Criticism of hadith

The criticism of Hadith refers to critique directed towards collections of the reports quoting what the prophet Muhammad said verbatim on any matter, that are known as Hadith. The criticism revolves primarily around the authenticity of hadith reports and whether they are attributable to Muhammad, as well as theological and philosophical grounds as to whether the hadith can provide rulings on legal and religious matters when the Quran has already declared itself "complete", "clear", "fully detailed" and "perfected".

Background

According to Daniel Brown there exist three major causes of corruption of the Hadith literature: political conflicts, sectarian prejudice, and the desire to translate the underlying meaning, rather than the original words verbatim. Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the scholars' work, these false hadith have been largely eliminated.

Main areas of criticism

Authenticity

According to Wael Hallaq the central issue with hadith is its authenticity. From the legal theoretician's point of view, hadiths can be divided into mutawatir (transmitted via numerous chains of narrators) and ahad (anything that is not mutawatir). The medieval scholar Al-Nawawi argued that any non-mutawatir hadith is only probable and can not reach the level of certainty that a mutawatir hadith can. However scholars like Ibn al-Salah (d. 1245 CE), al-Ansari (d. 1707 CE), and Ibn ‘Abd al-Shakur (d. 1810 CE) found "no more than eight or nine" hadiths that fell into the mutawatir category.

Daniel Brown notes that a group referred to as Ahl al-Kalam, who lived during the time of Al-Shafii also questioned the authenticity of the Hadith. The Prophetic example, they argued, "has to be found elsewhere – first and foremost in following the Qur'an." The Mu'tazilites, who are the later Ahl al-Kalam, also viewed the transmission of the Prophetic sunnah as not sufficiently reliable. The Hadith, according to them, was mere guesswork and conjecture, while the Quran was complete and perfect, and did not require the Hadith or any other book to supplement or complement it." Racha El Omari, Associate Professor in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, determines the early Mutazilite attitude towards the hadith corpus in three main points:

The first consisted of simply transmitting ḥadīth. The earliest testimony of their transmission of ḥadīth is found in ʿAmr b.ʿUbayd (d.144/761), whose transmission of free-will ḥadīth led to their boycott by the ahl al-ḥadīth. This tendency was coupled with concern for scrutinizing the matn (content) of the ḥadīth; Muʿtazilites rejected those ḥadīth whose matn contradicted what they considered to be correct doctrine and interpreted away those positing multiple meanings. There are several lost works whose surviving titles point to this sort of content, such as Thumāma b. Ashras’s (d. 213/828) Kitāb al-sunan, Jaʿfar b. Mubashshir’s (d. 234/848–9) Kitāb al-āthār al-kabīr and Kitāb maʿānī al-akhbār wa-sharḥuha, and al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d. 255/868–9) Kitāb al-akhbār wa-kayfa taṣiḥḥ.

The second stance consisted of accepting a report if it was supported by some form of tawātur. This position dates back to Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, who held that there was evidence for the veracity of a report when it had four independent transmitters. His assumption was that there could be no agreement between all transmitters in fabricating a report. Wāṣil’s acceptance of tawātur seems to have been inspired by the juridicial notion of witnesses as proof that an event did indeed take place. Hence, the existence of a certain number of witnesses precluded the possibility that they were able to agree on a lie, as opposed to the single report which was witnessed by one person only, its very name meaning the “report of one individual” (khabar al-wāḥid). Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. 227/841) continued this verification of reports through tawātur, but proposed that the number of witnesses required for veracity be twenty, with the additional requirement that at least one of the transmitters be a believer.

The third stance among early Muʿtazilites was a skepticism of ḥadīth and its abuse as a polemical ideological tool. This concern was first voiced by Ḍirār b. ʿAmr (d. 728/815) who expressed outrage at the abuse of reporting by various groups and refused to accept any kind of report. In his al-Taḥrīsh wa-l-irjāʾ, Ḍirār is said to have attacked the abuse of ḥadīth by the ahl al-ḥadīth because of their polemical methods. In this attitude, he preceded al-Naẓẓām (d. between 220/835 and 230/845) in reacting to the rising power of the single report; yet, unlike al-Naẓẓām, he approved the authority of consensus as a source of religious knowledge.

Al-Naẓẓām expressed the strongest statement of skepticism of any source of knowledge outside of reason and the Qurʾān. For him, both the single and the mutawātir reports could not be trusted to yield knowledge. He recounted contradictory ḥadīth and examined their divergent content (matn) to show why they should be rejected: they relied on both faulty human memory and bias, neither of which could be trusted to transmit what is true. Al-Naẓẓām bolstered his strong refutation of the trustworthiness of ḥadīth within the larger claim that ḥadīth circulated and thrived to support polemical causes of various theological sects and jurists, and that no single transmitter could by himself be held above suspicion of altering the content of a single report. Al-Naẓẓām’s skepticism involved far more than excluding the possible verification of a report, be it single or mutawātir. His stance also excluded the trustworthiness of consensus, which proved pivotal to classical Muʿtazilite criteria devised for verifying the single report (see below). Indeed, his shunning of both consensus and tawātur earned him a special mention for the depth and extent of his skepticism, even among fellow Muʿtazilites.

Later, in nineteenth century British Raj, Syed Ahmed Khan "questioned the historicity and authenticity of many, if not most, traditions, much as the noted scholars Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht would later do." His student, Chiragh Ali, went further, suggesting nearly all the Hadith were fabrications. Although Muhammad Iqbal never rejected the hadith wholesale, he proposed limitations on its usage by arguing that it should be taken contextually and circumstantially. Ghulam Ahmed Pervez, a disciple of Iqbal, also noted, "no steps were taken by the Prophet or by his immediate followers to preserve the integrity of Hadith."

John Esposito notes that "Modern Western scholarship has seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the hadith", maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later." He mentions Joseph Schacht, considered the father of the revisionist movement, as one scholar who argues this, claiming that Schacht "found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which Schacht concluded that "the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of the Prophet, but apocryphal material" dating from later. Henry Preserved Smith and Ignác Goldziher also challenged the reliability of the hadith. Goldziher writes, in his Mohammedan Studies: "it is not surprising that, among the hotly debated controversial issues of Islam, whether political or doctrinal, there is not one in which the champions of the various views are unable to cite a number of traditions, all equipped with imposing isnads".

Patricia Crone noted that early traditionalists were still developing conventions of examining the chain of narration (isnads) that by later standards were sketchy/deficient, even though they were closer to the historical material. Later though they possessed impeccable chains, but were more likely to be fabricated.

Some Western academics have been critical of this "revisionist" approach as a whole, for instance Harald Motzki, considered by fellow scholar of Islam, Christopher Melchert, as "the undisputed dean of hadith studies", who "challenged the reigning conclusions of Joseph Schacht and the late G. H. A. Juynboll by demonstrating convincingly that their study of early hadith and law used only a small and selective body of sources, and that it was based on sceptical assumptions which, taken together, often asked the reader to believe a set of coincidences far more unlikely than the possibility that a hadith might actually date from the genesis of the Islamic community."

Theological or philosophical critiques

Early criticism of the Hadith came from a group referred to as Ahl al-Kalam, who lived during the time of Al-Shafii, and mentioned in his Kitab Jima al-Ilm, rejected the Hadith on theological grounds. Their basic argument was that the Quran was an explanation of everything (16:89). They contended that obedience to the Prophet was contained in obeying only the Qur'an that God has sent down to him, and that when the Qur'an mentioned the Book together with Wisdom, the Wisdom was the specific rulings of the Book." Daniel Brown notes that one of the arguments of Ahl al-Kalam was that "the corpus of Hadith is filled with contradictory, blasphemous, and absurd traditions."

At the turn of the twentieth century, Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) of Egypt wrote an article titled 'al-Islam huwa ul-Qur'an Wahdahu' ('Islam is the Qur'an Alone) that appeared in the Egyptian journal al-Manar, which argues that the Quran is sufficient as guidance: "what is obligatory for man does not go beyond God's Book. ... If anything other than the Qur'an had been necessary for religion," Sidqi notes, "the Prophet would have commanded its registration in writing, and God would have guaranteed its preservation." "Sidqi held that nothing of the Hadith was recorded until after enough time had elapsed to allow the infiltration of numerous absurd or corrupt traditions." Another seminal Egyptian critique of the ahadith came from his friend and fellow disciple of Rashid Rida, Mahmud Abu Rayya (d. 1970), who, in his 1958 book titled "Lights on Muhammad's Sunna" (Adwa' 'al al-sunna al-muhammadiyya), "like Sidqi", argued that "many supposedly authentic Hadiths were actually Jewish lore that had been attributed to Muhammad".

The earliest Western scholar to note a relation between the ahadith and Jewish influences was the French Orientalist Barthélemy d'Herbelot (d. 1695), who "claimed that most of the six books (the most important hadith books) and many parts of the hadith literature were appropriated from the Talmud", and later many others, like Alois Sprenger (d. 1893), Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921), etc continued in such direction ; a more elaborated study was "Al‐Bukhārī and the Aggadah" by W.R. Taylor, who "appropriated some of these hadiths from al‐Sahih of al‐Bukhārī and some haggadic texts from the Talmud and Midrash. Taylor compared these hadiths with the texts, and concluded that these hadiths were appropriated from the Talmud and Midrash. Afterwards, he also said that there were many narratives in the hadith literature in general, especially in al‐Bukhārī, that were taken from haggadic literature. He then studied the ways of and how these narrations were transmitted to hadith literature. According to Taylor’s opinion, a large amount of the oral information, narrations, stories, and folkloric information entered in Islamic literature in general, and hadith literature, in particular, during the transcription of the Talmud and Mishnah and after the formation of hadiths via the Jews living in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the church fathers and Christian community." Other scholars have different opinions on the same subject: Franz Buhl connects the ahadith with a more Iranian/Zoroastrian background, David Samuel Margoliouth with Biblical apocrypha and Alfred Guillaume puts more stress on a generic Christian influence.