Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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168 t CHAPTER SEVEN<br />
jurisprudence. Some resorted to mockery, while others, like the new<br />
rationalists in <strong>Islam</strong> who accepted the Quran as revelation but were<br />
averse to an authoritatively traditioned explanation to revelation,<br />
lodged even more trenchant criticisms against the hadith. To resolve<br />
the obvious difficulties of the tradition system, scholars devised a<br />
critical method <strong>for</strong> the study of hadith that would enable them to<br />
sort out the “sound” from the “weak” hadith. The work of criticism<br />
concentrated principally on the authenticity <strong>and</strong> reliability of the<br />
witnesses cited in the isnad of the report in question, <strong>and</strong> by the<br />
mid–ninth century the work had proceeded to the point where the<br />
newly authenticated hadith could be brought together <strong>for</strong> the lawyers’<br />
use. That they were in fact designed <strong>for</strong> lawyers is manifest in<br />
the earliest of the collections, that by al-Bukhari (d. 870), called The<br />
Sound Collection. All the reports in it—2,762 of them, discounting<br />
repetitions, of an alleged 600,000 investigated—are certified as<br />
sound with respect to their tradents <strong>and</strong> so were usable in matters of<br />
law. To that end they are arranged according to their applicability to<br />
the categories of what was emerging as the science of <strong>Islam</strong>ic jurisprudence,<br />
97 divisions in all.<br />
Note: Non-Muslim Western scholars first encountered the hadith in<br />
the nineteenth century when they took up the critical-historical investigation<br />
of Muhammad’s life. The Muslim biographies of the Prophet<br />
are composed at base from hadith, though here they are historical<br />
rather than legal in content <strong>and</strong> are arranged chronologically rather<br />
than categorically. From the outset, there were doubts about their<br />
authenticity <strong>and</strong> soon Western scholarship turned its full critical attention<br />
to the question, particularly of the legal hadith, which had<br />
reportedly been sifted free of <strong>for</strong>geries. The results were <strong>and</strong> remain<br />
overwhelmingly negative: according to Western critics, the great bulk<br />
of the hadith, sound or otherwise, appear to be <strong>for</strong>geries <strong>and</strong> there is<br />
no reliable way of determining which, if any, might be authentic historical<br />
reports from or about Muhammad. This judgment may be the<br />
single most important bone of contention between modern Muslim<br />
<strong>and</strong> Western scholarship on the origins of <strong>Islam</strong>.