammad's companions began to record hadith in writing during his lifetime must explain the Prophetic prohibition on writing of hadith. Contradictions within the hadith exist regarding this subject.

Under orders from Caliph Hisham, Shihab al-Zuhri was first assigned to collect hadith. This tradition has commonly been taken to mean that al-Zuhri, under duress, became the first traditionist to violate the Prophet's prohibition on recording hadith in writing. Al-Zuhri is reported to have said: "We disapproved of recording knowledge until these rulers forced us to do so. After that reason we saw no reason to forbid the Muslims to do so." In other words, before al-Zuhri writing was the rare exception; after him writing of traditions became commonplace. This argument is bolstered by numerous accounts that early generations of pious Muslims, including not only al-Zuhri and traditionists like him but also the first four Caliphs, strongly disapproved of writing hadith.

The evidence strongly suggests that early generations of Muslims did record traditions in writing, however having reports about written records is rather different than having the records themselves. Thus, the apparent aversion of pious Muslims to the recording of hadith should be interpreted as reluctance to record an official, public collection of hadith.

Scholars agree that forgery of hadith took place on a massive scale. The science of hadith developed gradually as a response to this problem. The early written compilations called suhuf were little more than random transcriptions or personal collections. Muslim sources identify the first systematic collection in recording of the hadith with the Ummad Caliph Umar and with the scholars Abu Bakr. No such collection has survived. The earliest systematic collection is the muttawata of Mailk bin Anas, 179 AH (168 years after Prophet Muhammad's death), p94. Isnad (checking of transmissions) was not applied until after the early 2nd century AH according to Schacht.

According to some, forgers of hadith became active even during the lifetime of the Prophet. In the Caliphate of Umar, the problem became so serious that he prohibited transmission of hadith altogether. The degree of the problem that resulted can be seen from the testimony of the muhahadithin (those who collect hadith) themselves. Bukhari selected 9000 traditions out of 700 000 (p96). When Bukhari reports that he selected from over 700 000 traditions, he is counting every different transmission chain, even when the substance of the tradition are the same (p99). The point is that hadith criticism did not begin during the 3rd century but was practiced continually from the time of the companions onwards.

Aisha for example when she heard it reported that the dead suffer because of the mourning of the relations, a tradition which is found in numerous versions of the classical collections retorted by citing from The Quran "no-one will bare the burden of another", and claimed the narrators of this hadith had misinterpreted what the Prophet said. Her objections did not prevent the tradition from being included in the sahih collections however.

The hadith must be analysed not only by their transmission chain but also the content, many of the early hadith scholars neglected this aspect. The hadith must be understood in the light of the background and circumstances of the occurrence. Changable elements must be distinguished from permanent principles. Figurative meanings and literal meanings must be recognised. Apparent and hidden meanings must be recognised, and the meanings of the words themselves must be thoroughly understood. You must gather all the information: the revelation, The Quran, then look at the hadith, and other hadith that discuss the same topic, then they should be rated on their degree of reliability, then rejected or not. Some hadith are only relevant for the time and should not be applied to shariah (Islamic Law) in the present time. These have to be distinguished, this has mainly not been done and not been applied today.

Emergence of new challenges to Hadith traditions

In the 19th century William Muir and Alloyce Sprenger were the first Western scholars to question whether hadith really reflected the words and deeds of the Prophet. Whether its transmission was reliable, and whether the science of hadith (method of collection) was valid.

In the 18th century, because of the decay of the society around them Muslim reformers diagnosed the problem as straying from the original sources, The Quran and sunna. Shah Wali Allah in the 18th century stressed the need to re-examine the hadith and sunna with respect to legal aspects. Shawkani emphasised the trend towards increased stringency and rigorous scholarship in hadith studies. He was willing to subject all sunna and hadith to tests.  Both  figures were not alone in this view, people before and also after held it, they were simply the two main scholars who approached this topic. They prepared the ground for rigorous hadith based reform movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The first major challenge to sunna in the modern period came from the great South Asian modernist Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan (SAK), who lived from 1817 to 1898. He eventually came to reject all hadith as unreliable, however he never fully rejected the authority of sunna. He severely curtailed its scope, and called for new methods of evaluating it and insisted on its subordinate (lower) position with respect to The Quran. 

On the basis of his extensive research he concluded that both pre-Quranic revelations, i.e. the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and the sunna are less trustworthy than The Quran and unlike The Quran were liable to corruption.


In the course of subtly undermining The Bible, in relation to The Quran, he also widened the gap between Quran and sunna.

Muir who wrote a critique of the hadith rejecting all of it and stating that all Islamic information should come from The Quran alone, deeply troubled SAK. So he prepared a rebuttle in his series of essays on the life of Muhammad and subjects. In this work and all of his subsequent writings on hadith he demonstrated a preoccupation with issues raised by Muir. He defended the value of isnad (transmission) criticism, he argued that Muir was unreasonable in attributing bias to the early narrators of hadith and he suggested his opponent had vastly underated the power of memory. Despite his apologetic tone in the face of Muir's attacks, he made a critical concession agreeing that all traditions, even those in the 6 collections of hadith should be subject to criticism.  SAK began to regard The Quran as the supreme standard, against which other information about the Prophet should be tested. He came to consider only muttawatir traditions (those transmitted by great enough number of persons to eliminate the possibility of collusion to deceive) to be a reliable basis of belief independent of The Quran. Of these, he claimed to have found only 5.

In Egypt, Muhammad Abu began to express skeptisism concerning the hadith about the same time as SAK, but much more cautiously.

In the generation following SAK and Abu, another band in the spectrum of modern approaches to prophetic authority took shape, with the emergence of Quranic scripturalism. They were the ahl-i-Quran.  They came to view adherence to hadith as the cause of Islam's misfortunes, this was about in 1917.

How most of the people from ahl-i-Hadith (a group who restricted the extent of usage of the hadith), or ahl-i-Quran came about: an ardent student of hadith came across traditions that shocked his moral sensibilites, in the course of trying to explain the presence of such traditions, he digs deeper and deeper into the study of Hadith, only to become more and more disillusioned, concluding in the end that no hadith can be trusted.  They were concerned with the precise form of salat (prayer/link). They established their own mosques, refusing to pray with other Muslims and they eliminated special prayers for the dead as well as Eid prayers. But in most matters of doctrine and practice, again like the ahl-i-Hadith, they did not differ significantly from other Muslims.

Simliar arguments made a surprising appearance in Egypt in 1906, Sidqi published an article stating that Muslims should soley rely upon The Quran. He argued that the details of Muhammad's behaviour were not meant to be imitated in every particular. This article caused a controversy for four years. In Egypt anti-hadith ideas have been the province of a small number of isolated writers and they have never found fertile ground or developed an institutional base. Anti-hadith views, such as those of the ahl-i-Quran and Sidqi have never attracted a large following. In the 20th century however, there have been a handful of important writers, most notably Allama Ahmed Parwez in Pakistan and Mahmoud Abu Riah in Egypt, who have developed sophisticated arguments to defend anti-hadith views


(Edited slightly for clairifications)

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Good and informative piece, really.  I did a quick reading of this book earlier.  I guess the original is by D. Brown.  The above in D. Brown's work, edited by Wakas Muhammad for better understanding of readers.