Introduction

Daniel W. Brown

More than a decade ago Andrew Rippin wrote that the publication of the Blackwell Companion to the Qur?an marked the emergence of the Islamic scripture "within the canon of world literature" (Rippin 2006, x). While he was right that the Qur?an is now widely known and studied, the same cannot be said about the other major body of Islamic scripture, the hadith. In the West, at least, the hadith remains largely the domain of a small band of specialists. Many well-educated lay readers have only the vaguest notion of the nature and content of this vast and important body of literature. While it will be easy for many readers to find an introductory course on the Qur?an, or to join a Qur?an reading group, most will be hard pressed to find an undergraduate "Introduction to the Hadith" at their local college or university. This is not the case, of course, for one's local madrasa. Thus to some readers of this book the hadith literature will seem like an alien and unexplored world, while to others it is a constant companion and essential guide for life. Part of the burden of this book is to bridge this gap.

Definition and Characteristics

Because the hadith literature is unfamiliar terrain for many readers, we need to begin by explaining why it deserves sustained attention and to describe this literature's characteristics and boundaries. If we open Bukhari's ?a?i?, the most famous collection of hadith, we read,

?umaydi ?Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr related to us that Sufyan related that Ya?ya ibn Sa?id al-An?ari reported: Mu?ammad ibn Ibrahim al-Taymi informed me that he heard ?Alqama ibn Waqqa? al-Laythi saying: I heard ?Umar ibn al-Kha??ab, may Allah be pleased with him, saying from the minbar: I heard the Apostle of God, peace be upon him, say: "Deeds are according to intentions [niyya], and each person gets what he intends. Whoever emigrated for worldly reward, or for a woman to marry, his emigration is for that for which he emigrated."

(Bukhari 1 Bad? al-Wa?y, 1)

Like every other hadith report, this one has two parts, a list of names of people who passed it on, called the isnad, and a text ("Deeds are according to intentions ."), called the matn. The matn of most hadith reports may also be further analyzed as the composite of narrative frame and text. Sometimes the narrative frame is long and elaborate; sometimes, as in this case, short and economical, indicating the small but important detail that ?Umar ibn al-Kha??ab cited the tradition in a sermon. The narrative frame sometimes serves important functions like reinforcing the importance of the report, as it does here.

This particular tradition nicely fits the narrow, technical definition of the term "hadith": a report about something the Prophet Muhammad said or did, or a description of the Prophet, or an account of something that happened in his presence. The term also has wider, less precise uses. Hadith can, for example, refer collectively to the whole, monumental body of literature that is made up of such discrete narrations about the Prophet. The term is also sometimes used for traditions composed of an isnad and a matn in the form illustrated above, but which do not go all the way back to Muhammad. A report attributed to a Shi?i imam, for instance, or to a companion of the Prophet, or to some other authority in early Islamic history might be called a hadith. In the later tradition of hadith studies, these non-Prophetic reports are often labeled "athar" or "khabar" in order to reserve the term "hadith" for reports attributed to Muhammad.

This book is concerned with hadith in the broadest sense, beginning with traditions like the one above that transmit information about the Prophet Muhammad and that therefore match the technical definition, but also extending to the whole genre of literary uses of the isnad-matn pattern. Applied in this broad sense, the hadith literature provides us, beside the Qur?an, with our most important documentation of early Islamic history, a massive treasury of records documenting the life of Muhammad, the history of the earliest generations of Muslims, the context of the Qur?an, and the origins of Islamic law, theology, and piety. Take away the hadith literature, and we are left with very little to say about any of these. Much of what we know, or think we know, about the first two centuries of Islamic history, we know from the hadith literature, understood in this broad sense.

For the Islamic tradition, hadith-derived data about the Prophet Muhammad and early Islam are a major source of religious authority, providing theoretical foundations for Islamic law, ethics, theology, and scriptural exegesis. The matn of the hadith cited above, "Deeds are according to intentions," articulates a principle of Islamic law so foundational that it is inscribed over one of the entrances to al-Azhar, the world's oldest institution of Islamic learning. Apart from the testimony of hadith, a Muslim lacks the most rudimentary knowledge about when and how to perform ritual prayers. Similarly, without hadith the meaning of much of the Qur?an remains obscure. Consequently, Muslims developed a nuanced and complex system to transmit, study, and evaluate hadith. This approach to hadith within the Muslim scholarly tradition is surveyed in Chapter 1 and is also the focus of several other chapters of this book.

This book will also be concerned with another tradition of historical scholarship that also takes hadith as its essential data, and that emerged in the first instance in the Western academy. For this reason, I have labeled it "Western," although the label is misleading insofar as the scrutiny of hadith as a historical source has subsequently grown into a worldwide scholarly enterprise to which Muslims, non-Muslims, Western, and non-Western scholars contribute. The broad aim of this historical enterprise is to illuminate the origins and development of Islam and to pursue the same sorts of questions that historians might pose about the emergence of any great movement in history, such as, for instance, the life of the Buddha or the origins of Christianity.

Hadith scholarship in both traditions involves sometimes dizzying levels of complexity and sophistication; both traditions require us to navigate through seemingly impenetrable technical jargon. Yet the difficulty should not be allowed to obscure just how important these two overlapping worlds of scholarship are to the real world: take away hadith from Islam and the traditional foundations of Islamic law and practice crumble, as modern Qur?anist movements (described in Chapter 16) exemplify; reject the historical reliability of the whole body of hadith literature, as some revisionist historians have done, and we are left with a craterous gap in our knowledge of the origins of Islam. The whole superstructure of Islamic belief and practice, on the one hand, and, on the other, almost everything we might wish to know about the history of early Islam, rests on the hadith.

Hadith, History and Memory

We should also not let complexity obscure the fundamental universality of the epistemological issues raised by the study of hadith. We can begin to grasp this universality by stepping outside of the Islamic tradition altogether. Consider, for example, a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill. Churchill is widely reported to have said, "If you're not a liberal when you are 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you are 35, you have no brain." The report comes to us in several variants, suggesting that the saying has become a widespread tradition, and like any widely distributed tradition it has mutated in the course of transmission. In this case the mutations are largely inconsequential; the differing versions are recognizable variants of a single tradition, and the differences make little difference to the point. Nor is there any mystery about that point, or about why the tradition spread widely: the saying pithily captures the self-understanding of conservatives who fancy themselves the adults in the room, and it invokes the authority of an iconic statesman of the twentieth century for a not-so subtle takedown of liberalism as the province of immature, youthful passion.

But did Churchill actually utter these words? The Churchill Centre rules the quote inauthentic with a terse declaration: "There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this." (Churchill Centre, n.d.). The Centre's website goes on to invoke the authority of a University of Edinburgh professor to argue that Churchill could not possibly have originated this tradition since "he'd been a conservative at age 15 and a liberal at 35!" (Churchill Centre, n.d.). Others argue that the saying originated with a Frenchman, François Guizot, or with George Bernard Shaw, or Disraeli, or Bismarck. Cumulatively these arguments will likely reduce our confidence that the tradition is traceable to Churchill. But they are not decisive. Churchill talked a lot, and it remains at least remotely possible that...