The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009.
3. The First Big Bang–Hadith
Then you have a very rapid inflation in terms of content related to what Islam is or could be. We know about this inflation primarily from data coming from the late 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, but there’s no reason to doubt that this inflation began almost immediately and it took the form of people who knew Mohammad saying things about him. So you end up with a second body of material that was not divine revelation, but rather consisted of stories either quoting Mohammad as saying something, or representing him as doing something or expressing some preference for or opposition to a particular behavior. This cumulative body of material ultimately comes to be called the Sunnah, or the tradition in a very general sense. Each individual story is called a hadith, and the plural is one of those awkward Arabic plurals aḥādīth—Prof. Bulliet will therefore use hadith as both the singular and the plural.
Mohammad, when he was receiving direct communication from God, did so in a physical state that was recognized as being particular to that moment. Some people call it a trance, but that sounds so hokey that Prof. Bulliet doesn’t want to go on record as using that particular word to describe it. Mohammad was receiving revelation or reciting, subsequent to the received revelation, what he had heard in the revelation, because these were things he recited openly in public. A distinction was made between that state and the state of Mohammad simply going about his daily affairs. The former, those revelations that came in the Qur’an, were regarded as God’s word. So now what was the status of things that Mohammad said or did when he was not in a state of receiving God’s revelation, that is, the substance of what was in the hadith?
In time, a belief emerged that is not attested to in the Qur’an (and indeed, the Qur’an says virtually nothing about the person of Mohammad) that Mohammad was a perfect human being, a perfect man, and legends arose to explain this. For example, the idea was that there was a black spot in every human heart, but Mohammad when he was an infant had his chest opened by an angel and the black spot was removed. So unlike all other humans he had this flaw removed. As the notion that Mohammad was perfect or inerrant became stronger or more widespread, the importance of the hadith became enhanced. It comes to be thought by many people that what Mohammad said or did when he was not receiving revelation constituted a fuller expression of what a Muslim’s life should be like, and how it should be lived. Ultimately, the hadith in their aggregate come to be considered the second most important source of guidance for Muslims. However, you have strong differences over time as to how important this is as a source. One wing says that everything you do as a Muslim must be done on the basis of hadith, and you must be imitating the life of the Prophet. If you are a member of the Tablighi Jamaat, the world’s largest Muslim organization, and you’re on a subway platform in Paris and the train is about to leave, there is a certain prayer you have to say because that’s the prayer Mohammad said according to the hadith before he would start a journey. Every aspect of your life will be regulated—which sandal you take off first when you enter a mosque, which one you put on first when you leave, the minutiae of the life of a Muslim are laid out in the hadith.
This inflation meant that you had a book of revelation which was comparatively little known, in the sense that it was a book written within a population in which almost everyone was illiterate. So it was not well known as a written work; but it was as a recited work which was the main way you would become cognizant of the Qur’an. The problem was that it takes many, many hours to recite the Qur’an. If you say, “I want to learn about the Qur’an”, you say “I’m going to sit and listen to someone for the next four days read this aloud to me.” Not many people ever heard the entire Qur’an recited; they would hear pieces of it. The hadith were intrinsically divided into very, very short utterances. Typically the utterance would contain the story about what the Prophet did or did not proscribe, preceded by a statement by the reciter saying, “I heard from my teacher so-and-so, who heard from his teacher so-and-so, who heard from his teacher so-and-so, who heard from the Messenger of God, salla allahu alaihi wa sallam.” There was a chain of authorities recited prior to the recitation of the hadith itself. However, the recitation might be very, very short. The number of hadith that came into circulation probably is in the hundreds of thousands. (Prof. Bulliet says “probably” because we really don’t have a complete collection of the hadith.)
How did the hundreds of thousands of hadith get reduced to the collections of hadith that exist today? That is the subject of the next blog post, where the first “Big Crunch” comes after the expansion of hadith expressed in this post.
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