Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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