Throughout their history, Muslims have rarely doubted that hadiths should play some role in understanding what actions were acceptable or unacceptable in God’s sight. Even the most intransigent rationalists of ninth-century Baghdad accepted that hadiths could be used as a source for law if narrated by two or four chains of transmission. Law has always been a central part of the Islamic faith tradition, but it has not required total certainty. The different Sunni legal schools, for example, accepted that differences of interpretation could exist regarding the sources of the law, and the dubious authenticity of some of those sources itself left room for further doubt.
Since the eleventh century, mainstream Sunni opinion has held that, even if considered reliable, hadiths narrated by only a limited number of chains of transmission (termed ahad hadiths, which are the vast preponderance of reports that make up the hadith collections) yield only strong probability (zann rajih) and not total certainty (yaqin) that they were truly the commands of the Prophet. This strong probability has been deemed acceptable for deriving Islamic law, so in practice both scholars and lay Muslims have treated sahih hadiths as being the authenticated words of the Prophet.
But what about theology, those tenets of what Muslims should believe about God, the cosmos, and a person’s fate after death? Did the Quran not lambast earlier communities who had made pronouncements about God and religion based not on revelation but merely on their own beliefs? The Quran had proclaimed that ‘they have no knowledge of this, they do but conjecture’ (Quran 45:24). If Muslim scholars held that the reports found in the great hadith compilations of the ninth century only yielded ‘strong probability’ as opposed to the total certainty yielded by the Quran, what should be the role of hadiths in theology?
By the twelfth century, Sunni Islam had become a very adaptive religious tradition that could accommodate four varied schools of law, divergent schools of both literalist and speculative theology, and numerous Sufi orders all under one ‘big-tent’ of deference to the Quran and the Prophet’s legacy. Since that time, Sunni scholars have been able to adopt the rational methods of Greek logicians and the thought of Gnostic Christians into the Islamic tradition, all the while sincerely professing their loyal adherence to the Prophet’s Sunna and rejection of bid‘a, or heretical innovation in religion.
The Sunni worldview, however, was not always so flexible. Sunni Islam began as the small and strictly conservative ahl al-hadith (Partisans of Hadith) sect in the eighth and ninth centuries. For these original Sunnis ‘the isnad is part of religion,’ and they preached that anyone who ‘impugns reports from the early community or denies anything from the hadiths of the Messenger of God, then doubt his Islam.’1 Even great scholars like Abu Hanifa, who promoted using independent legal reasoning, were heretics in the eyes of these original Sunnis.2
For these original Sunnis, in whose ranks we find early pillars of the hadith tradition like Ibn Hanbal, al-Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, and al-Tirmidhi, hadiths were not only reliable enough to inform Muslims of proper theology – they were its primary source. As early Sunnis proclaimed, ‘Islam is the Sunna, and the Sunna is Islam,’ and ‘the Sunna of the Messenger of God is not known by reason, but by transmission.’3
Some of the theological beliefs that these early Sunnis upheld (and have since become part of Sunni Islam) included:
A belief that God knew before creation whether a person would enter Heaven or Hell and that humans cannot comprehend the true nature of free will and predestination.
A belief in the ‘punishment of the grave’ (‘adhab al-qabr), or the notion that the dead are punished for their sins or rewarded for their good deeds in the grave even before they are resurrected on the Day of Judgment. This recompense will be determined by a test administered by two angels, Munkar and Nakir, who will appear to a person in his grave and ask him about God, the true religion, and the Prophet.
A belief that Jesus will return at the end of time along with another Messianic figure known as the Mahdi (The Guided One) and that together they will vanquish the Antichrist (Dajjal).
A belief that in the last third of the night God descends to the lowest heavens to answer the prayers for forgiveness of those Muslims who have stayed up late in worship (see the hadith examined at the end of Chapter 8).
A belief that on the Day of Judgment believers will be rewarded for their faith by actually seeing God.
A belief that there will be certain landmarks on the Day of Judgment. One of these is the Basin (al-Hawd), a pool where Muhammad will meet his community. Another is the Bridge (al-Sirat). This bridge crosses Hellfire, and, although the believers will cross it easily, for the unbelievers it will become narrower than a hair and sharper than a sword, causing them to fall into Hell.
None of these articles of faith is clearly laid out in the Quran. There are vague or ambiguous references to some of these tenets; the holy book contains verses such as ‘On that Day [of Judgment] their faces will be pleased, gazing at their Lord’ (Quran 75:22–23), which Sunnis have argued establish seeing God. But the only unambiguous description for these beliefs, and the only mention at all of others such as the Antichrist and the Mahdi, come from hadiths such as the following:
The hadith from the Companions ‘Abdallah b. Mas‘ud, Hudhayfa b. Yaman, Jundub, and others in various permutations that the Prophet said, ‘I will be the first of you to the Basin [on the Day of Judgment], with some from among you raised up with me but then falling back trembling. I will say, “O my Lord, these are from my community!” but it will be said, “You do not know what wrongs they committed after you!” ’ (From the Sahihayn of al-Bukhari and Muslim)
The hadith of the Companion Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri: We were afraid that there would come after our prophet some catastrophe, so we asked the Prophet of God and he said, ‘Indeed in my community there will be the Messiah (mahdi), he will come and live five or seven or nine (the transmitter was not sure).’ We asked the Prophet, ‘Five or seven or nine what?,’ and he said, ‘years.’ Then the Prophet continued, ‘And a man will come to the Messiah and say, ‘Give me, give me,’ and he will dispense whatever he can from his own clothing.’ (From the Sunan Ibn Majah and the Jami‘ of al-Tirmidhi)4
The hadith of Abu ‘Ubayda b. al-Jarrah, that ‘the Messenger of God said, “Indeed every prophet since Noah has warned his community of the Antichrist (Dajjal), so indeed I warn you of him.” Then he described him and said, “It may be that some of those who have seen me or heard my words will live to see him.” ’ (From the Jami‘ of al-Tirmidhi)5
The hadith of the Companion Abu Hurayra, from the Prophet: ‘Indeed the dead person goes to the grave, and the righteous man sits in his grave with no fear or terror. It is said to him, “What [religion] were you?” and he replies, “Islam.” And it is said to him, “Who is that man?” and he replies, “Muhammad the Messenger of God, he came to us with clear evidence from God and we believed in him.” It is said to him, “Did you see God?” and he replies, “It is not for anyone to see God.” Then a small glimpse of Hell is given to him, and he sees its people bound to one another, and it is said to him, “Behold what God has spared you!” Then he is given a glimpse of Heaven and sees its splendor and all within. It is said to him, ”This is your place, you believed in truth and died with that belief, so you will be resurrected in truth, God willing.” The iniquitous man, however, sits in his grave terrified. It is said to him, “What [religion] were you?” and he replies, “I do not know.” And it is said to him, “Who is that man?” and he replies, “I heard the people saying things about him so I said them too.” Then he is shown a glimpse of Heaven and its splendor, and it is said to him, “Look at what God has denied you.” Then he is shown a glimpse of Hell, and he sees its inhabitants bound to one another, and it is said to him, ”This is your place, you were in doubt, in doubt you died and in doubt you will be resurrected, God willing.” ’ (From the Sunan of Ibn Majah)6
The hadith narrated by Abu Hurayra in which the Prophet says: ‘Adam and Moses argued, and Moses said, “O Adam, you whom God created with His hands and breathed His spirit into have led the people astray and exiled them from Paradise.” Adam replied, “And you, O Moses, whom God purified with His own speech, do you blame me for committing an act which God had fated for me before the creation of the heavens and the earth?” So Adam bested Moses in the argument.’ (From the Jami‘ of al-Tirmidhi)7
The hadith narrated by Abu Hurayra that ‘The Messenger of God (s) came out to us while we were debating free will and predestination (al-qadar) and was angered to the point that his face turned red, as if a pomegranate had burst on his cheeks. He said, “Is this what you have been taught to do?! Is this what I was sent with!? Indeed those who came before you perished when they began debating this matter, so I have ordered you not to contend over it.” ’ (From the Jami‘ of al-Tirmidhi)8
The elaborate epistemological (having to do with the study of knowledge and its sources) classification of sources into those yielding probability or certainty, introduced into Sunni Islam in the tenth century by Muslim rationalists, was totally foreign to the early Sunnis. Hadiths that early Sunnis deemed authentic according to their system of criticism were the words of the Prophet and compelling in every sense. As Ibn Hanbal said about the hadith in which the Prophet foretells that Muslims will literally see God on the Day of Judgment, ‘We believe in it and we know that it is the truth.’9 When al-Tirmidhi presents a hadith describing how God will take people’s charitable donations ‘with His right hand,’ the author explains:
More than one scholar has said that this hadith and other narrations like it dealing with God’s attributes and the Lord most high’s descending every night to the lowest heavens, that these narrations have been established [as reliable] and are to be believed. They say that one should not fall into error concerning them and say ‘How could this be?’ It has been reported that Malik b. Anas, Sufyan b. ‘Uyayna, and ‘Abdallah b. al-Mubarak all said about such hadiths, ‘Take them as is without asking “How”.’ Such is the stance of the scholars from the People of the Sunna and the Early Community (Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama‘a).10
Contrast this with the stance of early Muslim rationalists like the great Mu‘tazilite author al-Jahiz (d. 255/869), who wrote ‘If not for reason, religions would never be upheld for God, and we would never have been able to distinguish ourselves from the atheists, and there would be no distinction between truth and falsehood.’11 For these rationalists, the idea that God could be seen or move from place to place, they felt, belittled the omnipotent and unknowable creator of the universe. Claims that people would be punished in their graves had no basis in the Quran and were only transmitted by glorified rumors – precisely what the Quran had warned Muslims against!
The tenth century witnessed a merging of the strict, literalist Sunni theological beliefs of Ibn Hanbal and the rationalist Mu‘tazilites’ theories of knowledge. The individual most responsible for this was Abu al-Hasan al-Ash‘ari (d. 324/935–6), who was born in Basra in southern Iraq and became a prominent member of the Mu‘tazilite rationalist school there. In 300/912–13, however, he had a series of dreams in which the Prophet appeared to him and instructed him to take care of his community, to follow the Sunna but not to abandon the ways of rationalist theology. He understood this as meaning that he should embrace the beliefs of the Sunnis but express and defend them with the tools of rational and speculative argument.
Al-Ash‘ari’s strategy of forcing the rationalist methods of the Mu‘tazilites into service for Sunni beliefs became hugely influential. It allowed a merging of the Sunni and Mu‘tazilite schools, and in the century after al-Ash‘ari’s death three Sunni scholars, Abu Ishaq al-Isfara’ini (d. 418/1027), Ibn Furak (d. 406/1015), and Abu Bakr al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013), combined hadith scholarship and the rationalist tools of the Mu‘tazilites into what became the dominant Ash‘ari school of theology. Because the ways in which knowledge is derived affect law as well as theology, this school was also a way of looking at legal theory. It is often referred to as the Ash‘ari, or ‘Majority (Jumhur)’ school of theology and legal theory. Along with the surviving ahl al-hadith school of the early Sunnis (discussed below), which still generally rejected all use of rationalist tools, the Ash‘ari/Majority school constitutes one of the two great Sunni theological and legal-theory orthodoxies.i
Abu al-Hasan al-Ash‘ari embraced all the tenets of the early Sunni theology, such as the punishment of the grave, seeing God on the Day of Judgment, and the denial of unrestricted free will, proclaiming that these were the beliefs of true Sunnis.12 Merging Sunni beliefs and the Mu‘tazilite vision of knowledge, however, presented serious challenges.
As we saw in Chapter 3, with the contributions of legal theory to hadith criticism, Mu‘tazilite legal theory and its Ash‘ari successors divided reports transmitted from the past into two distinct levels, each conveying its own level of certainty and suited to its appropriate tasks. Ahad reports, or those transmitted by only a few chains of transmission, yielded probable knowledge (zann) and were only suitable for establishing Islamic law or the details of ritual. The second type of reports was a massively transmitted (mutawatir) one, or a report transmitted by such a vast number of people in so many different places that it is impossible to imagine that anyone could have made it up or conspired to forge it.
i There is a third Sunni school, the Maturidi school, which closely resembles the Ash‘ari school and thus will not be discussed in this book.
Although the hadiths establishing the beliefs mentioned above by al-Ash‘ari appear in highly respected Sunni hadith collections such as the Sahihayn of al-Bukhari and Muslim, they were only ahad hadiths. The Mu‘tazilite and Ash‘ari traditions of epistemology had made clear the requirements that reports had to meet in order to convey absolute certainty. Legal theorists required that a hadith be transmitted by anywhere from five to forty transmitters at every stage in its transmission in order to be considered mutawatir. Other influential Ash‘aris, like al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085), avoided this focus on specific numbers. Instead, they argued that a hadith was mutawatir as long as it was transmitted via circumstances that made conspiring to forge it impossible and allowed it to convey immediate certainty to anyone who heard it. But as we saw in Chapter 3, Sunni hadith scholars admitted that no (or at most one) hadith actually met these requirements for being mutawatir!
How could the Sunnis who followed the new Ash‘ari tradition of theology and epistemology, then, justify their beliefs in things like the punishment of the grave or the coming of the Antichrist? They found two solutions: first, legal theorists like Abu Ishaq al-Isfarayini and Hanafi contemporaries like Abu Bakr al-Jassas (d. 370/981), developed a middle tier of reports between ahad hadiths and the almost unattainable certainty of mutawatir ones. This middle tier was called ‘well-known (mashhur)’ or ‘widespread (mustafid)’ and was defined as those hadiths that might have started out with only a few chains of transmission but then became massively transmitted as time went on. Their authority was guaranteed not by the breadth of their transmission, but rather by the fact that the Muslim community had agreed on their authenticity.13
Second, in the eleventh century, Ash‘ari hadith scholars and legal theorists like al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463/1071) and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) articulated the notion of reports that were ‘mutawatir bi’l-ma‘na’, or ‘massively transmitted in their meaning.’ Even if one particular hadith, they said, was not transmitted widely enough to meet the requirements for being mutawatir, what happened if you had a number of different hadiths that all shared one common element? Maybe no one hadith about the Messiah (Mahdi) could be considered mutawatir, but what if we collected all the hadiths mentioning him? We find a hadith in the books of al-Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah, al-Bayhaqi, and al-Hakim al-Naysaburi transmitted by several Companions in which the Prophet says, ‘When the black banners come from eastern Iran, go join that army, for indeed the Messiah is among them.’ We find another hadith from two Companions in which the Prophet tells his followers that, even if only one day were remaining before the end of the world, God would lengthen that day so that He could send a messiah from the descendants of the Prophet with the same name as him. In another hadith through ‘Ali, the Prophet predicts the coming of one of his descendants who will fill the earth with justice as it has been full of injustice. Even in the comments of the Companions, we find Ibn ‘Abbas saying that a ruler will come from the family of the Prophet, bringing justice so absolute that under his rule flocks of sheep will be safe from predators.14
If we take all these hadiths together they all agree on one common element: there is a Messiah who will come. According to Ash‘ari scholars, just as it is impossible to imagine that one massively transmitted hadith could have been forged, so it is impossible to imagine that all these separate hadiths could be forged with one common theme if that theme were not really representative of the Prophet’s words. By creating a middle tier of non-mutawatir hadiths whose certainty was assured by the consensus of the Muslim community or whose meanings appeared in many different hadiths that together could be considered mutawatir, Muslims from the mainstream Ash‘ari school of theology could justifiably believe in articles of faith found not in the Quran, but rather in their hadith collections.15
The Ash‘ari school of theology is often called the Sunni ‘orthodoxy.’ But the original ahl al-hadith, early Sunni creed from which Ash‘arism evolved has continued to thrive alongside it as a rival Sunni ‘orthodoxy’ as well. While Ash‘aris proclaimed the theological beliefs of the early Sunnis like Ibn Hanbal, the influence of Mu‘tazilite rationalism had led them to decline some of the most extreme early Sunni beliefs. Certainly, Ash‘aris affirmed that believers would ‘see God’ on the Day of Judgment, but this could not involve actually seeing God as we see objects in front of us today. How could an omnipotent creator, wholly outside creation, be seen? The Quran says that our vision ‘cannot grasp Him’ (Quran 6:103). Yes, authentic hadiths left no doubt that God does indeed ‘descend to the lowest heavens’ at some point in the night, but how could an unencompassable being engage in physical movement? Rather, it was God figuratively ‘approaching’ the believers by responding to their prayers.16
Ash‘ari theologians had accepted the Mu‘tazilite principle of content criticism. As al-Ghazali said, any hadith describing God in an anthropomorphic way or assigning Him some physical location must be interpreted figuratively or rejected as false.17 In a famous hadith known as the Hadith of the Slave Girl (hadith al-jariya), the Prophet tests to see if a slave girl was Muslim by asking her if he was a prophet and asking her where God was. She replied by saying ‘In the sky (fi al-sama’)’. The Prophet acknowledged this as a correct profession of faith and ordered that the girl be freed.18 Ash‘ari theologians, however, said that, although it is recognized as authentic, this hadith is only ahad and is not sufficient to establish belief.19 Extreme Ash‘aris have gone so far as to say that anyone who assigns a direction to God or believes that He actually moves is an unbeliever.20
In the wake of the tenth-century Ash‘ari synthesis, some Muslim theologians still maintained the strict details of the early Sunni creed. This continuation of the original Sunni theological school is often referred to as the Salafi school of theology (because they claim to follow the righteous early Muslim community, or the Salaf) or as followers of ‘Traditional (Athari)’ or ahl al-hadith theology. Famous adherents of this school include the Sufi ‘Abdallah al-Ansari (d. 481/1089) of Herat and the Damascene scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328).
For this Salafi school, reason has no role in determining theological beliefs. It is ‘nothing more than a tool for distinguishing things.’21 If the Prophet described God as descending during the night, who are we to insist that this descent occurs in one form as opposed to another? Ibn Taymiyya argues that the early Muslim community had no compunction about assigning a direction to God. He asserted that the Quran, the Sunna, and the practice of the righteous early community provided undeniable evidence that it was acceptable to point upward when referring to God (although he maintained that this meant that God was above the heavens, not in them).22
Adherents of the Salafi school of theology felt that the Ash‘aris had allowed the influence of rationalism to lead them astray from the true beliefs of Muhammad. How could they claim that a sahih hadith cannot provide a reliable basis for belief, demanded the Salafi scholar Abu Nasr al-Wa’ili of Mecca (d. 444/1052), but that frail human reason can?23 Hadiths like the Hadith of the Slave Girl that address theological tenets, al-Wa’ili continues, have been transmitted by numerous chains of transmission that are more than enough to make one’s heart feel at ease with believing in them.24 Unlike the wayward Ash‘aris, al-Wa’ili boasts, his school of theology is that of the true ‘People of the Sunna (ahl al-sunna), who stand fast on what the early generations (salaf) had transmitted to them from the Messenger of God.’25 Today this school of ahl al-hadith theology is espoused by the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia and the various other hadith-based Salafi movements (see Chapter 9 for more on this).
For an accessible discussion of the Mu‘tazilite rationalist school, including the translation of one of their texts, see Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu’tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol, by Richard Martin, Mark R. Woodward, and Dwi S. Atmaja (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). A selection of different theological creeds, including one attributed to Ibn Hanbal, is translated in Montgomery Watt’s Islamic Creeds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). Another excellent selection can be found in John Alden Williams, ed., The Word of Islam (Austin: University of Texas, 1994, Chapter 5). Two of al-Ash‘ari’s short treatises on theology have been translated in The Theology of al-Ash‘ari, trans. Richard McCarthy (Beirut: Imprimérie Catholique, 1953). For a discussion of apocalyptic visions in Islam, see David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2002).
1 Al-Barbahari, Sharh al-sunna, p. 81.
2 Al-Khatib, Tarikh Baghdad, vol. 2, p. 176.
3 Al-Barbahari, Sharh al-sunna, p. 59; Abu Nasr al-Wa’ili, Risalat al-Sijzi ila ahl Zabid, p. 99.
4 Jami‘ al-Tirmidhi: kitab al-fitan, bab ma ja’a fi al-mahdi .
5 Jami‘ al-Tirmidhi: kitab al-fitan, bab ma ja’a fi al-dajjal.
6 Sunan Ibn Majah: kitab al-zuhd, bab dhikr al-qabr wa al-bilya.
7 Jami‘ al-Tirmidhi: kitab al-qadar, bab ma ja’a fi hijaj Adam Musa.
8 Jami‘ al-Tirmidhi: kitab al-qadar, bab ma ja’a fi al-tashdid fi al-khawd fi al-qadar.
9 Ibn al-Farra, Al-‘Udda fi usul al-fiqh, vol. 3, p. 900.
10 Jami‘ al-Tirmidhi: kitab al-zakat, bab ma ja’a fi fadl al-sadaqa .
11 Al-Jahiz, Rasa’il al-Jahiz, vol. 1, p. 285.
12 Abu al-Hasan al-Ash‘ari, Maqalat al-islamiyyin, vol. 1, pp. 346–348.
13 Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim, pp. 183–193.
14 See Ahmad al-Ghumari, Ibraz al-wahm al-maknun min kalam Ibn Khaldun, p. 113.
15 Al-Sarakhsi, Usul al-Sarakhsi, vol. 1, p. 329.
16 Al-Kawthari, Maqalat, p. 145.
17 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, al-Mankhul min ta‘liqat al-usul, p. 286.
18 Sunan Abi Dawud: kitab al-ayman wa al-nudhur, bab al-raqaba al-mu’mina.
19 Taqi al-Din al-Subki, al-Sayf al-saqil fi al-radd ‘ala ibn al-Zafil, p. 94.
20 See, for example, al-Kawthari, Maqalat, p. 146.
21 Al-Wa’ili, Risala, p. 85.
22 Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu‘at al-fatawa, vol. 3, p. 97; Abu Zahra, Ibn Taymiyya, p. 269.
23 Al-Wa’ili, Risala, p. 101.
24 Al-Wa’ili, Risala, pp. 187–190.
25 Al-Wa’ili, Risala, p. 99.