Questioning the Hadeeth

What is the purpose of Islam?

It can be argued that Islam is not a religion. The word religion comes from the Greek word releglae, which means to bind and to control, and religion has been used for just that through history. Islam means submission, and this is the religion of mankind according to the Quran - the Muslim Holy Book. The Quran was revealed in the 6th century through the Prophet Muhammad, the last of the messengers of God. The Quran shows that through time there has been a single and cohesive message through numerous prophets, but that message has been constantly distorted or ignored by various groups of people. The single message is one of belief in the one true God, who has no partners, and a set standard of morality.

So in the Quran, the purpose of life is defined. Muslims are urged to remember and give thanks to God and equally do justice to fellow man. The Holy book also ordains certain rituals and lays down guidelines ranging from marriage to criminal punishments. Admittedly, these are vague, but the principle is more than clear. The Quran constantly argues for moderation and the whole message is one of love, hope and reassurance from a God who is ‘Most Gracious and Most Merciful.’

However, in today’s Islamic world, most laws and customs are derived from the hadeeth. These are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad which were passed down from generation to generation via oral transmission until they were collected, studied and analyzed nearly two hundred and fifty years after his death. Taking all the above into account, the purpose of Islam has grown more and more complex through the centuries. There are some who cite that since it is the Quran which is the word of God, the hadeeth should be largely ignored due to huge inconsistencies and contradictions. Others argue that Islam is a complete way of life and there is an Islamic way to do everything so it is compulsory for hadeeth to be a part of our lives - on a state and social level. Both groups cite verses from the Quran to support their arguments and it is the latter which seem to have won the argument due to the ignorance of many Muslims and the suppression of debate on this topic.

The Hadeeth vs. the Gospels

"Do they not consider the Quran with care, if it had been from anyone other than God, it would contain many discrepancies." (Quran 4:82)

True story: there was once a great prophet who taught great things and after he left this earth, his followers passed along his teachings through oral methods. Nearly two hundred years later, these were compiled in the forms of books called gospels. There were nearly seventeen hundred gospels written – all with different texts, teachings, often one contradicting others - but the council of Nicea in Rome decided that only four would be adopted into the official church teachings. The rest of the gospels were labelled heretic and ordered destroyed. Those four remaining gospels were the ones called Mark, Mathew, Luke and John. This is the story of Jesus, his teachings and how Christianity came to be.

When Muslims hear this, they smile – the Cheshire cat grin, we know better don’t we? Well, Muslims don’t have the gospels, but they have something quite similar. Its called the hadeeth. After the Prophet Muhammad passed away, and Islam spread rapidly through to new regions, the way he lived and what he said where passed along via oral transmissions for over two hundred years. As time went on it became clear that the hadeeth were being invaded by many forgeries. Many reporters simply put into circulation hadeeths that would favour their various political objectives. Other additions were simply the result of the natural tendency to confuse common practices which predated Islamic laws and norms. The dispersion and death of the companions of the Prophet further added to the dilemma.

Then came the period of the great scholars, like Bukhari and Muslim, who devoted their lives to the science of collecting, analysing and recording hadeeth. Saheeh Bukhari collected over 600,000 hadeeth. How many did he include in his works? The exact number is 7275, but subtract the further 1725 hadeeth that are now suspended because of weak authorities and we have a grand total of 5550 which he deemed to be reliable. That is 0.925% of the total hadeeth he came across at his time. Less than one percent.

That number speaks for itself, and here is the problem we have in the Muslim world, how reliable are these hadeeth? "Why is it an issue?" some would ask, "we have the Quran, which is the word of God." Good question, and the answer to that is that many of our laws, customs and opinions are derived from the hadeeth, and I will take just two examples. The Quran, the word of God Himself, does not state that a man should be killed for leaving Islam, infact there are verses which argue that there should be no compulsion in religion. However, there is a hadeeth attributed to the prophet in which he is supposed to have stated this. The result is that this is a law in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and other parts of the Muslim world.

The other example I can take is that of dogs. Though there is nothing like it in the Quran, there is a hadeeth in which the prophet states that those households, which have dogs in their houses, will not be visited by angels. A very grave thing indeed and this idea is embedded in Islamic culture. So the hadeeth are an issue, because the religious authority use them to make laws and enforce their views on us. The hadeeth restrict a lot of our actions, thoughts and put a cloud over the whole spirit of religion. The solution is to analyze this science. How reliable are the hadeeth? How were they collected? Why do we need the hadeeth when we have the Quran? What have been the consequences of the hadeeth? This is what I attempt to question and counter.

"They say: enough for us are the ways we found our fathers following. What if their fathers had no knowledge and guidance?" (Qur’an 5:104)

The courage to Question

Though the hadeeth is mired in controversy it has not been given the scrutiny that it deserves. This is a topic that most people fear to delve into as they are repeatedly warned by the religious regime that this is the same as going against God and His Prophet. This is by no means an exaggeration. I posed a simple question to Muft Mahmoud Ashraf Usmani via email, when I was inquiring on the merits of the hijab. I asked him if a woman refuses to wear the niqab (covering her face from head to toe) are we as men supposed to force her? He answered that it has to do with the upbringing of the child, and the problem with parents especially in the west is that they do not know how to raise their children in the way of the Muslims. He added, " that children on the correct path would not question applying the rulings of Islam." What a statement! How can rational people not question their beliefs? Again, muftis and sheiks love to cite hadeeth in which the prophet has warned against asking too many questions, but this is nowhere to be found in the Quran. The religious authority have given us an option, they tell us that they have studied the texts, history and hadeeth and that we should listen to what they have to say, no questions asked.

This seems convenient, but it is very dangerous. When I studied Christianity in-depth and would go to the Churches and raise questions as to contradictions in the Bible, I would often get a scolding. "Don’t question that my son," the pastor would say with wide eyes and a look of dismay, "God doesn’t want you to understand that." This was my first indication that something was fishy, and now I find the same thing plaguing the Islamic world.

Sunnah vs. Hadeeth

"Verily in the Messenger of Allah ye have a good example." (Quran 33:21)

The problem we have today is that many people regard the hadith and Sunnah as one, but in actual fact they are quite distinct from one another. The Sunnah refers to the established customs of the Prophet that were passed down through the community through practical consensus and perpetual adherence to them. For example the Salah (praying), and circumcision. There is not much dispute for instance on how to pray, it is a universal ritual of Muslims with very minor and unimportant variances. Also though circumcision is not directly ordered upon the Muslims in the Quran - unless you count the covenant with Abraham - we do not actually need a hadeeth to inform this to us. It is a general practice followed by all Muslims. So the authenticity of the Sunnah does not depend on the narratives told by a few individuals; the entire society in the Prophet’s time adopted an transmitted the sunnah, thereby making it an established fact of history.

The hadeeth, on the other hand are short narratives which describe a statement or an action or a tacit approval by the prophet. A hadeeth is composed of two parts, the chain of narrators and the content. For a hadeeth to be called ‘saheeh’ – for it to have any relevance in our daily lives - it has to meet two requirements. One is that the chain of narrators going back to the time of the Prophet has to be verified – meaning the integrity, knowledge and whereabouts of the narrators is checked. The second is the actual content has to be compared to the Quran. But this process is laid into doubt when hadeeth doctors encounter hadeeth which have a sound chain of narrators but its content is disputed or the other way around. The entire system then falls on itself. In addition, as Asif Iftikhar writes, more often than not, hadeeth were not analysed thoroughly in regard to content but primarily towards the chain of narrators. Therefore, we have a lot of hadeeth, even in Saheeh Bukhari that quite frankly do not make sense, or just don’t seem to be in the spirit of God’s word.

There are many Muslims who agree that some hadeeth do appear to be questionable, but the solution they offer is to analyze each hadeeth by its own accord. This is extremely subjective, as Edip Yuksel argues, our only guide to decide on the content of hadeeths will be our personal wish or our current inclinations. Some would say that we can compare the hadeeth to the Quran, but what does this really achieve? People will judge the hadeeth compared to their own understanding of the Quran and will often end up quoting hadeeths which support their own particular arguments.

No matter how much hadeeth apologists push their case as to how ‘meticulously’ the scholars in the eighth century verified hadeeth, there are still rational doubts raised. Several studies have been conducted in the West as to how reliable oral methods of transmission are. I put forth the following study conducted in the U.S. in 1986:

The morning after the Challenger shuttle explosion, the 106 students in Psychology 101 (personality development) at Emory University filled out questionnaires on how they had first heard of the disaster. That established a baseline for their memories within twenty-four hours of the event itself in January of 1986. Then in October of 1988, the forty-four of the 106 students still at Emory were requisitioned (only 25% remembered the original questionnaire) and their two answers compared. Finally in March of 1989, follow up interviews were given to the forty students willing to participate in the final phase of the experiment. When those second versions were compared with the first ones for accuracy and graded on a 0 – 7 scale for major and minor attributes of the event. The mean was a 2.95 out of a possible 7. Eleven subjects were wrong about everything and scored 0 (25% of the sample). Twenty-two of them (50% of the sample) scored 2 or less, this means that if thy were right on one major attribute, they were wrong on both of the others. What makes these low scores interesting is the high degree of confidence that accompanied many of them. (Crossan 1998: 63 – 63)

The above study, as have many others been conducted in similiar fashion, puts into question the reliance of oral transmission. I remind the reader that the above was conducted over a period of three years and only required each person to recall his original assessment of the incident. The hadeeth were oral traditions for over 250 years and spanned several generations, each narrator was not only required to remember the original quote of the Prophet, but also each narrator who had passed along the saying. It is absolutely absurd to believe that these hadeeth could possibly be remembered and conveyed accurately for so long by so many people without any errors.

"It is not becoming to a believer, whether man or woman, when a matter has been decided by Allah and by His Apostle, to have any option. If anyone disobeys Allah and His Apostle he is on a clearly wrong path." (Quran 33:36).

Hadeeth apologists offer this verse of the Quran as one of their main arguments towards following the hadeeth. However, when this verse was revealed we did not have ambiguous hadeeth floating around, whose authenticity was in question. The fact of the matter is that the Prophet was not only a messenger, he was a leader and revolutionary who had to take many decisions in several fronts to bring Islam into being. So the verse in this context makes sense as to the authority given to the Prophet Muhammad.

The purpose of the hadeeth

Many Muslims claim that the hadeeth are meant to explain the Quran, as the latter is too difficult to understand. Well, what can I say? When a lot of these Muslims are questioned further, they will more often than not reveal that they themselves had never read the Holy book in a language they could understand. If they had, they would have read the following verse.

"And we have indeed made the Quran easy to understand and remember" (Quran 54:17)

Why do Muslims feel it necessary to read forty volumes of hadeeth, which are often contradicting, make little sense and many times paint an ugly picture of the Prophet when we have the tolerant and simple word of God. The hadeeth touch on nearly every aspect of life, from eating, walking, laughing and sleeping – yes, there is even an Islamic way to sleep. In fact, if you are further confused then you can even find hadeeths on how to use the bathroom. There are even perverse hadeeths to do with the Prophet’s sex life.

My friends, if God wanted to dictate our daily lives, then he could have done so by revealing volumes and volumes of the Quran. Yet the Quran is deliberately vague as to the details of rituals, daily activities and never seems to come across as imposing in any particular sense. Has anyone considered that maybe God is not meant to be a babysitter. Take an example: a teacher teaches her class using textbooks and lectures. At the end of the year, the exam will consist of many questions, some of which are straight forward and can be found in textbooks and notes. Then there are other more difficult questions, in which the student needs to use his own judgement, analysis and common sense to answer. God does not run out of words - according to the Quran, let's use the guidelines in the Holy book and then use our common sense.

"The worst human for Allah, is the deaf and the dumb who does not use his logic." (Qur’an 8:22)

Yet, we ignore our God given logic and resort to many hadeeth which are a never ending headache for us. There are even hadeeth about whether we should drink a glass of water sitting or standing! Why should anyone care? Why is Islam plagued with these petty rules and regulations about every aspect of life? The answer is not that Islam imposes, the hadeeth are a man made innovation which have been a curse to our societies, and have been used by religious authority and ignorant people to dictate our lives. They are ignorant as to the meaning of Islam and submission. They are intent on making religion difficult and miserable on themselves and furthermore for the rest of us.

"We have not sent the Quran to be for thy distress" (Quran 20:2)

The consequences of Hadeeth

There are many and I wish to touch on just a few.

Woman’s rights

For example, the niqab which orders woman to cover their bodies from head to toe except for the face and hands, is non existent in the Quran. However, based on just about two hadeeths, this is Islamic law and norms in many countries, societies and families.

In many hadeeth, you will find that the Prophet has supposedly made statements such as a state governed by a woman can never be successful, or that most of the inhabitants of the hellfire will be woman. These hadeeth can all be found in Saheeh Bukhari and though the Quran is revolutionary, placing man and woman equal to one another, these hadeeth and others have played an integral part in subjecting our woman to second class status.

The breakdown of Islam into sects.

We say we have the perfect religion. We have the Quran, which is the most incredible book because it is free of contradictions and not one word of it has ever been changed. There is a guarantee in the Quran that this book can never be reproduced or altered. How then can a Sunni and Shia read the same Quran and come up with contrasting systems of belief? The answer is because they have different hadeeth to back their respective arguments.

I am not one to say who is right or wrong, and in my point of view - it is not important. However, ask a Shia Muslim where his beliefs come from, and instead of quoting from verses of the Quran, he will immediately go into details as to sayings of Imams, and ambiguous hadeeths of intercession which can also be found in Sahih Bukhari. You can even find similar hadeeth in both Sunni and Shia schools of thought which have subtle differences that change the meaning of the narration. . It is the hadeeth which has been manipulated in order to further political causes and division.

We have the perfect book, but the hadeeth is what has divided Muslims from all over the world. What is then the difference between us and the Christians who we claim have gone ‘astray.’ We mock them saying that all their bibles are different, well we’re actually worse off, we have the perfect book, yet we rely on man made innovations to dictate our lives. These innovations which are as earlier proved not reliable, many don’t make sense, and others simply contradict the teachings of the Quran. The damage has been done, but can we gather some sense as to just how to solve it?

God cites the example of a man who deals with disputing partners, compared to a man who deals with only one man. Are they the same? Praise be to God; most of them do not know." (Quran 39:29) The narrators and collections are disputing partners, while the Quran is a consistent source.

The image of Islam

I used to be part of an organisation in the United States which promoted Islam and helped new Muslim converts. I have seen in front of my own eyes these young brothers who were drawn to Islam solely on the basis of the Quran, then turn around in horror and recoil once they had read many of the hadeeth. And what could I say to them? Here they are reading a tolerant and loving message of hope from God, then the next they are being quoted hadeeth which restrict and limit them.

Contrary to some opinions, our image in the world does matter. We are not a bunch of backward people living in the wrong century as some able to say because of our extreme conservative views which are a direct result of hadeeths. We are a balanced, moderate and loving people who believe in the one true God, and have similar if not superior moral standards as to our Jewish and Christian brethren. It is hadeeth like, "if a dog touches something in your house, wash it 7 times," which makes one question our common sense and frame of mind.

Questioning the hadeeth

The hadeeth have played a huge role in shaping our thoughts and dictating law. While I am by no means suggesting that we should discard every hadeeth, it has to be questioned why such a subjective science has played such a huge role in the Islamic world, especially when we have the Quran – the word of God. The hadeeths have been responsible for sectarian divide in our communities, the birth of customs such as the niqab which were non existent at the time of the Prophet and the subjugation of women. In addition, intolerance, violence and paranoia have been spread citing numerous hadeeth.

I therefore argue for reform in the Islamic world, educated Muslims should not argue for another extreme, but a moderate approach to counter this innovation which continues to hold us back. Muslims love to cite the glory period of the righteous caliphs when Islam became a dominant force in the world. I would remind them that hadeeths were non existant at that time, there was the Quran and the sunnah – the example of the prophet in regards to rituals and piety. There was tolerance with the non Muslims, there was education and there was unity. There were people who strived to be better human beings. These are the keys to success, not extremism, not corruption and not die hard conservatism.

If some people feel that sitting on the floor when drinking a glass of water makes them better Muslims - then let them do so, but please do not impose it on the rest of us citing controversial hadeeth which go against the very essence of this beautiful religion which argues against extremes.

As for Islamic law, it is only the educated who can take up this battle to reform our systems. Islam is a personal religion but there are certain laws revealed in the Quran, which help bring stability to communities, and these should be adapted but the role of hadeeth in Islamic law must be questioned.

I will end with a call for moderation. There are Muslims who call for the total abolishment of hadeeth – this is neither practical nor achievable. There is a need for moderate, practical voices, reform has to come through peaceful and educated means or no means at all. Any idealogy which is forced upon another human being can only result in discontent and rebellion. That is why questioning the unreliable science of hadeeth is so important, because the hadeeth have been used to impose and enclose us into a box. For us to be successful, let us think outside it. Inshallah.

"And We will make it easy for thee to follow the Simple path." (Quran 87:8)