Masood N. Khan M.D.
It is well recognized that after Quran the holy scripture of Muslims, voluminous collection of hadith the sayings and actions of Prophet Mohammad is the most revered and consulted source for Muslims in religion. Meticulous work and research has gone into these encyclopedic compilations of Prophet’s sayings though not earlier than almost two centuries after hijrah, the year when he migrated to Madinah from Mecca. It is said there were at least 45 persons among his companions with the ability to write who were scribes for hadith. By the end of the first century after hijrah, there were numerous piecemeal collections of hadith in written form. They were replaced by more comprehensive and exhaustive compilations by later generations of Muslims, notable among them Bukhari, Muslim, Malik and others. These compiled sayings of Prophet have been scrutinized thoroughly, not only by the compilers themselves, but also by other contemporary scholars of hadith who also categorized them into different levels of authenticity. While this monumental work did deserve credit, it should be a shocking revelation for many Muslims that the Prophet himself emphatically forbade his companions from writing down anything he said. Among numerous of his sayings to this effect, a very authentic hadith stands out for attention quite invitingly. Reported by his companion Abu Saeed Alkhudry, it states that the Prophet said;
“Do not write anything from me except Quran and whoever has written anything from me other than Quran should erase it.”
Abu Hurairah has stated that after they were told not to record hadith, they gathered collections of what had been recorded at that time and burned them in Madinah. It is also reported that after Prophet’s departure from this world, Omar the second Caliph known for his wisdom and authority, seriously contemplated about a proposal to officially collect all the sayings of Prophet and after having prayed for divine guidance in this matter abandoned the idea and declared that he feared Muslims would focus on Prophet’s sayings to the neglect of Quran.
It is amazing that this advice of the Prophet was hushed up by scholars of hadith with a nonsensical explanation that the Prophet’s forbidding was to prevent Muslims from confusing his words with Quran. Little they realized that it was blasphemous to claim to not only have the knowledge of what was in his mind but also the audacity to express it with their own false ideas. Besides, since no such confusion with Quran has taken place even centuries after his sayings were recorded, God forgive, it could mean his concern was false. It seems numerous such make-believe explanations by the scholars to reinforce a perpetual misunderstanding in religion have over centuries buried the essence of the message under the rubble of an inflexible, rigid, heavy and stagnant structure that we call Islam. For many of us it is a familiar observation that scholars have gone to great lengths to emphasize that all the sayings of the Prophet to impress upon Muslims the importance of knowledge and education are meant exclusively for education of Deen, not for secular education just another example of an atrociously false and make-believe explanation of Prophet’s words.
Today several centuries later, seeing how Islam has shaped up Muslims’ approach to their faith in today’s world, the wisdom behind Prophet’s forbidding to record hadith and Omar’s decision to abandon such a proposal becomes glaringly evident. Muslims have no doubt messed up the divine balance of priorities in human conduct, delineated in Quran, by dealing with Ahadith (sayings) of Prophet irresponsibly and many a times even dishonestly, not to mention their misinterpretation and misapplication in resolving the challenges of the modern age. Such abuse of his sayings if combined paradoxically, as is the case, with extreme reverence to every reported word attributed to him to the degree that even debating or doubting it is considered near-blasphemy, the consequences are bound to be destructive. Retrospectively it seems Prophetic vision and Omar’s wisdom was rightly alarmed with such consequences. Muslims as the bearers of a faith, whose message was to unite whole mankind under submission to God, unfortunately have themselves divided into numerous sects based mostly on misquoted, misinterpreted and misapplied ahadith. Their often intolerant and extremist behavior, their lack of progress, their inability to critically evaluate and dynamically update their understanding of divine message revealed in Quran as it evolutionarily unfolds with time and their hairsplitting institution of Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence or law) are examples of the dreaded consequences. In this process have they not unfairly misrepresented their great Prophet? is a sad and painful question whose answer unfortunately is in affirmative.
The Muslim world is ubiquitously full of so called scholars or Imams who act, as somebody rightly pointed out, like ‘Hadith Slingers’ throwing hadith on audience left and right to either shut up those with differing points of view or to impose their own point of view with no regard to the authenticity, implied meaning, context, and its proper application.
Examples of ‘Hadith Slingers’ are rampant. A scholar/Imam in a Jumuah Khutbah exerting his scanty brain to emphasize man’s leadership in family that demands total obedience from women, mentioned two sayings of Prophet. In one he quoted the Prophet as saying, ‘woman was created deficient in intelligence Naqis-ul-Aql’. And in another ‘he had seen women in hellfire in greater number than men’. A young Muslim girl, a brilliantly educated professional supporting her family financially for her husband was jobless, walked out of the Masjid with her non Muslim friend who had come with her to know about Islam, both disgusted and disappointed. In an eye-witness incident in an American city an imported Imam and so called scholar actually obstructed a male teacher from entering an Islamic school because he was the only male teacher among all female teachers in the staff. A scene was created which resulted in hostile division and polarization in the community into two groups one with the Imam and the other with the administration of the school. The situation was affecting this newly established school that had been founded with lot of struggle and hard work so adversely that the administrators finally had to terminate the contract of the 65 year old male teacher and give him good lump-sum to prevent him from suing the school for gender discrimination. When asked the reason, the Imam quoted a hadith in which the Prophet said “when there is one man and one woman in an enclosed area there will be shaitan (the devil) with them.” He irresponsibly did not care to reflect correctly that there was a special definition of the word “khulwa” used in hadith meaning “a totally enclosed space invisible from others”. This did not apply to the situation in the school.
An Imam giving his sermon for a congregational prayer of Friday trying to explain the verse in the first chapter of Quran that says “lead us to straight path, other than the path of those who have earned thine wrath and who have gone astray.” passionately declared that those who have been cursed by God and those who have gone astray are none other than the Jews and Christians respectively. He then slung a hadith on the Friday Sermon attendees to support his misapplied interpretation. Two Christian friends of a Muslim man who had come to attend the Friday prayer to observe how Muslims offered their congregational prayers, walked out hateful of Muslims and their Prophet for having said so.
Three very damaging effects have occurred because of rampant availability of ahadith combined with the irresponsible abuse of them by Muslims.
A. Muslims lost the ability to understand that many of Prophet’s sayings relating to interaction among people, style of dress, preferences and acceptance of certain social norms, day to day living habits and certain decisions he took pertaining to situations that arose during his time were bound by the cultural, social, linguistic and geographic characteristics of his time and these parameters have drastically changed as life has evolved. This change is a natural order of creation that has been made indispensable by God. In a misguided understanding of obeying him Muslims began imitating the Prophet instead of following him without realizing that there is a marked difference between following an individual and monkeyishly copying him. The natural result of this lack of understanding was that Muslims began trying passionately to transplant the society that existed at the time of Prophet into the modern time, only to cause a misfit patch marked with backwardness, stagnation and bizarre behavioral traits inviting ridicule and contempt.
B. By stupidly trying to imitate the Prophet and foolishly attributing piety and virtue to such senseless imitation, Muslims have lost sight of the underlying message in his sayings and in his actions the core lesson that needed to be extracted by proper understanding of what he said and why he said. They certainly misrepresented him to the world. Instead of taking pride in the fact that their Prophet was revolutionarily progressive and that he provided very magnificent guiding principles for human community, Muslims portrayed him a very backward, intolerant, inflexible, highly restrictive and a narrowly focused person. Painfully, it seems Muslims have been more unfair to their own Prophet than what non-Muslims have been to him.
C. Muslims have developed a rigid code of conduct with rigid rules and regulations, comprehensively known as the Fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence, which is based upon numerous sayings of the Prophet. As opposed to broad directive principles given in Quran that can be utilized for guidance with a relaxed flexibility, nuances and subtleties of interpretation, they have developed nitty gritty rules and regulations and emphatic adherence to outward structure and rituals. Such an attitude has resulted into rigid applications of these rules in such a way that it created different schools of Fiqh promoting division rather than union.
Let us see what would have happened if Muslims had not recorded the ahadith so abundantly, much less abusing them. Islamic jurisprudence would have been reduced to what has been clearly spelled out in the Quran and a few sayings of the Prophet complementing the spelled out principles. The so called Islamic Jurisprudence would have been destructured into broad standards of living a morally upright life. Muslims would have been more focused on the lofty concepts of guidance than petty rules and regulations. They would have practiced certain acts of Ibadath mentioned in Quran like Salat, Zakat and Hajj with a deeper understanding than focusing on their outward ritualistic structure. As Quran would have been the only dependable source of guidance for them, they would have studied it more thoroughly, and would have readily accepted the wide range of its interpretation and application with broad-mindedness, tolerance and compassion. Lastly, they would certainly not have unfairly misrepresented their own Prophet by irresponsible interpretations and applications of his words.
Often the dishonest critique in the western media about Islam has referred to Muslims’ behavior as evidence of Islam’s damaging effect on human beings. But as somebody has said, it is not what Islam has done to Muslims, it is what Muslims have done to Islam, that is so damaging.