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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]

Traditionalists, on the other hand, seek to garner intellectual legitimacy by referencing the opinions and works of classical scholars. According to them, correct interpretation of Islamic primary sources can only be ensured through adherence to an unbroken chain of knowledge, for the earliest generations understood the Qur’an and prophetic Precedence (Sunnah) on such a profound level that later generations cannot hope to access their knowledge without recourse in a legacy of qualified scholarship. Regardless of the seemingly incongruous nature of these two methodologies, the traditionalist-modernist paradigm is a spectrum rather than two distinct schools of thought, and lines of demarcation are not always clear-cut.

While modernist tendencies have infiltrated many of the traditional Islamic sciences, the field of Hadith studies stands as a microcosm of modernism’s far-reaching influence and as such will be the focus of our analysis. Legal and theological rulings are what drive any interpretation or reinterpretation of an Islamic original source, and consequently Hadith studies and law are inextricably connected. According to varying degrees, all Hadith have legal implications, while the evaluation and interpretation of them is typically viewed in light of law. Were this not the case, then difference of opinion in Hadith criticism would be a trivial matter and not the source of sectarianism that it in fact is. From the perspective of both Hadith studies and overall scholarly methodology, there exist four major subdivisions within modernist Islam: Each subgroup’s approach towards Hadith reflects its general attitude towards the Islamic sciences. Our study is essentially concerned with the treatment of Hadith within the modernist camp, though where appropriate, we will also mention some corollary implications within other disciplines and sciences of a particular subgroup’s methodology.

The Wahhabi Approach

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]

Wahhabi jurists are unique in their unwavering insistence upon directly quoting the Islamic primary sources, particularly rigorously authenticated Hadith, in an effort to garner legitimacy for their legal and theological rulings by demonstrating their exclusive reliance upon the Qur’an and Sunnah and not the opinions of mortal men. With the possible exception of Ibn Taymiyah, Islamic jurists from the classical period are rarely mentioned; rather, the Wahhabi approach is to present a ruling or fatwa along with its primary evidences in a highly abridged format for use and citation by lesser scholars and laymen. This stands in direct opposition to the traditionalist attitude towards religious rulings and fatwas, in which citing the opinions of one or more classical scholars from the preceding generations in lieu of primary evidences is viewed as a means of maintaining the sincerity of the contemporary scholar, who represents a vehicle for knowledge rather than an originator of it. Additionally, such an approach serves to express the contemporary scholar’s gratitude and reverence towards the consummate scholars of eras past.

An additional idiosyncrasy of the Wahhabi school lies in its functional marginalization of weak (da`if) Hadith, thereby implicitly equating them with spurious (mawdu`) ones. This attitude is reflected in the words of Al-Albani:

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]

In response to this innovative approach to Hadith studies, the traditionalist scholar Nuh Ha Mim Keller explains:

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]

While it is beyond the scope of this study to detail in full the traditionalist considerations that admit the use of weak Hadith, the crux of the argument derives from the possibility of multiple means of transmission of a particular hadith. In other words, should a hadith be related through many different chains of transmission (asanid, sing. isnad), the probability of its falsity drops while the degree of its authenticity and consequent authority are enhanced, even though its chains of transmission may all be weak when considered individually. The Wahhabi approach, on the other hand, represents a further example of the school’s attempt to purge the Islamic sciences of the grey areas of scholarly debate, in which weak Hadith and their juristic implications are clearly a key component.

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]

It is difficult to see how the translators derived “the Day when the Shin shall be laid bare” from the original Arabic, which in fact is employing a common classical Arabic locution that denotes a day of severity from which there is no escape. In pre-Islamic battles, warriors would raise their garments to facilitate combat, and with time, the action became a ubiquitous idiom in Arab society. That the translators are not aware of the expression is astounding, while their translating an indefinite shin (saaq) as “the Shin,” a divine quality that necessitates unequivocal faith, hints at a misunderstanding of the original Arabic.

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,<sup>[16]</sup> 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 Approach

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]

Al-Afghani, `Abduh, and their later disciples such as Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1354/1935) and, to a lesser extent, Muhammad Al-Ghazali (d. 1410/1989) espoused some of the key Wahhabi ideals, particularly the endeavor to “return” to the Islamic understanding of the first Muslim generations (as-salaf) by reopening the doors of juristic deduction (ijtihad) that they saw as closed. In effect, such a new-fangled policy signified a complete break from the traditional chain of knowledge transfer and its respective methodology. As such, the founding fathers of the Salafi movement often found themselves as the de facto apologists for Ibn `Abdul-Wahhab and his devotees, who were viewed as little more than an odious nuisance by pilgrims from traditionalist Muslim countries like Egypt.

Nevertheless, the Salafi attitude is less myopic than that of the Wahhabis. Salafi scholars accept juristic disagreement, and notwithstanding their tendency to oversimplify many of the traditional Islamic sciences, they do not propound categorical rulings in areas of established ambiguity. While they view the traditionalist methodology as essentially archaic and less than ideal, the Salafis nonetheless deem it acceptable before God, thus rendering it within the tolerable umbrella of pluralism. Furthermore, they do not altogether dismiss Sufism or a rational deduction of law, unlike their Wahhabi counterparts.

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]

Keller proceeds to mention examples from each of the four juristic schools of Islam in which a later-day scholar upgrades and changes the ruling of his particular imam, thereby making the school’s official edict differ from that of its original founder. Regardless, a glimmer of the Wahhabi influence shines through the Salafi contention, specifically, that a reevaluation of Hadith authentication is an effective method to generate unequivocal juristic rulings in place of the classical legacy of scholarly disagreement. 

Unlike the Wahhabis, the Salafi approach to the Islamic sciences does not lay great emphasis upon rote memorization of texts beyond the Qur’an. This may be a factor of `Abduh’s foremost complaint against Al-Azhar’s curriculum: It focuses heavily on memorization often at the expense of a student’s proper understanding. Additionally, Salafis are at the forefront of the audio-visual learning movement in Islam. As such, they champion the idea that knowledge can be obtained in books and supplemented with human contact. Traditionalists, on the other hands, view book knowledge as information at best—a dangerous ingredient when taken alone.

The Salafabi Approach

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.

With regard to Hadith that they deem acceptable, Salafabis often ignore classical commentaries and understanding, save the atypical or even obscure classical ruling that supports their argument. A prime example of this can be seen in the December 2001 public statement of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera news, in which bin Laden refers to a Hadith, reported in the Sahih of Muslim and included in Imam An-Nawawi’s celebrated Riyad As-Salihin (The Gardens of the Righteous), that centers around the story of a boy who learns faith from a monk and is subsequently persecuted for his beliefs by a wicked tyrant. Bin Laden says:

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.

The Liberalist Approach

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]

Conservative liberalists, on the other hand, may be indistinguishable from the Salafi outlook. Even so, while it is difficult to pigeonhole the liberalists as a whole, they are clearly a product of the West through either naturalization or colonization.

Ironically, the liberalist intelligentsia frequently mirrors the approach of its Salafabi adversaries by fashioning its arguments and subsequently establishing legitimacy for them through novel interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith. Kugle’s article represents such an approach to “revisionist” Hadith studies. In an attempt to establish legitimacy for homosexuality in Islam, the author writes:

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]

In effect, Kugle is limiting the gamut of legally applicable Hadith to those found in the two most authentic collections, thereby rendering the vast majority of Hadith irrelevant. Reminiscent of the Wahhabi approach, Kugle is performing naïve adherence (taqlid) on almost an absolute level to the Hadith found in the Sahihs of Al-Bukhari and Muslim, though unlike the Wahhabis, he discards all other Hadith in order to substantiate his preexisting argument. The “general conclusions about Hadith” that Kugle derives after his glib and unscholarly research are astonishing:

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]

That medieval scholars debunked some Hadith and that they did not agree unanimously to their levels of authenticity are unconvincing reasons to discard the bulk of the Hadith corpus. By this rationale, the Hadith found in the Sahihs of Al-Bukhari and Muslim can be discarded, for a handful of later scholars disagreed to their level of authenticity as well. Furthermore, Kugle states that most Hadith condemning same-sex relations carry weak chains of authority, while one could venture to say that most Hadith that report the virtues of reciting the Qur’an are reported according to weak chains of authority, though no scholar (or layman) has ever used this to prove that reciting the Qur’an is not a virtuous deed. One can assume that if all Hadith that condemn homosexual relations were weak in their chains of authority, Kugle would have been vociferous in pointing this out. That he specifically states that “most Hadith” are weak is strong grounds to believe that there exist Hadith to the same purport with strong chains of authority.

Kugle’s attitude towards Hadith studies is extreme in its oversimplification but not unusual in the modern era. Nevertheless, it represents a clear break from the other three modernist schools, which maintain at least some deference towards the opinions of classical scholars.

While it may be difficult for the present author to stifle his personal sentiments at times, the above analysis is not meant to promote a value judgment of the modernist approach to Hadith studies. For a well-reasoned counterargument, particularly from the Salafi perspective, interested parties are advised to see Tariq Ramadan’s To Be a European Muslim. The text epitomizes a sound presentation of the modernist concerns and objectives, while it is written in a style and format that remains true to the Islamic intellectual tradition of excellence. In an age when the majority of modernist publications flout the Islamic concept of ihsan (excellence), either by breaking from linguistic standardization or through poor grammar and style, Ramadan’s book comes as a welcome surprise.

On a concluding note, a chief complaint leveled against the traditionalist methodology by its detractors lies in what is seen as its inherent inability to adjust to the modern world. While this may be a reasonable allegation in the case of certain interpretations of traditionalism, the approach itself has demonstrated its dynamic ability to redefine itself throughout the fourteen centuries of Islamic history. Traditionalism is not a time-capsule approach to the Islamic intellectual sciences; rather, it adapts to the needs of the hour while never relinquishing the unbroken chain of knowledge transfer. While some modernists would view this insistence upon traditional knowledge as the raison d’être for the contemporary disgrace of the Islamic world, a traditionalist would argue that breaking ourselves from a direct nexus with the divine is the source of all our woes.

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Related Links

• An Introduction to the Science of Hadith

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