Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Salafis, Sufis, modernists, reformists, Wahhabis: whichever Muslim group, by whatever name one calls them, and in all their conceivable permutations, portray themselves as bearing the mantle of the Prophet. The Salafis claim to be the most authentic bearers of his authenticated words and deeds. The Sufis claim to be striving not just for the actions but also for the inner experience of the Prophet. Modernists talk about Ijtihad, or reinterpreting Islam according to what the Prophet would do and teach today. In short, they all claim to speak in Muhammad’s name, quoting, misquoting, and contesting the legacy of the Prophet.

Muslims had always read the Qur’an through the person and legacy of the Prophet, whether embodied in oral or written traditions, whether in inspired visions or through scholastic commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. It is the contested legacies of the Prophet that have been the prime commentaries on the Divine text.

Misquoting Muhammad comes at an opportune time. The author has quickly established himself as the foremost scholar of the Hadith (prophetic traditions), combining the most rigorous aspects of the Western academic study of Islam with the best of classical Islamic scholarship.

It became clear to me that by far the most pressing questions befuddling both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences were how we should understand such-and-such a controversial Qur’anic verse, or such-and-such a provocative Hadith.

Some of the revolutionary youth and the Muslim Brotherhood protesters quoted a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad: ‘The best jihad is a word of truth before a tyrannical ruler.’ Facebook posts countered this, especially from Muslims with more conservative, Salafi leanings. They warned of the inevitable chaos of revolution and quoted another saying of the Prophet: ‘Civil strife sleeps, and God curses whomever awakens it.’

While the ulama of Al-Azhar acquired a pastoral aura with their unmistakable charcoal robes and white and red turbaned fezzes, Islam has never had a formal clergy. Throughout the Islamic world the ulama did eventually take on the role of religious functionaries, but they have always been more rabbi than priest.

Islam is a religion erected in a scholastic idiom of preserving the sacred knowledge of revelation and studying God’s law. The ulama have thus always been scholars first and foremost.

because the Islamic tradition formed the backbone of a world civilization, it necessarily dealt with challenges common to other religious and philosophical traditions.

One perennially pressing issue is the challenge of reconciling the claims of truth and justice made by scripture with what the human mind considers true and just outside it.

Some aspects of Islam that seem glaringly problematic today actually resulted from efforts to answer questions so fundamental that they have never been resolved definitively by anyone. Their answers are not so much right or wrong as they are choices between competing priorities, such as whether and when it is acceptable to tell a lie for a good cause.

Another common frustration with religion comes from atheists or skeptics who object that modern scientific discoveries contradict scripture and thus disprove its divine origin. This would perplex the medieval ulama. Many such discoveries are actually not that modern, they would point out, and they would add that they had reconciled their interpretation of Islam’s scriptures to such empirical observations centuries ago.

medieval ulama would suggest that much of the violence and extremism found in the Muslim world results precisely from unlearned Muslims deciding to break with tradition and approach their religion Luther-like ‘by scripture alone.’

What constitutes scripture for a particular group of people is whatever that community endows with religious salience. Scripture is something created by a community or tradition when it valorizes a text as ‘sacred or holy, powerful and meaningful, possessed of an exalted authority… distinct from other speech and writing.’

Even a body of scripture as well known as the Bible in Western Christianity is not monolithic or homogeneously scriptural. The King James Bible came to include thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven books of the New. The Catholic Latin Vulgate Bible, however, includes the additional fourteen (or fifteen) books of the Apocrypha, which Jews considered valuable but did not include in the Hebrew Bible. The exact demarcations of scripture can be contested even within one sect.

Islam’s scriptures were once oral but were set down in writing in time. The faith’s scriptural foundation is made up of two parts. Its core is the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the unchanging record of God’s revealed words, a small volume that can be gripped and memorized word for word. Around it are the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, amorphous and contested. A saying of the Prophet or a description of his actions is known as a Hadith, and it is primarily over the Hadiths and their contents that Islam’s sects and schools of thought have diverged.

The indistinct corpus of Hadiths in Sunni as well as Shiite Islam surrounds the solid nucleus of the Qur’an like a nimbus, its inner reaches made up of a narrow band of well-known Hadiths that circumscribe the established teachings and precedent of the Prophet. These are surrounded with layer after layer of more Hadiths, becoming less and less reliable and often more controversial as they stretch outward, until their muted light fades into profane blackness.

Such early attacks on Hadiths from non-Muslims in Baghdad were facilitated by the ulama’s admission that they had themselves uncovered thousands and thousands of forged Hadiths.9

Few things seem more repugnant than religious intolerance, luring young men to murderous deaths with carnal promises of virgins in Heaven, allowing polygamy and marrying teenage girls to old men. Though such practices might have been acceptable at some point in the past, few in the West would welcome them in this day and age.

Often Islam’s most denounced barbarisms are nothing more than prosaic differences in dietary preference and dress.

Islamists and the dragoons of conservatism might win battles, but in time the forces of liberal democracy will win the war. All they want, after all, is to live in a reasonable and tolerant country.

Only in 1938 did French women attain full capacity before the law, managing to acquire rights that the architects of the Shariah had granted women as early as the seventh century.

Shariah law acknowledged only five capital crimes.

Western scholarly and scientific development was, of course, eminently indebted to Islamic civilization in fields from medicine (Avicenna’s Qanun was used as the standard medical textbook in Europe through the seventeenth century) to scholastic theology (Thomas Aquinas admitted relying heavily on Averroes to understand Aristotle). Yet Renaissance heralds of Europe’s newfound scientific promise could not admit their vast indebtedness to the hated, infidel Saracens. Avicenna, Averroes and other undeniably prominent Muslims in the Western scholarly pantheon had to be uprooted completely from their ‘Islamic’ environment.

When Western scholars have evinced an appreciation or admiration for Islamic scholarship, it is never for the religious sciences of law, language theory, exegesis, scriptural criticism or theology, which formed the voluminous core of the ulama’s world.

This is a book about a proud, at times overconfident tradition that had its cosmology of truth shattered by a confrontation not only with a more powerful civilization but also with a new stage in human history. It is about how that tradition has responded, sometimes turning inward to defend its integrity and sometimes adopting the novel and the strange. This is a book about how Sunni Islam was constructed and reconstructed, about the scriptures on which it was built and the ulama who built it.

What I hope to bring forth in this book is Islam’s contributions to an area at once profoundly theoretical but also eminently practical, namely the science of interpreting scripture, reconciling its claims of truth and justice with what is true and just outside its text. I hope to offer glimpses into the world of the ulama and their books, a world that I at first wanted to observe as an object of study but soon found to be an interlocutor that all too often showed me the limitations of the worldview I had grown up in and revealed my own intellectual arrogance.

When historians try to map out the past, it is often to make sense of a present that, like the fluid chaos of Delhi’s streets, offers glimpses of some elusive order that must be there but seems always just out of frame.

Shah Wali Allah is a worthy guide to the rich terrain of Islamic tradition, leading his reader from the dawn of the faith to the cusp of the modern world, when the interpretive order that he exemplified was shattered.

As the years passed, Muhammad ordered and reordered these separate transcripts into chapters forming a stream of divine consciousness, neither a strict chronology nor a linear narrative. The Qur’an lived privately in the recitations, prayers and scattered parchments of Muhammad’s followers until the revelation was formalized in one official copy some twenty years after the Prophet’s death.

Although the Qur’an was the epicenter of the Islamic movement, it was not a lengthy book. Shah Wali Allah memorized it by heart before he was seven years old (many Muslims still do the same today), and only a fraction of its verses provide details about Islamic law or dogma.

The five daily prayers and the details of the Ramadan fast are found nowhere in the holy book. These were provided by Muhammad’s teachings and his authoritative precedent...

Known as the Sunna, or ‘The Tradition,’ Muhammad’s collective words, deeds, rulings and comportment were...

message implemented in one time and place by the living example of the infallible ‘Messenger of God.’ How the Sunna was communicated and implemented in subsequent generations...

The full systems of Islamic theology and law are not derived primarily from the Qur’an. Muhammad’s Sunna was a second but far more detailed living scripture, and later Muslim scholars would thus often refer to the Prophet as ‘The Possessor of Two Revelations.’

The meaning of the Qur’an’s language and edicts had to be determined, and the myriad sayings of the Prophet placed within a hierarchy of rules and exceptions. Ultimately, human reason was thus a third source of guidance.

‘It is not for a believing man or woman that they should have any choice in a matter when God and His Messenger have decided it,’ the Qur’an proclaimed (33:36). Disputes were to be brought before Muhammad, whom God instructed to ‘judge between them according to what is just’ (4:58) and ‘by what God has revealed’ (5:48).

Yet the Bedouin troops who flocked to the victorious banners of Islam and settled in the new garrison cities of Egypt, Syria and Iraq knew little about the religion in whose name they fought.

The text of the Qur’an had already been fixed, but the uncontested authority of the Prophet’s voice remained dangerously inchoate. Eager to insinuate their ideas and customs into the new religion, parties from every religious and political direction began placing their messages in the Prophet’s mouth. Hadiths – reports of the Prophet’s words or deeds – were forged by the thousands.

Supporters of the Umayyad dynasty forged a Hadith in which the Prophet foretold that Mu’awiya, the first Umayyad caliph, would enjoy the intimate company of God, seated below His throne in the heavens, as recompense for the abuse his opponents dealt him in this world.6 Mu’awiya himself encouraged his followers to forge Hadiths detracting from the standing of his opponents, the Shiah supporters of Ali and his descendants.

In time, Muslim scholars would develop a five-tiered model for marking the status of any conceivable act in God’s eyes. ‘Required’ (wajib) acts would be rewarded by God in the Afterlife, and failing to carry them out would result in punishment by God and perhaps in this life by state authorities as well. ‘Recommended’ (mandub) acts were rewarded by God but not required for Muslims. If a person avoided ‘Disliked’ (makruh) actions, God would reward him or her, but committing them was nonetheless allowed. The ‘Prohibited’ (haram) acts carried the threat of punishment by God in the hereafter and possibly in this life by the state. ‘Permitted’ (mubah) was a narrow category of acts that had no value, positive or negative, in God’s eyes. All conceivable words and deeds had some ruling under God’s law, and, as an early Muslim scholar explained, it was not permitted for a Muslim to undertake anything without determining what that ruling was. To do this they had to ask the ulama.

On one occasion, a man came to Hasan unsure of what to do because, when one of his slaves had run away, he had sworn to cut off the slave’s hand in punishment when he found him. Must he fulfill this gruesome oath? Hasan recalled that the Companion Samura, who had settled in Basra, had told him that the Prophet used to encourage charity and forbid mutilating prisoners, and that the Prophet had once said, ‘Whoever kills a slave, we will kill him; whoever mutilates a slave, we will mutilate him.’

Unlike Christianity, in which a priest was invested with his office in a ritual presided over by senior clergy, Islam has no formal priesthood or process of ordination. Nor did the medieval Islamic community erect any stable institutions of learning producing graduates marked for religious distinction. Instead, the emergence of the Muslim scholarly class took place through the society’s valorization of ‘ilm and the community’s recognition of those deemed to possess it.

Tracing Islam’s movement out of Arabia, Shah Wali Allah described how, as different Companions settled in different cities, varied approaches to understanding Islam’s teachings emerged. Not only did each group of Companions bring with them their own recollection of the Prophet’s Sunna as well as their own understanding of the Qur’an, they also faced starkly divergent local environments. These early Muslims were a small minority compared to the huge native populations, and the specific customs, foods and climates of each region began impacting their lifestyles.

When asked, for example, if a person performing their ritual ablutions before prayer had first to formulate the intention to do so, Abu Hanifa said no. The Qur’an merely commanded those preparing for prayer to ‘wash your face and arms to the elbows, and wipe your heads and feet to the ankles’ (5:6). It never mentioned forming an intention. A person who happened to submerge themselves in the nearby Euphrates would thus be, quite accidentally, ready to pray.

More importantly, there may be no reason at all for a ruling. This was especially the case in the rules revealed by God and His Messenger on matters of ritual. God had forbidden pork in the Qur’an, calling it ‘filth’ (rijs) (6:145). The Prophet had also instructed Muslims to wash out seven times any dish that a dog had drunk from. Did that mean dogs were ritually filthy too? Abu Hanifa and the majority of Muslim scholars used analogy to conclude that dogs were unclean. If one slobbered on your clothing, you could not pray in it. One scholar, Malik, disagreed. The Prophet allowed Muslims to use dogs in herding and to fetch game in hunting, Malik observed, so how could they be filthy? Malik concluded that the command to wash dishes drunk from by dogs was merely ‘done out of worship’ (ta‘abbudi), an arational act of obedience performed for the sake of God alone and unrelated to dogs’ ritual cleanliness or lack thereof.

Abu Hanifa and his circle thus engaged in Istihsan and drew a third analogy based on a separate scriptural command, namely the Qur’an’s statement that Muslims could consume the forbidden substances of pork and carrion in cases of necessity (2:173).

Leaning against a column of the Prophet’s own mosque, only yards from where the Prophet himself was buried, Malik sorted through this material, organized it by topic and recorded it in his Muwatta’, the earliest surviving book of Hadiths and Islamic law. Consisting of approximately 1,800 reports, 527 are Hadiths of the Prophet, 613 are rulings made by Companions, 285 are the rulings of Successors and the remainder are Malik’s own opinions.

Unlike the cosmopolitan soup of Kufa, Malik saw Medina as the bastion of the pure Islam the Prophet had originally taught. He believed that the customs and practices of Medina’s scholars were the true vehicle of the Sunna and a peerless guide to how to live as a Muslim. The strange Hadiths circulating in Damascus or Egypt seemed suspicious to Malik, and in some cases even Hadiths he heard from his own teacher, Nafi‘, who had heard them from the caliph Umar’s son, who had heard them from the Prophet, were not definitive for him.

In a use of reason similar to Abu Hanifa’s Istihsan, Malik pioneered a mode of thinking about laws that became known as ‘blocking the means’ (sadd al-dhara’i‘). This prohibited something otherwise legal because it was a slippery slope to a known evil or prohibited result.

The Qur’an forbade Muslims from engaging in Riba, which Muslim scholars understood as any kind of interest-bearing transaction such as loans in business. The Qur’an explicitly condemns excessive usury as exploitative to the poor, but Shah Wali Allah explained that Islamic law considered even mild interest harmful. It prevents people from focusing on agriculture and manufacture, ‘the roots of profit,’ he claimed.20 Even in the early Islamic period, however, Muslims lending money felt that charging interest was as essential a part of business activity as it is today (at the very least, it represents the opportunity cost of the lender’s money – what he could accomplish with it were it available and not with the borrower). Muslim scholars thus developed what became known as ‘the double sale,’ in which the borrower approaches a lender with an offer to buy some item from him, for example, a bolt of cloth, for some cost, such as 100 gold pieces. Since the buyer (i.e., the borrower) does not have that sum available at the time, he agrees with the seller (i.e., the lender) to pay him 125 gold pieces in a year’s time – buying the cloth on credit and paying a premium for receiving it right away (credit purchases were allowed by the Prophet and were essential in activities like farming in which revenues come only at harvest time). In theory, the borrower can keep the cloth or sell it to whomever he wants for whatever sum he wishes. But the lender ‘offers’ to simplify matters by taking...