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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

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.’