History vs. hadith

History vs. hadith

By: Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford

The original meaning of the Greek word from which ‘history’ is derived is ‘inquiry’, that is, asking questions, seeking knowledge. However, history is not, and never has been, a disinterested questioning about what happened in the past, still less a disinterested, impartial recording of events. History is story-telling about the past, a construction in the present about the past, even though historians (especially Western ones) claim that their story, their construction of the past is true, non-fictional, because (they claim) it agrees with researched and established facts. Historians can use many different techniques to determine whether or how far their sources for reconstructing past events are reliable. The sources may be oral traditions or written documents or material artefacts, which the serious, scholarly historian will compare and cross-check, while also applying a measure of common sense or general human experience to determine if what is presented in the sources could indeed have happened as presented, or if details have been invented or embellished or in some other way distorted. But even if this critical activity has been done honestly and rigorously, it is at most a preparatory stage before the history writing begins. In the course of that writing of history, the historian weaves the researched matter into a coherent narrative that puts incidents in a meaningful order, decides what is most important for understanding what happened and why, and its significance for how later events unfolded. In sum, history writing is a literary effort, albeit the historian’s imagination is substantially constrained by having to refer to what ‘really’ happened. This constraint does not, by itself, suffice to make the historian’s narrative any more or any less ‘true’ than a fiction whose author is constrained only by the limits of his or her imagination. The ‘truth’ of a historical or ordinarily fictional narrative depends on the intellectual and professional integrity of their authors, on these authors’ commitment to being true to the demands of their craft.

The core of my talk today will be about precisely this truth to craft, the professional integrity, of the great compilers of hadith, who were necessarily also great exponents of the craft of hadith criticism, which they had to be in order to compile –– as best they could –– only the most reliable reports of the Prophet’s sayings, without neglecting to record variants among them or to record other reports they deemed less reliable or weak or fabricated. But before going on to that I want to clarify further the point I have just made about history-writing.

History’s claim of a connection to actual events, to a reality external to its narrative, means that a historical narrative is subject to revision if new sources are found or if new techniques of interrogating the existing sources are discovered and applied. Usually the scholarly effort preparatory to the writing up of the history-narrative is not invalidated by the revision, rather it is re-worked into a different narrative. However, political histories are often declared by the revised narrative to be false, to have been consciously or unconsciously fitted by the historian to suit the biases of the audience of that historian’s time and place. Literary effects in a debunked history can nevertheless linger in the culture: for example, one still hears people accuse political leaders of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’, an allusion to the Roman emperor Nero playing his fiddle, unaware or careless of his city being on fire. Apparently there was a great fire in Rome during Nero’s rule, but he was not in the city at that time. The literary ‘truth’ of a particular tyrant’s indifference to the condition of his people survives in spite of its ‘falsehood’ as historical fact.

Sadly, there are people, scholars among them, arguing that modern techniques of interrogating reports about the past are superior to the techniques available to the classical Muslim hadith criticism. Classical Muslim scholars were deceived by their own piety or by a demand for conformity to religious doctrine into believing that they were commenting and interpreting the sayings of the Prophet, when (most likely) much of this material was made up by later generations.

I do not deny that scholarly techniques evolve and improve. Let me give a simple example. Suppose in most versions of an ancient legend transmitted by oral tradition and later written down, the hero of the poems is represented as wielding a magical bow, but in other versions he wields a magical axe. Obviously the two versions are not incompatible. Now suppose that pottery fragments are discovered and pieced together, on which incidents from the legend are depicted. The vast majority show the hero as an archer, a very few show him as an axeman. Coincidentally, the majority of the written verses of the legend also present him as mainly an archer, though a few verses here and there also mention his prowess with the axe. Suppose further that a new scanning technique applied to the pottery relics establishes decisively that the archer depictions are two hundred years later than the axeman ones. Then, a scholar working in a different discipline is able to show that the date of the archer pottery is some 50 years after the arrival in the region of an invading army which featured skilled archers. This scholar now looks for, and duly finds, subtle hints in the lexicon of the texts recording the legend, and in the way the hero’s name has been adapted to suit the metre, that lead to the conclusion that in his ‘original’ form the hero was indeed an axeman and that references in the poems to a magical bow are later alterations. The scholar then explains that what ‘must’ have happened is that the conquering people took over the legend and in the process of making the hero their own, they changed his super weapon from axe to bow. The written versions of the legend, of later date, necessarily favour the archer version of the legend.

The discovered pottery fragments and what the scanning technique revealed may be categorised as ‘historical facts’. The scholar’s explanatory narrative refers to these ‘facts’ but is not based on them. It is the scholar’s familiarity with this kind of explanation, a cultural preference for a material cause, that converts mere ‘facts’ into ‘evidence’. The same preference is the reason why non-Muslims explain the sudden political unity and military prowess of the first generation of Muslims as necessitated by population pressure among the Arab tribes which forced them to exploit political upheavals in the great empires to the north and east of the Peninsula.

The general Western scepticism about the hadith corpus, which some Muslim scholars have adopted as ‘rational’ and ‘hard-headed’, is an instance of cultural bias: it repeats for Muslim sources the same procedures of critical textual history applied to the Christian religious texts. The most charitable explanation for this attitude among Muslim scholars is that they want to demonstrate a willingness to view their own scholarly tradition as intellectually docile and inferior compared to the modern West, which is vigorous and honest, and which has ‘matured’ out of credulous submissiveness to religious authority.

I have tried to argue that we readily distinguish the preparatory scholarship that precedes historical narrative from the narrative itself. Scepticism about particular hadiths in the corpus, and about particular narrators and certain chains of narrators, is commonplace among classical scholars. The accusation of intellectual docility is patently absurd. The assumption that all hadiths must be assumed to be pious fabrications unless their veracity can be demonstrated is incompatible with belief in the Qur’an as God’s final guidance. That belief depends on the trustworthiness of the Prophet by whom it was conveyed and by whom it was practically embodied. No doubt the great hadith scholars were deeply pious, and therefore strongly motivated to seek out those who had heard from those who had heard from those who had heard from the Messenger himself how to conceive of God, how to not conceive of Him, how to understand human relation and responsibility to Him, and how to live accordingly. There is very little in the hadith corpus that can support historical story-telling –– certain incidents like the Ifk, some situations associated with the sending down of a very few Qur’anic passages, some particulars of some battles and raids during the Prophet’s lifetime. By contrast, there is very much in the corpus that relates to the practice of the religion in respect of obeying and loving God, of devotional rites, of how to conduct oneself with family, neighbours, friends and enemies, how to live in circumstances of wealth and poverty, when to be strict with oneself and others and when not, and so on.

The chief prompt to general scepticism about the hadith corpus is the sheer number of variants. Why is the same teaching not recorded and reported in the same words? Apparently this means the reports must have been made up by different persons with different motivations and agendas. But ordinary human experience confirms the opposite. The variations in the wording of hadiths on similar topics is the strongest argument for their veracity in general. Ask the audience of any lecture or indeed the witnesses to any event what they heard or saw, and there will be a stable core of information within the natural variety in how different individuals remember and report what they report. The only case when two persons would use exactly the same wording when reporting what they heard is if the wording is itself critical (i.e., not just the intended meaning, but the words themselves) –– for example, when a teacher sets a homework task –– or if the two persons are colluding. Independently, different people not only remember different elements of the same experience, but they convey them in different words and in a different order.

The usefulness and worth of Prophetic hadiths has nothing to do with the historical factuality of what they convey. In the rare cases when precise wording matters (when one expression is distinguished from another, or when a certain style of speech is commended or condemned), the hadiths are found to have the same or almost the same words. In sum, there is no discovery of new information, nor a new technique of information processing, on which general scepticism about the hadith corpus can be based. It is based instead on a cultural attitude. Particular scepticism about particular hadiths and particular pathways through which the hadiths were conveyed is the bread and butter of classical hadith scholarship. And it is this that I will now illustrate by comparing the presentation of the same hadiths in the Sahihs Bukhari and Muslim…

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