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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Studies on how people pass on information or impressions demonstrate that, while attitudes and opinions are primary beliefs that tend to survive communication from person to person intact, the certainty or doubt about those attitudes or opinions tends to be lost along the way.

No one in the gathering felt any need to question the authenticity of this living Hadith. It had no relation to the rulings of the Shariah or to Islamic theology. The Baraka, or pious blessings, of this smiling old shaykh inspired us and warmed the hearts of his guests. We all felt incorporated into an intimate bond with the Arabian prophet of fourteen centuries past. In time, we will feed dates and water to another generation and recount the chain of connection, brought into the present with our names added on at the end, in turn.

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. Daraba was used in numerous other ways in the Qur’an, he continued, some much better suited for the verse. One usage of the word was also found in a Hadith in which the Prophet explains a rule about business partnerships by expounding a parable of passengers together in a boat. A careless person in the lower part of the boat starts to drill a hole in the hull so that he can access water without climbing above deck. The Prophet describes how the other passengers should ‘strike upon his hand’ to stop him.* As with these imperiled passengers, the young shaykh explained that the verb daraba in the Qur’anic verse is thus really an instruction for a husband ‘to do whatever is physically necessary to rectify the situation’ and save his wife from bringing about the demise of the marriage.

The professor and the shaykh were delivering the same message. Both rejected categorically the evident meaning of Qur’an verse 4:34, refusing to accept that Islam’s sacred scripture could condone domestic violence. But the approaches and appeals of the two speakers differed dramatically. The first speaker attacked tradition from outside it, appealing to the authority of ‘this day and age.’ The second mounted a defense of tradition from within, deriving authority by acting as an indigenous and trusted bearer of sacred knowledge. The first speaker, in effect, defied the text of the Qur’an, restricting it to its pre-modern origins by admitting its anachronism and breaking the yoke of tradition. The second speaker claimed that there was no contradiction between the Qur’an and modern justice. There was no anachronism, just misunderstanding. It was the ulama, the qualified interpreters of God’s law, who could point this out and resolve it.

Reconsidering the specifics of how the ulama had interpreted the word daraba, however, did not mean rejecting the Shariah. Rather, it meant fulfilling it as a comprehensive set of values, Abu Sulayman insisted. Like Ghazali’s arguments about women heads of state, Abu Sulayman based his interpretation of Qur’an 4:34 on Muslims’ duty to pursue the ‘aims of the Shariah (Maqasid al-Shariah)’ even if it meant breaking with consensus on the law’s details. In the case of family life and marriage, Islam’s overarching and abiding objectives were affection and mercy. Violence and intimidation contradicted these, so understanding 4:34 as advocating striking one’s wife was impossible.

Here we must remember, however, that there is no such thing as ‘literal meaning’ in its usual sense of ‘what a text really says.’ We often assume that, however much we differ on interpretations, a statement or text has an obvious and objective ‘literal’ aspect that preserves an unchanging core of meaning and cannot be escaped. We assume that we can isolate this stable, stand-alone meaning using the dictionary definition of its words and by removing it from any context. What we might term the ‘dictionary meaning’ of a text may indeed exist, but it is neither objective nor universal. As generations of Shakespeare readers have found, the definitions of words are not at all stable. They are shaped and reshaped by the speakers of a language as the language evolves.

‘Literal meaning’ is also commonly understood as the meaning that makes sense to us with the least interpretive effort. Put simply, it is the first coherent meaning that comes to mind. Better termed ‘evident meaning,’ as the Muslim legal theorists called it (Zahir, or ‘outward’), this is not necessarily the same as the dictionary meaning.

The evident meaning of a text seems obvious to those within an interpretive community, but, as Detective Frank Drebin illustrates, moving from the dictionary meaning to the evident one requires significant, if unnoticed, interpretive steps. In evident (i.e., ‘literal’) meaning, these unnoticed steps are those assumptions that the reader leaves unstated because he or she assumes everyone else shares them. Frank Drebin is so humorous because he is clueless about them. A tough noir cop supposedly ensconced in society and its hard-boiled dialogue, he is comically outside its interpretive community. He is oblivious to the understanding that you should leave your coat at the door at a fancy party; that the doorman is there to serve you; that you will be spoken to according to an etiquette that assumes you are used to being served.

The canonical Sunni Hadith collections also include recollections of the Prophet’s Farewell Sermon, given on Hajj in what would be the final year of his life. One of the parting pieces of wisdom he leaves his followers is the commandment to ‘Fear God as concerns your womenfolk, for indeed you took charge of them with God’s assurance.’ The Prophet further explains that only if a wife allows herself to converse with men against her husband’s wishes or, in another version of the Hadith, commits some grievous transgression (fahisha mubayyina, a phrase with sexual innuendo) can the husband strike her, and then only ‘with a light blow that leaves no mark.’10 Another sound Hadith has the Prophet further discourage striking one’s wife, imploring his followers, ‘Would one of you beat his wife like a slave and then sleep with her at the day’s end?’

A twelfth-century Shariah judge in Seville named Ibn Al-Arabi, who had traveled east to study in Baghdad, instructed his students that people are not all the same in how they should be disciplined. ‘A slave might be hit with a stick,’ the judge noted as an analogy, ‘while with a free man it’s enough to point it at him.’