Juynbolliana, gradualism, the Big Bang, and hadith study in the twenty-first century.

• Author: Reinhart, A. Kevin
• Position: Report

1. INTRODUCTION

   There is something about hadith studies that seduces its students. The sheer mass of the field--the commentaries, biographical dictionaries, supplementary studies, its seemingly precise terminology, seeming specificity and facticity--draws scholars to it like a giant gravitational field, and keeps some of them there for their entire careers. Too often it is a black hole from which no light escapes. Sometimes this is because the scholar is sucked into the world of the ashab al-hadith and loses critical distance. Or sometimes it is because the critical distance itself becomes an event horizon that radiates only suspicion, disdain, and hyper-criticism as scholars position themselves against the forces of religious irrationality and tradition.

   Recent scholarship has moved us, finally, beyond the dichotomy of "forgery" and "faith" that has characterized hadith studies since Ignaz Goldziher and, especially, Joseph Schacht. The publication of earlier hadith collections, the refinement of isnad analysis, and, as importantly, a recognition that there are other questions in hadith studies besides "did Muhammad do it or not?"--all have helped profoundly transform the study of hadith and early Islamic religious practice in ways that now promise to alter our understanding of Islam's origins and development.

   What follows is an attempt to develop the picture of this crucial Islamic practice that is coming into focus. This essay is a review of several recent books in the field but it also draws on a number of other recent and not-so-recent works to provide an overview of hadith studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

   A hadith (in English the word is often used as a collective, with hadiths used also as plural of particularity, in preference to the Arabic ahadith) is an anecdote reporting that the Prophet Muhammad did or said something, or allowed something to occur without comment, thereby permitting it. For most of Islamic history these reports have served as Muslim religious norms and data alongside, or complementary to, norms and data derived from the Qur'an; they are the true source of most Islamic law (of the parts that can be persuasively tied to sources, that is). Using as an example a hadith now of supreme relevance to those who fly, it can be seen that a hadith has two parts: the matn (the body of the report):

   The Prophet said, "Traveling is a measure of punishment which bars man from sleep, food, and drink. When he has achieved the goal he set out for, he should hasten back to his family." (1) and the isnad, a "headnote," verifying the account by listing the report's line(s) of transmission. The isnad of this report about traveling begins with Abu Hurayra, who is reported to have heard it from the Prophet, and Abu Salih Dhakwan reported this to Sumayy, who reported it to Malik ibn Anas, who recorded it in his great work of hadith and law, the Muwatte. It continued to be related and is found also in the greatest of the canonical Six Books, the two sound (sahih) works of al-Bukhari and Muslim (referred to collectively, in the dual (oblique), as al-Sahihayn). These collections have functioned as the second scripture of Islam alongside the Qur'an.

   Around these collections hadith scholars--the muhaddithun--created a vast apparatus of commentaries, as well as reference works that identified and assessed those whose names are found in the isnads: who was this Abu Salih Dhakwan; when did he live; where did he travel; could he possibly, in fact, have met and transmitted hadiths to Sumayy; did he have a good memory, good hearing; was he of sound moral character; was he theologically sound; and from whom, in turn, did he learn hadith? These supplementary works envelop the hadith in masses of additional data, making precise, adding, confirming, and augmenting it so that one either is intimidated from studying hadith at all or neglects that corona around the hadith and treats it as freestanding scholarship--or, even, gives over one's life to mastering its detail and nuance. The vast apparatus of hadith scholarship seemed to ratify the authenticity of the hadith in part because it itself was ratified by the authority of the hadith experts; symbiotically, the authority of the hadith and the Prophet, who is "inlibrated" in them, gave authority to the scholars who certified the hadith as authentic and therefore authoritative.

   These two aspects of the hadith (authenticity and authority (2)) are intertwined and need to be separated. The former asks the question: did the Prophet say or do what is attributed to him in the hadith (as well as in the sira, the maghazi, and the histories)? In other words, are the hadith a historical source for knowledge of Muhammad's life and practice? This is a historical question, as is another related question: do the isnads record historiographically useful information about the transmission of the hadith-story? It is not merely a question of whether the isnad guarantees the authenticity of the matn but also whether it reliably reveals the transmissional history of the main's wording. If, in a given case, we suppose the matn not to be authentically Muhammadian, can the isnad still tell us about the main's point of origin--either particularly (was it Abu Salih Dhakwan who invented the tradition?), or more generally (did this story originate in Syrian pietist circles?)?

   The second aspect--much less studied but from a history of religions standpoint much more important--has to do with authority. When did Muslims decide that the stories of, inter alia, the Prophet's practice (and then, later, exclusively the Prophet's practice) begin to govern their own practice? Was the position that these stories were authoritative a minority position or the spontaneous commitment of all Muslims from Islam's beginning? When did the idea that Muhammad's acts were a source of religious knowledge become an incontestable article of faith? And how did certain forms and certain collections acquire their authority so that, in effect, the hadith became Muslims' second scripture, alongside and in many ways of more practical significance than the Qur'an?

   Putting to one side the pious position that everything of classical Sunnism was there from the moment of the Prophet's death in 632, two views of early Islamic religion appear in the literature, though both are too seldom explicitly articulated and defended. One is the "gradualist" view that in the unstable social and religious transformation of the early Islamic period, say, 632-92, the kerygma of the Qur'an alongside ad hoc rulings by figures with religious prestige constituted the body of Islamic belief and practice. Story-tellers (qussas) Qur'an reciters, sermonizers, and others also augmented the lore of Islam. Alongside them were people reporting the practices of Muslims during Muhammad's lifetime, including, no doubt, particular dicta of Muhammad. This is the picture of Islam one gets from sources contemporary with this transformation, whether from non-Muslims--Christian and Jewish sources (3)--or slightly later Muslim sources such as the Aphrodito papyri. (4)

   The gradualist account supposes that sometime in the late 600s C.E., plausibly in connection with the fitna of Ibn Zubayr, some religious enthusiasts began to systematize their reporting of religious lore and to attribute their knowledge to the sources from whom they had heard this information. They may even have begun to collect this lore in aide-memoires listing the narrators, and at least the idea (if not the wording) conveyed from the first and second generations of Muslims. These experts who recorded the data of oral transmission were very much a minority, but over time they succeeded in imposing their view on Muslims to the extent that lore from the first generation and particularly lore attributed to the Prophet became a supplement, and then the only acceptable supplement, to the Quran for the derivation of Islamic practice, but also for theological principles and pious practice. As such, hadithism began as a controversial and minority position and remained so for much of the formative history of Islam.

   The alternative to the gradualist position is what I might call the Big Bang theory. This position points to the apparatus surrounding the hadith--particularly the biographical dictionaries--to support the argument that from Islam's beginning thousands of Muslims occupied themselves with the transmission of hadith. In the Big Bang vision, a massive religious commitment to reporting what the Prophet and early Companions did and said not only justifies the primacy of the hadith as a source of religious knowledge, but also, because of the quantity of the transmission and religious intentions of the transmitters, the size and accord of the movement go far toward justifying the authenticity of the hadith as well. (5) In this view Sunnism, as a creedal commitment to the normativity of the first two generations of Muslims and especially of the Prophet's acts, is fully present from, say, the third generation of Muslims, the successors of the Successors of the Companions of the Prophet.

   My own view is that the controversial nature of the methodologies and beliefs of the ashab al-sunna is well enough established (6) that we have to view the hadith apparatus skeptically, as well as the hadith themselves. The claims that the hadith reliably record the Prophet's deeds, that the methodologies used to establish their reliability are convincing, and even that the Prophet's acts are normative and should be recorded were all at one time controversial; the hadith-science edifice that Islamicists regard with intimidated awe in part conceals the hadith's polemical functions. Ibn Sad's tabaqat work, for instance, does not disinterestedly report the activities of early Muslims; it argues and attempts to demonstrate that Muslims of the first generations were doing what the mythology of the...