Diversity and Debate in Hadith Scholarship
Panel 133, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, October 12 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
Along with the Qur'an, hadith literature constitutes the foundational source for Islamic law, belief, and worship, as well as the principal guide for Muslim etiquette. It also provides the historical narrative of the early Muslim community. The corpus of hadith literature, and its insistence on what William Graham has termed "the isn d paradigm," supposedly has a unifying effect on the edifice of Islam by outlining and defining the boundaries of Muslim practice and faith. However, hadith scholarship has arguably been as divided by various political, sectarian, and theological positions as any other field of Islamic scholarship. Most commonly, these lines of fracture were internal to Islam, such as the Sunni-Shi'n divide or the conflicting theological positions of hadith scholars, on the one hand, and speculative theologians, on the other. Occasionally, external influences, such as debates with Jewish and Christian theologians, also impacted the development of hadith as an intellectual field. Despite their centrality for our understanding of Islamic intellectual history in general, these tensions within the field of prophetic traditions have received relatively little attention in Western scholarship.
This panel will elucidate how hadith scholars have addressed questions of political, social, or theological divergence while preserving and utilizing the collective authority of hadith literature. Employing various methodological approaches, such as textual and statistical analysis, this panel will elucidate how hadith scholars have addressed questions of political, social, or theological divergence among their various groups while preserving and utilizing the collective authority of hadith literature. In contexts ranging from intra-Islamic sectarian debates to polemical exchanges with non-Muslims in Islam's formative centuries to articulations of Islamic reform in the early twentieth century, the papers presented will show how the methods and vocabulary of hadith scholarship have been put to varied and at times contradictory uses. The papers will highlight how social, intellectual and political affiliations created fractures and tensions within the communal enterprise of hadith scholarship. They will further examine how scholars responded to those fractures and tensions by employing strategies, either internal to the discipline of hadith, such as the selection and arrangement of material, and narrator criticism, or external to it, such as the adoption of modern journalism as a means of communication. Moving beyond typical discussions of authenticity, this panel will provide more nuanced views of the internal diversity of hadith scholarship, aspects of its diachronic development, and the myriad roles that it has played in Islamic intellectual history.
Disciplines
Religious Studies/Theology
Participants
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Dr. Jonathan AC Brown
-- Discussant
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Dr. Nebil Husayn
-- Presenter
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Dr. Michael Dann
-- Presenter
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Mareike Koertner
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Jacob Olidort
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Mareike Koertner
When Muslim conquests brought Islam as a new religion into the Byzantine Empire, the veracity of its claim to prophecy was immediately challenged by the established monotheistic faiths. Hadith scholars were the earliest contributors to Dala’il al-nubuwwa (signs of prophecy) literature, which sought to defend their Prophet from non-Muslim offense by providing indubitable evidence for his prophetic status from the vast body of hadith literature. During the intellectually formative 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries, Dala’il al-nubuwwa literature evolved at the nexus of inter-religious debates, the development of various Islamic intellectual fields, and religio-political as well as social movements within the rising Islamic empire. However, while these hadith compilations were squarely situated in the scholarly circles of muhaddithun and upheld their criteria of authenticity, such as isnad criticism, Western scholarship has almost completely neglected this type of hadith literature and associated it with the popular story tellers, instead.
This paper will explore the strategies hadith scholars contributing to this literature employed in order to maintain the collective authority of the prophetic tradition while incorporating the intricacies of religious discourses that were prevalent at their time – both in inter-religious debates and among various fields of Muslim scholarship. Based on a close study of early hadith-based Dala’il al-nubuwwa compilations, such as Ma‘mar b. Rashid (d. 153/770), Ibn Sa‘d (d. 230/845), and the unique manuscript of al-Jazajani (d. 259/873), as well as prominent later compilations, such as Abu al-Nu'aym (d. 429/1038) and al-Bayhaqi (d. 458/1066), this paper will highlight the shifting thematic strands found in this literature and will argue for a consistently increasing awareness and conscious acknowledgment of theological debates among these hadith scholars. This paper will, therefore, emphasize that Dala’il al-Nubuwwa literature showcases the eventual subsiding of a strict division between the muhaddithun’s textual approach and the theologians’ speculative approach to presenting ‘proofs of prophecy’.
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Dr. Michael Dann
Roughly 200 narrators of hadith in Sunni collections have been labeled as Shi'ites or associated with Shi'ism. Depending on where one draws the line, the list of “Sh'iites” among second/eighth century “Sunni” hadith scholars can read as a virtual “who’s who” of early Sunni hadith scholarship in Iraq. Ibn Qutayba counts figures as pivotal to the Sunni hadith tradition as Abu Ishaq al-Sabi'i, Shu'ba b. al-Hajjaj and Yahya b. Sa'id al-Qattan among their number. It is clear that the “Shi'ism” that such figures were associated with must have differed greatly from that of figures like Jabir al-Ju'fi and Abu al-Jarud, who played an equally pivotal role in the development of Shi'ite sectarian identities. In this paper, I engage in a statistical analysis of the biographical literature on these narrators with the aim of understanding the spectrum of Shi'ite sentiments that existed among these narrators and how it correlated with Sunni hadith scholars’ assessments of their reliability. My analysis is based on five factors. The first of these is the volume of references to the Shi'ism of a given narrator in the biographical literature. The second factor is the terminology used to describe Shi'ite narrators. This generally consists of the verb “yatashayya',” the label “Shi'i,” and a number of adjectives that attenuate or accentuate either of the latter. More explicitly negative labels were also applied, such as rafd, ghuluww and their derivatives or sectarian labels such as “al-khashabiyya.” The third factor is whether a given narrator was also included in Imami or Zaydi biographical dictionaries and how he was categorized therein. The fourth factor is the grade of reliability given to the narrator. The fifth and final factor is that of anecdotes that shed light on the sorts of attitudes and positions associated with these narrators’ Shi'ism. These generally consist of an excessive attachment to 'Ali and the family of the Prophet, criticism of other companions, or participation in or support for 'Alid revolts. While each of these factors is informative in isolation, the correlations between them allow for a sharper picture of the spectrum of meanings associated with Shi'ism in the Umayyad and early 'Abbasid eras and a detailed understanding of how they were regarded by Sunni scholars of hadith.
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Dr. Nebil Husayn
Abu Talib b. 'Abd al-Muttalib was the paternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad credited for both raising the orphaned child into adulthood and guaranteeing his protection throughout the earliest years of his preaching. According to sources of sira and hadith, Abu Talib's death was a great catastrophe for the Prophet that eventually caused him to emigrate from Mecca. Ironically, Abu Talib is popularly believed to be doomed to Hell for eternity despite a loving relationship with the Prophet and years of sacrifice for him. The source of this belief is Sunni hadith reports, which unequivocally assert that Abu Talib never converted to Islam. Fred Donner has summarized and analyzed reports regarding Abu Talib's death as a pagan. Agreeing with Ignaz Goldizher, Donner noted the role of pro-Abbasid and pro-Alid polemics regarding this issue and argued that narratives about Abu Talib's death were composite reports that were synthesized over many generations. This paper offers a thorough review of theological treatises and reports excluded from Donner's analysis that argue for the salvation of Abu Talib. The various methods by which pro-Alid Sunni and Shi'i writers challenged the hegemonic influence of canonical hadith in Sunni theology is understood through this case study.
The Sunni treatises by Sayyid Muhammad al-Barzanji (d.1103AH) and Ahmad Zayni Dahlan (d.1304) discussed the salvation of individuals who did not convert to Islam and the minimum requirements needed for a valid conversion in the context of Abu Talib's religious affiliation. The Shi'i authors, al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d.413) and Fakhar b. Ma'd al-Musawi (d.630), largely narrated reports that indicated Abu Talib's faith in the Prophet's revelation and his salvation in the Hereafter. While the Shi'i scholars possessed a methodology that permitted the dismissal of Sunni canonical hadith as false without any dilemmas, Sunni theologians were largely forced to acknowledge their authenticity and accommodate them in their arguments.
The hermeneutics of Qur'anic exegesis and hadith plays an important role in the dialectical discussions deposing the authority of canonical hadith that contradict the theological beliefs and allegiances of these authors. Nearly all of the authors under review were descendants of the Prophet and Abu Talib. All of them affiliated with a group that believed in the piety and virtue of the Prophet's ancestors. The religious, social and political identities of hadith transmitters and later writers are significant in determining the method by which they argue Abu Talib's place in the Hereafter.
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Dr. Jacob Olidort
Reflecting upon the ways in which scholarly circles have historically formed in the context of socio-political and theological engagements, and in so doing have cultivated unique identities and methodologies in response to these various environments, the following paper examines the ways in which the vocabulary of hadith became the principal mechanism for articulating a vision of Islamic reform in the Damascus-based journal al-Tamaddun al-Islami, founded in 1932 by disciples of Rashid Rida. A uniquely modern phenomenon, “disrupting” (to use Giddens’ expression) traditional paradigms of communication and authority with the new mechanisms it introduced, journalism was adopted by various reform-minded scholarly communities since the nineteenth century as a way of engaging with a broader audience. Journals and pamphlets became the principal spaces in which reform-minded scholars in Egypt and Syria, taking as their cue the example of the much-read al-Manar of Rashid Rida, articulated their visions and disseminated them to a readership of unprecedented diversity and volume.
This paper will examine select articles by Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani written over the span of twenty installments of the journal al-Tamaddun al-Islami, comparing his hadith commentaries with his more anecdotal social criticisms, to see, first, why hadith served as the principal source on which he relied and, second, what role the subject played in framing his conclusions and prescriptions for his immediate community. Not only will this discussion add a new dimension to understanding the dynamics of community-formation around hadith, especially in the modern period, but also the ways in which its usage reflected the accepted modes of communication of a particular setting. Ultimately, it was this ability to render the messages and authenticity of hadith reports in a specific vernacular that served as the bedrock for a new, popular-based authority structure which would later appear so subversive to more “established” ‘ulama’ and their institutions.
As a case study in the mechanics of this process of constructing an alternative authority, this examination of al-Albani’s writings on hadith in this journal will add further nuance to connotations of his epithet of “Traditionist of Syria” (Muhaddith al-Sham) not as a reflection of his innate scholarly pedigree (to the best of our knowledge he did not study with any hadith scholars) but that this pedigree became associated with his ability to construct standards of scholarship through the newly established media of communication.
