Message for Muslims

Islam Has Two Sources the Quran and the Traditions

The Hadith is undoubtedly the greatest authority in Islam always excepting the Quran. The lock of the Quran’s obscurities opens only to the key of Tradition. Zwemer remarks, “Mark Twain once defined a ‘classic’ as a piece of literature which everyone has talked about, but which no one has read. One fears this remark would apply to the Hadith as regards many who profess to interpret Islam.” Islam consists of the Quran and the Traditions. A note of caution must be included, for Muslims actually hold to four foundations. Gilchrist says: The Quran has always been regarded as the primary legal source of Islam, but when it was found necessary to look elsewhere for guidance, the early jurists of Islam turned to the Hadith. Only when both of these failed to provide the authority sought did they resort to ijtihad (interpretation) until they reached ijma (consensus). In the very early days of Islam, Muslim authorities tended to rely on their own opinions to establish their interpretation of what a prescribed law should be for any given situation not founded on the Quran, a practice known as ra’y. The great jurist ash-Shafi’i, however, preferred to rely solely on traditions from the prophet and thereafter on the method known as qiyas (analogy).

 

The Quran and Hadith are Comparable to the Two Sides of a Single Coin

They together comprise one religion of Islam, or submission to Allah, who revealed himself to his Messenger, Muhammed, in the seventh century A.D. The Quran comprises Allah’s revelation of his character by revealed word, the Traditions reveal the life and actions of Allah’s revered Messenger, who is to be perfectly copied, and against whom no Muslim will tolerate the least word spoken. Thus the two are vital and no one can be a Muslim, unless keeping both the Quran and the Traditions. Many non-Muslims are unclear about this, knowing that Islam comes from the Quran, yet unable to see how the religion as practiced today, arose from that book. To a Muslim it is basic that anything to do with the Prophet is inspired, a binding model, and beyond question. Muhammad Hamidullah says, ‘ the custodian and repository of the original teachings of Islam’ are found ‘ above all in the Quran and the Hadith, and adds, ‘ the Quran and the Hadith’ are ‘ the basis of all [Islamic] law’. Muhammad Zubair Siddiqui, in summarizing his own book, Hadith Literature, says, ‘The hadiths, the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, form a sacred literature which for Muslims ranks second in importance only to the Quran itself’. As a source of law, ethics and doctrine the immense corpus of the hadiths continues to exercise a decisive influence.

 

The Quran and Hadith Form an Unequal Partnership

Over a space of about twenty-three years Muhammad received revelations, which are now gathered into the Holy Quran. He himself in the Traditions prophesied, “Verily it will happen to my people even as it did to the Children of Israel. The Children of Israel were divided into seventy-two sects, and my people will be divided into seventy-three. Every one of these sects will go to hell, except one sect.” All sects alike hold the Quran as sacred, unalterable, the last word on any difference, and utterly revere it. Muslims tolerate little criticism of it. Yet whilst the Quran is held by Muslim theologians to have a higher level of inspiration than the Traditions, they too are inspired. Thus Traditions occupy a lower place, yet one essential to the practice of Islam, They are the sayings and doings of Muhammad, gathered after his death by the Companions, the name officially given to those men who accompanied him, and written down in collections. There exists much Islamic criticism of them, unlike the Quran and this started early.

 

Both are Requisite to the Understanding of the Life of the Prophet

The Quran comprises only revelations and little about the Prophet, so only the salient points of Muhammad’s life could be reconstructed from the Quran alone. The main one that could is that the suras or chapters are divided into those received early in Mecca, and those revealed later after his flight to Medina. The Meccan suras arise from a voice “crying from the very depths of life, and impinging forcefully on the prophet’s mind’ (Rahman, Islam, quoted by Gilchrist). They show a prophet calling his people to quit their idolatrous ways, and have that ring of honesty so lacking in the later Medinan suras, with their legal, political and opportunist revelations, of which he himself is the centre. Temple Gairdner called it ‘a change for the worse.’ Thus whilst the Quran is Muhammad’s words recorded during his life, Tradition must always form the main material for his biography, to see one event relative to another and to weave all together.

Muslim Traditions consist of the sayings of the Companions and friends of the Prophet concerning him, handed down, says Muir, by ‘a real or supposed chain of narrators’ to a period, usually thought by scholars to be somewhat over a hundred years after his death, when the Ummayid Khalifate had been overthrown by the Abbasids, when the practice of collecting, recording and classifying really took root. Men travelled all over the Muslim world collecting them. Muslims deny the lateness of the collection, although they acknowledge it to be the general view, saying it is based on misunderstanding, and that many were written down, during the Prophet’s lifetime, who himself taught it to them verbally, by dictation, and by example, and that he set up schools for teaching them. The six standard collections are well known by name, but who has read them? In the eighth century of the Hegira, Sheikh Wali ud-Din prepared a careful and authoritative collection from all six standard books and entitled it ‘Mishkat-ul-Masabih’.

 

The Quran and the Hadith at times Contradict Each Other

Educated Muslims reverence, yet dread, the two main collections, those of Al Bukhari and Muslim, ranking them almost with the Quran. Yet the untrustworthiness of many of the Traditions and the weakness of the whole as a support to Islam only increases the importance of knowing them. This is also true for any who would win Muslims to Christ.

Muhammad asserts repeatedly in the Quran that he brings no sign, performs no miracle, and foretells no future events, but that the Quran itself is his miracle. Yet as time went by, the Traditions invest him with supernatural attributes. One example is that the Quran, sura 17:1 says, “Glorified (and Exalted) is He (Allah) Who took His slave Muhammad for a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque… in order that we might show him of Our Ayat (proofs, evidences, lessons, signs, etc.).” This is taken by Muslims in his collection Sahih Muslim (Vol. 1. p. 101; Vol 5, p. 226) as Jerusalem. Whilst in the collection Sahih Bukhari ( Vol. 6, p. 196) Gabriel tests Muhammad, and the incident is taken by Tradition as a night journey to the Mosque in Jerusalem, thence through the seven heavens talking to previous prophets, Adam, Joseph, Idris, Moses, John. Jesus and Abraham mounted on the Buraq, a fabulous beast with a horse’s head. an angel’s body and the tail of a peacock, as Muslim art generally depicts it the Prophet waking next morning in bed back home. This is held to be his greatest miracle apart from the Quran itself, and is the major plank of the Muslim claim to the Temple Mount area, the Al Masjid Al Aqsa.

Other Traditions tell how Muhammad, asked by the Meccans to prove he was Allah’s prophet, cut the moon in half with his sword; that the tree he used to stand to preach beneath cried like a baby when he used a pulpit; that he miraculously caused water to flow from his fingernails to satisfy men in the desert, their number variously estimated at between 70 and 1,500. Further Traditions credit him with the miracles of Moses, the Lord Jesus and pagan soothsayers, such as the miraculous multiplying of bread, multiplying dates, making rain, drought, prophesying wind, estimating the number of dates in a future crop, spitting on a man’s eyes to heal the man, multiplying water, making spit water, healing a broken leg by massaging it, and illnesses and bites by recitation and waving his hand over the place and spitting on it.

Yet another tradition tells how Muhammad married Aysha when she was eight, and consummated the marriage when she was nine, a fact unknown to many Muslims. Muslims faced with such traditions tend to change from regarding them as important, to suddenly saying they are of little importance. There are very many uncomfortable traditions such as the one that “The Prophet said, Allah created Adam, making him sixty cubits tall.” That is a three-storey building height. Or that yawning is from hell, that bad breath stops Allah hearing prayer, as does eating garlic or onions before going to prayers, or that Satan urinates into the ears of those who fall asleep during prayers. Yet what Muslim is prepared to deny these ‘inspired traditions’ all found in Bukhari.

 

Obeying Both is Necessary to Salvation

Islam is the way to Allah, not another way to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. As such, it is Islam’s answer to man’s dilemma what must I do to be saved? The Quran lays down the way to earn God’s favour, by obeying the revelations given to the Prophet, in very exact terms, in rules rather than by principles. How different to the gospel of grace, which inculcates principles rather than rules.

The Traditions give the way to enter paradise as exact conformity to the lifestyle of Mohammed. For instance, much attention is given to the way one urinates, with hell being the destination of any who deviate from this. The rituals and practices of Islam owe much to the Traditions. The efficacy of prayer, for example, consists of exact conformity to certain ablutions, postures, gestures and words, originating in Tradition.

 

Both are Necessary to Islamic Jurisprudence

One of the best known and most controversial aspects of Islam is Shari’ia law, by which certain practices, repression and restrictions such as dealing with any apostates from Islam, or Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule, or stoning adulteresses, and cutting the hand off (some) thieves. These laws are increasingly being demanded by Muslims and enacted by some of the Muslim states in the world. How did this come about?

The Traditions recited by the Companions who accompanied Muhammad were taken up by the Successors of the Companions. Only a few Companions survived to near the end of the first century after Muhammad’s death, and of their Successors few lasted into the second century. Yet within a century of the death of Muhammad at sixty-two years old, the Muslim Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Oxus. The Quran provided the law, theology and politics of early Islam. Muhammad had ruled by it, so his successors had to ground their opinions on it, being themselves uninspired. As Islam entered courts of luxury, lands and peoples of the wider world, meeting new and unforeseen situations for which the Quran contained no provision, and could not be altered in the least, how could the situation be met, except by adopting the Sunna or custom of Muhammad? All he did was held to be inspired, so Sunna had the force of law. Thus the Shari’ia arose.

Take one example. The Law of Apostasy is based on three passages in the Quran, of which sura 5:59 says: “0 ye who believe! Whoso turns away from his religion – God will bring (instead) a people whom He loves and who love Him….” The standard commentary on this by Baidhawi says: “Whosoever turns back from his belief openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him….” Zwemer who gives this, says: “Many of the Traditions’ regarding apostates were manufactured to express later tendencies for which Divine authority and the Prophet’s example were needed.”

It is not hard to see how fabrication occurred, and material was gathered and biographies and collections appeared. Hadith are classified by Muslims into those written down by the Companions during the lifetime of the Prophet, those produced by one individual, those dealing with one particular topic, those dealing more widely, and those that are supported by a chain of witnesses back to the Prophet via a Companion, often divided into chapters by topic, or by the person reporting them. One work, no longer extant contained traditions from 1,300 Companions. Muslim scholars like Dr. M. M. Azami in Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature, and Professor Zubayr Siddiqi in Hadith Literature, Its Origin, Development & Special Features, agree that many hadith were fabricated, and classify them according to their reliability. Many thousands were rejected as false. Al-Bukhari acknowledges that of the 40,000 people who were instrumental in handing down Tradition, only 2,000 were reliable, and of the 600,000 traditions he studied over a sixteen year period, he selected only 7,200 of which half were duplicates. Can we trust selection by one man? Some Traditions originated 200 years after Muhammad.

 

The pitfalls of the Quran and Hadith.

The result of all this is, especially when presenting Islam attractively to one who does not know it well, that the Quran can be made to bring forth whatever meaning suits the moment. This is even more so, as when the first revelations came, Muhammad was being persecuted, so the Quran extols the virtues of tolerance in religion. From thence he gradually moved into a position of equality, fighting the Meccans, and allows equality in religion. As he triumphed over Mecca and returned victorious, his statements assume more and more an intolerant attitude. The Quran can be shown as a book of toleration, very like Christianity, by quoting selectively, depending on where in Muhammad’s life you choose your quotation from. This is further complicated by the fact that certain verses take precedence over others, whilst yet others have their meanings in heaven.

Now add to this Tradition, and truth is indeed fallen in the street. Muslims themselves have a science of acceptance, rejection, and trustworthiness with regard to Tradition. As we have seen, vast numbers of Traditions were dismissed as lies or unsafe. The method of distinguishing between true and false Traditions was by the ‘isnad‘, or chain of witnesses. The reliability of any given tradition was not its inherent probability, but the acceptability of the chain of witnesses quoted, which Muslims defend as an exact science. However it has not commended itself as a scientific method to scholars. Given such complexity, Islam can present the face it wishes and fear no contradiction.

 

The Relationship of the Quran and Hadith also concerns politics and co-existence

Islam is a political religion. Why, if it is not so, does it date its calendar by the Hegira, the year of the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina? Why not like Christianity, date itself from the birth of its founder? Or from the year he received his revelations? Or from the year he died? The answer is that Islam started from the point it had political control of the town of Medina. Dr. Lamin Sanneh has understood the danger Islam poses to the West. ‘Islam has the ability to overcome obstacles, to overcome defences. It is only a thin secular wall that prevents the Islamic tide from sweeping over the West; it is the only thing that prevents a pan Islamic global triumph. The religious West has suppressed its own religious heritage.’

An observer of the hate spat out by certain Muslim Imams might wonder how it accords with the statements on love so often and persuasively quoted from their Quran on radio and television by Muslim speakers. The reconciliation supposed is that the hate is extremism, foreign to Islam, a misunderstood literalism, or fundamentalism. The conclusion drawn is that evangelical Christianity is also dangerous fundamentalism, and any sort of criticism of Islam is inspired by hate. The problem with such a view is that just as the Lord Jesus is the worst fundamentalist in Christianity, so the Messenger Muhammad is in Islam. He inspired men to follow him to death and beyond both by his personality, and also by the narrow intensity of his revelations. It is not much of a compliment to say he was a very great man and the only man in history to unite the notoriously individualistic Arabs. Nor to judge him by the standards of his day as a seventh century gentleman comparable to an Old Testament character. Sahih Muslim Vol 1. 4 page 2610 states, that Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: I am most akin to Jesus Christ among the whole of mankind…. and no prophet was raised between me and Jesus.’ Whilst on page 1230 of that volume Muslim gives: ‘I shall be pre-eminent among the descendants of Adam on the Day of Resurrection and I will be the first intercessor and the first whose intercession will be accepted (by Allah).

Therefore it is fair and just to put these claims to the test. Two men arose in the Near East as prophets. Both were rejected by family, religious leaders and people. Both fled one over the Jordan, the other to Median, and there were offered the sword of their followers. One accepted, warred and returned to Meccan in triumph. One of the last suras in the Quran, number 111, which Muslims never quote on air is this: Perish the two hands of Abu Lahab. His wealth and his children will not benefit him! He will be burnt on a fire of blazing flames! And his wife, too, who carries wood. In her neck is a twisted rope of Masad (palm fibre).” The man was his merchant uncle, who had brought the orphan Muhammad up, but opposed his claims and preaching. His name means ’the father of the flame’, and is used as ‘hell ‘. The woman, Omm Jemil, had stirred up her husband against Muhammad and on one occasion had sown his path with thorns. Her fate is also a play on words. Now turn to the other who was proffered the sword of His followers. He refused, choosing to love those who hated Him, returning to Jerusalem to die on a cross, and as He was being nailed to it said, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’

In contrast, Muhammad hated the Jews who mocked his early preaching in Mecca, and his claims to be Messiah. Later he beheaded 700 to 800 Jewish prisoners after they surrendered in a siege, and ‘ married, the fairest survivor, the beautiful Rihana. Another Jewess, Zainab later avenged herself on him by administering the poison in his food of which he later died. She said, ’Thou hast inflicted grievous injuries on my people, and slain as thou seest, my husband and my father. Therefore, I said within myself, If he be a prophet he will reject the gift, knowing that it is poisoned; but if only a pretender we shall be rid of our troubles.’ (Dr. A. Shorrosh, Islam Revealed (Thomas Nelson 1988 p. 68).

‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’

EDWARD MALCOLM is Presiding Bishop of the Church of England (Continuing), and a former missionary in Morocco.
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