THE COMPILATION of the Quran and the issue of an
official text were essential steps in the development of Islam. They would
have been taken sooner or later, but it is a striking fact that they were
taken so quickly and so resolutely. The speed and vigour of this action were
due partly to the practical demonstration of its urgency. But they were also
in keeping with an attitude of mind which directed the outlook, and
consequently the activity, of the earliest generation of Muslims, an
attitude which we may call traditionalist. The traditionalist as a Believer
accepts Islam as a simple practical religion, and, if a scholar, makes it
his function to assemble all that can be got together about the teaching and
the conduct of the Prophet. His ideal is to model his own conduct upon the
Prophet’s example, without entering into discussion of ultimate whys and
wherefores.
In this spirit the early Medinian community and its disciples
accepted the teaching of the Quran and the heritage of Mohammed, with a
fervour undimmed by philosophical speculation. The realistic Quranic
presentation of God and of man’s relation to Him, with the ritual and
ethical precepts inculcated by the Prophet, sufficed (and suffice to this
day) for the faith and practice of the great body of humble and sincere
Believers. But amongst the intellectual leaders of Islam it represented a
primitive stage of simple piety, which passed in succeeding centuries into a
stage of systematization, when elaborate theologies were worked out with the
aid of logical methods and concepts.
The characteristic religious activity, then, of the first century was
the collection and transmission of details about the life and actions of
Mohammed, and especially those relating to his revelations and the growth of
the Muslim community. In view of the profound impress which the personality
of the Prophet had left on his adherents, this activity was a spontaneous
growth, owing nothing to outside influences. The natural centre of these
studies was Medina, where most of the Companions continued to live and where
firsthand information was most securely to be found.
Already in pre-Islamic times tradition had played a most important
part in Arabian social life. Every tribe prided itself on the ‘custom’
(sunna=mos) of its
ancestors, and on its adherence to that ‘custom’. The Quran speaks of
the unchanging sunna of Allah and reproaches the Meccans for clinging to
the sunna of their
fathers. The Muslim community also developed its own
sunna, its
proper system of social and legal usages, whether these were taken over from older custom or were set by the Prophet;
but in the strict sense the term was applied to those usages only which were
not laid down in the Quran. Sunna,
in the Islamic sense, thus designated the ‘custom of the Community’
handed down by oral transmission, in distinction from the kitab, the written ‘Book’.
After the conquests the sunna
began to develop in diverging direction
in each of the new Arab settlements. Against this, the students of
tradition maintained that the term could be properly used only of the usage
set by Mohammed himself, either in the form of definite prescription or
prohibition or by example. Their view ultimately prevailed, although a relic
of the older meaning survived in the name of
Sunnis or ahl
al-sunna, ‘the followers of the Sunna’, applied to the general body
of ‘orthodox’ Muslims who adhered to the ‘usage of the Community’.
Their opponents, the Shi’a, the ‘partisans’ of Ali, gave the same
allegiance to the Sunna of the Prophet, but held the subsequent conduct of
the Community to have been illegal. The opposite of
sunna, namely bid’a
or ‘innovation’, also implies rather divergence from the established
usage of the Community than from the usage of the Prophet, although, no
doubt, for most Sunnis the two were identical.
The sunna of the
Prophet was handed down in the form of short narratives told by one of the
Companions. For example:
Uqba ibn Amir said ‘Someone sent the Prophet a silk gown and he
wore it during the prayers, but on withdrawing he pulled it off violently
with a gesture of disgust and said “This is unfitting for Godfearing
men.”
Such a narrative is called a
hadith or ‘statement’. Hadith is thus the vehicle of the
sunna, and the whole corpus of the
sunna recorded and transmitted in the form of hadiths is itself
generally called ‘the hadith’.
In the earlier historical traditions about Mohammed no special care
was taken in their transmission, the substance being more important than the
precise form of words. Oral transmission was indispensable pentacle in view
of the primitive state of the Arabic script, although individuals may have
made written notes of hadiths for their own use. Within two or three
generations, however, large numbers of hadiths came into circulation,
professing to relate statements made by the Prophet on points of law and
doctrine. Religious and political parties showed a suspicious readiness to
produce sayings of the Prophet in defence of their particular tenets, and as
time went on these became more and more categorical and detailed.
It was, in fact, obvious that the Tradition was being invaded by
forgeries on a vast scale, sometimes by editing and supplementing genuine
old traditions, more often by simple inventions. Partisans winked at the
abuse, and even the pious were not averse to giving credence to sayings
which emphasized moral or doctrinal points. Students journeyed far and wide
‘in pursuit of knowledge’, as it was called, and the supply increased
with the demand. Legal maxims, Jewish and Christian materials, even
aphorisms from Greek philosophy, were put into the mouth of the Prophet and
there seemed no limits to the process of fabrication.
For the serious students of the hadith it therefore became a matter
of urgency to establish some method of control by which genuine traditions
could be sifted out of the mass of forgeries. The first step was to require
the narrator of a hadith to state his source, and if that person was not
himself an original Companion, the source from which he had received it.
Each hadith was thus
prefaced by a chain of authorities (sanad)
going back to the original narrator, and the process was called
isnad or ‘backing’. The tradition quoted above, for example,
appears in the standard collection of al-Bukhari with this
isnad: ‘It was told us by Abdallah ibn Yusuf who said, it was
told us by al-Laith, who had it from Yazid, who had it from Abu'l-Khair, who
had it from Uqba ibn Amir – he said...’
On this basis a science of hadith-criticism was
gradually built up in the course of the second and third centuries. The
leading part in its earlier development was apparently taken by the students
of law, owing to the need of establishing a solid foundation for the
formulation of the Sacred Law, as will be seen later. But the theological
and legal study of the Tradition went at first hand in hand, although they
ultimately diverged to a certain extent.
The first requirement of the new science was adequate bio- graphical
data about the narrators, with special attention to their doctrinal views
and their relations as contemporaries. This gave rise to a voluminous
literature on the Companions and later generations of scholars, in the form
of biographical dictionaries, usually arranged in ‘classes’, i.e.
Muslims of the first generation (Companions), of the second generation
(Followers-on), of the third generation (Followers of the Followers),
&c. The earliest authoritative work of this kind is the ‘Great Book of Classes’ of Ibn Sa’d (d. 844)
in eight volumes; and in almost every century down to the present time
similar biographical dictionaries were compiled, not only of traditionists
but also of legists, of Quran-reciters, and scholars of almost every
kind.
The specific application of this biographical material to the
purposes of hadith-criticism was the object of a special branch of study
called the ’science of impugnment and justification’. This investigated
the bona fides of the guarantors of tradition, their moral character,
truthfulness, and powers of memory. A certain subjective element inevitably
entered into the matter, so that the judgements of different authorities are
often discrepant, and relatively few transmitters of tradition emerge from
the ordeal with a completely clean sheet. The method of transmission from
narrator to narrator was also studied, under the control of the biographical
material. In the isnad
quoted above, for example, it will be noticed that only the two latest
transmitters claim direct personal transmission, whereas the three earlier
only ‘had it from’ or ‘on the authority of ’ one another, implying a
possible interval.
Finally, on the results of all these investigations, each hadith was
classified under one of three main categories: sound
(sahih), good (hasan),
or weak (da’if). A
‘sound’ tradition is one
whose sanad is carried
back without interruption to a Companion by a chain of narrators each of
whom is trustworthy; a ‘good’ tradition
is one whose sanad,
though complete, has one weak link, but which is confirmed by another
version. Within each class there are further subdivisions, and indeed the
criteria for ‘good’ traditions vary rather considerably; but the
refinements of classification may be omitted here. Most of them are the work
of later generations of students, when the science of hadith-criticism had
lost all practical value and developed into a pedantic hair-splitting
exercise.
The first written collections of traditions were actually made for
legal purposes, not for the sake of hadith-study. In the early years of the
third Islamic century, hadith-study liberated itself to some extent from the
needs of the juristic schools and developed as an independent scholastic
discipline. But the results of these investigation
were immediately applied afresh to law. The outcome of this renewed
convergence of law and tradition was the issue half-way through the same
century of the first two critical collections, each claiming the title of
al-Sahih. Their authors were respectively al- Bukhari (d. 870)
and Muslim (d. 875). These two works rapidly acquired almost canonical
authority, and that of al-Bukhari in particular (though the less critical of
the two) has ever since enjoyed a veneration second only to the Quran.
In view of the place which Bukhari’s
Sahih occupies in Muslim religious literature, it is worth while
to describe it in fuller detail. The work
is divided into 97
‘books’, sub-divided into 3,45o chapters. Each book
is devoted to some large general subject of faith or works, such as
prayer, fasting, alms, testimony, buying and selling, surety, marriage. Each
chapter, called bab or
‘door’, contains from one to five or six traditions, together with a
heading or rubric indicating the subject or bearing of the contents, and
often supplemented by Quranic texts or other fragmentary traditions. Occasionally a
bab is
found without any hadith inserted, or with hadiths but no rubric.
Bukhari’s object, in fact, was to furnish the canon lawyers and
theologians with the most carefully scrutinized and authenticated traditions
on all matters of faith and conduct, arranged for ready reference. The total
number of hadiths quoted is about 7,300, but since many are repeated more
than once in different contexts they come down to
2,762 in all. Later Muslim tradition asserted that these were
selected by Bukhari out of some 200,000 hadiths, not counting other tens or
hundreds of thousands which he rejected without examination–a very
revealing comment (even granting some exaggeration) on the enormous
circulation of forged traditions.
Viewed as a whole, the Sahih
is a work of immense interest and scrupulous scholarship. Variants are
carefully noted, doubtful or difficult points in the
sanads or texts are glossed. On any careful student the book
produces a remarkable impression of honesty combined with piety. It may be
true, as has been suggested, that the popular appreciation of Bukhari’s
collection was due largely to the fact that he brought together the
traditions already accepted in religious circles as a result of the long
preceding process of critical examination, but this does not exclude the
element of personal worthiness which set, as it were, the seal of
authentication upon them.
Several sections of the Sahih
have been translated into English, but the only complete version in a
European language is one made by MM. Houdas and Marcais into French. It may
be of interest, therefore, to summarize here the contents of the first book,
which consists of a single bab,
although it is not fully typical of the rest. The rubric runs: ’How the
beginning of inspiration came to the Apostle of God, and God’s saying
(Exalted be His Name) ”Verily We have inspired thee as We inspired Noah
and the Prophets after him.” ’ But immediately after this and before
inserting any traditions relevant
to the rubric, there is inserted the celebrated tradition, carried back by a
direct chain of authorities to the second Caliph, Omar:
I heard the Apostle of God say, By their intentions shall men’s
works be judged, and to each man shall be only that which he purposed. Whoso
hath migrated [i.e. left his tribe to join the Community at Medina] for
worldly goods, to attain them, or for a woman, to marry her, his migration
(shall be reckoned) only for the purpose for which he migrated.
It would seem that the object of this parenthesis was
to warn students of the hadith against the outward and mechanical
application of the letter of
the traditions without regard to their spirit. Then follow five traditions;
three shorter ones from Mohammed’s wife A’isha and his cousin Ibn Abbas
describing the experience and outward appearance of the Prophet during the
reception and recital of the revelations; a lengthy tradition ascribed to
A’isha in which Mohammed relates the beginning of his mission with the
vision of Gabriel and the first words of the revelation; and a still
lengthier tradition from Ibn Abbas which is a typical fragment of early
Muslim legend recounting an interview between the Roman Emperor Heraclius
and the chiefs of the pagan Meccans on the subject of Mohammed.
It must not be imagined that the collections of Bukhari and Muslim
ended the compilation of the hadith – rather the opposite. The elaboration
of the legal systems still
required authorities for many matters not dealt with either in the Quran or
in the two Sahihs, and
later compilers undertook the necessary task of compiling
them, even if, in order to do so, they had to relax the strict rules
of criticism to some extent and to include many hadiths which were
admittedly less well authenticated or even (though exceptionally) weak. Four
works of the next generation were eventually accepted as canonical
authorities for this purpose; these were the ’four
sunan’ of Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Nasa’i (d. 915), al-Tirmidhi
(d. 892) and Ibn Maja (d. 896), which with the two
Sahihs made up the ‘Six Books’. For several centuries more,
collections of traditions continued to be made for many purposes and on many
different plans. Several of these works also were esteemed by scholars,
though they ranked below the collections already mentioned.
To Western scholars the technique of hadith-criticism by examination
of the chain of authorities seems to present some grave defects. A
frequent criticism is that it was as easy for forgers to invent an
isnad as to tamper with or fabricate a text. But this overlooks
the difficulty that the forger would have in getting the
isnad (with his name at the end of it) accepted and passed on by
scholars of honesty and repute. And that the Muslim critics of tradition
were generally honest and pious men must be allowed, even if some Muslims
have themselves asserted the contrary. A more fundamental criticism
is that the isnad
technique was elaborated only in the course of the second century. If one
looks, for example, at the recorded teachings of al-Hasan of Basra, the
exemplar of Muslim piety at the end of the first century, it will be seen
that he recites hadiths without any attempt to back up their authenticity
with isnads. Ample
evidence has been produced to show that the technique itself arose out of
the conflict between the traditionists and the older schools of law in
Medina and Iraq which followed the sunna
of their own communities, and that in the course of this conflict many
accepted legal decisions and traditions recently put into circulation, or
deriving from later authorities, were provided with formal
isnads back to the Prophet, more or less artificially. The
historians in their turn adopted the same method of ’improving’ the
isnads of their materials relating to the life and activities of
the Prophet, although there was little need, in their very different case,
to supplement the existing traditions by
new inventions.
Of all this the Muslim scholars were fully aware. In characteristic
fashion this recognition is itself ascribed to the Prophet by several
hadiths, such as: ’Whatsoever is said of good speech, that have I said’,
or ’After my departure the sayings attributed to me will multiply...
Whatsoever is told to you as my words, compare it with the Book of God; what
is in agreement with it is from me, whether I have actually said it or
not.’ On the other hand, many theologians were deeply disturbed at the way
things were going in the invention and distortion of hadiths. But even they
found no way of giving currency to their protest except by putting it too
into the form of a tradition: ’Whosoever shall repeat of me that which I
have not said, his resting place shall be in hell’–a hadith which found
its way in due course into all the canonical collections.
Here, as often in Muslim scholarship, there is a certain unexpressed
dislocation between the formal outward process and the inner realities. The
isnad-criticism has undoubtedly an element of artificiality in it, which
conceals (or rather rationalizes) a long process of criticism
of the texts themselves, and even Bukhari admits into his
Sahih a number of traditions which do not fulfil his formal
conditions of genuineness. The real justification of the system is twofold.
In the first place, it gave formal approval to the results achieved by the
scholars of the second century in asserting what was felt to be the
genuinely Islamic standpoint against deviating tendencies in law and
doctrine, and anchored them securely by the device of ascribing them to
Mohammed himself. In the second place, it provided a reasonable guarantee
for the future against the infiltration of suspect hadiths. If their
contents were purely ethical or homiletic, the
muhaddithun or experts in this new branch of learning
were inclined to be lenient; but the canons of criticism were more strictly
applied to hadiths concerning theological, legal, or ritual matters. On
these subjects the theologians were justly suspicious, and the later
orthodox jurists had, as we
have seen (p.55), to find the materials they required as best they could.
It is true, on the other hand, that the scholars of the third
century, finding a formally perfect hadith which was generally accepted in
scholastic circles as genuine, could only with difficulty reject it or
question its bona fides;
and that for that reason many hadiths which are clearly suspect on other
grounds (like the story of Heraclius and the Meccans) are included in the Sahih works and in other works of religious learning,
such as Tabari's Commentary on the Quran. But while the early canonical
collections already contain a certain substratum of pious legend and much of
the newer ethical and homiletic material which had grown up in the Islamic
community as a result of its expansion and contact with older civilizations
in Western Asia, the great mass of sectarian traditions of the first and
second centuries are only to be found in collections of less authority and
repute. The judgements and criteria of the early traditionists, whatever may
be regarded as defects in their method, seem at least to have effectively
excluded most of the propagandist traditions of the first century and all
those of the second, such as those which supported the doctrines of the
Shi’a or the claims of the Abbasids, or which foretold the coming of the
Mahdi.
But so far as the later scholars and collections are concerned, it is
one of the paradoxes in the history of Islamic science that precisely as the
discipline of hadith-criticism became more and more meticulous, the general
body of Muslim theologians and writers became less and less critical. In the
later centuries the most patent inventions were cited and accepted without
any apparent hesitation and
this in turn reflected unfavourably on the scholastic study itself, so that
ultimately, in the later collections, the whole
isnad- apparatus was discarded altogether or reduced to the name
of the first ’authority’ and an indication whether the tradition was
’sound’, ’good’, or ’weak’.
The place occupied by the tradition in the building up of Islamic law
and theology will be shown in the following chapters. But before closing
this discussion of its development, there is one other aspect of the process
which it is of interest to note. Just as, in dealing with the documents of
Christian tradition, the task of critical scholarship
is directed not only towards isolating the primitive elements in
the tradition, but also to tracing the development of thought and practice
in the Christian community in successive generations, so too the study of
the hadith is not confined to determining how far it represents the
authentic teaching and practice of Mohammed and the primitive Medinian
community. It serves also as a mirror in which the growth and development of
Islam as a way of life and of the larger Islamic community are most truly
reflected. From this historical angle, it
is precisely the non-authentic and invented elements in
much early and all later tradition that give it special documentary value.
Thus it is possible to trace in hadiths the struggle between the
supporters of the Umayyads and the Medinian opposition, the growth of Shiasm
and the divisions between its sects, the efforts of the Abbasids to
establish their right to the Caliphate by inheritance, the rise of
theological controversies, and the beginnings of the mystical doctrines of
the Sufis. Already in the great collection, containing nearly
30,000 hadiths, of the orthodox doctor Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 8 55)
much of this is incorporated. But in later days the different movements
within Islam tended to form their own separate collections of traditions.
More particularly the Shi’ites, in the next century, composed their own
standard works, repudiating the traditions
of the Sunnis and proclaiming the validity only of the hadiths
derived from Ali and his supporters.
