The Modernist Approach to Hadith Studies

• The Wahhabi Approach
• The Salafi Approach
• The Salafabi Approach
• The Liberalist Approach

Modernist Islam is both unique in its expression and yet so clearly an exported product of its Western counterpart. Like Western modernism, Islamic modernism is difficult to define: it is rather the general rubric for a series of metaphysical, epistemological, and heuristic trends that stand as a stark antithesis to traditionalism. Simply stated for the purposes of our study, traditionalism represents the epistemological paradigm whose legitimacy rests upon an unbroken chain (silsila) of knowledge transfer, the starting point of which is God Himself. In the words of the Christian traditionalist James Cutsinger, “Where revelation is the projection of God into space, tradition is the extension of revelation through time.”[1] Thus, if a stone’s dropping into a pool of water represents revelation, and the subsequent concentric waves that radiate from the point of entry represent tradition, then modernism could be visualized as a ring floating above (or below) the farthest periphery of the waves that is disconnected both horizontally from the water and vertically from the trajectory of the stone.[2] While neither Islamic traditionalism nor modernism is a factor of era per say, the latter phenomena is undoubtedly an upshot of Western colonialism in the Muslim world.[3] It did not, however, fully displace traditionalism, which can still be found today, albeit rarely in an unadulterated form.

Distinguishing Islamic traditionalism from modernism helps a person to sort and filter knowledge, while allowing him to recognize predispositions and assumptions within both camps. Once he is comfortable with a particular methodology, the designations promote efficiency in his search for knowledge by allowing him to limit his study to a specific school. With this advantage in mind, two questions must be leveled at a methodology in order to determine its position within the traditionalist-modernist spectrum. First, what is its definition of knowledge? The modernist school often seeks to oversimplify areas of scholarly debate into unequivocal terms, be it in the form of prayer posters that advertise the “correct” way to pray or books such as Sayyid Sabiq’s ubiquitous Fiqh us-Sunnah, which attempts to abolish 1,400 years of juristic disagreement in a few slim volumes. The traditionalist school, on the other hand, rarefies its knowledge with the passage of time through commentaries and précis of earlier texts, while simplification occurs only through a gradation of the material to correspond with students’ relative levels of proficiency. Additionally, the source of knowledge is a point of difference between modernists and traditionalists. The latter category, in keeping with its insistence upon an unbroken chain of knowledge transfer, regards human beings as the sole vehicles for knowledge while books and other inanimate mediums are merely tools to facilitate its transmission. Conversely, modernists implicitly raise non-human media to the same level of their human originators by employing pamphlets, books, and audio-visual technologies as a viable alternative to human instruction.[4]

Second, to which scholars does a particular methodology owe its allegiance? Islamic modernists frequently cite the opinions and interpretations of scholars from either the earliest or the most recent generations, while overlooking, criticizing, or even denying the rulings and commentaries of scholars from the classical Islamic period in between.[5]

The Wahhabi school, or Salafi traditionalism as it has been called by the Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan,[6] has experienced a dramatic intellectual proliferation across the Muslim world within the past few decades. Pamphlets espousing the Wahhabi creed and methodology sprinkle the mosques of even the remotest Muslim lands, while the school has a veritable monopoly on public speeches, lessons, and activities within the holy sanctuaries of Makkah and Madinah. The group’s founder and eponym, Muhammad ibn `Abdul-Wahhab (d. 1206/1792), was a Hanbali reformist from the eastern highlands of the Arabian Peninsula who sought to purge Islam from what he saw as heretical accretions in the form of rationalism, Sufism, and naïve adherence to juristic schools (taqlid). In the process of forcibly instituting these purifications upon the Muslim populace of the region, Ibn `Abdul-Wahhab mounted a formidable insurrection against the “corrupt” Ottoman rulers that was ultimately quelled by the army of Muhammad `Ali in 1234/1818. Nevertheless, Wahhabi doctrines persisted in the region, posing as little more than a nuisance to the caravans of Muslim pilgrims until `Abdul-`Aziz ibn As-Sa`ud (r. 1319/1902 – 1373/1953) adopted the ideology as the official doctrine of what would become Saudi Arabia.[7] Owing to vast oil revenues and its unique position as the patron-nation of the holiest sanctuaries in Islam, the Saudi Arabian government, with the help of its scholars, has propagated the ideology of Ibn `Abdul-Wahhab around the world. Furthermore, within the past few years, Wahhabism has come to dominate Internet Islam. It has met with different levels of intellectual acceptance among Muslim populations.

The Wahhabi school seeks to remove all grey area from the Islamic sciences in an effort to produce absolute answers to legal and theological questions. As such, Wahhabi scholars tend to practice rigid adherence (taqlid) to “rigorously authenticated” (sahih) Hadith, most notably those found in the Sahihs of Al-Bukhari and Muslim. For the other canonical books of Hadith, the Wahhabi school often relies upon the reevaluations of contemporary scholars, particularly those found in the mustadrak[8] works of Nasir Ad-Din Al-Albani. For example, the author of the widespread booklet of prophetic invocations Hisn Al-Muslim (The Fortification of the Muslim) insists upon Al-Albani’s reassessment of authenticity for most of the Hadith drawn upon that originate in the classical collections of Ibn Majah, At-Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, Ahmad, Malik, and others.[9]

It has become well known among many scholars and students that it is permissible to act upon weak Hadith with regard to excellent actions. … And this is clearly not correct... Acting upon it is permissible if that action is established by [an authentic] proof, but I do not think that the majority of those who hold this saying intend this meaning, even though it is clear since we find them acting upon weak Hadith comprising actions not established by authentic Hadith; for example, al-Nawawi’s declaring it to be recommended to respond to the words, “The prayer is commencing,” with, “May God establish it and make it endure,” even though the Hadith about it is weak.[10]

Weak [hadith] cannot simply be equated with false [hadith]. Were this the case, mere analysis of the transmitters would be the universal criterion for acceptance or rejection of particular rulings based on hadiths. While scholars do use this measure in upgrading the work of preceding generations of legal authorities, they have not employed it as a simplistic expedient to eliminate every piece of legal information that is connected with a weak hadith, because of various considerations.[11]

In addition to its novel attitude towards Hadith classification, the Wahhabi school is similarly unique in its naïve adherence to the Hadith found in the Sahihs of Al-Bukhari and Muslim in matters of Islamic catechism. Regarding the primary sources of theology (`aqeedah), traditionalists base their catechism upon the Qur’an and those Hadith that have been reported through so many channels of transmission that the possibility of their spuriousness is rationally impossible.[12] In contrast, the Wahhabi school gives preponderance to the authenticity of a particular hadith’s chain of transmission over the frequency of its transmission. Hence, theological rulings can be derived from the Sahihs of Al-Bukhari and Muslim, the two most authentic compilations of Hadith. A startling example of this trend is found in Muhammad Taqi Al-Din Al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan’s Interpretation of the Meanings of the Noble Qur’an, the official Wahhabi translation of the Qur’an in the English language. The text translates verse 42 of Surat Al-Qalam as [(Remember) the Day when the Shin shall be laid bare (i.e., the Day of Resurrection) and they shall be called to prostrate themselves (to Allah), but they (hypocrites) shall not be able to do so.] In order to elucidate the word shin, two footnotes accompany the English text, one of which refers the reader to an earlier footnote that reads as follows:

All that has been revealed in Allah’s Book as regards the Qualities of Allah, the Most High, like His Face, Eyes, Hands, Shins (Legs), His Coming, His rising over His Throne and others, of all the Allah’s Messenger qualified Him in the true authentic [sic] Prophet’s [Hadith] as regards His Qualities like His Descent or His Laughing and others, the religious scholars of the Qur’an and Sunna believe in these Qualities of Allah and they confirm that these are really His Qualities, without Ta’wil (interpreting their meanings into different things) or Tashbih (giving resemblance or similarity to any of the creatures) or Ta`ţil (i.e. completely ignoring or denying them, i.e. there is no Face, or Eyes, or Hands, or Shins for Allah). [emphasis added][13]

In truth, the Wahhabi use of “the Shin” originates in a hadith found in Al-Bukhari’s Sahih[14] that is translated into English in the second of the footnotes that qualify the verse in question. The elaborate hadith depicts the events of the Day of Judgment, and it culminates in the following account, as translated by Al-Hilali and Khan:

And none will speak to Him then but the Prophets. And it will be said to them, “Do you know any sign by which you can recognize Him?” They will say, “The Shin,” and so Allah will then uncover His Shin whereupon every believer will prostrate himself before Him.[15]

In spite of the English rendering above, Ibn Hajar Al-`Asqalani’s superlative Fath Al-Bari, the definitive commentary on Al-Bukhari’s Sahih, mentions numerous explanations of what has been translated as “the Shin” above,[16] none of which suggests an anthropomorphic appendage. Arguably, the most convincing of these explanations is that of Ibn `Abbas in which he interprets it, “God will surely disclose His Omnipotence (qudratih) through which the severity [of the Day of Judgment] will become clear.” Al-Bayhaqi relates it according to two chains of transmission, both of which are good (hasan). Regardless, the above instance stands as a poignant example of the Wahhabi school’s rigid adherence (taqlid) to a hadith’s authenticity with deference neither to its classical interpretation, to the classical use of the Arabic language, nor to the classical approach to theological rulings.

The Salafi School as Khalid Abou El Fadl defines it,[17] or Salafi reformism according to Tariq Ramadan,[18] is effectively a twentieth-century movement with its origins in Egypt while still under British colonial rule. Its most prominent intellectual founder, Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1323/1905), was Sheikh of Al-Azhar University for a brief period before his death; while prior to this, he was a supporter and apprentice of the modernist Muslim philosopher Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani (d. 1314/1897). Particularly in his Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), `Abduh was skeptical towards ahad Hadith, or those Traditions that are reported through few chains of transmission, even if they are deemed rigorously authenticated in any of the six canonical books of Hadith. Furthermore, he advocated a reassessment of traditional assumptions even in Hadith studies, though he did not devise a systematic methodology before his death.[19]

Tariq Ramadan voices a cardinal Salafi adage when he writes, “Our knowledge regarding Hadith authentication is more precise today.”[20] In other words, the Salafi School views classical scholarship as a lead-up to the industrial age in which most primary Islamic sources have been quantified, appraised, and printed, thus making it possible to derive superior juristic rulings that were not possible in generations past. However, while Ramadan’s logic is admittedly more sophisticated than the above representation, his Hadith argument is flawed when taken as a claim against traditional juristic schools (madhahib, sing. madhhab). Modernists frequently perceive naïve adherence to one of the four schools of Islamic law as obsolete since none of the four schools’ eponyms had access to the complete corpus of Hadith that we have today. In fact, a juristic school comprises a series of principles (usul) that admit the injection of additional Hadith even after the death of the school’s original founder. In response to claims like those of Tariq Ramadan, Nuh Ha Mim Keller writes:

In respect to the contention that the Imams “did not incorporate all the Hadiths into their madhhabs;” while undoubtedly true in some instances (as knowledge of all Hadiths is probably impossible), what they missed was not ignored by the succeeding generations of top scholars who followed them in each school, rechecking their evidences and conclusions, and revised their Imams’ madhhabs.[21]

Combining the most extreme tendencies of the Wahhabi and Salafi schools while adding a distinctly militant twist, the Salafabi School as Abou El Fadl labels it,[22] or the political or literalist Salafiya according to Tariq Ramadan,[23] is no doubt an angry reaction to both Western colonization of the Muslim world in the past few centuries and the moral relativism and laxity seen to accompany globalization in the postmodern period. Infamous media figures such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri epitomize the bellicose vigilantism that distinguishes the practical ideals of the school, which Abou El- Fadl perspicaciously defines as:

A supremacist puritanism that compensates for feelings of defeatism, disempowerment, and alienation with a distinct sense of self-righteous arrogance vis-à-vis the nondescript “other”—whether the “other” is the West, non-believers in general, or even Muslim women.[24]

The Salafabi methodology is unique in its use of evidences from the Qur’an and Hadith to legitimize preexisting juristic arguments and rulings that are often violent in nature. As such, Salafabi preachers rely primarily on Qur’anic citations, for divine scripture lends itself to open and irrefutable interpretations,[25] though some adherents of the school commit a limited array of Hadith and their implications to memory that are primarily of a political nature. For example, in response to the Islamic narration often attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad,”[26] which implies that the struggle against the indulgences of the soul is superior to fighting against the enemies of God, a Salafabi may remind his ideological opponent that this narration is at best a weakly authenticated report, though more likely a forgery. While the objective may stand up to scholarly scrutiny, that a layman has memorized such an esoteric piece of information is evidence of a polemical agenda.

This Hadith of the boy: when the boy took the stone, while still possessing little knowledge and vacillating between the magician and the monk, and the beast hindered the people from the street, he said, “Today I shall know who is better: the monk or the magician,” … So he took a stone and struck the beast, killing it. Then, the monk came to the boy and said, “O my son! Today you are better than me,” … in spite the knowledge of the monk and the ignorance of the boy! … Thus, the measure of excellence in this religion, as it comes in the Hadith of our Prophet (may peace and blessings be upon him); the measure of faith is not merely gathering knowledge, rather it is gathering knowledge and actions.[27]

In other words, bin Laden uses the Hadith to indicate that the actions of the September 11 hijackers prove their superiority in faith to the entirety of Islamic scholars who have no such actions to their names. According to bin Laden, the boy’s violence against the beast correlates to the hijackers’ violence against the American people: Both “justified” acts of violence confirm the worth of the perpetrators before God and the rest of humanity. In contrast, the illustrious scholar from the classical period of Islam, Imam An-Nawawi (d. 676/1277) mentions the same Hadith within his chapter of “Patience,” which is introduced by several verses from the Qur’an, among them, [But indeed if any show patience and forgive, that would be an affair of great resolution.][28] Hence, An-Nawawi reads the hadith as a lesson in non-violent perseverance in the face horrible tyranny. Ironically, owing to the popularity and convenience of An-Nawawi’s text, it is reasonable to assume that bin Laden first learned of the hadith from Riyad As-Salihin.

What Tariq Ramadan categorizes as liberal or rationalist reformism[29] is rather the olla podrida of the modernist movement: Though fundamentally different in its approach from the other three modernist sub-schools, it is nonetheless a miscellaneous rubric. “Liberal” here, according to Ramadan, refers to the modern Western definition of the  term, meaning favoring the primacy of the individual,[30] and advocates of this methodology often identify themselves in contrast to the “fundamentalists”—an amoebic term, “which to their way of thinking covers all other tendencies than their own.”[31] Extreme strains of the liberalist school go so far as to challenge the authority of the Qur’an and prophetic Sunnah in a Muslim’s life, as can be seen in the article “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims” by Scott Kugle in the liberalist publication Progressive Muslims:

It is very difficult to establish the authenticity of most reports that circulate in the name of the Prophet Muhammad. … In the contemporary period, there are less and less scholars who are trained in Hadith criticism. Wahhabi and Salafi scholars, who may have such training, have no motive to critique Hadith, for in their zeal to escape history and return to the Prophet’s own time, they reify Hadith as unquestionable building blocks for their monolithic iconic image of the Prophet’s exemplary behavior.[32]

A review of Hadith from the two most reliable collections (Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari) reveals no evidence that the Prophet asserted, in word or deed, that homosexual relations were a hadd crime, or were to be equated with adultery, or ever punished any persons for “crimes” related to homosexuality. Nor is there any Hadith in these two most authentic collections in which the Prophet discusses [Lot] in relationship to sexual acts or relationships. This writer further suspects that the very terms Luti and Liwat are not found in the authentic Hadith, although this would take more research to substantiate.[33]

Most reports in which the Prophet reportedly condemns same-sex activities have weak chains of transmission and are found in Hadith collections that are not the most authoritative. Hadith scholars in the medieval period (when Hadith criticism was still actively pursued in Muslim communities) explicitly debunked some of them for having forged chains of transmission. In the earliest period, jurists did not agree as to which Hadith might be authentic and strong enough to form the basis of legal opinions. [emphasis added][34]

Noor al-Deen Atabek is a researcher in Islamic Studies.

[1] James S. Cutsinger, “An Open Letter on Tradition,” Modern Age, vol. 36, issue 3, 1994.

[2] The stone analogy is an adaptation of that of James S. Cutsinger.

[3] Even the movement of Ibn `Abdul-Wahhab, though initially a reaction to Ottoman colonialism in the Arab world, found its chief propagators espousing its dialectics as a response to Western intellectual colonization.

[4] The teach-yourself-Islam approach of modernist institutions such as the American Open University is a prime example of equating book knowledge with human instruction.

[5] An exception to this tendency is certain modernist schools’ frequent citation of Ibn Taymiyah (d. 728/1328), who himself earned a reputation for iconoclasm by reassessing the first generation of Islamic scholarship not infrequently in contravention of classical interpretations.

[6] Tariq Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim. Islamic Foundation: Leicester, 2002, p. 240.

[7] Khalid Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly: Reclaiming the Beautiful in Islam.” Progressive Muslims, ed. Omid Safi. Oneworld: Oxford, 2003, p. 52.

[8] A mustadrak text is a collection of Hadith “in which the compiler, having accepted the conditions laid down by a previous compiler, collects together such other traditions as fulfill those conditions and were missed by his predecessor.” Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, Hadith Literature. Islamic Texts Society: Cambridge, 1993, p. 12.

[9] See the appendix of Hisn Al-Muslim (Safīr Press: Riyadh).

[10] Al-Albani’s words have been translated by Dawud Burbank Salafī with grammatical corrections made by the present author. The original and complete text can be found on “Allaahuakbar.net,” http://www.allaahuakbar.net/ scholars/albaani/abandoning_acting_on_weak_Hadith.htm. It was accessed on 25 May 2004.

[11] Nuh Ha Mim Keller (transl. and editor), The Reliance of the Traveller. Amana Publications: Beltsville, 1999, p. 954.

[12] They are called mutawatir hadiths.

[13] Muhammad Taqi Al-Din Al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan, Interpretation of the Meanings of the Noble Qur’an. Darussalam: Riyadh, 1996, pp. 133-4.

[14] See Sahih Al-Bukhari, Book of Tawhid, No. 6886 for the original Arabic.

[15] Muhammad Taqi Al-Din Al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 1996, pp. 1128-29.

[16] Selections from Ibn Hajar Al-`Asqalani’s Fath al-Bari were accessed on www.al-islam.com on 22 May 2004.

[17] Khalid Abou El Fadl, 2003, pp. 55–57.

[18] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, pp. 241-2.

[19] Daniel W. Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996, p. 37.

[20] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, pp. 95-6.

[21] Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Al-Maqasid: Nawawi’s Manual of Islam. Revised and expanded edition. Amana Publications: Beltsville, 2002, pp. 134-5.

[22] Khalid Abou El Fadl, 2003, pp. 57-62.

[23] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, pp. 242-3.

[24] Khalid Abou El Fadl, 2003, p. 58.

[25] For more information on the disingenuous Qur’anic interpretations of the Salafabi school, see David Dakake’s “Myth of a Militant Islam” in Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition, ed. Joseph E. B. Lumbard. World Wisdom: Bloomington, 2004, pp. 3-38.

[26] Bayhaqi, Kitab Az-Zuhd.

[27] The original Arabic transcript of this speech was obtained on www.aljazeera.net in December of 2001. I could not relocate it in the archives.

[28] Qur’an 42: 43.

[29] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, pp. 243-4.

[30] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, p. 244.

[31] Tariq Ramadan, 2002, p. 247.

[32] Scott Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims.” Progressive Muslims, ed. Omid Safi. Oneworld: Oxford, 2003, p. 220.

[33] Scott Kugle, 2003, p. 220.

[34] Scott Kugle, 2003, pp. 220-21.