Hadîths: A Key for Reading Today’s Islam

Last update: 2025-01-21 16:07:29

The imitation of the behaviour of the Prophet and his first companions is a pivotal element of Islam. In this perspective, one can easily understand how important hadîth literature is, i.e. the traditions (sunna in Arabic) recording that behaviour. An Associate Professor of Islam and Islamo-Christian studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Jonathan Brown in this book offers an anthological study of this literature. At a specific level the author examines the technical terminology that defines hadîths, analyses the way in which they were collected and handed down in Sunni Islam, and criticism on them produced down the centuries, bringing out at the same time how the debates and the events of history have shaped and influenced them. Although he analyses the Sunna through the perspective of Sunni Muslims (the author is a convert to Islam), Brown also gives space to Shi’ite Islam. Abandoning the discourse within Islam, in the second part of the book the author briefly goes over the orientalist debate about the authenticity of the Sunna and illustrates the position of sceptics such as Goldziher but also the stances of those who believe that a significant part of the hadîths are authentic, for example the German scholar Harald Motzki.

In addition to offering a complete and exhaustive picture of the Islamic tradition, the aim of the book is also to explore the debates that have arisen in contemporary Islam. More specifically, Brown attempts to answer two questions. The first is whether the classic method of interpreting the hadîth produced a correct portrayal of the Sunna of Muhammad; the second relates to the role that the Sunna should play in understanding Islam. Here the author identifies four different schools of thought, all of which were born during the course of the nineteenth century and answer these questions in a very different and opposing way: Islamic modernism, modern Salafism, conservative Salafism and Sunni traditionalism. The first, also known as the ‘Quran only movement’, is a phenomenon that was born in the Indian context during the second part of the nineteenth century with such scholars as Chiragh ‘Alî, Muhammad Aslam Jayrapûrî and Abû Rayya. As the name of the movement indicates, modernism preaches an exclusive reading of the Qur’an and believes that the hadîth do not in the least offer a truthful image of the Prophet. As regards the two forms of Salafism, the modern and the conservative versions, both look to the original purity of the Islam of the Salaf, the first pious generations of Muslims, through the lens of the Sunna, but they interpret it in different ways. The first (Sayyid Ahmad Khan, ‘Abduh and Rashîd Ridâ) hoped to recreate a pure Islam, although adapting it to the modern world, whereas the second, which arose Saudi Arabia with ‘Abd al-Wahhâb sought to retrieve Islam precisely in the forms lived by the Prophet, purging it of all its subsequent cultural additions. The survey ends with the school of Sunni traditionalist thought, which is the most widespread, according to which a good Muslim obtains the juridical, spiritual and theological instruments needed to live his life in the best way by following one of the four schools of law, by referring to Ash’arite theology, the Qur’an and the Sunna, and by deciding to join one of the Sufi brotherhoods.

Hadith. Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World – explains Brown – is an attempt to achieve a better understanding of the past, the present and the future of the Islamic world. This is because in all the debates within Islam regarding the most controversial questions – jihad and martyrdom, the rights of women according to Islamic law, the troubled relationship of the Middle East and the West, how a Muslim should pray and fast during Ramadan, and whether the Sunna is or is not a founding element of Islamic law – the hadîth are cardinal elements and keys by which to read, after the Qur’an, the present.

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