Misquoting Muhammad

MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy JONATHAN A. C. BROWN ONE W ORLD A Oneworld Book Contents First published in North America, Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications 2014 Copyright © Jonathan A.C. Brown 2014 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The moral right of Jonathan A.C. Brown to be identified as the FOREWORD Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 PREFACE All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Copyright under Berne Convention NOTES ON DATES, TRANSLITERATION, xxi A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library ABBREVIATIONS AND CITATIONS ISBN 978-1-78074-420-9 1. THE PROBLEM(S) WITH ISLAM 1 eBook ISBN 978-1-78074-421-6 A world full of God 1 Typeset by Tetragon, London Taking Islamic scripture and its interpreters seriously 5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY 2. A MAP OF THE ISLAMIC INTERPRETIVE TRADITION 15 Oneworld Publications The word of God, the teachings of His Prophet and the mind of man 17 10 Bloomsbury Street Obey God and obey His Messenger 18 London WC 1B 3SR The beginnings of the Islamic interpretive tradition 20 England Abu Hanifa and the Partisans of Reason 24 Malik and the authority of custom 28 The power of reason: the Greek legacy and Islamic theology 31 Shafi`i and the beginnings of Sunni Islam 35 The collection and criticism of Hadiths 39 Putting reason in its place in Sunni theology and law 41 The great convergence of Sunni Islam 46 Legal theory and its discontents 52 Sufism and inspiration from God 57 The iconoclasts and Islamic revival 62 Twilight of an era 67 3. THE FRAGILE TRUTH OF SCRIPTURE 69 , 6. LYING ABOUT THE PROPHET OF GOD 216 A crisis of confidence 70 The truth, what's that? 218 Canons and reading scripture with charity 72 Noble Lies and profound truths 220 The turning over of an era 78 The ulama as guardians 223 Reading scripture so its true 79 Appealing to the flesh: using unreliable Hadiths in Sunni Islam 229 The Islamic science of epistemology and interpretation (Usul 83 A familiar habit: assisting truth in Western scripture and historiography 233 The language of God and the rhetoric of His Prophet 89 Seventy-two virgins: pragmatic truth and the heavenly reward of martyrs 238 The Qur'an: valid for all times and places 91 The cost of Noble Lying 247 Hadiths and interpreting the life of the Prophet 94 Muslim objections to the Noble Lie 250 Changing times and the reasons behind scriptural law 96 Genre versus book: reviving an old approach to authenticating Hadiths 256 The interaction of the Qur'an and Hadiths in time 97 The dangers of Noble Lying for Muslims today 260 Into the weeds: the case of raising one's hands in prayer 103 Pragmatic truth and the beauty of Noble Lying 263 The summer of the liberal age 109 7. WHEN SCRIPTURE CAN'T BE TRUE 267 4. CLINGING TO THE CANON IN A RUPTURED WORLD 114 The Qur'an and domestic violence 268 Upstarts at the end of time 114 Who decides what God means? 272 The treason of interpretation 116 Courts have the final word 280 Heresy acceptable: ruptures in canonical communities 118 Saying 'no' to the text and the hermeneutics of suspicion 286 Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them: 121 APPENDIX I: MARRACCI AND OCKLEY ON 291 jihad and (re)interpreting scripture AISHA'S MARRIAGE TO THE PROPHET Women cannot lead: historicizing scripture versus God's inscrutable law 130 APPENDIX II: HADITHS ON A PARENT KILLING HIS CHILD 294 Sex with little girls: interpreting scripture amid changing norms 141 294 The ulama, the state and Shariah authenticity without scripture 148 Ratings of the Hadith by Muslim critics 294 The court must not be political - 157 Examination of individual narrations morality and truth in a ruptured world My evaluation of the Hadith 296 Citations for Hadith of a Father Killing His Child 296 5. MUSLIM MARTIN LUTHERS 161 AND THE PARADOX OF TRADITION APPENDIX III: THE HADITH OF RIBA AND INCEST 298 The paradox of interpretive control 161 Ratings by Hadith critics 298 The rule of interpretation in the conflict 168 My evaluation of the Hadith of Riba and Incest 299 between Sunni and Shiite Islam Citations for the Hadith 300 Tradition as governor, scripture as subject 175 APPENDIX IV: THE HADITH OF THE SEVENTY-TWO VIRGINS 302 Killing one's children: tradition betraying scripture 179 Overall rating 304 Reconsidering the penalty for apostasy: tradition redeeming scripture 186 Citations for the Hadith of the Seventy-Two Virgins 305 Women leading prayer: should scripture trump tradition? 189 307 The 'Qur'an Only' movement 200 NOTES No escaping tradition 204 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 331 The price of reformation 207 349 The guide of tradition: a necessary but thankless job 214 INDEX 14 I MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD in and revealed my own intellectual arrogance. It was sitting at the feet of particularly capable ulama in Al-Azhar and elsewhere, watching thern perform the delicate and controversial tasks of interpreting Islam's scrip- tures in a fraught time, that I really learned to think. Their story deserves to be told in its own right. Though I try to limit myself to narrating this journey, there are points at which I cannot keep silent and, as one says in Arabic, 'pour out my own bucket from the well: I will begin this book as 2 the ulama have always ended theirs, with the admission that I may well be wrong and that 'God knows best.' A Map of the Islamic Interpretive Tradition T i ost in the urban chaos between the tangled lanes of Old Delhi and the leafy boulevards of the new city lies a Muslim graveyard, unexpectedly inhabited by both the quick and the dead. At its center is a school. When I came to visit the Rahimiyya Madrasa, I found its entrance down a narrow path lined with brightly dyed yarn hung to dry between tombstones, obstructed by an impromptu soccer match and guarded by a solitary goat wearing a recycled sports jacket. The school is the modern descendant of the seminary founded by the eighteenth-century family of scholars who now lie buried in the humble mausoleum around which the graveyard grew. I had for some time hoped to stand there above one grave in particular and pay my respects. When historians try to map out the past, it is often to make sense of a present that, like the fluid chaos of Delhi's streets, offers glimpses of some elusive order that must be there but seems always just out of frame. As a historian, I had found a convincing order brought to the past in the writings of that one grave's occupant. The more I pondered the turmoil of Egypt's revolution, and indeed all the scenes of great intellectual struggle in the Muslim world, the more it seemed that the paths to the present day all passed sooner or later through this great scholar's mind. In 1732, Shah Wali Allah, the scion of a learned clan of Delhi ulama, returned home from his studies in the distant Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina to take up his father's place teaching at the Rahimiyya Madrasa. The school lay just outside the city's colossal red sandstone walls, which extended impossibly far into the distance and stood in relief against the lush expanse of green stretching to the horizons of the Ganges plain. Women cloaked in scarlet and yellow, curtained palanquins carrying merchants W 16 I MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD A MAP OF THE ISLAMIC INTERPRETIVE TRADITION I 17 and gentlemen, camels, carts and elephants strolled in and out of sight on revealed texts; between the outward strictures of God's law and the through the city gates. This was the grand capital that India's Muslim rulers mystical longing for God Himself; between following in the accumulated had chosen five centuries earlier as their base from which to rule over a footsteps of those who had built the rich Islamic tradition over the centuries vast land, one quarter of whose population would one day enter the fold and returning to its origins in order to renew it. of Islam. The Muslim Mughal Empire that shaped Shah Wali Allah's world Reading Shah Wali Allah's book today, the ideological sparring and was held together by its Turkic warrior princes in fragile alliance with dramas that continue to shape the Muslim world seem smoothed into order Hindu maharajas across northern India. The language of this blended ruling on the page as the author untangles them, tracing the roots of diversity class, and Shah Wali Allah's mother tongue, was Persian. The artistic style and fragmentation in the Islamic community of his own day. Shah Wali of their palaces blended the thousand-pillar porticoes of Indian temples Allah is a worthy guide to the rich terrain of Islamic tradition, leading his and the delicate ceramic tiles of Iran. It was indeed far from the craggy reader from the dawn of the faith to the cusp of the modern world, when ravines and earthen-tone huts of Mecca, where Shah Wali Allah's religion the interpretive order that he exemplified was shattered. He wrote his had been born almost twelve hundred years earlier. bookin the language of Islamic scholarship, Arabic, and entitled itAl-Insaf Yet Shah Wali Allah, perhaps more than any other mind of his day, fi Bayan Asbab al-Ikhtilaf, 'An Evenhanded Elucidation of the Causes of seemed to epitomize the breadth and depth of Islam's intellectual tradi- Disagreement2 tion.

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