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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

The norm that the ulama did come to consensus on was only a general guideline: they prohibited sexual intercourse for girls ‘not able to undergo it,’ on the basis that otherwise sex could be physically harmful. If the groom and his wife or her guardian disagreed about her capacity for sex, a Shariah court judge would decide, perhaps after a female expert witness examined her.49 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. In the case of the Hanbali tradition followed by the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, sex was allowed when the bride was ‘at the age at which others like her have intercourse,’ specifying nine as the norm for suitability for sex on the basis of Aisha’s Hadith. 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.’ Historical evidence from nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine suggests that husbands having sexual intercourse with wives before they reached puberty did sometimes occur. But it was rare, condemned socially and censured by Shariah court judges. Shariah courts in French Algeria in the 1850s considered it equally despicable, although colonial officials seemed unable to grasp the crucial difference between c...

Yet I have found no instance of anyone criticizing the Prophet’s marriage due to Aisha’s age or accusing him of pedophilia until the early twentieth century. Even in the nineteenth century, British, German and French orientalists mostly passed over the matter in silence. Others assumed a Montesquieu-like sense of climatic determinism. In the 1830s the British ethnographer and lexicographer E. W. Lane prefaced his observation that Egyptian women married as young as ten (only a few remained single by age sixteen) with the remark that they ‘tend to arrive at puberty much earlier than the natives of colder climates.’ The first condemnatory note comes in Mohammad and the Rise of Islam (1905) by the British orientalist David Margoliouth. He calls Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha an ‘ill-assorted union… for as such we must characterise the marriage of a man of fifty-three to a child of nine.’

In some US states, such as Georgia, the legal age of consent for women was as low as ten well into the twentieth century. In all these areas, this was probably due to the need for as many hands as possible to work the fields, hence a premium on high birth rates, as well as a relatively short life expectancy and a need to start families early.

Works such as The Genius of Muhammad and The Genius of Umar were consciously modeled on Carlyle’s ‘great man’ view of history, efforts to bolster the assurance of Arabs and Muslims who wanted to believe in the legitimacy of their civilization but needed that proven in terms convincing to Europeans.

At rallies for short-lived Islamist parties in the 1990s and at times of particularly heightened sensitivity, such as Israel’s capture of Jerusalem in 1967, crowds have called for a return to Shariah law. But such extreme calls for a return to the past have proven rare and politically dangerous (advocating for the Shariah is illegal in Turkey).78

How do you retain faith in transcendent scripture and its commandments when many in the world declare them barbaric relics? When the disapproving gazes and piques of contempt issue from colonial masters or an overbearing West, it is easy to understand why many Muslims cling to the canons of tradition and an idealized past more strongly than ever, turning vindictively on others who let them go. How do you read the Qur’an and Hadiths ‘authentically’ when the foreign-made backdrops enveloping your scriptural world become as real as the scripture itself? In centuries past no one denied that sometimes the month of Ramadan ‘falls short,’ or that the Abode of Islam must expand so that ‘the word of God is supreme.’ But now what to some is as self-evident as the evils of holy war or pedophilia seems to others like foreign hypocrisy or capricious imposition.

But which master did he serve, scripture or the seductive pressures of the present? Could both be heeded faithfully, or was one the true face and the other the mask placed over it?

It is so hard to know whence truth comes in a fractured age. What does one cling to and what does one tear up in a world that does not endure?

Tradition is the scholarly structure built on scripture through interpretation, both systematizing its teachings and controlling its authority, deciding its meaning and making it plain while limiting those who can access scripture directly. Tradition is constructed of parchment, countless fascicules and seas of ink. It is built by generations of devout scholars, who shape it to fit or fight the world of their day, their learned wraiths incorporated into its edifice.

Luther’s Catholic opponents were not the first to offer such warnings. Medieval rabbis had long before concluded that sincerity, inspiration and zeal were no guarantors of right guidance. Explaining the grave error of the Karaite Jews, a Babylonian sect who had called for the rejection of the Oral Torah tradition by which rabbis explained the written books of Moses, the Andalusian rabbi Judah HaLevi noted that sincerity of intention is useless. ‘For that which appears plain in the Torah is yet obscure, and much more so are the obscure passages.’

Concerning the written word, its hazards were known as far back as Plato. Writing may seem a ‘sure receipt for memory and wisdom,’ warned the Athenian, but it is only a ‘shadow’ of real knowledge. Written knowledge is passive before the reader and unable to defend itself against misunderstanding. People read into books only what they already believe, and books cannot correct them. Only living teachers can. For the disciple seeking knowledge, it is the master who passes on true, sound wisdom, not the book.10 Left to their own devices, the uninitiated may choose their texts poorly.

Inspired wisdom, however, can never be captured entirely by the written word, so it can never be left to the unlearned to read in the absence of its living inheritors. So revelation is set down in writing by scribes and explicated by prophets.

Like the Oral Torah and Christ’s teachings, early Muslim scholars believed that the prophetic wisdom needed to unlock the Qur’an’s written message should not be consigned to the written word.

Ilm is not taken from someone who relies on written pages,’ was a common early mantra.

As Luther had so stridently objected, however, tradition does not just preserve. The carriers of tradition are also its subtle sculptors, shaping it to fit the needs of changing times and inevitably gathering up into its folds the tacit assumptions of community and culture.

Whenever he could, St. Augustine answered questions with scripture. On several occasions, however, the peerless Church Father was asked about the validity of Christian practices that had no basis in the Bible. Augustine responded that, if the practice was widespread enough, it needed no such justification. ‘In those things concerning which the divine Scriptures have laid down no definite rule, the custom of the people of God, or the practices instituted by their fathers, are to be held as the law of the Church.’33

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

Several European scholars have argued that Islamic law adopted much of Roman provincial law, notably as passed through Jewish law. The Shariah tradition certainly mirrors the principle of patria potestas in noticeable ways, but this could have indigenous roots as well. Like its Roman precursor, the Shariah’s effective confirmation of patria potestas seems more a reflection of the deep logic of law and society than a common court ruling. Like the ancient familial origins of Roman society, the Arabian world of the Qur’an was based on the family and tribe, and patrilineal descent was its organizing principle. A product of this stateless world, the Qur’an conceived of murder as a wrong committed against the victim’s kin, not against ‘the state.’ The father was the font and axis of his progeny’s entire legal existence and rights to protection in the tribal system. How could he be punished for killing one of them?

Gomaa compares the apostasy condemned by the Hadiths as closer to high treason, namely a betrayal of the Muslim state and polity. Qaradawi distinguishes this severe form of apostasy, which he labels ‘Apostasy of Transgression,’ from the lesser apostasy of an individual making the personal choice to privately change his or her religious beliefs. This lesser form was not punishable under the Shariah. Transgressive apostasy, such as public ridicule of Islam or calling others to apostatize, however, amounted to an attack on the religious structures of society and was indeed punishable by death. Furthermore, Qaradawi interprets Umar’s lenient statement on apostasy as evidence that the gruff second caliph understood the Prophet’s severe condemnations of leaving Islam as a ceiling of punishment and not a strict rule. Like the case of forbidding tobacco and coffee, treatment of apostates fell to the ruler’s discretion.54

The motif of the European knight/gentleman rescuing the oppressed oriental maiden from her harem prison remains a well-watered one. The native ‘oriental’s’ preservation of his ‘authentic’ tradition has sprung up in response. Taking the iconic example of Hindu widow self-immolation (satti, banned by the British in India in 1829), Gayatri Spivak notes the discourse that spirals destructively between the colonialist impulse of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ and its inevitable epiphenomenon, the ‘brown men’s’ response that ‘the women actually wanted to die.’

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. During the vulnerable early days of Muhammad’s community, Umm Fadl, the wife of his uncle, killed one of the leading enemies of Islam in their home by crushing his skull with a tent pole after he beat a Muslim slave. When the Prophet was surrounded by enemy warriors at the Battle of Uhud, and the bulk of the Muslims had abandoned hope, a woman who had been tending the wounded, Nusayba bint Ka‘b, fought beside him to guard her Prophet from sword blows and arrows. Later, she accompanied the Muslim campaign into central Arabia to avenge her fallen son, returning to Medina with twelve wounds. At the Battle of Yarmouk against the Byzantines, another Muslim woman, Asma’ bint Yazid, killed nine enemy soldiers with ...

How could one read the Hebrew Bible free of tradition when the very grammar and lexicon of biblical Hebrew itself had been defined and passed down by the same rabbis? The archaic language was a heritage of the past and was subject to all the same historical skepticism as rabbinic tradition. Though he submitted that changing the meaning of words is much harder than altering religious teachings, Spinoza had to admit that even biblical Hebrew was under the power of the rabbis. Just like Arabic, the Hebrew script was incomplete (lacking short vowels) and its early grammar fluid. One had to know what it meant to read it. Even the meanings of many biblical words were known only through the teachings of the rabbis. Because Spinoza was committed to a method of interpreting the Bible that drew on the Bible alone, he had to accept that if the text did not yield clear answers on its own, ‘we must simply give up’ on the point in question. Ultimately, core matters necessary for salvation and happiness would be clear, since Spinoza believed they were universal anyway.90

The Qur’an Only approach is, in the end, not a solution to the prison of tradition. It is only a selective reliance on it. None of these intellectuals has achieved a systematic break with the past or reread the Qur’an apart from it. This may well be impossible. Deeply anticlerical, inspired by the Mutazila rationalists of the ninth century and committed to broad Qur’anic principles rather than a concrete and detailed Shariah, the general Qur’an Only trend is an expression of a desire for an Islam compliant with modern rationalism and Western sensibilities. It is the product of how a particular segment of society wants religion to be.

Read through the lens of the Hadiths, Tafsir reports and biographies of the Prophet that constituted the first layers of Islam’s tradition, however, this verse was easily explained and misunderstandings easily defused. The word commonly misunderstood in modern colloquial Arabic and by Hirsi Ali as ‘friends’ (awliya’) actually meant ‘patrons’ or those to whom one has some commitment, either as a protector or a subordinate. The verse thus warns Muslims against taking the side of unbelievers against fellow Muslims in conflicts, since these other groups ‘are but allies of themselves,’ the Qur’an explains.

According to the critiques launched by Abu Zayd and a legion of other Islamic modernists, the descendants of these medieval ulama, today’s bearers of tradition, have lost the ability to apply the message of Islam to new situations. Instead they have reified and paralyzed Islamic interpretation. Whereas their more dynamic and capable predecessors would be calling for religious equality in today’s world, asserted Abu Zayd, modern conservative ulama threaten to level the jizya tax on Egypt’s Christians.104 Abu Zayd’s disappointment with the ulama was therefore not ultimately a disapproval of tradition per se. It was a disapproval of how the traditional ulama understood Islam and the Shariah at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The universal ‘Reason’ touted by Western natural-law philosophers was an early casualty of the snapping of tradition’s last threads. Born in the rubble of postmodernity, contemporary critics of liberalism note that Reason cannot be the judge that rules impartially from outside discourse. It is part of the discourse, and any transcendent throne claimed for it is a stealthy grab for power. Stanley Fish observed that Reason(s) ‘always come from somewhere,’ and it is clear that once you have stepped outside of a tradition or leveled its authority, you cannot in fairness invoke ‘Reason’ without admitting its aims and assumptions and convincing others to accept them – precisely the unifying role that tradition used to perform.

Western demands that other people act ‘reasonably’ because that is what ‘reasonable people’ should do still smell of British colonial efforts to bring native customs into accord with ‘good conscience.’ Especially in its avatar of ‘common sense,’ Reason in global discourse today carries its ancestry barely concealed: the early modern British ideal of unifying, upper-middle-class values, a relaxed but assumed Anglo-Saxon Christian temperament, French anticlericalism and Jefferson’s democracy-justifying yeoman wisdom.109 Muslim protests over French cartoons mocking the Prophet in 2011 were rebuffed in the West with indignant referrals to the freedom of expression, a right self-evident to those possessed of ‘Reason’ and ‘common sense.’ A year earlier, however, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority had banned an advert featuring a pregnant nun as a ‘serious offense’ to Catholics.110 A young Egyptian web entrepreneur and self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ advocating the motto, ‘You are free as long as you do no harm’ betrayed the cultural boundaries of his own Reason. Discussing freedom of expression in a talk-show dialogue with a conservative Sufi shaykh, he immediately agreed that, ‘of course, insulting Muhammad could not be allowed. It harms his followers.’

Martin Luther was never as contemptuous of Catholic Traditio as his opponents liked to believe. He was as mortified by the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster as any Catholic, and he understood well that flocks need shepherds. Touring the German parishes where his reading of the gospel was being taught, Luther was grieved by the ignorance he encountered. He penned a pair of catechisms to set out clearly Christ’s teachings and to guide folk in their reading of the Bible (newly translated into German by Luther himself). He was further troubled by the arrogance of many who claimed that, since the scriptures were now easily accessible, there was no further need for pastors or preachers. There is some irony in the predictability of his subsequent plea. Pastors and nobles alike must not ‘imagine that they know everything,’ Luther upbraided, but should continuously study his Large Catechism, which was ‘a summary of all the holy scriptures.’113

Appointed Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Ali Gomaa compiled a short collection of fatwas that resembled a modern catechism: Elucidating What’s Troubling People’s Minds. The fatwas were clear, efficient responses to questions that commonly vexed Muslims in Egypt, and the book was printed in cheap, pocket-sized paperback form.

‘There are some scholars who know the Tradition’ (turath), he explained one day to his students, ‘and some who understand present realities. But there are very few who know how to fit the two together.’

Early works of Islamic law and theology are replete with the maxim that ‘We have been commanded to speak to people according to their minds’ abilities.’14 The Prophet had once instructed one of his Companions not to tell the masses of his followers that God would protect from Hellfire anyone who professed that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His Prophet. He feared that such a guarantee might encourage laxity in his followers’ practice. In his definitive commentary on Bukhari’s collection, the fifteenth-century Cairene scholar Ibn Hajar notes that it was desirable to refrain from telling mass audiences any Hadith that might, at face value, mislead listeners into heresy or incite rebellion against the state.

So widespread and moving was love for the Prophet that in eighteenth-century Egypt a book entitled The Signs of the Good (Dala’il al-Khayrat), which included a weekly regimen of poems praising the Prophet and prayers for him, was the most commonly owned book after the Qur’an.

Had he met Lady Montagu, her Neapolitan contemporary Giambattista Vico would have admitted himself appropriately impressed by her scientific discoveries and by the multiplying body of ‘facts’ in their new, modern world. But he also understood well that, since the birth of myths among ancient peoples, the truest stories have often been the ones that made sense of the world even if they later fell short of facts. The professor of rhetoric could not bring himself to endorse the new fad of reconfiguring ethics, language and education through the same scientific lens of mathematics and measurement. The world of human experience was too immense and clouded in the miasma of man’s own invented cultures to be measured so exactly. Poetry, not arid prose, was man’s original language, the common-sense probabilities of alert living his best guide, and rhetorical flourishes, not dry accuracy, his most convincing moments. In an inaugural address given before the University of Naples in 1708, Vico vented his disapproval. In public speaking, he observed, enthusiasts of the mathematical philosophy of Descartes might assume that nothing sways an audience like reasoned truth. While wise men might be so convinced, Vico objected, ‘the multitude, the vulgus,’ are in the end only carried by ‘corporeal images’ and carnal appeals to their fears and appetites. If ‘modern’ philosophers thirsted after truth, they were better off consulting the ‘invented examples’ of the poets than some cold review of ...

As far back as textual evidence can take us in Islamic civilization, the ulama understood Vico’s point well. 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. To dissuade the vulgus from a sin like usury, what could shame them into cringing reconsideration more than the Prophet of God himself equating the least collection of interest with mounting one’s own mother? By positive contrast, a tired mosque imam, perhaps not as eloquent as he had once hoped, might find great utility in a book of forty homiletic quotes, each rhetorically refined and packaged with the authority of the Messenger of God.

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 transgre...

By far the most persistent defense for employing unreliable Hadiths, however, was not a justification at all. Rather, it was a simple statement about the ulama’s distinction between areas of their religion that merited a strict regime of accuracy and those where such a regime might constrict benefits. Ibn Hanbal drew on the words of one of his teachers when he stated, ‘If Hadiths are related to us from the Prophet concerning rulings of the Shariah and what is licit and prohibited, we are rigorous with the chains of transmission.’ ‘But if we are told Hadiths dealing with the virtues of actions, their rewards and punishments [in the Afterlife], permissible things or pious invocations,’ Ibn Hanbal qualified, ‘we are lax with the chains of transmission.’

The textual accuracy of the Bible knew no greater advocate in the sixteenth century than Desiderius Erasmus, forgery no greater foe. As he worked to produce an edition of the New Testament based not on the Church’s derivative Latin translation but on the earliest available manuscripts of the book’s original Greek, Erasmus made a stunning discovery. The only verse that explicitly references the doctrine of the trinity (1 John 5:7) was not an authentic part of the biblical text. Yet this same crusader against forgery chose to overlook the same problem in the case of the moving pericope of the woman accused of adultery (‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ John 8:1–11). Erasmus knew that many of the early manuscripts of the New Testament garbled the story or lacked it entirely. St. Jerome had concluded that the story lacked evidence, and Eusebius had felt it was apocryphal. But Erasmus nonetheless included the section because it conveyed a good message. Like Origen and Eusebius over a millennium earlier, Erasmus acknowledged that stylistic indicators left little doubt that Paul was not the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, as it was widely believed. But, like those Church Fathers, Erasmus included the letter in the New Testament canon because, even if Paul had not written it, it embodied the spirit of his teachings.32

‘If the account is not true, it ought not even to be called history,’ affirmed the sixteenth-century French Renaissance scholar Jean Bodin in his seminal treatise on how to write in the genre.34

The awareness that the historian is always part of society – as bard and moralizer – contributed to the battering that claims of presenting objective history and historical truth have taken in the Western academy since the 1970s. Scholars of historiography like Hayden White have exposed how historians construct their narratives according to the same themes of tragedy, satire, redemption, and so on, as are used by less meticulous storytellers. This critical re-evaluation of Western historiography proposed that the conception of truth operative in the genre was less that of Correspondence than that of Coherence. There was no account of history that corresponded to what really happened. There were only narratives, told from perspectives and only as true as they could be nestled into the worldviews of the communities that recounted them. More conservative and confident defenders of history as a discipline argue that, like the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, while interpretation and even many areas of fact are relativistic, there is a ‘factual bedrock’ of undeniable historical truths, such as Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, that cannot be declared untrue simply through a change of perspective.40 Such a bedrock must exist, many contend, because denying it would have the same impact as denying the common-sense reality of our sense perception and leave us stranded, disoriented in time.41

Whether Achilles, the Spartans standing at Thermopylae (retold most recently in the 2006 film 300), Beowulf (a 2007 feature film), the masterless samurai avenging their slain lord in the Treasury of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) or Will Farrell’s accountant in the film Stranger Than Fiction (2006), throughout history men have sought what one of the three hundred Spartans calls ‘a beautiful death’ in order to find immortality in shared memory. In a secular age of nationalism, death for one’s country, family or a just cause is deemed its own reward, though films eulogizing heroes usually provide a denouement that assures the audience that fallen protagonists receive the public attention needed to guarantee the remembrance of their deeds. This may be a neo-pagan vestige of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom an afterlife in the shades of the underworld offered little comfort. Truly surviving death came from dying heroically and living on in the memory of generations of the living through ‘the lords of song and story,’ as Pindar sang. ‘Even in death your name will never die,’ Agamemnon confesses jealously in the underworld to Achilles, even as both of them rest in the disappointing gloom of the Elysian Fields. ‘Great glory is yours, Achilles, for all time, in the eyes of all mankind.’47

Far from Troy’s ruins, Aeneas finds fuel to inspire his men and urge them forward into further dangers. Stumbling across heroic images of themselves carved in temple reliefs that preserved in stone the already epic tale of the Trojan War, Aeneas tells them, ‘This fame ensures some kind of refuge.’

The Hadith of the Seventy-Two Huris is one of many prophetic reports enumerating in tantalizing detail the pleasures awaiting martyrs in Heaven. 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).

Christian audiences were not the only ones disconcerted by the carnal descriptions of Heaven in the Qur’an and Hadiths. Medieval Muslim thinkers deeply influenced by the Near Eastern heritage of Aristotle and Plotinus rejected them because they believed such images fell far short of accurately describing the loftiness of heavenly bliss. Muslim ‘Philosophers’ (falasifa) such as the famous physician Ibn Sina believed that the prize attained by the righteous and enlightened after death was the soul’s rejoining the divine realm. Those souls that had purified themselves in life through right action and acquiring wisdom would bask in the presence of divine beauty without the body’s constraints, while those who had become attached to the appetites of their earthly bodies would suffer their deprivation. The pleasures of the Afterlife would be ethereal and intellectual. 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.53

Ironically, though they championed vigorously the Hadiths describing the pleasures and agonies of Heaven and Hell, Sunni scholars admitted that not even the clear texts of the Qur’an and Hadiths could convey any immediate understanding of these unseen realms. What the ulama insisted on was that believers affirm the truth of what God and the Prophet had revealed about the world to come. Its actual nature could never really be known in this life. Ultimately, the ulama admitted to an agnosticism about the actual nature of the ‘Gardens under which rivers flow.’ Al-Attas had come across the pseudo-Hadith that humans are asleep and only awaken upon death while reading the books of his beloved Hujjat Al-Islam Ghazali. The saying is one of the prime pieces of scriptural evidence that the great Persian divine had cited in his defense of the Islamic conception of the Afterlife against the Philosophers’ cynicism about its carnal imagery. Hujjat Al-Islam, a towering jurist and theologian but not known for his accurate knowledge of Hadiths, used the report to prove that ‘it is not conceivable to explain the heavenly realm while in this earthly domain except by expounding parables (amthal).’58 Like Lady Montagu’s statues, words could never convey such images to those whose eyes had never beheld them.

In a sense, it was overly ambitious to demand concrete answers to such questions. How could minds that know only the earthly world parse descriptions that were no more than crutches for imagining an unknowable realm? Only through metaphor could scripture constrained by human language and its lexicon of imagery convey glimpses of the unseen. Sunni discussions of the Afterlife thus frequently quote a report of God declaring, ‘I have prepared for my righteous servants what no eye has seen nor any ear heard nor what has ever occurred to a mortal heart,’ and their affirmations of the ultimate truth of Heavenly rewards might end with the Companion Ibn Abbas’ agnostic admission that ‘There is nothing common between this world and the Afterlife but words.’

Sensitivity about the human mediums of God’s revelation speaking falsehoods was understandable. But lying is hard to avoid completely. Muhammad had allowed deception in warfare and also permitted the white lies needed between spouses and for mending social fabric. Indeed, it is hard to make the argument that speaking falsehoods is always wrong. Many morally conscientious people hold that being truthful is the best policy, unless lying seems necessary to promote an unquestionably greater good or if the lie is of the minor, white variety. Both of these species are, in effect, Noble Lies. They are falsehoods told for a greater good, whether they are serious lies told for the preservation of life and property or insignificant ones used as social lubricant.

Early scholars like Bukhari, however, had not conceptualized the authenticity of Hadiths in terms of books and authors. They had associated Hadiths with their transmitters, and they determined the degree of critical attention that each Hadith deserved according to its subject matter. Those formative Sunni ulama who had actually sifted through the Hadiths in circulation and compiled the canonical Hadith collections had explained openly that they treated Hadiths differently based on their topics. Hadiths on the virtues of actions or individuals, on the apocalypse, on manners and on exhortation were only subjected to lax authentication. Hadiths on the core areas of Shariah law and explicit tenets of theology were evaluated stringently.

This policy is one of the oldest and best-attested practices in Sunni scholarship. A self-identified Sunni of the ninth century and an author of one of the canonical Hadith collections provides proof of this method in application. Tirmidhi was unique in that he rated each Hadith he included in his collection. We see that Tirmidhi’s chapters on subjects that Sunni ulama considered pillars of the Shariah include relatively few reports to which he gives a poor rating, such as might result from a weak narrator or a lack of corroboration. Only 17 percent of the Hadiths in the chapters on tithing (Zakat) and the Ramadan fast are rated poorly, and only seven percent in the chapter on inheritance law. Chapters on topics outside the core areas of ritual and legal obligation fare far worse. Tirmidhi points out noticeable flaws in the reliability of 27 percent of the Hadiths in his chapter on etiquette and 35 percent in the chapter on apocalyptic strife presaging the world’s end. The percentage exceeds 50 percent in the chapters on the virtues of various early Muslims and pious invocations.

Judging Hadiths not solely by the reputation of the books that include them but also according to whether their subject matter would have merited rigorous versus lax criticism from classical Hadith scholars could provide enormous benefit today.

A population that believes stories merely because they are useful or warm the heart places expedience toward an end above a commitment to demonstrable truth as a common reference meaningful to all individuals regardless of their religious beliefs. A community that accepts Noble Lying wholeheartedly is likely to drift into gullibility, uncritical of what it is told and vulnerable to manipulation. Fear of such an eventual fate lay behind much of Ibn Jawzi’s disapproval of using unreliable Hadiths. In the Baghdad of his day, pious falsehoods drew people down a slippery slope toward damaging asceticism and manipulation by fraudulent Sufi saints and charlatans. Buti shared such worries in the twenty-first century.