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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

One figure who responded to the letter was Ahmad Shakir, an Al-Azhar cleric and a judge in Cairo’s family courts, the last bastion of Shariah law in Egypt’s judiciary. Shakir was an important link between the Egyptian ulama and the Wahhabi scholars of Saudi Arabia, where the revivalist thought of Ibn Taymiyya was undergoing a renaissance. Shakir, in fact, was a founding figure of the Salafi movement in Egypt.

This was not a license for forced marriage. Well-known Hadiths explained that any woman who had reached puberty must give her consent for marriage, though if she was a virgin who remained silent the Prophet explained that ‘her silence is her consent.’ This applied to girls who had reached maturity, which occurred when they began menstruating or reached fifteen years old, whichever came first (Maliki scholars alone allowed that eighteen was the oldest possible age by which puberty occurs). All four Sunni schools, however, permitted a father to contract a marriage for his underage virgin daughter, no matter how young she was, without her consent, which had no weight due to her minority.48 Hanafis alone allowed a girl in such a case to ask a judge to annul a marriage contract previously arranged by her guardian once she reached puberty.

This was also based on the Prophet’s marriage to Aisha. The couple had concluded the marriage contract when Aisha was only six but had waited to consummate the marriage until she reached physical maturity.

A Scottish physician resident in Aleppo in the mid 1700s noted how families endeavored to marry their children off (i.e., complete the marriage contract) at a young age but that they would not consummate the marriage until the girl ‘had come of age.’

It is a quirk of history that, while Christianity has had only one Martin Luther, Islam has had at least six in the last twenty years.

Regular readers need wait only a few months for The Economist to raise the prospect of another Luther or Luther-like force on the horizon. Heralding the impact of online sources explicating Islam to Muslim populations, the magazine wrote recently: ‘For the first time, lay people can easily separate religious commands from tradition by looking at holy texts and scholarship rather than relying on their local preachers.’

A Sudanese Muslim blogger pre-canonized by the publication ‘even thinks that digital media will be to Islam what the printing press was to Christianity – and ultimately lead to a Reformation.’ ‘We’re still in the early stages,’ explains the blogger, ‘but we’re going to see many eclectic versions of Islam.’2

Until the collision with the modern West, no Muslim scholar of any consequence ever advocated that the Qur’an be read alone. They might dispute on all else, but the varied sects of Islam all agreed that Muslims should under no circumstances read the Qur’an in a vacuum. Islam’s sects shared two foundational principles: that the Sunna of the Prophet rules over and interprets the Qur’an, and that the Prophet’s interpretive authority had been passed on to those authorities who were to lead the community after his death.

Where sects diverged was over how and by whom this Sunna was known and who had the authority to speak in the Prophet’s name. For Sunnis it was transmitted and known by the Muslim community as a whole, borne via the twin routes of the Hadiths, which recorded the Prophet’s words, and the inherited teachings of the early Muslim generations, spoken for by the community’s often cacophonous body of ulama. Taken together, this was the Sunni tradition, in which the authority of God and His Prophet could coalesce from the riot of stentorian voices and express itself fully in instances of consensus (ijma‘).

Shiites believed that the Prophet’s teachings were inherited by particular lines of his descendants. The esoteric knowledge of the religion and the ability to interpret infallibly the Qur’an’s layers of hidden meaning passed from father to designated son like bloodlines. Those descendants designated in succession as Imams spoke with the authority of the Prophet. Further sectarian splintering into Imami (T...

The most recent Western scholarship on Hadiths has shown that such wide-scale forgery was highly improbable. Textual analysis and archeological evidence can take us back reliably to within a century of the Prophet’s death, and as far back as that horizon the Sunni science of Hadith transmission and law seems to have been an honest if hotly contested undertaking. As for the first crucial century of Islam, beyond its broad outlines, it lies out of historical sight.

After that, the new mother would resume her daily prayers whether her bleeding had stopped or not.38 There was no reliable Hadith anywhere on this topic. Yet we find chapters devoted to the issue in the canonical Hadith collections of the mid-ninth century, which feature several Hadiths on Nifas. These Hadiths then repeatedly appear as evidence in subsequent books of Shariah law. The main Hadith quotes the Prophet’s wife Umm Salama recalling that women in the Prophet’s time observed a forty-day break from prayers after childbirth. But none of these Hadiths in any way met even the lowest bar of reliability according to the Sunni science of transmission criticism. After including this Hadith in his canonical Hadith collection, Tirmidhi admits its unreliability. But he is quick to add that ‘scholars had come to consensus on this ruling.’

Along with quips about camels and hummus, ‘honor killing’ is among the first phrases that average folk in the West associate with Islam. As intimated by the British court’s decision, this does not reflect the reality of the Shariah tradition. Violence committed against women for perceived compromises of family honor is a product of patriarchal societies suffering from economic underdevelopment. The phenomenon is found across religions and from Brazil to India. Ironically, those Arab countries with legal provisions that treat honor crimes more lightly than comparable offenses all draw these laws from the Ottoman Criminal Code of 1858. It, in turn, translated this provision directly from the French Legal Code of 1810.42

No Muslim scholar of any note, either medieval or modern, has sanctioned a man killing his wife or sister for tarnishing her or the family’s honor.

Why then do all four Sunni schools of law agree that a Muslim man who leaves Islam is killed if he refuses to recant (the Hanafis only punish a woman with imprisonment)? The ruling is based on a number of Hadiths considered totally reliable by Sunni scholars, such as ‘Whoever changes his religion, kill him’ and another specifying that a Muslim’s life is only taken for three crimes: murder, adultery and apostasy.52

A Muslim leaving the fold, however, was undermining the religious order of the Umma. This vital dimension of communal loyalty is alluded to in the Hadith laying out the three capital crimes for Muslims. The Prophet describes the apostate as ‘one leaving his religion, forsaking the community.’

As Gomaa wrote in a representative fatwa, these prohibitions had been agreed upon by ‘the people of knowledge from the four schools of law, nay the eight schools of law,’ referring to the four Sunni schools, the two Shiite, the Zahiri and the Ibadi Kharijite schools.

It is a bizarre irony of history that the physical consigning of women to the private space of the home, so ubiquitous in the Shariah heritage that flourished with classical Islamic civilization, clashes so discordantly with the decidedly open and active role that the Prophet’s wives and other Arab women played in the Arabian cradle of Islam. A woman once rose up and interrupted the caliph Umar while he was addressing the congregation from the pulpit of the Prophets’ mosque. Far from silencing her, he admitted the mistake she had pointed out.80 Aisha’s prominence in the life of the Prophet and the early Muslim community, ranging from a senior bearer of the religion’s teachings to the head of a faction in Islam’s first civil war (whatever her regrets), cannot be denied.

Women have always been present among the ranks of the ulama, but their role has almost always been invisible. Of the inestimable library of books produced by scholars of the Shariah before the twentieth century, no more than a handful issue from the hands of women. As one fourteenth-century (male) jurist observed with more pride than disapproval, it was surely the Shariah’s emphasis on female modesty and protecting women’s honor that prevented them from a greater role in scholarship, though he notes that many of the greatest scholars would issue fatwas with their learned wives’ or daughters’ signatures attached in approval.

Convincing average Muslims of the sinfulness of dealing in interest has always been a challenge for the ulama, and never more so than with rulers eager to borrow and influential merchants eager to lend. In the late eleventh century, the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad expelled a hugely popular scholar from the city for urging his large audiences to heed the Shariah’s ban on Riba.

They sought only to prevent exploitatively high rates.2 Yet the campaign to stomp interest out completely has never ceased, with preachers to this day reiterating to the faithful the severe condemnation of Riba in the Qur’an and Hadiths.

The Hadith equating the slightest form of Riba with incest has been widely considered unreliable or even a blatant forgery by Muslim Hadith scholars, and the Hadith quoted by Al-Attas was never said by the Prophet but rather by the caliph Ali bin Abi Talib.5

When he was not occupied with his work as a Shariah court judge in Cordoba or writing manuals of Islamic law, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote precious commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Discussing the Republic and the Noble Lie, Ibn Rushd remarks: ‘There is no lawgiver who does not employ fictitious tales, because this is necessary for the masses if they are to attain happiness.’12 Like his philosophical paragon Aristotle, Ibn Rushd believed that different audiences should be addressed with different types of proof or methods of argumentation. When it came to the masses, the ulama should address them not with demonstrations of the truth or complex argument but with compelling rhetoric. In this way they might be urged toward what helps them and steered away from what harms them.13

As Ibn Rushd and Aristotle before him insisted, rhetoric was the tool that the elect employed to move the masses toward what benefited them and away from what harmed them.

One genre of Hadiths that the ulama found useful in this regard was Hadiths of ‘exhortation and warning’ (targhib wa tarhib). These either described the fantastic rewards that believers could expect in the Afterlife for performing some deed, such as extra prayers, or alternatively warned of dreadful punishments in Hellfire for transgressions.

To justify acting on or disseminating patently unreliable Hadiths of exhortation and warning, the ulama often cited a Hadith in which the Prophet promises,‘Whoever comes across a report from God (and his Prophet) about the virtue of some act and then acts on it, believing it and hoping for that reward, God will grant him the reward even if the report was not true.’ Ironically, this Hadith itself was of dubious origin.30

But Hollywood audiences routinely accept factual embellishments in the cause of conveying the real truth perceived at the heart of the story.

A twenty-first century successor to the heroic portrait painter, American filmmaker Martin Scorsese acknowledges the factual liberties taken in making a period film recounting historical events. ‘It’s the truth wrapped in a package of lies,’ he explains.

Often mistakenly cited as coming from the Qur’an, the promise of seventy-two huris, or ‘dark-eyed heavenly beauties,’ for each martyr is actually found in a problematic and unreliable Hadith of exhortation.

Martyrs merit special reward. The Qur’an praises again and again those who fight and die ‘in the path of God,’ promising that they are not dead but rather ‘alive, given sustenance with their Lord’ (3:169).

As an eighth-century Byzantine emperor wrote, the Qur’an’s alluring images of a ‘Paradise’ (like the Bible, the Qur’an uses the old Persian word firdaws)

and ‘Blessed Garden’ abounding with rivers of milk and pure wine, brocaded couches, vines heavy with fruit and sexual mates could only suit a religion that sanctioned sexual excess in this earthly world as well.

A bevy of Hadiths extended the category of martyr far beyond those who died in war. They list other causes of death that earn an individual the status of martyr: death from plague; stomach illness (like diarrhea); an abscess; tuberculosis; drowning; structure collapse; childbirth and its aftermath; someone killed for their money, their family or religion; someone who speaks truth to an unjust ruler and is killed or dies in prison; as well as anyone who stands alone for truth in corrupted times.

Muhammad explains: The martyr receives six special rewards with God: he is immediately forgiven his sins; he sees his seat in Paradise; he is protected from the torment of the grave and the greatest terror of the Resurrection; he is given the crown of honor, whose ruby is greater than the world and all in it; he is given seventy-two huris as wives and allowed to intercede on behalf of seventy of his relatives. In light of the centuries of disapproval that this Hadith has elicited from Western critics, it seems supremely ironic that it is not reliable at all according to leading Sunni Hadith scholars (see Appendix IV).

Along with dozens of other Hadiths enumerating the martyrs’ many prizes, it often appeared in books on the virtues of jihad written during periods of heated conflict with non-Muslims on the frontiers, like the ninth-century raids and counter-raids between Byzantium and the Abbasid caliphate, or the height of the Crusades in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

As with the threat against engaging in Riba, the fact that the ulama lacked strong evidence tracing the Hadith of the Seventy-Two Huris to its supposed prophetic source provoked little concern.

In fact, resurrection on Judgment Day would exclude the body altogether. Of course, Muslim Philosophers believed heartily that the Qur’an was a revealed message from God. But it used corporeal language to describe Paradise not because it was accurate, insisted Ibn Sina, but because that was the only idiom that the masses would find appealing.

The Islamic Philosophers were an elite group whose works and thought remained consistently controversial for the mainstream of Sunni Islam. Unlike the Sunni ulama, they did not hold obedience to God’s law as an absolute command and the basic foundation of any Muslim’s life.

The most celebrated attack on those Muslim intellectuals who had adopted the cosmologies of Aristotle and Plotinus came from an eleventh-century Sunni scholar from Iran named Abu Hamid Ghazali (the namesake for the twentieth-century Egyptian reformist), who was so influential that he became known as Hujjat Al-Islam (The Proof of Islam). He listed among the Philosophers’ most severe sins their suggestion that the duties of worship and the Shariah restrictions that applied to all Muslims did not apply to them (Ibn Sina might have struck too close to home – Lady Montagu would later hear her Ottoman ulama interlocutors excuse their own wine indulgence with the claim that ‘the Prophet never designed to confine those that knew how to use it with moderation’).

Denying the literal reality of Heaven and Hell as portrayed in the Qur’an and Hadiths and instead claiming that they were superficial falsehoods tailored for the masses dovetailed dangerously with the Ismaili claim that the exoteric reading of the revelation obscured the ‘Religion of Truth’ known only to the Ismaili Imam and taught to his elect followers. If it were accepted that the evident meaning of scripture could be set aside for an elite, inner sense on topics such as the nature of the Afterlife, the door to the Ismaili reading of scripture would be opened wide.

In the summer of 2007 I asked one of my teachers, a young Yemeni Sufi master, about ulama citing unreliable Hadiths. ‘It may be that they are mentioned to make the point in an appealing way,’ he replied.

During the question-and-answer period, this speaker too was asked how Muslims should make sense of what is sometimes simply referred to as ‘The Wife Beating Verse.’ He replied that, contrary to what is widely believed, the Shariah in no way condoned a husband striking his wife. He pointed out that the Arabic verb taken to mean ‘strike’ or ‘beat’ in the verse, daraba, had been incorrectly interpreted. God could not have intended this meaning because it would have contradicted the conduct of the Prophet, whom well-known Hadiths described as never having struck any of his wives in any way.

Unlike the secondary scripture of Hadiths, a Qur’anic verse cannot be dismissed as historically unreliable or overlooked as an isolated anomaly. It is unavoidably the word of God. Qur’an 4:34 is thus the ultimate crisis of scripture in the modern world.

The tragedy of domestic violence against women is far too common worldwide for any one religion or scriptural passage to be its cause. In Nigeria, a country that straddles deep religious and ethnic fault lines, a survey found that 74 percent of Muslim women considered it acceptable for a husband to beat his wife in certain circumstances. But so did 52 percent of Christian women and 64 percent of women adhering to African religions.

violated the Qur’anic principle requiring husbands to ‘Live with them [wives] according to what is right’ (4:19) and, based on the medical reports, ruled that the husband should pay his wife 9,000 riyals (around $2,400) compensation for her injuries and receive thirty lashes for his insulting language.

Ayesha was then but seven years old, and therefore this marriage was not consummated till two years after, when she was nine years old, at which age, we are told, women in that country are ripe for marriage.