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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

I sit writing this in a bed and breakfast in Johannesburg, South Africa, Peter Tosh’s ‘Downpressor Man’ playing on the music-video channel on a small TV. This city is a panoply of diversity. In the malls, people of all races and dress window-shop and wait for tables. Women in full face-veils and men with long beards and turbans stroll by without a passing glance from others. Back in the US, in the wake of the tragic Boston Marathon bombings, the media are still frenzied over distinguishing good, moderate Muslims from evil, extremist ones. No one of consequence ever acknowledges that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the American public square are too often not moral qualities or commitments to principle (a principled view might be, for example, ‘The good person respects human life and protects the innocent at all costs; the evil kills and causes suffering ruthlessly’). Rather, they are tribal qualities. ‘Good’ corresponds to ‘works to kill America’s enemies’ (American Muslims who joined the US military to fight in Iraq are thus good), and ‘evil’ means ‘works to kill Americans or their allies or both’ (Iraqi Muslims trying to defend their loved ones from random, dismembering explosions were evil). As for ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme,’ they map onto ‘congruent with mainstream American culture’ (Muslims who drink or don’t cover their hair are thus moderate) versus ‘clashes with mainstream American culture.’

Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement.

As I ponder what this book I’ve written is about, I realize that it is as much as anything an expression of my desire to transcend the tribal and of my frustration at those who pass off cultural chauvinism and narrow-mindedness as liberalism, who use ‘common sense’ as a proxy for forcing one culture onto another on the pretext of imposing ‘universal values;’ who scoff at subservience to backward traditions when they see it in others but are blind to it in themselves; and who refuse to look at the cultural systems of others as – at least initially – equals that deserve to be judged by more than whether they drink beer, wear jeans, date or support some political agenda.

what one person insists is ‘reasonable’ is often no more than the conventions and sensibilities of their particular culture.

It is often difficult, however, to distinguish those criticisms of Islam that are grounded in demonstrable moral realizations from those that merely mask cultural biases.

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.

Shah Wali Allah’s discussion of the stereotypical punishment of cutting off a thief’s hand for stealing reveals the complexity of how Abu Hanifa dealt with problems of law. One might imagine that, if presented with a question such as ‘How should a thief who has stolen loaves of bread from a baker be punished?’ Abu Hanifa and the young scholars who congregated around him would look first to the Qur’an. It states clearly, ‘The thief, male or female, cut off their hand as a punishment for what they have earned…’ (5:38). But Abu Hanifa would also remember that his teacher Hammad had heard the great Nakha‘i tell that the Prophet only ordered this punishment if the item stolen was worth more than ten silver coins. Moreover, earlier Kufan masters had ruled, on the basis of a well-known Hadith from the Prophet, that ‘There is no amputation for stealing the fruits [of a palm tree] or its heart.’14 But Abu Hanifa and his colleagues would still not have found a clear answer to the question of the loaves of bread in the Qur’an, the Hadiths or the Companion rulings at their disposal. How could they use these sources to cover new territory and resolve the question? Abu Hanifa developed a systematic form of analogical reasoning, called Qiyas, to extend the ruling of one situation to another based on a shared legal cause (‘illa) – that feature for which God or the Prophet had judged the situation in a certain way. By understanding what lay behind the rulings of the Qur’an and Hadiths, the...

Important to Abu Hanifa’s method for deriving law from scripture was the concept of Istihsan, or ‘seeking the best.’

The Qur’an had encouraged Muhammad and his followers to use their reason, to scan the heavens and appreciate the ordered infinity of God’s creation. But the Qur’an also cautioned against trusting too much in reason when pondering matters of the unseen, for the Devil is forever urging man to ‘say about God that which you do not know’ (2:169). Reason and rationalization offered a deceptive and alluring window for indulging one’s own fancies and desires. This had been the bane of earlier peoples gifted with prophecy by God. Overconfident in their own speculations about the nature of God and His law, they ignored the revealed books sent down to them. The Qur’an warned Muslims, ‘If you heed most of those in the world, they will lead you astray from God’s path. They do but follow supposition, they do but conjecture’ (6:116). Belief, prayer and practice must be built on firm instructions revealed by God. All else is too subject to abiding human whims and interests.

While their fundamental commitment to the truth of the Qur’an obliged the Mutazila scholars to negotiate such problematic verses, they had no such duty with Hadiths. For them, any Hadith that they saw as contradicting the Qur’an or reason had to be rejected outright as a forgery. One such Hadith quotes the Prophet as revealing how ‘God descends to the lowest heavens in the last third of the night.’ From there He grants the wishes of those who remain awake in prayer. The Mutazila rejected this as absurd because it entailed God moving and thus being a body subject to change. In another Hadith, the Prophet recounts how Moses confronted Adam in Heaven, rebuking him for robbing all his future descendants of life in the Garden of Eden. Adam replied that Moses, as a prophet of God, should know that it is not fair to blame him for something that God had ordained. ‘So Adam bested Moses in the argument.’30 This was preposterous and could never have been taught by Muhammad, the Mutazila asserted, because man has free will and cannot escape blame by claiming that some act ‘was written.’

Far from a myopic or rigid body of law, the Sunni Shariah tradition thus became a swirl of stunning diversity. Not only were there four distinct schools of law, but each school also had a range of opinions on any one question. Furthermore, the recorded legacies of the extinct madhhabs of scholars like Tabari and the ancient opinions of scattered Companions and Successors added to the body of legal knowledge. The statement ‘the Shariah says…’ is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question.

As the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi wrote, humankind’s cry of isolation was like the reed flute’s song. Ever since it was cut from the reed bed, it has yearned to return.

The metaphysical reality that creation was an emanation, an overflow, of God’s perfection, growing darker and less real the further it extended from Him; that human souls were caught too far out in this tide and yearned for the divine shore, traced its roots to Plato and a later mystical interpreter of his philosophy in Rome, the influential third-century philosopher Plotinus. Such awareness led some Muslim mystics to acknowledge that truth lay embedded in other religions, even if they had gone egregiously astray. The

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the schools of law were solidifying into their guild-like form, a number of Sufi masters emerged whose teachings attracted wide attention. Among them were a Hanbali scholar in Baghdad, renowned for his piety, named ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani; a Moroccan saint who settled in Egypt, Abu Hasan Shadhili; and the Bukharan Baha’ al-Din Naqshband, who gathered together the wisdom of Persia’s Sufi masters.

Canonical texts may not always be above criticism, but critiquing them has its limits and its costs. Although criticizing Shakespeare’s oeuvre is permitted in the academy, one cannot say it is bad English. Some might argue for revisions to the American Constitution on matters such as the right to bear arms, but no American in public life could say that the Constitution is not suited for running a garden club, let alone a nation. Such opinions would be dismissed as absurd if not offensive within the canonical communities whose very identities are formed in part around these texts.

Neither do epistemological eras transition overnight. Western civilization did not progress from purely religious to purely secular. It has never been purely either. But the dominant canonical culture built around the Bible and the public cult of Christianity was the overarching framework of the medieval West, and it faltered irreversibly in the mid-nineteenth century.

the notion of lahn al-khitab, or the ‘perceptive understanding of a textual address.’

He was restating the central pillar of scriptural hermeneutics, the reciprocal movement in which, as Leo Lefebure describes, ‘We interpret the part in light of the whole, and then we reinterpret the whole in light of our new understanding of the part.’27

the doctrinal maxim of ‘Adamic purity’ (taharat al-adami), based in part on the Prophet’s interactions with unbelievers and his allowing them into his mosque. Non-Muslims, like Muslims, are thus inherently pure, and their sweat, tears and saliva are ritually innocuous.

That one had to move from the evident meaning of a text to a secondary meaning because compelling evidence required it was known as Ta’wil, or interpretation.

One could object that these readings of the Qur’an and Hadiths contradict what the texts explicitly ‘say.’ But texts themselves do not say anything. What they say and what they mean is determined by the reader in the unavoidable and sometimes unconscious act of interpretation.

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.’36

With speaker and listener separated by an interpretive gulf, there is no escaping the inherent ambiguity in language. An intended meaning may be conjured by the speaker in light of how he or she assumes the audience will understand it, but actual meaning is ultimately defined by the hegemonic power of the audience’s worldview. There is no way to deny these influences or meld them seamlessly. Once you speak or write, it is the audience who decide your meaning.

Language is an imperfect medium for communicating the ideas of one mind to the mind of another.

Madison offered that, ‘When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.’

The Qur’an, on the other hand, has never been a legal manual. Its language ranges from apocalyptic warnings about doomsday to mystical ruminations about man’s longing for God; from broad ethical commands to, occasionally, more specific instructions on the division of inheritance and manslaughter.

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). Tirmidhi explains that this is not an accusation of unbelief but rather indicates that the person was simply ‘not following the path of the Muslims’ in committing such acts.

The nature of Qur’anic commands and rulings has been endlessly debated and is one of the primary causes for the tremendous variety within Islamic law and dogma.

Sunni legal theorists since the eleventh century have phrased the tension between the specificity or generality of Qur’anic verses as the tension between the ‘Generality of the Language’ (‘umum al-lafz) and the ‘Specificity of the Reason for Revelation’ (khusus al-sabab).

‘No compulsion in religion’ (2:256) was a Qur’anic command revealed in Medina when a child from one of the Muslim families who had been educated in the town’s Jewish schools decided to depart with the Jewish tribe being expelled from Medina. His distraught parents were told by God and the Prophet in this verse that they could not compel their son to stay. The verse, however, has been understood over the centuries as a general command that people cannot be forced to convert to Islam.

The genre of Tafsir reports that explained when and why a Qur’anic verse descended came to be known as Asbab al-Nuzul, or ‘Reasons of Revelation.’

But in light of the dearth of Hadiths on masturbation, Ibn Hanbal and his school did not see this verse as relevant and thus considered masturbation to be merely disliked or even totally permissible for those who lacked the circumstances to marry.

When he arranged with his Meccan enemies to allow the Muslims to journey from Medina to perform the Hajj one year, Muhammad instructed his followers to move vigorously through the various stations of the pilgrimage, walking briskly in their seven transits between the small hills of Safa and Marwa near the Kaaba. He hoped to show the Meccans that years of war, travel and hardship had not sapped the Muslims’ strength. The ulama preserved this ‘brisk walking’ (raml) as a well-established, recommended act. Years after the Prophet’s death the caliph Umar remarked on Hajj, ‘What is this for, this brisk walking… now that God has empowered Islam and negated unbelief and the unbelievers?’ He answered himself with pride. ‘Regardless of this, we will not abandon something we used to do in the time of the Messenger of God.’

The notion that aspects of the Qur’an’s message and the Prophet’s teachings developed over time was expressed through the concept of Naskh, commonly translated as ‘abrogation.’

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 alone.

And if they desist, then let there be no attacks except upon the oppressors.

four Sunni madhhabs to be one great school of law, offering each believer a range of positions on any issue and thus the choice between relaxed or more stringent rules on any one issue. For him, claims of abrogation were the recourse of those mediocre and narrow-minded jurists whose hearts God had not illuminated with His light. They could not perceive all the interpretive possibilities in the words of God and the Prophet or appreciate that a diversity of opinion was a mercy. By taking the shortcut of stamping Qur’anic verses or Hadiths ‘abrogated,’ such ulama had restricted the interpretive plurality that God had intended in the Shariah.

The cases of Spinoza and Woolston offer a clear distinction between the cognitive content of an idea or a component of a scholarly tradition and the ideological purposes to which it is put to use.4 The main route for introducing change to a conservative interpretive tradition is to employ veteran tools from its repository to advance unprecedented ideas. But one must do so without seeming to break the coherence of that system or pandering too obviously to external agendas. Overloaded or pushed too far, even the most indigenous interpretive scheme will run aground.

With Spinoza and Woolston, what opponents and timid supporters alike knew mattered was the worldview preached in their writings, not the formal legitimacy of their interpretive methods or even the particular conclusions they reached.

Worldviews split at ruptures in commonly acknowledged truths, diverging and coexisting in tension. Cosmopolitanism can exist side by side with an atavistic longing for an insulated, ‘authentic’ tradition. The Hellenistic Mediterranean world produced Jewish communities of both types, Platonic philosophers like Philo of Alexandria and the hermetic community of the Dead Sea Scrolls.7 Microcontexts coexist in stark contrast. The pious but disquieting peripatetic teacher Giulio Vanini was executed for heresy and atheism in the zealous French city of Toulouse in 1619. Meanwhile, a professor in the University of Paris flourished while mocking the Bible as absurd and dismissing Heaven and Hell as fables drummed up to scare simpletons.8

In modern Egypt, what had unfolded as internal dynamics between the secular/scientific and the scriptural/clerical in Spinoza’s Amsterdam and Woolston’s England was being rehashed as part of the agonistic dynamic between the colonizer and colonized, ‘co-opted’ elites and ‘authentic’ tradition. In the 1930s the Muslim Brotherhood arose to challenge the notion that ‘Islam and organization can never coincide’ and to drive imperialism first from the hearts of Egyptians and then from Egypt itself. Arabic nationalism rolled back calls like that of Egyptian reformists in the late 1930s to follow Turkey’s example and write Arabic in a Latin script. Most importantly, the powerful, popular Islamic revival of the 1970s and 1980s reintroduced at least a formal respect for Islam and its scriptures in public life.

Media, the state, secular Arab intellectuals and international actors alternately encourage or oblige segments of the ulama to reconcile the Qur’an and Hadiths with the firmest tenets of neoliberal economics and democracy. State-appointed muftis and state-employed clergy usually comply.

Meanwhile, more conservative ulama, particularly those in opposition to the state, champion interpretations of the scripture and the Shariah that preserve the pre-modern heritage. Sometimes they reimagine an atavistic tradition more conservative than any that actually existed.

considered the Pentagon a military target and the World Trade Center a vitally symbolic organ of the capitalist imperial system that oppressed Muslims.

The crux of Qutb’s interpretation is the Qur’an’s verses on God’s absolute sovereignty, ‘Rule is God’s alone’ and ‘Those who ruled by other than what God has revealed, they are the unbelievers’ (12:40, 67). He had been strongly influenced by the Islamist thought of the Indian (later Pakistani) ideologue Abul Ala Mawdudi, and like him read these declarations as condemnations of secularization and the subordination of the Shariah to fickle, man-made regimes.17

Arrested by Egypt’s security forces and often brutalized in prison, leading members of one Islamist group in particular, the Jama‘a Islamiyya, turned back to the writings of Sayyid Qutb with a new perspective. His characterization of Egypt’s government as a resurrection of pre-Islamic paganism rang prophetically when prison interrogators tortured the young activists for what the victims could only assume was their sincere faith in Islam. When prisoners called out to God during torture, the guards mocked them with barbs like, ‘Bring your God and we’ll put him in a cell too.’ The Jama‘a activists concluded that they were indeed facing pure enemies of God just as the Prophet had.23 They and other Islamist groups turned to violence against the infidel state. The Jama‘a Islamiyya and another small cadre called the Jama‘t Jihad cooperated in assassinating Sadat and a failed uprising against the government in Upper Egypt in 1981. Locked in a destructive tit-for-tat with the Egyptian security services, through the late 1990s Jama‘a Islamiyya militants carried out sporadic and horrific attacks on state interests and tourist sites.

While still in prison, in 2004 leading thinkers in the organization produced a set of concise, accessible booklets entitled the ‘Series for Correcting Understandings,’ which condemned violent extremism on the basis of sound interpretation of scripture. The reformed Jama‘a members warned that a main cause of religious extremism was the literal reading of the Qur’an and Hadiths, without qualified ulama as guides or an understanding of the overarching principles of the Shariah.

In Egypt of the late twentieth century, the figure who strove hardest and most successfully to accomplish this was Muhammad Ghazali, an Al-Azhar scholar and a disciple of Shaltut. His countless books on every aspect of Islam and reviving its proper understanding, with titles like Our Intellectual Heritage, Renew Your Life and Islam and Women’s Issues, still sell briskly at Cairo’s impromptu sidewalk bookstalls. Through the decades of his prolific writing and serving as an imam in Cairo’s leading mosques, Ghazali picked many fights and earned even more admirers.

One of Ghazali’s last, and certainly his most controversial, books would confront the Salafi reliance on Hadiths and Egypt’s gender conservatism head-on.

Epitomizing the converse of Ghazali’s approach, one scholar of Mecca had written that, even if the Prophet’s wife Aisha herself came to bear witness in court, her sole testimony would not be accepted.