© Roger M Tagg 2016
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
Jonathan A C Brown (JB) is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, a Catholic/Jesuit research university in Washington DC, whose notable alumni include Bill Clinton.
The book is one in a series 'Islam in the 21st century', edited by Omid Safi. Other authors in the series include feminist Islam scholars Amina Wadud (see this YouTube clip) and Kecia Ali.
Although raised as an Anglican, JB converted to Islam in 1997.
I have spent some effort reading and trying to understand the Koran (spelt Qur'an in this book). But I have come to realize that this has not got me very far in a full understanding of Islam. It was clear that I needed to go further, in particular to look at the Hadiths - the reported sayings and actions of the Prophet. An Iranian friend during my time in Iran in the 1970s had introduced me to the many different schools within Islam (see this diagram). But I had foolishly thought that there would exist somewhere a single 'authorized', consensual collection of widely-respected Hadiths. This book has shown me how mistaken I was.
The title 'Misquoting Muhammad' might give an impression of adverse criticism of the whole business of Hadiths. Brown himself has done particular studies on forgeries within the many collections of Hadiths. However that is definitely not the message that this book offers. The theme is more about how all the different factions developed their own preferred sets of Hadiths, how the reliability of them grades from 'most reliable' to 'almost certainly a forgery', and why some Islamic leaders still prefer to keep the dodgy ones on the grounds that they 'send the right message' and 'make a strong statement' to ordinary Muslims.
JB seems to have unearthed so many difficulties with the Hadith tradition that he seems to be leaving open the question 'where next?' But he does not offer more than a couple of minor suggestions for improvement on the existing situation. As he says, having seen 6 Islamic 'Martin Luthers' in 20 years - without much signs of a consensus for change - does not bode well.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Pref- ace | xv | "I saw again and again the disillusioning clash between scripture and modernity; ... (people, both Muslims and non-Muslims) ... wondering how they should understand Islam today, and what their relationship to the classical heritage of Islam should be." |
| xvi |
" 'Good' and 'evil' ... are tribal qualities" - he means that they depend on looking at things from 'our' side. [RT: While this may be true on some topics, I would not agree with this statement totally. I believe that, if we put aside for a moment the religious bag and baggage of our upbringing and 'native' culture, we all have some concepts of good and bad in common. Pity, sympathy and a preference for working together are to a greater or lesser extent common human feelings, and our 'consciences' may run on similar lines - although consciences in individuals can range from very strong to very weak. Most of us would rather live in peace, although not if we have some grievance. I think "peace on earth, goodwill to all men" is not an inappropriate slogan for most humans capable of thinking for themselves - although maybe we should add "consideration for all living things".] | |
| Common opinions in a culture can vary wildly in a fairly short space of time. Not so long ago, US press painted Nelson Mandela as a terrorist; nowadays, very few modern figures are more respected. | ||
| We all ought to practice "tolerance of disagreement" and to learn to "transcend the tribal". | ||
| 1 - | Chapter title - 'The Problem with Islam' | |
| 2 | The impression given by the western Press, during the Muslim uprising in Egypt against Mubarak, of all Muslims thinking the same way - was wrong. [JB was there some of the time.] There were many Muslims for and against the revolution, and lots of opinions in between. | |
| 3 | This showed when it came to elections, trying to form a government, and drafting a new constitution. Muslim leaders from the most-respected Al Azhar mosque had to face rival Muslims with different views. | |
| 4 | These rivals included both Salafis educated in Saudi Arabia and Western-educated academics and lawyers. | |
| When the military coup came, its supporters and those of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood battled "for the religious high ground". | ||
| 5 | Gomaa, then Egyptian Grand Mufti, labelled Muslim Brotherhood supporters as extremists. | |
| 5-6 | The Sunni tradition is a pretty impressive edifice, and should not be lightly dismissed. | |
| 6 |
The efforts of Muslim scholars and religious leaders, in "reconciling the claims of truth and justice made by scripture with what the human mind considers true and just outside it (scripture)" is not so different from what Christians - and in particular the US - have had to do over recent centuries. [RT: Whereas the West has acknowledged an increased secular element, I would say that many Muslims may not be ready to do that.] | |
| Another challenge is "determining the ultimate nature of truth and reality". A question JB has been trying to address is "Are those guardians who speak on behalf of scripture allowed to misrepresent surface facts for the greater good of their followers?" or is that 'betrayal of truth'? [RT: I suppose 'surface facts' means those facts that we can ourselves observe, or reach evidential consensus on.] | ||
| "... answers are not so much right or wrong as they are choices between competing priorities ..." | ||
| 7 |
"... much of the violence and extremism found in the Muslim world results precisely from unlearned Muslims deciding to break with tradition and approach their religion Luther-like 'by scripture alone' ". [RT: I suppose this means that if people can find a piece of scripture with supports their violence, then that absolves them from any responsibility to consider other people's interests or even right to life.] | |
| 7-8 | Whereas Christian (and Hindu) scriptures are relatively 'bounded', "it is primarily over the Hadiths and their contents that Islam's sects and schools of thought have diverged". [RT: Christianity is bounded to some extent by what's in the Bible - there isn't a tradition of lots of later additions that count as 'scripture'.] | |
| The total volume of Hadiths far outnumbers the number of chapters - probably even verses - in the Qur'an. | ||
| 8 | "What one camp considers an authentic and compelling reading of the Prophet, another considers a forgery." | |
| "... the exact number of supposed Hadiths defies calculation." | ||
| "The Qur'an ... has always been described (in the West) as disjointed and incomprehensible." [RT: I would say its structure is not so far different from the raft of New Testament epistles. However the latter are more pragmatic and mundane in content - the Qur'an seems more poetical and symbolic.] | ||
| 9 | (In Baghdad) "the ulama's admission [was] that they had themselves uncovered thousands and thousands of forged Hadiths." ('Ulama' means a body of Islamic scholars.) | |
| Tony Blair: Such Muslim practices (e.g. squads of assassins, polygamy, marrying teenage girls to older men) are "not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies". [RT: I don't suppose traditionalist Muslims are worried about Blair's view. Following God's rules doesn't need to involve pluralism, liberalism or open minds; the duty of humans is to surrender to God's will. However as JB shows, Islam is already quite pluralistic, so it perhaps more likely a particular sect's or tendency's leaders that one ends up surrendering to.] | ||
| 10 | Dietary preferences and dress are not really the big issue between religions. | |
| 11 |
Montesquieu: "a religion must temper the mores of men", but Islam hasn't often met this standard; it has fostered intolerance and extremism. [RT: Some Christian sects, sometimes even the mainstream ones, have done no better over past years - what about Crusades, the Inquisition or anti-Catholic laws? And the Catholic church banned most of Montesquieu's works.] | |
| 12 | "Western scholarly and scientific development was, of course, eminently indebted to Islamic civilization in fields from medicine [Avicenna] ... to scholastic theology [Averroes]." [RT: Recently, this has become a contested assertion - see this review of a new book by Dario Fernandez-Morera.] | |
| 13 | A big challenge for Islam today is that "of understanding what that truth [i.e. God's revelation to his Prophet] meant in distant times and places ..." [RT: I think 'distant times and places' means 'now, and wherever we are in the world', i.e. distant from the time of the Prophet.] | |
| "This is a book about a proud, at times over-confident tradition that had its cosmology of truth shattered by a confrontation not only with a more powerful civilization but also with a new stage in human history." [RT: I'd say Christianity too has at times been 'proud and over-confident', and has had similar challenges (e.g. science as well as greater literacy) to face. Perhaps it has met those challenges earlier than Islam, but it still hasn't got it totally sorted.] | ||
| We should acknowledge "... Islam's contributions to ... the science of interpreting scripture, reconciling its claims of truth and justice with what is true and just outside its text." [RT: Islamic scholars have certainly had more practice, since it's a bigger job for them than for Christian scholars.] | ||
| 2 - | Chapter title - 'A Map of the Islamic Interpretive Tradition' | |
| 16 | JB relies heavily on a history of all the (up to then) branches of Islam, in a work written by an Indian Muslim scholar, Shah Wali Allah, in the mid 1700s. | |
| 18 | The Qur'an, which so many learn by heart in the original old Arabic, is fairly short and does not cover much of the rules and teachings about wider life that are applicable today. The rest is "The Tradition", based on what was reported to have been said by the Prophet - or exemplified by reports of his life. Scholars talk about "Two Revelations". | |
| How that tradition "was communicated and implemented in subsequent generations would be a central cause of diversity in Islam". | ||
| 19 | "The Muslims around Muhammad tried to imitate him in every aspect of his life." | |
| 22 | "The text of the Qur'an had already been fixed [c 650 AD], but the uncontested authority of the Prophet's voice remained dangerously inchoate." | |
| "Parties from every religious and political direction began placing their messages in the Prophet's mouth." | ||
| 23 | Early Muslims envisaged their religion as covering every aspect of life, not just what the Qur'an addressed. | |
| 24 | "... a Muslim scholar derived his or her authority from the chain of teachers that linked them back to ... the Prophet." | |
| There are a small number of mainstream 'schools' and a host of minor ones. [RT: Better than anything in the book, this map shows where - geographically - different schools predominate. JB restricts his attention to Sunni Islam.] | ||
| 24-28 | The Hanafi school used analogical reasoning and an approach of "seeking the best". It "presupposed a scholar referencing some notion of equity or justice outside the boundaries of the literal texts of the Qur'an and Hadiths". | |
| 28-30 | In the Maliki school the customs and practices of scholars in Medina were paramount. It came down hard on any practices that could be argued to lead later to a slippery downward slope. Some other Muslims had used a 'work-around' for the Qur'an's ban on usury - JB calls it "buying on credit with a premium" or "double sale". So the Maliki school banned this as a clear plan to violate the spirit of God's law. | |
| 31-35 | The Mutazila school tried to base "its understanding of Islam on sources that it felt could stand up to the skepticism of internal and external critics". This included Aristotelian 'reason'. They interpreted "the seemingly anthropomorphic verses of the Qur'an (e.g. 'ranks of angels') figuratively rather than literally. "For them, any Hadith that they saw as contradicting the Qur'an or reason had to be rejected outright as a forgery." | |
| 35-39 | The Shafi'i school rejected local consensuses and wanted to reduce the tradition to what was basic and acceptable by all. They wanted to concentrate on the actual words of the Prophet - but this needed the concept of "the Hadiths of the Prophet". They did allow reasoning on an 'a fortiori' basis. But there was an issue of how to determine forgeries. | |
| 40-41 | The study of 'chain of transmission' (Isnad in Arabic) became vital, and Hadiths were 'graded'. | |
| 42 |
Relying on Hadiths, rather than reasoning by analogy, became a hallmark of the Sunni tradition. This was justified by "Qur'anic warning against an over-reliance on man's frail reason in understanding God and morality". [RT: I suppose using reason was thought of as a 'slippery slope'! One might be tempted to deduce that this was why Islam 'lost its lead' after the European Renaissance. Europeans who used reason got their people a better life, and its armies and industries got better technology. Sure, there has to be a balance, but maybe this form of 'tradition' went too far.] | |
| 43 | "The Sunni solution to the problem of authenticating Hadiths was to remove reason from the process, focusing on tracing and evaluating their chains of transmission instead of examining their contents." | |
| 44 | "Admitting that the door to man's frail reason could not be closed completely would mean that the Sunnis' claim to preserving the Prophet's true teachings might still be colored by subjectivity." | |
| 44-45 | The Hanbali school only allowed reason where "there were absolutely no other grounds for arriving at a ruling". Otherwise, "a flawed Hadith is preferable to me [a follower] than a scholar's opinion". | |
| 48 | "The movement's [Hanbali's] doctrine of political quietism, based on the belief articulated by Ibn Hanbal and others that Muslims should never rebel against their Muslim ruler regardless of his heresies or iniquity, made Sunni Islam eminently acceptable to the rulers of the Muslim empire [e.g. Ottomans, Mughals] as well. [RT: So, it's really 'submission to the will of those in power'.] | |
| 49 | The 4 schools, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali each built up their own corpuses of Hadiths - called a 'Madhhab'. | |
| 51 | Diversity became a sort of strength - people could - and did - seek more favourable judgments from another school. [RT: a sort of 'second opinion'.]. | |
| 53 | "But, as the ubiquity of Greek logic in its curriculum betrayed, Sunni Islam had long ago adopted much of the heresy it had once fought so fiercely." | |
| 55 | The Ash'ari school tried to oppose the 'reason-rich' Mutazila tendency, but ended up adopting a lot of it in developing their legal theory. | |
| 57-61 |
Sufism was characterized by emphasis on direct contemplation and inspiration [RT: like Zen Buddhism?] But the mainstream criticized their adoration of saints and visiting of graves and tombs. Sufism may have been a reaction against 'all those schools and scholars'. Sufism "transcended Islam's Abrahamic horizons and the legal and theological traditions of the ulama". [RT: Sufism seems to have similarities to Christian monasticism.] | |
| 62-64 | Taymiyya (d 1328) led a revolt against the heresies and corruptions he saw. Some saw him as a reviver of the true religion, others as "an unleasher of interpretive chaos". He opposed the Ash'ari school and the excesses of Sufism.[RT: He was a near contemporary with Wyclif, the Lollards and Jan Hus.] | |
| 67-68 | When Delhi and Cairo were 'lost' to the Europeans, the trend was to go back to "old time Islam". | |
| 68 | "Napoleon ... really looked upon all religions as 'the work of men' ." | |
| 3 - | Chapter title - 'The Fragile Truth of Scripture' | |
| 71 |
For a doctor in early 1900s Cairo named Sidqi, and his classmate Abu Rayya, there was "a clash between, on the one hand, the certainty espoused by the new behemoth of 'modern science' and the hegemony of globalizing Western sensibilities [RT: pause for breath!] and on the other, a suspicious archaic religious tradition that must have been the work of man". | |
| 72 | "When a community's commitment to scripture is shaken or lost however, crises of contradiction quickly emerge and threaten the canonical worldview built around those scriptures." [RT: This seems to be where the nub of today's problems lies. It also sounds similar to what Loyal Rue wrote (see his chapter 4).] | |
| 73 | We "endow certain texts or bodies of material with authority ...[so we are inclined to] ... interpreting those texts with charity ..." | |
| But it (scripture) "cannot suffer from senseless internal contradictions ... [or] ... clash with what is known to be true outside the text". | ||
| 75 | "The great danger looming over a canon is the turning of a new epistemological era [RT: phew, I suppose he means 'where we get knowledge from'], when the community no longer grants its text sufficient charity." | |
| 79-83 | A lot of dodges were invented to avoid inconsistencies and illogicalities in the Hadiths, but it was often little more than tinkering with word meanings. | |
| 83 | "But texts themselves do not say anything. What they say and what they mean is determined by the reader in the unavoidable and sometimes unconscious act of interpretation." | |
| 84 | "With speaker and listener separated by an interpretive gulf, there is no escaping the inherent ambiguity in language." | |
| "This does not mean that there are no boundaries to interpretation, or that no interpretation is wrong. But those boundaries are set by the community reading the text, not by something intrinsic in the text [,] or by the fact of the text itself." | ||
| 89-109 | JB gives lots of examples of how scholars have tried to resolve contradictions and disagreements. | |
| 111 | "Egypt of the early 20th century was at a historical nadir of confidence in Islam's scriptures" - due to "colonial influence and intellectual liberalization". | |
| "The Egyptian king appointed 'Abduh as Grand Mufti, in charge of Shariah rulings for the government". He ('Abduh) allowed bank interest, and the preservation of "artwork and statues depicting human beings". | ||
| 4 - | Chapter title - 'Clinging to the Canon in a Ruptured World' | |
| 115 | After "Ataturk's abolition of the Caliphate", Kevseri railed that "there was no modern world, there was only a glorious past ..." | |
| 116 | When scripture feels most fragile, that's when we get lots of backlash from traditionalists. | |
| Spinoza and Thomas Woolston were expelled from their communities for advocating critical views of scripture. [RT: Lollards and Hus too - maybe they all went a bit too far, a bit too early.] | ||
| 119 | In Egypt, the battle between "secular/scientific and scriptural/classical ... was being rehashed as ... "colonizer and colonized, co-opted elites and 'authentic' tradition". This probably sparked the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood from 1930 on. | |
| Egypt resisted both Turkish-style modernization and "Islam is the Qur'an alone" thinking. | ||
| "Ring-fenced and embattled, the symbols of Islamic identity ... occupy a station made all the more sacrosanct by its precariousness." | ||
| 120 | "... more conservative ulama ... champion interpretations of the scripture and the Shariah that preserve the pre-modern heritage ... sometimes ... more conservative than any that actually existed." | |
| Abu Zayd, formerly a Professor at the University of Cairo, tried to apply postmodernism to the Qur'an - for which he received death threats. | ||
| 121-30 | Regarding Jihad, originally it was primarily defensive, then it was expansionist, and then quietist under strong rulers (Ottomans, Mughals and then Europeans). | |
| 123 | Some traditionalists preferred to let 'Sword Verses' "abrogate the Qur'an's principles of proportionality, mercy and the desirability of peace". | |
| While in Egypt governments from the 1940s promoted modernist Islam, Osama bin Laden and others thought the time had come to be 'defensive' again. | ||
| They thought that "the reality of the modern world was not 'real' enough to overwhelm the scripture-centered worldview of classical jihad doctrine". | ||
| 124 | Their doctrine "was a warped but recognizable descendant of the militant revivalism that burgeoned in the Wahhabi and Sokoto [Nigeria] movements". | |
| 125 | Sayyid Qutb's readings "recasts the modern world as one in which the pre-Islamic 'Age of Ignorance' and idolatry once again reigns". | |
| 126 | People didn't like the Saudi government inviting US troops to defend them against Saddam Hussein. | |
| 128 | Sadat allowed "Islamist activism as an ideological counterweight" (to communism). [RT: Like when the West supported the Mujaheddin when the USSR invaded Afghanistan.] | |
| 130-9 | These next pages lead up to a discussion about women leading - but it doesn't really get going until page 137. | |
| 132 | Egyptian law was drifting away from Shariah by 1883. French Civil Law was deemed more appropriate for central government. | |
| 134 | Opponents objected to allowing women leaders, finding 'suitable' Hadiths. | |
| 136 | Some speakers "championed the canon of Islamic scripture out of fear that it and the religious culture around it would recede into history". | |
| 137-9 | In Egypt, Ghazali tried to do something about improving the role of women. He instanced Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher as evidence against the Hadith that 'women leaders cannot flourish'. JB also mentions the Queen of Sheba. But many traditionalists resisted this trend. | |
| 140 | A Meccan scholar said "even if the Prophet's wife Aisha herself came to bear witness in court, her sole testimony would not be accepted". If many accepted Hadiths did come from her, any inconsistency "comes merely from our inability to grasp the 'divine secrets' of God's justice". | |
| 141-8 | These pages address the question of under-age girls and marriage. The problem is that the prophet and Aisha married when she was 6, and consummated at 9. However it is wrong to assume that Islam allows forced marriage. It recognizes that sex should in any case be postponed until the girl was ready. | |
| 145 | In Egypt, female activists got a minimum of 16 for female marriage into law. | |
| 148 | But in rebutting this, one conservative believed that "Muslims ... are supposed to derive their laws and sensibilities from the Islamic heritage, not from Europe". | |
| 149 | "The interpretive authority of the scholars eclipsed the evident [i.e.'obvious', or literal] meaning of the Hadiths or Qur'anic verses." | |
| JB thinks that one avenue for allowable development would be to give greater weight to some concepts that were considered minor in earlier times, like "public interest and welfare". [RT: I would add 'fairness'. My 'Gaian pentagon', a development of Rue's, has 5 groups of criteria for what is 'good'.] | ||
| "The rare case has no value in ruling" - "plurality of occurrences" is needed to provide a precedent. | ||
| 149 -150 |
Polygamy is stated to be not permissible if husbands cannot treat all their wives equally. By the above 'plurality of cases' rule, even if one man [presumably rich and with plenty of time] could take multiple wives, that does not make it acceptable for all | |
| 152-3 | Big rulers like Mongols, Ottomans and Mughals could hold their own courts of justice - separate from Shariah - and encourage religious leaders to fit in with the rulers' priorities and convenience. | |
| 154 | Ottoman law contained some European influence. | |
| 156-7 | Egypt and Syria made laws about teenage marriage, and some activists thought 'inappropriate age differences' should be stopped as well. | |
| 158 | Even recently revived Islam in Turkey has not gone back to fundamentalism. [RT: That might not last with Erdogan.] | |
| 159 | For modernizers, "the new world of the modern West was the mold into which Muslims' understanding of their religion had to fit ..." | |
| "For conservatives ... the West and its tightly tailored and ordered power were at best baseless illusions tempting Muslims away from God and his Prophet." | ||
| 160 | "But what is the source of their (the ulama, the interpreters of the tradition) guidance? It shouldn't be "a reed blowing in the political winds of the day". | |
| 5 - | Chapter title - 'Muslim Martin Luthers and the Paradox of Tradition' | |
| 161 | The western press hopes Islam will find one, and it talks up likely candidates. There have been 6 in 20 years, JB reckons. | |
| A Sudanese blogger thought social media "will be to Islam what the printing press was to Christianity" and would produce "many eclectic versions of Islam". | ||
| 163 | "... tradition is rarely a match for the charisma of Scripture." | |
| But, "People read into books only what they already believe, and books cannot correct them. Only teachers can". | ||
| "... its [the written word's] perils only concern those who believe strongly that knowledge and wisdom are matters of correct understanding." [RT: i.e. that Scripture has only one 'correct' meaning.] | ||
| 164 | "Yet too often prophecy overstays its welcome and dies hard." | |
| 165 | "Inspired wisdom ... can never be captured entirely by the written word ..." | |
| 168 | "The tradition of Islamic legal and theological interpretation is essential for the proper understanding of God's word, but it is also a prism in which divine inspiration and human fallibility mix all too easily." | |
| 169 | It's a Sunni rule that "evident meaning" should "not be abandoned without convincing evidence that this was necessary". | |
| 170 | In Shiism, the difference is that a chain of Imams each "inherited the Prophet's infallible understanding of the message that God revealed in the Qur'an". | |
| 172-5 | This talks about the history of the Ismaili Shiites, the Assassins and the Fatimids. | |
| 176 | 'Custom' can always come into play in a Tradition; it could be given "the status of words inspired by God". [RT: Presumably, this only applies to customs not actually prohibited by Scripture.] | |
| 177 | "As Muslim scholars themselves admitted, Hadith forgery in the generations after the Prophet was widespread, and many Hadiths were certainly concocted for political or sectarian causes, or in an effort to help make exegetical sense of the Qur'an." | |
| 180 | "No Muslim scholar of any note, either medieval or modern, has sanctioned a man killing his wife or sister for tarnishing her or the family's honour." JB says doing so is a custom of an economically backward and patriarchal society. [RT: Yet we get regular reports of it.] | |
| Several Hadith scholars say "A father is not executed for killing his child". | ||
| 183-5 | JB thinks this may be a spill over from the Romans' patria potestas. But not all schools agreed with this principle anyhow. | |
| 186 | All 4 main schools "agree that a Muslim who leaves Islam is killed if he refuses to recant". | |
| 187-8 | 2 senior Egyptian scholars, Gomaa and Qaradawi, said any death sentence should depend on the circumstances and what exact form the apostasy takes. | |
| 189- 199 |
These pages are all about women leading prayer. The particular case of Dr Amina Wadud - who led a prayer meeting in New York which was partly organized by MuslimWakeUp.com - is highlighted. She is of course one of the other authors in the same book series as this one. | |
| 190 | Gomaa and Qaradawi both condemned this event, although "Gomaa's fatwa acknowledged the dearth of any real scriptural evidence against woman-led prayer". [RT: In Christianity, St Paul might well have agreed with G and Q. His opinion is IN the Bible, but it isn't being followed in many churches today.] | |
| 192 | One opinion against woman-led prayer was that hearing a woman's voice "would excite the uncheckable male appetites in the audience ..." | |
| But ... "Women in the Prophet's time spoke openly to unrelated men." | ||
| 194-9 | JB judges that that arguments against women-led prayer are pretty weak. | |
| 200-4 | These pages talk about the 'Qur'an only' movement - these are where the Hadiths are not regarded as 'scripture'. One such group was Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan's 'Partisans of the Qur'an'. | |
| 201 | In these movements, "the Sunna was [seen as] the symptom of a disease that metastatized into the barbaric ulama and their backward clericalism". | |
| 201-2 | Fazlur Rahman [RT: does this link point to the right one?] thought that "the Sunna was never supposed to be fixed rulings transmitted from the Prophet. It was a moving frontier, the constantly evolving effort of Muslim scholars to apply the message of the Qur'an to the challenges of human life and society". | |
| 202 | Muhammad Shahrur said that "neither language nor texts have fixed meaning but are instead constantly redefined through the act of communication between text, content and reader". | |
| 203 | What is more important is "to comprehend the lofty principles it (the Qur'an) originally advanced". | |
| "The Shariah was thus 'a man-made production' with nothing divine about it." This idea has gained some support in Turkey. | ||
| 204-6 | But this movement cannot totally escape tradition, because writers like Edip Yüksel ('Reformist translation') have to draw on detail provided by the Hadiths. | |
| 206 | "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." | |
| "A systematic break with the past ... may well be impossible." | ||
| 208-9 | There was tension between Egyptian scholars who thought that the coherence of Egyptian nationhood was paramount, and those who wanted Shariah with 'confessional pluralism', but still allowing Muslims "to 'hate' a Christian for their heretical beliefs". | |
| 209-10 | Ayaan Hirsi Ali thought that there was "hostility and religious intolerance explicit in Islam's holy book". | |
| 210 | "The basic lexical disconnect between modern native Arabic speakers and the ancient text of the Qur'an poses a serious challenge to the post-modernist school of Qur'anic interpretation ..." | |
| 211-2 | If coercive tradition is lost, any structure that replaces it might be just as coercive. [RT: I have read that some people regard 'free thought' as coercive! And that was in a Catholic diatribe against pluralism.] | |
| 212 | "Any transcendent throne claimed for it (reason) is a stealthy grab for power." | |
| There is inherent difficulty in phrases such as 'act reasonably', 'reasonable people', 'good conscience', 'common sense', 'serious offence' etc. | ||
| 213 | "As far back in Islamic history as textual evidence can take us, the ulama envisioned the Shariah as a total and comprehensive system that could and should assign a ruling to any conceivable act." | |
| 213-4 | But how might they address test cases like 'Should a woman undress in front of a dog?' 'Does male or female dog make a difference?' 'Is a person with a full colostomy bag ritually pure or not?' | |
| 215 | Gomaa called on Egyptians to stay at home both in the anti-Mubarak revolution and in the later military coup. He also issued lots of fatwas. | |
| He said "there are some scholars who know the tradition ... and some who understand present realities. But there are few who know how to fit the two together". | ||
| 6 - | Chapter title - 'Lying about the Prophet of God' | |
| 217 | Malaysia is a centre of Shariah-compliant banking. 20% of current banking activity is so, and a majority of the population would like it all to be so. | |
| 218 | There is a Hadith that says interest is of 70 types, "the least severe is like a man having sex with his mother". But this Hadith has a broken chain. | |
| 219 | What is Truth? Aristotle - and Islam - favoured the 'Correspondence Theory of Truth' - i.e. it's true if it corresponds to observable reality. | |
| However Nietzsche said that truth is "just a necessary lie" ... that we need for our comfort and safety. | ||
| 219 -220 |
An alternative to the Correspondence Theory is the 'Coherence Theory of Truth', i.e. it's consistent with a "greater system of chains". [RT: or, with a whole lot of other statements?] | |
| 220 | William James proposed a 'Pragmatic Theory': "Speaking truth about the empirically measurable world around us means describing it as it is, but claims about higher [?] realities are true if they bring the speaker solace". | |
| 221 | Plato proposed the 'Noble Lie' - i.e. fooling of the people by the Guardian class, for their own good. | |
| 222 | Buddhism is similarly flexible. | |
| 223 | Ibn Rushd (Averroes) "believed that different audiences should be addressed with different types of proof or methods of argumentation. When it comes to the masses ... not with demonstrations of the truth or complex argument but with compelling rhetoric". | |
| Ulama consider themselves as a Guardian class. | ||
| 224 | But ... "Ulama had inveighed against it (Noble Lying) since the earliest days of the Muslim community". | |
| "If uttering 'propositions that contradict reality' was forbidden in Islam, speaking truth could be flexible ... Generalization, omission and creative phrasing were all accepted by Muslim scholars as tools of pedagogy and rhetoric." | ||
| 225 | "... the Sunni science of Hadith criticism rated the reliability of attributions to the prophet along a spectrum." This ranged from 'widely transmitted', through 'sound' and 'weak' to 'baseless forgery'. But it could be admitted that some weak Hadiths have sound meaning. | |
| 226 | Some Sufis claimed they could authorize Hadiths with no chain, by 'inspiration'. | |
| 229 | G Vico thought that "Poetry, not arid prose, was man's original language, the common-sense possibilities of alert living his best guide, and rhetorical flourishes, not dry accuracy, his most convincing moments". | |
| 230 | Vico: "The multitude, the vulgus, are in the end only carried by 'corporeal image' and carnal appeals to their fears and appetites." [RT: Sounds like an apologia for modern advertising-funded media.] | |
| 231 | Some scholars felt it was OK to be "lax with the chains of transmission" on questions of ethics, rewards and punishments (in the Afterlife). | |
| 232 | "Why had rigorous clerics, who believed earnestly that 'lying about the Prophet of God' was a mortal sin, strayed so far into the gray land between truth and falsehood? The answer lies in their understanding of what constitutes the core of religion." [RT: Good, but that understanding could be variable.] | |
| 234 | Many doctrines and stories from the Bible are equally fanciful, but even Erasmus ignored this problem in one story "because it conveyed a good message". | |
| 234-5 | History books often reported speeches as what the author thought they should have said. [RT: Today that's not so easy - we have recordings.] | |
| 238 | Many who quote false or weak Hadiths would make the excuse that they were "just helping the truth along". | |
| 238-9 | The story about martyrs having 72 virgins in Paradise is acknowledged as unreliable, although there are quite a few detailed descriptions, not all consistent, in the Qur'an itself. | |
| 242 | Many Muslims, as well as Christians, were disconcerted with all the carnal images of Heaven. | |
| 243 | "Islamic Philosophers" like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were unlike the Sunni ulama. For them, the Shariah existed to guide the masses towards Aristotle's golden mean. They didn't have to follow all the rules. They also denied bodily resurrection. | |
| 244 | An opponent said that the Islamic Philosophers were accusing God of lying. | |
| 245 | "Even the basic realities about the 'world to come' proved difficult to pin down [RT: even in the Qur'an]." | |
| 246 | "There is nothing common between this world and the Afterlife but words." | |
| 247 | "But lying is hard to avoid completely." | |
| "Noble Lies ... are falsehoods told for a greater good ..." | ||
| But, in the modern West, " 'denial' and being 'out of touch with reality' are ... symptoms of illness, while honesty to oneself and others is 'healthy' ". | ||
| 247-8 | Some say Noble Lying may give short-term good, but that may be outweighed by "the long-term damage to truth and trust that lying causes". | |
| 249 | "The Noble Lie could never be justified for Kant ..." because it wouldn't make a good rule for everyone. | |
| 250 | St Augustine warned "when regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful". | |
| Kant thought "a lie always harms others or humanity in general inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right". | ||
| 252 | "Part of the obligation (of the ulama) was the preservation and propagation of the Prophet's authentic Sunna." | |
| 254 | Wahhab and others "embraced the strict rejection of using unreliable Hadiths"; so did Salafis. | |
| 255 | In Europe, "terrifying their flocks with sermons about the Afterlife and ushering them through rituals and catechisms, the clergy constructed a unified religious society, but it was one based on manipulation and not on understanding". | |
| 255-6 | Yet even some modernist Islamic clerics did not want to lose the unreliable Hadiths as they felt they carried good "lessons". | |
| 257 | Some Islamic clerics have tried to defend 2 books of 'good' Hadiths as 'not to be criticized'. [RT: A last bastion to be held at all costs?] | |
| Authenticity in older collections was organized by transmitters, this being higher priority than the subject matter. More recently, Hadiths have started to become organized by topic. [RT: This is what I had hoped to do, as I did with the Qur'an.] | ||
| 260 | "... the 2-tiered system of laxity versus stringency (in evaluating the authenticity of Hadiths) was a systematic feature of Sunni Hadith transmission and criticism. | |
| JB feels that judging on 'lax or strict' should depend on subject matter as well as the general reputation of the book in which they were collected. | ||
| Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan Buti (see below) "was killed in a Damascus mosque in 2013 ... and was a strong supporter of Sufism ..." | ||
| 261 | [RT: For me, this and the following page are the most memorable in the whole book.] | |
| Buti: "When people love a pious person, they invent miraculous stories about him." [RT: Sounds familiar - like Christian saints?] | ||
| "... if people wanted to believe random stories of saintly miracles, they could. Disbelieving them, however, was no sin. Yet Buti also recognized the dangers. 'Ultimately', he concluded, 'the negative consequences of these stories are greater than their positive ones'. " | ||
| "A population that believes stories [-] merely because they are useful or warm the heart [-] places expedience towards an end above a commitment to demonstrable truth as a common preference meaningful to all individuals regardless of their religious beliefs." | ||
| Otherwise, a community "is likely to drift into gullibility, uncritical of what it is told and vulnerable to manipulation". | ||
| "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." [RT: In other words, repeatedly retold stories gradually lose any 'doubt factor', and become regarded as the truth.] | ||
| "The more stages of transmission there are, the less nuance survives ..." | ||
| 262 |
An Egyptian official who procured 40,000 signatures on a petition in only 24 hours claimed "It was a miracle brought about by divine assistance". [RT: This reminds me of Diego Maradona's 'hand of God' that enabled him to score a goal that should have been disallowed. It is also like the excuse given after 9/11 that it was God that drove the planes into the World Trade Center towers.] | |
| "... fully 17% of the American electorate believed Barack Obama was Muslim." [RT: The 'stories' turned into confident belief.] | ||
| "Societies in which religion pervades and plays a wide-ranging role can find their fabric laced with dangerous naďveté." | ||
| "The willingness to suspend normal rules of disbelief in the case of matters religious comes from the submission to the supernatural that faith and scripture demand." | ||
| "Homer never requires his audience to believe that any of his fantastic stories [-] of gods intervening crassly in the lives of man [-] are true." But we are meant to believe the tale of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. | ||
| "Scriptures 'seek to subject us'." | ||
| "Unreliable Hadiths can cause harm at numerous levels in society, from facilitating illegitimate violence to masking its true drivers." [RT: I suppose JB means the clerics, and the influencers behind the assassins.] | ||
| Muslim suicide bombers citing the 72-houris Hadith "feed the Western stereotype of Islam as carnal, venal and backward". | ||
| 263 | "Dubious Hadiths of admonition and encouragement, along with fanciful prophecies of End Time, once had a place in Islam's imposing scriptural edifice. In an era characterized by skepticism toward scripture writ large, they have become a liability." | |
| 7 - | Chapter title - 'When Scripture Can't Be True' | |
| 270 | Qur'an 4:34 allows a husband to beat his wife. At a Muslim Students Association meeting in Georgetown University, one year's guest speaker said that just wasn't good enough in today's environment. Another year's speaker said it must have been that all the upholders of the tradition had misinterpreted it. | |
| 271 | Another recent author in 1998 said that Muslims should pursue the spirit of the Shariah even if it meant breaking with the "consensus of 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 ..." | |
| 272 | Amina Wadud said that rejecting the wife-beating clause meant having to say 'no' "at those few seemingly impossible points in Islam's scripture that are 'inadequate and unacceptable' no matter how much interpretive energy is poured into them". | |
| 273 | Both 'literal' and 'dictionary' meanings of words [RT: and phrases] are subjective and unstable over time. | |
| 274 | "... Muslim sects agreed that the Qur'an had to be read through the prism of the Prophet's teachings as expounded by the ulama, who then disagreed endlessly on what those teachings should be." All of the ulama were men. | |
| 275 | Most early Hadiths suggest that Muhammad himself was averse to striking women. | |
| around 285 |
Islamic courts these days - and many in the past - mostly support battered wives. But that isn't easy in the more primitive and economically backward countries. | |
| 286 | "Yet no matter how immediate God's command or how obvious any act of speech may seem, we cannot process their meanings without engaging in the act of interpretation." [RT: Is it enough that we interpret the text ourselves, or must we consult our 'guardians?] | |
| "Scriptural communities, by contrast, have only the text left behind by prophets to mine for clarity and the tradition handed down to aid in interpretation." | ||
| 287 | Qur'an 4:34 epitomizes the crisis of scripture in the modern world [,] because it posits a God or religion [that] would even leave the door open to such an obvious or harmful misunderstanding." | |
| Similarly in Christianity, Origen castrated himself because of a reported promise by Jesus in Matthew 19:12 "for those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake". | ||
| This problem "leaves them (the Hadiths) dangerously vulnerable to misreading". | ||
| 288 | Saying " 'no' to the evident meaning of the Qur'an" has been going on for centuries, but "was phrased as an act of clarification, not overruling ..." | |
| "The move from assuming that Scripture contains the truth but need only be understood properly ... [gap for breath] ... to saying 'no' to scripture because it says something unacceptable or impossible is a blow that shatters the vessel of scriptural reverence." | ||
| "It means that some extra-spiritual source of truth has been openly acknowledged as more powerful and compelling than the words of God in Scripture." [RT: or is it just a different or better understood spirit?] | ||
| 289 | "Certainly, a scriptural tradition still has its uses [,] even for those who have moved on to believe that truth comes from secular sources ... But sooner or later, it will clash with secular truths and become a burden." | |
| "Affected resistance to extra-scriptural truth only confesses to its power." | ||
| "But, as it is, we look back at Galileo as the symbolic proof that 'one must choose between religion and science." | ||
| "Civilization has reified these two concepts and for the most part placed them at loggerheads." | ||
| "... the relationship between scriptural and extra-scriptural truths has been re-cast permanently as one of mutually exclusive enmity." | ||
| 290 | "... how can we tell ... (who) really does bear that treasure?" [RT: he means 'of true Islam'.] | |
| I didn't spend time on the Appendices. They are about tracing the transmission on four of the most contentious Hadiths. |
I have to congratulate the author on a noble attempt to grasp the issue of how Islam can find a way forward in the world it now finds itself. He has made a real effort to find good sources to consult and good modern scholars to meet and discuss with. His background has enabled him to avoid a partisan approach.
I don't know enough to comment on whether his concentration on the Sunni branch of Islam, with only passing comment on Shiism and no mention of the Ibadis, Karijites or Druzes weakens his general message. I think it probably doesn't, and if he had covered these, the book would have been too long.
Islam's theological tradition certainly seems to seem strange to modern outsiders' eyes, with its preference for chasing spaghetti-like chains of authority of Hadiths over analogous reasoning over what is 'fair' and conducive to 'peace on earth and goodwill towards men' - not to forget women, children, animals and the planet.
Brown reads as though he hopes to see a major reformation of Islam; in this he could be compared with Christian reformers like John Robinson or John Spong. However his path may be a very difficult one. Just as Christianity was not comfortable with Wyclif, Hus, Galileo or even at times Erasmus, Islam was not comfortable with Avicenna, Taymiyya, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Tawfiq Sidqi, Abu Zayd - and especially Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan Buti. It is still not comfortable with Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Amina Wadud.
Religions as a whole do not feel easy with 'new epistemological eras' (see this web page). They would rather they didn't happen, and if they do, traditionalists would like to wipe them out. Traditional religions are constrained by being wedded to one-off divine revelations, scripture set in stone, self-perpetuating traditions of interpretation, and man-made organizational and authority structures. They often argue that if we jettison all those things, we will descend into a world of chaos and 'dog-eat-dog'.
In my view we certainly do have a new epistemological era, and reading between the lines it seems that Brown does also. What is nature of this change of era? I would summarize it in the following 6 themes:
If the term 'epistemology' is restricted to 'where knowledge comes from', one could say that today 'It's all in Wikipedia' rather than 'It's all in the Bible' - or the Qur'an or Hadiths. And none of these are ever complete, or infallible.
As Brown's title - 'Misquoting Muhammad' - suggests, the drift of his later chapters is a highlighting of questions of 'truth', deception and lying. He leaves it to the reader to decide whether it matters if 'noble lies' are used to bolster a tradition; he gives arguments both for and against. He effectively leaves it open as to whether scripture is better regarded as 'a story that overrides science' or just 'instructive myth' - as a means of motivating coherence in a society.
Brown does raise the point that language is a very unreliable tool for 'pinning down' meaning. He warns against the idea that everyone can be left to read the text of scriptures as the spirit guides them - the dangers of fundamentalism prove this only too clearly. But if the alternative is to rely on scholar 'guardians' that enforce their interpretations, then Brown has shown that these interpretations can and do vary widely, and can be bent to suit the agendas of the guardians - or the secular powers that legitimate their positions.
In my personal view, each of us has to find a working explanatory 'model' of the world we find ourselves in. Such a model has to serve us as a good mental and spiritual framework for our thinking and doing in our environment. We can take our model 'off the peg' - for example the common model of the community or culture we grow up in, or an established religion. Alternatively, we can have our model 'made to measure', based on our own direct experiences, evidence that we observe, and the testimony of other people whom we choose to read or listen to.
I feel that, given our new epistemological era, many people today are in a sort of 'transit' or 'adolescence' from 'off the peg' models to 'made to measure' ones. In my opinion, neither Islam nor Christianity has yet offered an updated model that can evolve with modern populations that can choose where they get their knowledge from.
Incidentally another Brown (Daniel W) wrote a book in 1999 on much the same subject as Jonathan AC, and in 2009 published 'A New Introduction to Islam'.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 21st July 2016
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .
