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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.  

4.  The Big Crunch—Strong vs. Weak Hadith

It is universally agreed, among Muslim scholars and among Western, non-Muslim scholars, that many of the hadith were spurious in the sense of being invented in some way and not reflective or what Mohammad said or did, or downright tendentious, that is, put into circulation for a particular purpose.   And people more or less agreed that you could observe this more or less from the content.   For example, if Mohammad has a hadith in which he says “444 years after the first revelation the government will collapse,” then you suspect that that was probably put into circulation somewhere around 443.   Of course God could have revealed this to Mohammad, but remember this is not supposed to be revelation.   The problem was there was no certain way to determine what was spurious and what was genuine.   Prof. Bulliet is firmly of the belief that a good deal of what ultimately gets preserved is genuine.   This is opposed to a Western school of thought that maintains that all hadith are frivolous inventions for later tendentious reasons.

Separating which hadith was strong from which was weak was a conceptual challenge.   If you knew a lot of hadith, you could say “I wonder if this one is accurate and this one is inaccurate.”  If you knew a lot of hadith, you discovered that they were contradictory, that in one hadith Mohammad says “it is prohibited to eat lizard”, and in another he says, “There’s nothing wrong with lizard, it’s just that I don’t personally eat it because it disagrees with me.”  Then you have a disagreement, and a lot of the hadith do disagree at some level.  Prof. Bulliet mentioned the example with the lizard simply because it becomes a favorite fantasy of later Iranians that Arabs are lizard-eaters, that is to say, barbarians, as opposed to sophisticated Iranians who do not eat lizard.   Therefore, you can easily maintain that verses in which Mohammad sanctions the eating of lizard were invented by Arabs who were defending themselves against these nasty Persians who were accusing them of being lizard-eaters.  Minor details like this come up again and again.  How would you resolve this?  If you didn’t have a direct contradiction, why would you resolve it?

The way in which these hadith were transmitted, which is by word of mouth in an oral chain of authority, makes it clear that when people learned hadith, they didn’t learn it by reading it in a book, they learned it by hearing someone recite it.

While we don’t know the exact way in which recitation of the hadith was done in the earliest period, we do have later books that talk about the etiquette of hadith recitation.   What should the reciter do before class?   Well, you should put on a clean white garment and headdress, you should put on a little perfume, you should look into the mirror and comb you hair (you’ve got to look nice), or nowadays wear a necktie, I guess.   There’s the etiquette for the teacher, and etiquette for the class, how you enter the room, how you respond to the presence of the teacher, and so on.   It’s very clear when you read a book on etiquette regarding the recitation of the hadith that the reciter is in a sense the embodiment of the Prophet.   In other words, he is saying, “I heard from A who heard from B who heard from C who heard from Mohammad the Messenger of God—I am now reciting the words of the Prophet, and I am adopting the seriousness of demeanor and the seriousness of purpose that would be appropriate for the Prophet himself if he were standing before you.”

The people in the class were largely young people, particularly once you get into the 800s—a century and a half after the initial conquests of Islam.    The reason they were young people was because as you go from generation to the next, getting farther away from the Prophet himself, and your chain of authorities of A to B to C becomes longer.   Even though it was warned against, there was nevertheless a strong impetus to secure the shortest chain of authority that you could have.   So there was a high premium placed on having extremely young people listening to hadith recited by very old people.   This is your primary educational experience within the early centuries of Islam, and it highlighted the ends of the age table.   This is opposed to our educational system, which says that between 18 and 25 you get your education.   Before 18 it doesn’t really count, because you know what it was like (laughter), and after 25 it’s too late, you’re already formed, as some of the older members here would agree with me that nothing happens after that (laughter).

So we have a system that privileges a certain piece of the age table, and they have a system which privileged other pieces, the very young and the very old, because then you would have the shortest number of steps going back to the Prophet.   In fact, after you were around 18 or so, you would continue to listen to people reciting hadith, but you would quit taking notes.  If you were ever called upon later on in life to teach hadith, the notes you would take after the age of 18 would not be very useful, because there is not a big enough time gap.  The class let’s say in the 800s or 900s would often have boys from 5 to 8 years old just starting out, many of them with a father or an uncle who would take down in Arabic a dictation of the words said by the teacher, and a sprinkling of older people.  And then someone may quit learning hadith at the age of 18, not do anything with them for the next 30 years, and then suddenly be invited to start teaching hadith, perhaps on the grounds that he is the only surviving student of a certain source.   Whether you ever taught hadith had a lot to do with the vagaries of survival of teachers and students.

If you were in a class, you certainly had no impetus to question the truth of what you heard.  What you heard was the Prophet before you giving you instructions, giving you knowledge, giving you guidance, telling you how to lead your life—that was the Islam you were learning.   And yet, if you had hundreds of thousands of hadith, and if in any given community, you might have ten thousand in circulation, what Islam was differed from one community to another, because the array of hadith differed from what one community to another.  We know this because we have an enormous amount of information about the practice of hadith scholars traveling from place to place in order to listen to hadith because they knew what they heard in city A would differ from what they heard in city B.  During this first inflation period you had a very large empire that had been conquered by Arab armies in the course of the 630s and the 640s.   After the year 711 AH (, when the geographical limits of the early expansion had been reached, you had small communities of Muslims spread from Spain to Pakistan probably aggregating not much more than a million people.   They formed a ruling elite over a population that was many times larger than their own, so they were a sparsely distributed ruling elite.  They were largely focused in particular camps or towns, because the policies of the rulers were designed to keep the Muslims largely together so they could be brought on military campaigns when needed.   This didn’t always happen everywhere; Spain and Syria were somewhat different.   But by and large you had small islands of Muslims spread over an enormous geographical area completely surrounded by Christians, in Iran by Zoroastrians, and occasionally by Jews, Buddhists or even pagans.  It was a very widely spread community; each community had its sunnah, had its notion of what Islam was, not because they had generated a notion of a difference, but because they had different bodies of authoritative material.

They all the Qur’an or at least we can assume that they all had the Qur’an, but what they had of hadith varied, and what they had of hadith was contradictory, and a some substantial portion was spurious.   So what occurred wasn’t that you had individuals who sat in a class and said, “gee, I think Professor so-and-so told us a fib when he said that Mohammad didn’t like to eat garlic.  I bet Mohammad did like to eat garlic”; nobody was thinking that.  What you had instead was that you a had a group of people who were specialists and who knew, had heard, had written down thoroughly often literally tens of thousands of hadith.   They realized that this was getting too big and that it was getting out of hand.  So they started to cull the corpus to extract those that were sound and discard those that were weak.  In the 800s you had a number of collections, ultimately 6 for Sunnis, 4 for Shiites, of sayings of the Prophet that were sound.  The scores of thousands of others disappeared.   In making the collections, there was either an unconscious or a conscious desire to obscure geographical difference.   The collections were organized by topic rather than by locale where the hadith were collected.  This is because the underlying motive was not simply to discard the unsound and preserve the sound, but it was also to try and make the sunnah uniform and coherent, and you had to discourage the idea that you had localization because Islam should be all one thing.

In the next post, Prof. Bulliet relates how the combination of the Qur’an plus the sunnah (the collections of hadith) became the second singularity from which later Islam emerged.

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