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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