Should Individuals Study Hadith on Their Own?
Would you advise individuals to study hadith from al-Bukhari and Muslim on their own?
© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995
Any Muslim can benefit from reading hadiths
from al-Bukhari and Muslim, whether on his own or with
others. As for studying hadith, Sheikh Shuayb
al-Arnaut, with whom my wife and I are currently
reading Imam al-Suyuti's Tadrib al-rawi [The training
of the hadith narrator], emphasizes that the science
of hadith deals with a vast and complex literature, a
tremendous sea of information that requires a pilot to
help one navigate, without which one is bound to run
up on the rocks. In this context, Sheikh Shuayb once
told us, "Whoever doesn't have a sheikh, the Devil is
his sheikh, in any Islamic discipline."
In other words, there are benefits the ordinary Muslim
can expect from personally reading hadith, and
benefits that he cannot, unless he is both trained and
uses other literature, particularly the classical
commentaries that explain the hadiths meanings and
their relation to Islam as a whole.
The benefits one can derive from reading al-Bukhari
and Muslim are many: general knowledge of such
fundamentals as the belief in Allah, the messengerhood
of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace),
the Last Day and so on; as well as the general moral
prescriptions of Islam to do good, avoid evil, perform
the prayer, fast Ramadan, and so forth. The hadith
collections also contain many other interesting
points, such as the great rewards for acts of worship
like the midmorning prayer (duha), the night vigil
prayer (tahajjud), fasting on Mondays and Thursdays,
giving voluntary charity, and So on. Anyone who reads
these and puts them into practice in his life has an
enormous return for reading hadith, even more so if he
aims at perfecting himself by attaining the noble
character traits of the Prophet (Allah bless him and
give him peace) mentioned in hadith. Whoever learns
and follows the prophetic example in these matters has
triumphed in this world and the next.
What is not to be hoped for in reading hadith (without
personal instruction from a sheikh for some time) is
two things: to become an alim or Islamic scholar, and
to deduce fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) from the
hadiths on particulars of sharia practice.
Without a guiding hand, the untrained reader will
misunderstand many of the hadiths he reads, and these
mistakes, if assimilated and left uncorrected, may
pile up until he can never find his way out of them,
let alone become a scholar. Such a person is
particularly easy prey for modern sectarian movements
of our times appearing in a neo-orthodox guise, well
financed and published, quoting Quran and hadiths to
the uninformed to make a case for the basic contention
of all deviant sects since the beginning of Islam;
namely, that only they are the true Muslims. Such
movements may adduce, for example, the
well-authenticated (hasan) hadith related from Aisha
(Allah be well pleased with her) by al-Hakim
al-Tirmidhi that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give
him peace) said, Shirk (polytheism) is more hidden in
my Umma than the creeping of ants across a great
smooth stone on a black night . . . (Nawadir al-usul
fi marifa ahadith al-Rasul. Istanbul 1294/1877.
Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d., 399).
This hadith has been used by sects from the times of
the historical Wahhabi movement down to the present to
convince common people that the majority of Muslims
may not actually be Muslims at all, but rather
mushrikin or polytheists, and that those who do not
subscribe to the views of their sheikhs may be beyond
the pale of Islam.
In reply, traditional scholars point out that the
words fi Ummati, "in my Umma" in the hadith plainly
indicate that what is meant here is the lesser shirk
of certain sins that, though serious, do not entail
outright unbelief. For the word shirk or polytheism
has two meanings. The first is the greater polytheism
of worshipping others with Allah, of which Allah says
in surat al-Nisa, "Truly, Allah does not forgive that
any should be associated with Him [in worship], but
forgives what is other than that to whomever He wills"
(Quran 4:48), and this is the shirk of unbelief. The
second is the lesser polytheism of sins that entail
shortcomings in one's tawhid or knowledge of the
divine unity, but do not entail leaving Islam.
Examples include affection towards someone for the
sake of something that is wrongdoing (called shirk
because one hopes to benefit from what Allah has
placed no benefit in), or disliking someone because of
something that is right (called shirk because one
apprehends harm from what Allah has placed benefit
in), or the sin of showing off in acts of worship, as
mentioned in the sahih or rigorously authenticated
hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him
peace) said, The slightest bit of showing off in good
works is shirk (al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahihayn. 4 vols.
Hyderabad, 1334/1916. Reprint (with index vol. 5).
Beirut: Dar al-Marifa, n.d.,1.4). Such sins do not put
one outside of Islam, though they are disobedience and
do show a lack of faith (iman).
Scholars say that the lesser shirk of such sins is
meant by the hadith, for if the greater shirk of
unbelief were intended, the Prophet (Allah bless him
and give him peace) would not have referred to such
individuals as being in my Umma, since unbelief (kufr)
is separate and distinct from Islam, and necessarily
outside of it. This is also borne out by another
version of the hadith related from Abu Bakr (Nawadir
al-usul, 397), which has fikum or "among you" in place
of the words "in my Umma", a direct reference to the
Sahaba or prophetic Companions, none of whom was a
mushrik or idolator, by unanimous consensus (ijma) of
all Muslim scholars. As for sins of lesser shirk, it
cannot be lost on anyone why their hiddenness is
compared in the hadith to the imperceptible creeping
of ants across a great smooth stone on a black night;
namely, because of the subtlety of human motives, and
the ease with which human beings can deceive
themselves.
Similarly, al-Bukhari relates that the Prophet (Allah
bless him and give him peace) said: "Truly, you shall
follow the ways of those who were before you, span by
span, and cubit by cubit, until, if they were to enter
a lizards lair, you would follow them." We said, "O
Messenger of Allah, the Jews and Christians?" And he
said, "Who else?" (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo
1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil,
n.d., 9.126: 7320).
This hadith is also used by modern movements claiming
to be a return to the Quran and sunna, to suggest that
the majority of ordinary Sunni Muslims who follow the
aqida (tenets of faith) or fiqh of mainstream orthodox
Sunni Imams (whose classic works seldom fully
correspond with their views) are intended by this
hadith, while there is much evidence that the orthodox
majority of the Umma is divinely protected from error,
such as the sahih hadith related by al-Hakim that
"Allah's hand is over the group, and whoever diverges
from them diverges to hell" (al-Mustadrak, 1.116).
Such hadiths show that Quranic verses like "If you
obey most of those on earth, they will lead you astray
from the path of Allah" (Quran, 6:116) do not refer to
those who follow traditional Islamic scholarship (who
have never been a majority of those on earth), but
rather the non-Muslim majority of mankind.
It is fitter to regard the previously-mentioned
hadiths wording of following the Jews and Christians
as referring, in our times, to the Muslims who copy
the West in all aspects of their lives, rational and
irrational, even to the extent of building banks in
Muslim cities and holy places never before sullied by
usury (riba) on an institutional basis since
pre-Islamic times. Or those who promote divisive
sectarian ideologies under the guise of reform
movements among the Muslims, as the Jews and
Christians did in their respective religions.
Traditional scholarship is protected from such
misguidance by the authentic knowledge it has
preserved, living teacher from living teacher, in
unbroken succession back to the Prophet (Allah bless
him and give him peace). To return to our question,
without such a quality control process, the unaided
reader of hadith cannot hope to become a sort of
homemade alim, giving fatwas on the basis of what he
finds in al-Bukhari or Muslim alone, because the sahih
hadiths related to Islamic legal questions are by no
means found only in these two works, but in a great
many others, which those who issue judgements on these
questions must know. I have mentioned elsewhere some
of the sciences needed by the scholar to join between
all the hadiths, and that some hadiths condition each
other or are conditioned by more general or more
specific hadiths or Quranic verses that bear on the
question. Without this knowledge, and a traditional
sheikh to learn it from, one must necessarily stumble,
something I know because I have personally tried.
When I first came to Jordan in 1980, someone had
impressed upon my mind that a Muslim needs nothing
besides the Quran and sahih hadiths. After reading
through the Arabic Quran with the aid of A.J.
Arberry's Koran Interpreted and recording what I
understood, I sat down with the Muhammad Muhsin Khan
translation of Sahih al-Bukhari and went through all
the hadiths, volume by volume, writing down everything
they seemed to tell a Muslim to do. It was an effort
to cut through the centuries of accretions to Islam
that orientalists had taught me about at the
University of Chicago, an effort to win through to
pure Islam from the original sources themselves. My
Salafism and my orientalism converged on this point.
At length, I produced a manuscript of selected hadiths
of al-Bukhari, a sort of do-it-yourself sharia manual.
I still use it as an index to hadiths in al-Bukhari,
though the fiqh conclusions of my amateur ijtihads are
now rather embarrassing. When hadiths were mentioned
that seemed to contradict each other, I would simply
choose whichever I wanted, or whichever was closer to
my Western habits. After all, I said, the Prophet
(Allah bless him and give him peace) was never given a
choice between two matters except that he chose the
easier of the two (Sahih al-Bukhari, 4.230: 3560). For
example, I had been told that it was not sunna to
urinate while standing up, and had heard the hadith of
Aisha that anyone who says the Prophet (Allah bless
him and give him peace) passed urine while standing
up, do not believe him (Musnad al-Imam Ahmad. 6 vols.
Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d.,
6.136). But then I read the hadith in al-Bukhari that
the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) once
urinated while standing up (Sahih al-Bukhari, 1.66:
224), and decided that what I had first been told was
a mistake, or that perhaps it did not matter much.
Only later, when I began translating the Arabic of the
Shafi'i fiqh manual Reliance of the Traveller did I
find out how the scholars of sharia had combined the
implications of these hadiths; that the standing of
the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) to
pass urine was to teach the Umma that it was not
unlawful (haram), but rather merely offensive
(makruh)--though in relation to the Prophet such
actions were not offensive, but rather obligatory to
do at least once to show the Umma they were not
unlawful--or according to other scholars, to show it
was permissible in situations in which it would
prevent urine from spattering one's clothes.
In retrospect, my early misadventures in hadith
enabled me to appreciate the way the fiqh I later
studied had joined between all hadiths, something I
had personally been unable to do. And I understood
why, of the top hadith Imams, Imam al-Bukhari took his
Shafi'i jurisprudence from the disciple of Imam
Shafi'i, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr al-Humaydi (al-Subki,
Tabaqat al-Shafi'iyya al-kubra. 10 vols. Cairo: Isa
al-Babi al-Halabi, 1383/1964, 2.214), and why Imams
Muslim, al-Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, and al-Nasai also
followed the Shafi'i school (Mansur Ali Nasif, al-Taj
al-jami li al-usul fi ahadith al-Rasul. 5 vols. Cairo
1382/1962. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath
al-Arabi, n.d., 1.16), as did al-Bayhaqi, al-Hakim,
Abu Nuaym, Ibn Hibban, al-Daraqutni, al-Baghawi, Ibn
Khuzayma, al-Suyuti, al-Dhahabi, Ibn Kathir, Nur
al-Din al-Haythami, al-Mundhiri, al-Nawawi, Ibn Hajar
al-Asqalani, Taqi al-Din al-Subki and others; why
Imams such as Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Jawzi followed the
madhhab of Ahmad ibn Hanbal; and why Abu Jafar
al-Tahawi, Ali al-Qari, Jamal al-Din al-Zaylai (the
African sheikh of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, thought by
some to have been even more knowledgeable than him),
and Badr al-Din al-Ayni followed the Hanafi school.
These facts speak eloquently as to the role of hadith
in the sharia in the eyes of these Imams, for whom it
was not a matter of practicing either fiqh or hadith,
as some Muslims seriously suggest today, but rather,
the fiqh of hadith embodied in the traditional
madhhabs which they followed. There would seem to be
room for many of us to benefit from their example.
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