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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

The caliph Ali echoed this. Confronting the Kharijite rebels, who based their violent claims on what the Qur’an ‘said,’ Ali alerted them that ‘This Qur’an is but lines written between two covers, it does not speak, rather it is but men who speak for it.’

No use of language, regardless of how much care is taken in crafting a phrase, is unambiguous or immune to (mis)interpretation. Although he wrote much of the United States Constitution, James Madison still argued that the meaning of laws in the new republic could not be fixed with certainty until they were contested and discussed. All laws, he wrote, regardless of how finely worded, ‘are considered more or less obscure and equivocal’ until they are interpreted.

This does not mean that there are no boundaries to interpretation or that no interpretation is wrong. But those boundaries are set by the community reading the text, not by something intrinsic in the text or by the fact of the text itself. The allowable distance between what appears to be the literal meaning of the text and its outer limit of interpretation is determined by the charity extended to it.

Muslim scholars expressed this through a general principle, dubbed Qanun al-Ta’wil (the Rule of Interpretation), which required adhering to the evident meaning of a text until some significant evidence required otherwise.

Medieval Muslim ulama approached interpreting the Qur’an and Hadiths via two axes, that of attestation (thubut) and that of indication (dilala), each spanning the range of epistemological reliability (between doubt, probability and certitude).

A particularly important issue was the division between the literal (haqiqa) and figurative (majaz) registers of language. The sentence ‘The lion is the king of the jungle’ uses ‘lion’ in its literal sense; ‘The knight is the lion of the battlefield’ uses it figuratively. Both the literal meanings and accepted figurative uses of words were set by their uses in the Islamic scriptures, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and in the uncorrupted Arabic of the first century and a half of Islam.

The prophetic language of the Hadiths is consistently hyperbolic. We often find the phrase that someone who commits a certain sin or holds some incorrect belief ‘Is not from among us,’ for example. ‘Whoever carries arms against us is not from among us,’ the Prophet warns in one such Hadith. Does this mean that a person committing this act ceases to be a Muslim, leaving the faith for doing so? Recognizing the hyperbolic flair in the Prophet’s rhetoric, the medieval ulama understood this phrase as a type of preventative rebuke (zajr) and not a formal excommunication (takfir).

The Medinan scholar and descendant of the Prophet, Ja‘far Sadiq, was one of the pillars of sacred knowledge in the eighth century, revered by Sunnis and Shiites alike. When he was asked how the Qur’an, ‘despite the passage of generations, only increases in its freshness,’ he replied, ‘Because God did not make it for one specific time or one specific people, so it is new in every age, fresh for every people, until the Day of Judgment.’

Even an elementary understanding of the meaning of Qur’anic verses often depended on grasping the specific circumstances of their revelation.

Numerous Hadiths caution against excessive mourning, warning, ‘He is not from among us who beats his cheeks or rends his

garments, calling out the invocations of the Pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance.’

Such natural expressions of grief must be allowed, notes Nawawi, because authentic Hadiths tell of the Prophet shedding tears at the death of his own infant son, Ibrahim, and also describe his close friend and successor Abu Bakr breaking into tears upon seeing Muhammad’s body. Indeed, tears for the dead were ‘a mercy,’ the Prophet had explained.55

Outside of ritual matters, though, the disappearance of the original cause for some scriptural ruling proved more complicated. The Qur’an, for example, specifies eight groups who are eligible to receive the charitable tithe (Zakat) collected annually from Muslims as part of their religious obligation: the indigent, the poor, those in bondage or debt, travelers, those laboring in God’s path, workers compensated for collecting and dispensing the Zakat and ‘those whose hearts are to be reconciled’ (al-mu’allafa qulubuhum) (9:60).

This verse was revealed as the Muslims achieved their final victory over the Meccans and moved to establish their control over Arabia as a whole. The cryptic last group of Zakat recipients refers to the Meccan elite and the nobility of nearby tribes that had opposed the Prophet to the bitter end, embracing Islam only when its triumph became a foregone conclusion.

Muhammad decided to direct much of the spoils of war and charity collected to this group to help them retain their wealth, standing and thus their loyalty to their new community. It was a decision justifie...

Some cases of abrogation in the Qur’an and Hadiths were unmistakable in the texts themselves: the Qur’an’s command to Muhammad and the Muslims to turn their faces away from ‘the direction of prayer that you faced before’ (Jerusalem) to a new one, one that ‘pleases your heart,’ the Sacred Mosque in Mecca (2:143–50); Muhammad’s command to his followers that, ‘I had prohibited you from visiting graves, but visit them, for indeed in visiting them there is a reminder [of death].’

the challenge of maintaining consonance within the body of scripture overall. Instead of laboring to reconcile two scriptural passages, if any evidence suggested that one appeared later than the other, one could simply declare that abrogation had occurred. The following verse, for example, was generally thought to have been revealed after the Muslim conquest of Mecca in 630: When you meet the unbelievers in battle, smite their necks until you overcome them, then bind them as prisoners, either then setting them free out of munificence or for a ransom, until the war ends… (47:4) Other verses, however, command the Prophet that ‘It is not for a prophet to take prisoners until he has triumphed in the land’ and to ‘Fight the polytheists altogether

as they fight you altogether’ (8:67, 9:36). Some early ulama read these second two verses as abrogating the first one above, entailing an end to taking prisoners and commanding a total, merciless war with the enemies of Islam.

It is in the Islamic rules of war, in fact, that the doctrine of abrogation has been most consequential. The Qur’an’s commandments on conflict and warfare range from passive forbearance to declarations of open war. This befits a document that unfolded over more than two decades of preaching, persecution, incipient conflict and finally declared war and truces. The reasons of revelations tell of a slow escalation. Non-violent instructions to ‘dispute with [the Meccans] in the best way’ and declare ‘Unto you your religion, unto me mine’ (16:125, 109:6) give way to permitting Muhammad

and his followers to fight the Meccans after being driven from the city into exile in Medina: ‘Permission is given to those who fight because they were wronged, verily God is most able to give them succor, those who were driven from their homes unjustly, for but saying, “Our Lord is God”’ (22:39).

Yet even war with the Meccans and their allies was restricted by principles of proportionality: Fight those who fight you, but aggress not, verily God loves not the aggressors. And slay them wherever you find them, and drive them from whence they drove you, for strife is worse than killing… So fight them until there is no strife and religion is God’s a...

In a rare instance of agreement, the classical ulama declared all these verses, along with their clear principles of proportionality ...

the ‘Sword Verses,’ the moniker for a few decontextualized segments of Qur’anic verses suggesting unrestricted offensive war, such as ‘Fighting has been ordained for you’ (2:216) and ‘Slay the polytheists wherever you find them’ (9:5). In all, a total of ...

Jihad was understood as the unceasing quest to ‘make God’s word supreme,’ as Hadiths described, through the ongoing expansion of the rule of God’s law on earth. This was not envisioned in any way as a quest for forced conversion, which never

featured in the Islamic conquests.

The Qur’anic edict of ‘No compulsion in religion’ governed the interpretation of Hadiths like the authenticated report of the Prophet declaring, ‘I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, establish prayer and pay the charity tithe.’ Read in light of the Qur’anic prohibition on coerced belief, this mission to extract confessions of belief was not interpreted literally. Rather, it was understood as referring either only to Arabi...

On the issue of raising one’s hands in prayer (and, in fact, the shape of prayer in general), the Qur’an is silent. But Bayhaqi lists dozens of versions of almost a dozen different Hadiths, narrated from the Prophet by Companions like Ibn Umar, the Prophet’s servant Anas bin Malik as well as others via the caliphs Abu Bakr and Ali. He follows these with the rulings of Companions and Successors such as Hasan Basri. Ibn Umar’s narration of a Hadith from the Prophet was deemed decisive by a number of leading ulama, such as Malik, Awza‘i and the Meccan Sufyan bin ‘Uyayna.

Raising one’s hands at the opening of prayer, before bowing and after standing straight again is so well established via Hadiths of the Prophet, reports about how the first four ‘Rightly Guided’ caliphs prayed and from the opinions of other leading Companions, that Ibn Mas‘ud’s report simply cannot be true. Bayhaqi himself introduces the possible explanation that, if Hadiths like Ibn Mas‘ud’s were historically reliable, they must be cases of abrogation. They must represent some earlier form of the prayer before the Prophet gave it its final shape. He notes that in the early days of the Prophet’s mission other aspects of the prayer had differed as well, like placing one’s hands between one’s thighs while bowing instead of leaning on one’s knees.

Tahawi certainly hoped to convince all Muslims to pray as the Hanafi school prescribed, but as long as Muslims performed the five daily prayers according to any acknowledged madhhab their faith was valid.

Mosque preachers or popular storytellers at Sufi shrines could enrapture audiences with the many esteemed Hadiths from the Sahih books of Bukhari and Muslim describing Muhammad’s ascent through the seven heavens on his miraculous night journey, when God ‘took His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque of Mecca to the Farthest Mosque’ in Jerusalem (Qur’an 17:1). One version describes him leading all the great prophets in prayer in the heavens; another had him touring the Gardens of Paradise destined for the felicitous. Some imply that he actually saw God, others that he merely beheld the ‘Furthest Lote Tree’ in Heaven. If a Muslim chose not to believe some of these narrations, or denied the contrasting, sometimes contradictory details of

Muhammad’s ascent, a scholar like Bayhaqi could do no more than reprimand him as sinful or misled.

The one man to whom the Islamic modernist cause owed the most was the visionary scholar who inspired both Sidqi and Abu Rayya. Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) was a classically trained Maliki jurist, but one who had spent time in Europe

and possessed a peerless and creative reformist bent. Under the watchful eye of the British ‘Veiled Protectorate’ of Egypt, in 1899 the Egyptian king appointed ‘Abduh as Grand Mufti, in charge of issuing Shariah rulings for the government. In part this was to mollify the British High Commissioner, who supported ‘Abduh’s modernizing zeal. As Grand Mufti, ‘Abduh undertook dramatic efforts to reinterpret Islamic law according to modern precepts. While pre-modern ulama had derived legal rulings from an extensive body of scripture, including unreliable Hadiths as well as Companion opinions, ‘Abduh felt that only clear Qur’anic verses and the most solidly reliable Hadiths were compelling. In their absence, he ruled according to Maslaha, or public interest, which in his mind tended to dovetail with state modernization agendas.

During his tenure as Grand Mufti, ‘Abduh permitted individual Muslims and the Egyptian state to receive interest from bank deposits (since he argued that the Riba prohibited by the Qur’an was only excessive usury, not simple interest itself) and issued controversial fatwas allowing eating non-Halal meat and the collection and display of artwork and statues depicting human beings (the fear that Muslims would lapse into idolatry no longer applied, he argued).

For thirty years Kevseri had lived in Cairo, writing at home and teaching students in an impenetrably high literary Arabic lightened by the labial delicacy of his Turkish accent. And he had raged. He had raged against Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate, God’s shadow on earth and Muhammad’s rightful successor. He had raged against Egypt’s stupid, bewitched reformists, whose aim of matching the Western powers was matched only by their need to please them. He had raged most of all against the modernist ulama, who ‘tore up our religion to adorn our earthly world,’ not realizing that ‘our world does not endure, and now neither does what we have torn up.’ For Kevseri, there was no modern world.

For centuries Sunni scholars had critiqued freely, sometimes viciously, Hadiths from the esteemed Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim collections. It was only when the foundations of the classical Sunni tradition were challenged in the modern period by the Salafi movements and even more so by the appearance of Islamic modernists, that a skeptic like Sidqi was called an ‘unbeliever’ for rejecting the Hadith of the Fly. Similarly, for well over a millennium the Catholic Church had sensed no great need to declare the Latin Vulgate Bible unified and immune from textual criticism. Only after some Protestants had made the scripture the center of their occasionally critical study was questioning the Bible’s unity or content declared anathema at the Church’s Council of Trent in 1546.

The use of orientalist books in the Al-Azhar curriculum triggered influential defenses of the Hadiths and Sunna. ‘Abduh was attacked mercilessly in the popular press as a westernized hypocrite who ‘went to Europe but never to Hajj’ and died a broken man.10

He understood the Qur’an’s commands to wage war as applicable only in response to religious persecution. It did not mandate a blanket offensive against non-Muslims, even those who ruled over Muslim populations.

This reformist interpretation of the Qur’an and Hadiths inverted the classical doctrine of jihad, reading the Qur’an’s passages on warfare in their contexts instead of using the ‘Sword Verses’ to abrogate the revelation’s principles of proportionality, mercy and the desirability of peace.

But for Osama Bin Laden and the jihadist movements of the last forty years, the reality of the modern world was not ‘real’ enough to overwhelm the scripture-centered worldview of classical jihad doctrine. Instead, for jihadists, modern realities only sharpened classical understandings of the Qur’an and Hadiths. Their reading of scripture against global politics telescoped time and transposed the medieval into the modern world.

This extremist doctrine of jihad found scriptural footing in a raw, unmediated reading of the Qur’an and Hadiths. God permitted Muhammad’s followers to fight those who ‘drove them from their homes’ or attacked them. Was it then not legitimate to raise arms against the Israeli expulsion of Muslims from their homes in Palestine, or following the Soviet and then American invasions of Muslim lands? On the basis of strong Hadith evidence, classical jihad doctrine had uniformly prohibited the intentional killing of civilians (some scholars like Malik and Awza‘i even disallowed ‘collateral damage’), but Bin Laden considered the Pentagon a military target and the World Trade Center a vitally symbolic organ of the capitalist imperial system that oppressed Muslims. Moreover, if Muslims were permitted to fight those unbelievers

who victimized them for their religion, then what of supposedly Muslim governments that cast aside Shariah law for Western legal codes and consumerism, who imprisoned and executed pious Muslims?

The extremist doctrine of jihad articulated by Bin Laden and others was a warped but recognizable descendant of the militant revivalism that burgeoned in the Wahhabi and Sokoto movements. They too had justified their expansionist jihads (mostly against Muslims they declared apostates) not by artful interpretation of scripture but by imagining themselves in the original contexts of that scripture itself, the pioneering monotheists purifying a heartland for Islam.

They created black-and-white schemas that justified endless expansion when applied to the world around them. Callously caulking the theoretical technicalities of Shariah law onto the realities of a thorny world allowed them to attack lapsed Muslims and polytheist infidels alike. In the eyes of these militant revival movements, those who aided the enemy became

legitimate targets a...

In the mid-twentieth century, this militant revivalism found a new, more abstract and politicized expression in the novel and influential reading of Islam’s scriptures by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian liberal literary critic turned Islamist. After an alleged Muslim Brotherhood assassination attempt against Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, in 1954 Qutb found himself in prison along with many other Muslim Brothers. Lingering in jail for over a decade, suffering from consumption and subjected to torture, Qutb ...

Bin Laden’s use of the Qur’an and Hadiths to justify his path would require a book-length study in its own right. His ‘first’ jihad, however, is an illustrative example of how an artless mapping of scripture onto his perception of global geopolitics resulted in the gross oversimplification of Islam’s rich interpretive heritage.

Bin Laden was no stranger to the classical tradition of Islamic scholarship. He occasionally draws on the authority of medieval Hanbalis such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qudama in his speeches and interviews. The prophetic command he cited was well established, and its order of expulsion was not limited to pagan Arabs alone. In another authenticated Hadith, Muhammad declared: ‘Indeed I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Peninsula of the Arabs so that I leave only Muslims.’ This was not accomplished until the reign of the second caliph, Umar, who acted on the Prophet’s order and expelled the Jews of the oasis of Khaybar, north of Medina, from the Hejaz.

The Islamic justification for Bin Laden’s early jihad becomes much murkier when one investigates how even the earliest Muslim scholars had interpreted the details of the Prophet’s order. The ‘Peninsula of the Arabs’ may seem an obvious geographical unit on maps today, but its medieval definition was narrower and its Shariah status contested. Bukhari notes that it was the area of the twin shrine cities of Mecca and Medina, extending south to the mountains of Yemen and east across the craggy ridges of the Hejaz to the central Arabian oases of Yamama (near present-day Riyadh). Hence Malik had concluded that Umar had not expelled the Jews of the Tayma oasis in the northern Hejaz because it was not considered part of ‘the Peninsula of the Arabs.’

There was also notable disagreement among the Sunni schools of law on the rules governing the exclusive ‘Peninsula’ zone. The caliph Umar had allowed Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians three days every year to buy and sell from the markets of Medina. The Shafi‘i school of law thus held that no unbeliever could settle in the region between Mecca, Medina and Yamama, but they could enter with permission for up to three days on diplomatic duties or if bearing vital goods. They were only prohibited from entering the sacred Haram Mosque of Mecca, where the Kaaba stands. Most Hanafis, by contrast, had allowed unbelievers, even those from outside the ‘Abode of Islam,’ to live in the Hejaz and enter the Haram of Mecca and stay there as a traveler, provided they did not settle. Individuals could even be allowed to enter the Kaaba.