Part 2. How do Muslims Know Muhammed’s Biography and Teachings have been Preserved?
In last week’s blog we discussed why the hadith literature is so important to Islam and why Muslims need the hadiths to demonstrate the truth of the central miracle claim of Islam. So this week, we’re going to dive in and examine how Muslims assess and critique hadith literature- don’t worry this is going to be fun (inshallah).
So, what are the hadith?
Hadith literature are reports (hadith means report) about the actions and sayings of the prophet Muhammed. Muslims consider these actions and sayings (collectively known as the Sunnah) to be authoritative revelation or inspiration[1] from God. Not only that, but Muslims believe that the only way to properly understand the Qur’an is to interpret it through the lens of the Sunnah. That means that the proper exegetical context of the Qur’an is not simply the context within the Qur’an itself, but also the context of the life and sayings of Muhammed. There are innumerable ways this relationship is made obvious, but here are a few:
Abrogation: Muslims believe that verses in the Qur’an revealed to Muhammed later in his life cancel out and supersede earlier verses if there is a contradiction between them. So knowing exactly when Muhammed received different surahs is key to understanding which passages apply today, and which have been abrogated.
Legal rulings: While the Qur’an sometimes gives specific legal rulings (like 5:38 which prescribes cutting off the hands of thieves), Muslims typically look to the Sunnah of Muhammed to see how he applied the Qur’anic teachings, and they will base their legal rulings on Muhammed’s application of the Qur’an.
How to interpret ambiguous passages: Many Qur’anic passages are impossible to understand without understanding what was happening in Muhammed’s life when that passage was revealed. So to interpret much of the Qur’an, Muslims need to know detailed information about Muhammed’s life.
Religious praxis: The Qur’an does not give much information about key elements of Islamic praxis such as how to pray, how to fast during Ramadan, and how to give charity. Muslims rely on the example of Muhammed to determine the specific rules around how to properly engage in these foundational elements of Islamic practice.
This is something that all Muslims believe, but few really stop to think about the consequences of it. What this means is that the sunnah is equal to the Qur’an epistemically. That is to say that even though Muslims regard the Qur’an as objectively prior to the Sunnah, from the subjective standpoint of a Muslim today, what he knows about the Qur’an and Islam is mediated to him through the Sunnah.
I know I said I wouldn’t try to violate Muslim beliefs, and this claim seems to be doing that. But actually, this is an Islamic belief, and it is necessarily so. That’s because the lens we interpret through is always as important as what we are interpreting. Take the example of a painting being viewed through a window. No matter what the painting may be in reality, the clarity of the window is as important to the viewer as the painting itself. If the window is distorted, the viewer will see the painting as distorted. Islamic scholars have long understood this principle in regard to the Sunnah and the Qur’an. Though the Qur’an is the very words of Allah, we are only able to properly see and understand it by viewing it through the lens of the life and teachings of Muhammed. This makes establishing the veracity of the hadith literature of primary importance to Islam as a worldview. If the hadith are unreliable or false, then the Muslim is left with no way to understand God’s words.
However, for the purposes of deciding between Christianity and Islam, the hadith have another key layer of importance. If we are to make any sort of argument regarding the central miracle of Islam- the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammed- we must use the Hadith literature. Contemporaneous non- Muslim accounts of the life of Muhammed are practically nonexistent, and the Qur’an itself is almost entirely silent on the life of Muhammed (it only mentions him by name four times). So, for a Muslim to build any sort of positive case to try to demonstrate the reliability of the revelation of the Qur’an, he is going to have use the hadith literature as the foundation for his entire case.
So, now that we’ve come to appreciate the central importance of the hadith literature to the Islamic worldview, it raises the importance of what Muslims call “hadith sciences” and what Western scholars call “Hadith criticism”- namely the study of the sources, transmission, and reliability of the hadith literature. So, let’s dive into that now, and see if it’s reasonable to trust the hadith literature which undergirds Islam.
Narration Chain Methodology for Hadiths
Given that Muhammed died in 632 AD, one would expect the majority of the reports about his life and sayings to come from the seventh century- like we see with reports about Jesus’ life and ministry in the first century. However, that’s not what we find. Instead, there are very few contemporaneous reports about Muhammed until almost a century after his death, when the first biographies written by Ibn Ishaq and others began appearing. Strangely, even in the eight century we have comparatively few sayings of Muhammed (Ibh Ishaq wrote about the events in Muhammed’s life, but didn’t focus on recording his sayings), and it isn’t until two centuries after the prophet’s death that we see an explosion in the number of sayings (hadiths) that began being propagated throughout the Islamic empire.
The greatest collector of these hadiths was a Central Asian scholar named Muhammed al-Bukhari who lived in the ninth century AD. He claimed to have collected 600,000 sayings of Muhammed during his travels throughout the middle East, but that he found that only 7000 (about one percent) of them were reliable. You can probably see that there are some serious historical questions that need to be answered by Muslim scholars- namely, why do the majority of our sources about Muhammed only appear until nearly two hundred years after his death, and how can we trust them? Again, this is a deeply technical field, that I don’t want to wade into, instead, I would like to focus on how al-Bukhari, and Muslim scholars throughout history determined which hadiths were reliable and which were unreliable.
The core concept in hadith sciences is the concept of a “chain of narration”. Since virtually all hadiths were oral for the first 200 hundred years, until compilers like al-Bukhari wrote them down, there is no manuscript evidence that can help us see if a given hadith was corrupted at any point. Instead, the method that Muslim scholars use relies on assessing the trustworthiness of the people who transmitted the hadiths orally over the centuries. Therefore, a given saying of Muhamed begins with a comprehensive chain of narration listing every person in the chain. For example one of al-Bukhari’s chains of narration goes like this:
“I heard it from
Abdullah ibn Yusuf, who heard it from
Malik ibn Anas who heard it from
Muhammed ibn Ubayd Allah al-Zuhri, who heard it from
Humayd ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, who heard it from
Abu Hurayra, who heard it from
the prophet (pbuh) who said..”.
Since we can’t know what the hadith looked like at any stage prior to Al-Bukhari writing it down 200 years later, the way we assess how authentic (sahih) a hadith is is by assessing each person in the chain of narration. If Islamic scholars are satisfied that every person in the chain was well enough known, had a good reputation for being an accurate transmitter, and had a good character so as not to be prone to fabricating hadiths, then that particular hadith is graded as “sahih” (authentic). If there are one or two people in the chain who are of questionable character, or who we know little about, it may be graded as “hasan” (good), and as the quality of the narrators decreases, so do the corresponding grades. This methodology was what al-Bukhari used to determine the one percent of circulating hadiths which were authentic, and it’s the same methodology that Muslims around the world use today.
This system has its strengths and weaknesses. The main strength is that it at least attempts to preserve information about the people who were passing on the tradition- that can be helpful. The main weaknesses are that it fails to assess the content of the sayings being passed down, it relies very heavily on 1000-year-old (possibly biased) character references, and glosses over the fact that chains of narration can be easily forged. When we compare the chain of narration methodology to the normal historical methodologies used in modern academia, the hadith sciences come up lacking. In fact, as modern-day Islamic scholars and apologists like Sheikh Yasir Qadhi and Dr. Shabir Ally freely admit that this methodology relies on a blind faith acceptance of the reliability of the companions of Muhammed, and of the faithfulness of hadith transmitters, rather than on falsifiable evidence.
Now, a lot of critics of Islam stop at this point. They point out the flaws in the narration chain methodology (which we will discuss a bit more in depth in a later blog) and they leave it at that. However, that’s being unfair to the Islamic position. Because there is another method that Muslim scholars use for determining the authenticity of hadiths.
Mass Transmission methodology
As we just discussed, the main problems with the narration chain methodology is that it doesn’t deal with the content of the hadith literature, just the people who transmitted it, and narration chains are very easy to forge at a later date. However, in the hadith sciences, there is another methodology which attempts track the content of hadith literature- this is known as tawatur (multiple attestation). The basic idea of tawatur is to try to see how many independent narration chains a given hadith may have to try to verify it. If a given story has numerous independent, authentic narration chains that attest to the same exact hadith, then it’s considered to be mass-transmitted (mutawatir). If a story had a few independent sources at the beginning, but as time passed, the story became widely spread throughout the community, this hadith is considered to be well-known (mashhur). If a story only has one original source, and also, one chain of narration, then it’s considered to be solitary (ahad). In addition to these three categories, there are also two subcategories. For mass-transmitted and well-known hadiths, there are two classifications- meaning based transmissions (ma’anawi), and word for word transmissions (lafzi). This means, that for some multiply attested hadiths (either mass-transmitted or well known) the different narration chains yield similar but not identical stories. The core meaning has been preserved, but the exact wording is different between the different sources. For others, the exact wording has been preserved across all the narration chains. Of course, the word for word preservation is preferred but, Islamic scholars still consider meaning-based transmission to be reliable and acceptable.
This multiple attestation methodology is significantly more reliable than the narration chain methodology because it provides us with some way to reconstruct the original report by comparing different narration chains. Additionally, it helps us see which hadiths are less likely to be corrupted as the mass-transmitted and well-known hadiths are not just relying on the character of individuals to accurately transmit information orally, but on multiple different witnesses to help verify their stories. Modern scholars consider the mass-transmission methodology to significantly better than the narration chain methodology because it is able to approximate the established historical process of textual criticism, where various manuscripts of a text are compared in order to reconstruct the original text- it’s just in the case of hadiths, this is being applied to oral transmissions.
Making sense of the Hadith methodologies and literature
So, that’s a lot of information we’ve just waded through here- where does this leave us at the moment?
Basically, there are two systems that Muslim scholars use for authenticating hadiths. The narration chain system involves assessing the character of every person in the oral narration chain and then giving the hadith a grade that is correlated to the reliability of all the people [2]in that chain. The mass-transmission system involves figuring out which hadiths have multiple independent narration chains and giving the hadith a grade depending on how many independent narration chains attest to it. How do they relate to each other?
This is where things start looking like trouble for the Islamic position, because although in theory, they have two methodologies that, when combined could offer a decent amount of historical backing, the devil’s in the details. This is because practically speaking, there are precious few hadiths that are multiply attested (either well known or mass-transmitted). Of the 2600 [3] authentic hadiths collected by al-Bukhari and the 3000 by Muslim (the second most well-known hadith collector in the 9th century) less than 10 percent are considered multiply attested! The vast majority of those are well known, with only somewhere between 10 -300 (at the most) being considered mass-transmitted.
There is a great deal of disagreements amongst Muslim scholars of exactly how to define solitary, well known, and mass transmitted, but generally speaking, solitary reports require one narration chain, well known reports require 2-4 narrators at the beginning, but many later on, and mass transmitted reports require more than ten independent narration chains.
With these definitions, we can see that among the authentic hadith reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim, somewhere between 5-10 percent of reports are considered either well known or mass transmitted. What’s more, of those multiply attested reports, virtually all of them are multiply attested in meaning only- that’s to say that they aren’t identical in their wording across different narration chains. Again, scholars disagree on the exact number of word for word transmissions, but most estimate it as less than ten total.
So how do Muslims view these different hadiths? Because so few hadiths are multiply attested, Muslims are unable to use the mass transmission methodology as a default system for determining hadith authenticity. If they were to use the mass transmission methodology as their primary method, they would have to rule out almost all the hadith literature as being unreliable since it’s only singularly attested. What this means is that practically, the narration chain methodology is the only requirement for a hadith to be considered authentic and authoritative as revelation from God. Muslims have to trust that the people who transmitted the hadiths are reliable since the majority of the hadiths they accept are only attested by one solitary chain of narration. So, in the end, Muslims are perfectly comfortable with accepting the following things.
It is reasonable to put a high degree of trust in historical accounts that are multiply attested (well-known and mass-transmitted hadiths)
It is also reasonable to trust in historical accounts that are singly attested, as long as we know all the oral transmitters involved in the narration chain before it was written down, and as long as all the people in the chain were reliable.
If a Muslim wants to deny any of these claims, he is going to have to deny the overwhelming majority of the hadith literature, which in turn, is going to make it very difficult (if not completely impossible) to provide any evidence for the central miracle of his worldview.
My goal here is not to convince anyone that hadith literature is unreliable. Rather, the point of this post is to show what Muslims consider to be trustworthy historical evidence, and to show that they are willing to accept historical accounts that have a certain amount of ambiguity, transmission issues, and questions around attestation. In the next blog, I’m going to further extend this argument to the Qur’an itself to try to show that Muslims also accept the Qur’an despite some spotty transmission issues. After that, I’m going to assess the New Testament using the Islamic methodologies we’ve discussed here. My hope is to demonstrate that the New Testament passes the Islamic methodology test at least as well as the Qur’an and the Hadiths. Therefore, if a Muslim is willing to accept the hadith literature and the Qur’an as historically reliable, he must also be willing to accept the New Testament as reliable.
[1] This is a difference between Sunnis and Shi’as
[2] Technically, the grade is assessed according to the weakest link in the chain.
[3] That is the number of un duplicated hadiths. His total number is more like 7000
[4] Namely Shi’as
