Islam has a hold on the Western zeitgeist.
As the West drifts farther from its religious roots, it is experiencing a phase of intense engagement with Islamic tradition. At the same time, many Muslim countries have suffered from a mutant traditionalism in the form of literalist Wahhabism, in part as a reaction against the deconstruction of stable categories brought about by (post-)modernity.
It is in this context that we observe the rise of Islamic ‘modernism.’
When a meteor crashes to earth—or when ore is mined from the ground—it is liable to acquire debasing accretions. Likewise, history yokes tradition to all manner of spurious, speculative, and sectarian elements. These are celebrated by ‘traditionalists’ who do not notice the metal inside; who do not see how their oxidized tradition no longer sheaths the sword of spiritual combat, but closes it shut. To the degree that modern skepticism and the historical-critical method are wielded to isolate the essence of a religion and the historical developments true to that essence, we may liken it to separating precious metal from dirty ore.
Enter the believing historical-critical scholar, whose project is one of renewal, rather than revolutionary change.
In this category, we find Dr. Javad Hashmi, Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Studies at Harvard University and Director of Research & Strategic Communications at the Muslim Public Affairs Council. (See: Twitter and YouTube Channel).
Among other areas, Dr. Hashmi’s research has focused on how classical Islamic legal tradition has obscured the meaning and context of the Quran, especially as regards the use of Hadith collections (a body of episodic narrations and sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad).
Dr. Hashmi’s work is critical of the legalistic character of what may be described as mainstream Sunni thought, recovering the legacy of other theological schools, including medieval rationalists and philosophers.
Part I of this interview lays out the distinction between what has established itself as Muslim (Sunni) ‘traditionalism’ and its alternative, with Part II getting into deeper waters, including the ways in which postmodern relativism and literalist fundamentalism share the same premises.
“Hadith-Hurling”
How does what we may describe as today’s mainstream (Sunni, post-Imam Shafi’i) “traditionalism” rely on Hadiths, and specifically, how does it de facto assign more weight to Hadiths than to the Qur’an itself?
Traditionalism can mean all sorts of things. I mainly use the term in reference to people who cling to the tradition in the modern period, pitting them against the modernists.
Now, of course, within traditionalism, there’s a whole spectrum, and we have to address the question of what we mean by tradition. It cannot be that tradition itself is simply identified with following the Hadith.
So sometimes we refer to traditionists as opposed to traditionalists.
The traditionalist in the modern period can refer to two strains of thought:
- One of them relates to the Hanbali School, which derives from the people of Hadith, and has given rise to modern Wahhabism/Salafism. In a sense, the Hanbali School has now reincarnated as the Wahhabi movement.
- The other group definable as “traditionalist” are the followers of the four Madhhabs, those who follow historically established legal schools (in the Sunni case: Hanbali, Shafi’i, Hanafi and Maliki). Even though they prioritize their legal conclusions even above the Hadiths, these legal schools themselves are really built on Hadith in the first place.
So ultimately, both of them really buy into the Hadith paradigm, only that one, the heirs of the Hanbali school, does so in stronger terms than the other.
In Christianity, you hear references to Bible-thumpers, literalists. But in Islam, it’s the Hadith that becomes central to the literalists. The equivalent are less Quran-thumper than Hadith hurlers: an emphasis on Hadith over the Quran.
The Quran is the most important text in the religion, but it is nominally the most important source of theology and religious law. It becomes something that we respect as a ritual object. It has talismanic-like properties as well, protecting you from evil. But you put it up on a shelf. A high shelf which is almost symbolic for how we treat the Quran: we don’t read it, we recite it in ritual, we revere it, we keep it on that dusty shelf. Sometimes we take it down, we kiss it. We make calligraphy out of the Quran, we put it on our mosques.
As far as law is concerned, I don’t think it had a major impact. The one thing we didn’t do was really read it and try to comprehend what it was saying. Because, if we had, we’d notice how it diverges from traditional Islamic law.
Covering the Quran
Why did the Quran take a back seat in Islamic history?
I think this goes back all the way to the early period of Islam.
Nicolai Sinai is a Quranic studies scholar at Oxford University who argues for what is called the hidden scripture model, which I agree with. This is the idea (one which perplexed Western scholars) that traditional Islamic law differed quite a bit from the Quran.
So, for example, why is stoning, a punishment for adultery, upheld even though it is not found in the Quran? There are many examples of this. When it comes to inheritance, again, inheritance laws diverge from what the Quran says on the matter. Why is that?
One explanation is that traditional Islamic law emerged independently of the Quran, and was really based on local laws and customs, as well as influences from the Byzantine and Persian Empires. Almost all Western scholars agree that this is the case.
So then the question is, well, what was being done with the Quran at that time? One view you could take is a kind of extreme skeptical, revisionist approach, which is to say that the Quran did not exist at that time. This is the idea of a late origin of the Quran, so that it was still being put together during the early period when traditional Islamic law was forming. This view was popular in the 1970s. But it has been beaten back, because a lot of manuscript evidence has come forward and been carbon dated. So we know that the Quran is very early. One scholar who’s recently tried to push back against this is Stephen Shoemaker. However, his is a minority opinion.
The counter argument against it is quite strong: if the Quran came later, you would expect all sorts of historical anachronisms in it. For example, considering the punishment for adultery, you would expect someone to have created a verse on stoning and put it into the Quran to justify the practice. And the fact that it’s not there tells you that by that time, the Quran was already closed off, you couldn’t just insert something in. What people did instead was generate a Hadith report that said that there used to be a verse on stoning. They claimed that the verse got removed, but the ruling itself is still active. The recitation [its appearance in the Quran] was somehow cancelled, but the ruling [the legal prescription to stone adulterers] is still active.
As Western scholars, we kind of chuckle at this. It’s not very convincing. Why would you cancel the recitation, but keep the ruling?
Leaving the “late Quran” hypothesis aside, the other theory, which I think is very convincing, and which Nicolai Sinai raises, is called the hidden scripture model, according to which the Quran was very early, but in that early period, you didn’t really have it in people’s hands and houses, because it was an oral tradition, an “oral text.”
Even if you had codices, they were limited to certain individuals. And you definitely didn’t have widespread, dedicated exegesis of the Quran. Instead, people knew certain verses for ritual, but they didn’t really read the Quran in a thorough-going fashion, like many moderns do. What happened is that traditional Islamic law developed independently of the Quran.
This theory was put forward by Joseph Schacht, a major scholar of Islamic law. What it shows is that, in the early period, the Quran took a back-seat, and I think that back-seat has endured throughout Islamic history.
One issue that I’m debating nowadays is slavery. In multiple places, the Quran says to free slaves, and nowhere does it say to enslave people. The one route of enslavement that traditional Islamic law allows, denying any other route other than this one, was as an outcome of a just war, a Jihad. You could enslave prisoners. But the Quran itself actually disallows this: verse 47:4 says that the only two options for prisoners of war is to either free them by grace, or ransom them (a prisoner exchange). It specifically disallows enslavement in war.
If you look at traditional commentaries, they really struggle with this verse. So, what do they do? They draw on the Sunnah (via Hadiths and biographical reports):
- Some scholars argue that this verse was abrogated or cancelled. This is the most heavy-handed tool you can use. Once you can claim that Quranic verses are cancelled, well, you’re not really beholden to the Quran anymore.
- Another strategy was to expand the Quranic options. The Quran says to free slaves or ransom them. Then it says that if God had wanted, He could have punished them, but He doesn’t. But scholars claim that two other options are available, which are slavery or execution. However, these options contrast with the Quranic claim that God has forgone punishing them.
At this point, the Hadith had to be used to solve the problem, because the Quran was already a closed text, you couldn’t change that. What you could do is generate Hadiths.
The Science of Hadith Came Too Late
(or Of Barns and Horses)
There’s an admirable aspect to the Hadith, which is that you have this attempt at establishing a line of narration all the way back to the Prophet. And yet, with the modern, historical critical method, we find that, often times, this may not have worked out. What went wrong?
We do know that massive fabrication of Hadiths took place but the question is if they were all just lying, who are they trying to convince? If they were in a scholarly community, obviously, they operated by certain standards. And they’re not all just lying to each other. If some went to the trouble of creating chains of narration, it is because, in some circles, such chains were taken seriously and perhaps subject to some level of scrutiny.
So I think a moderate assessment is needed: a balanced assessment according to which, even though Hadith science became very precise, it took some time for it to develop. Therefore, it is the early period of transmission that is the problem: by the time codification happens, the horse had already left the barn.
There was no real distinction between the “storytellers” and the Hadith transmitters in that early period:
- Even when it comes to the Sira, the biography of Prophet, many of these biographers were storytellers;
- In the early period, they weren’t constructing chains of transmission;
- Importantly, transmissions were paraphrastic and atomistic.
At a certain point in time the chains do become accurate. But the problem is that early period. So Hadith science is not garbage, it does help the historian. However, that early period is problematic.
Quran Preservation vs. Hadith Fabrication
Your work suggests a stark contrast in Islamic history between the faithful preservation of the Qur’an by Muslims and the adoption of a fabrication-laden hadith corpus (even aside from issues in how these were used to legislate, per Benhnam Sadeghi). How might this contrast be explained?
One of the accusations that I face is that I’m just being selective, and modernists have been selective in the past. The criticism is: you’re using a critical method when it comes to Hadith, but not when it comes to the Quran.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, as I’m pretty committed to the historical critical method. What that means is that even when it comes to the Quran, we can’t a priori say that literally every letter and every sentence goes back to the Prophet necessarily, there could be interpolations or redaction processes that took place. Now, in the western academy, presently, none of these have actually been proven.
I would say that, if it became undeniable that a certain [Quranic] verse was a later interpolation, I think I would be forced to agree with that. If it became undeniable, but that hasn’t really been the case, which is a good thing. It makes it easier, theologically speaking, but I don’t think it’s theologically insurmountable if we found out that some [Quranic] verse came later.
So I’m pretty consistent, I think, and committed to the historical critical approach.
But to answer your question concerning how we can justify seeing the Quran and Hadith differently so far as the respective reliability of their transmission/preservation:
- The proof is in the pudding. Hadith literature, even the two main compendiums, al-Bukhari and al-Muslim, are full of historical anachronisms, even one of the greatest defenders of Hadith in the modern Academy, Jonathan Brown, has admitted this. Meanwhile, in the Quran, we find almost nothing that could be considered historical anachronism.
- Western scholars agree that the Quran reliably goes back to the Prophet, unlike the Hadith.
- I would say that it’s propaganda to say (as some traditionalists do) that the same people who transmitted the Hadith transmitted the Quran and, therefore, if you impugn one, you’re impugning the other. This is not historically accurate. In fact, very early on, we know that the early Caliphs were deeply concerned with preserving the Quran, whereas our sources indicate, conversely, that there may have been a ban on Hadith transmission, and there definitely was a ban on writing Hadiths down at one point. So the preservation of the Quran and Hadith are very different.
We have a tradition about Abu Bakr, Umar and other Senior Companions of the Prophet burning Hadiths. Whether these are historical or not, they show that early on somebody was opposed to preserving Hadiths.
Concerning the report that Umar said “I fear that you’re covering up the Book of God, [with Hadith traditions],” traditionalist critics will say, “Look, you’re selectively using these reports, even though you question them.” But I’m not beholden to the view that Umar actually said that, (he might have). The point is that the report is early: very early on, somebody opposed the Hadith project and fabricated or transmitted that saying of Umar’s.
We need some sort of methodology. This would include, for example, not accepting any Hadith that contradicts the Quran, nor ideas that contradict human reason or common sense (such as Hadiths with clear historical anachronisms).
