Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium - Softcover

Blecher, Joel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520295943 ISBN 13: 9780520295940

Publisher: University of California Press, 2017

Synopsis

Although scholars have long studied how Muslims authenticated and transmitted Muhammad’s sayings and practices (hadith), the story of how they interpreted and reinterpreted the meanings of hadith over the past millennium has yet to be told. Joel Blecher takes up this charge, illuminating the rich social and intellectual history of hadith commentary at three critical moments and locales: classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and modern India. Weaving together tales of public debates, high court rivalries, and colonial politics with analyses of ethnographic field notes and fine-grained arguments adorning the margins of manuscripts, Said the Prophet of God offers new avenues for the study of religion, history, anthropology, and law.

 

About this title

About the Author

Joel Blecher is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies,Oriens, and several edited volumes.

From the Back Cover

"Joel Blecher's work is truly pioneering in calling attention to the importance of the hadith commentarial tradition for Muslim history. Said the Prophet of God is that rare ambitious work that draws on textual analysis from early and classical Arabic sources as well as anthropological fieldwork. This is a major contribution that opens new lines of inquiry and will quickly become a classic."--Asma Sayeed, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Director of the Islamic Studies Program, University of California, Los Angeles

"This is a beautifully written book tackling one of the most important Islamic textual sources. Blecher convincingly unlocks an overlooked commentary tradition and does so in a dauntingly wide-ranging fashion. The reader is taken on a fascinating journey from Spain via Egypt to South Asia, from the ninth century to the present, and across a variety of methodological approaches. A real pleasure to read."--Konrad Hirschler, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Institute of Islamic Studies, Free University of Berlin

"Said the Prophet of God is a first-rate monograph on a topic that has so far never been researched--the commentary tradition on hadith literature. Bridging historical periods and linguistic mediums, Blecher states that hadith is a universal Islamic phenomenon that needs global attention and a theoretical lens that looks beyond time periods and language barriers. This book makes a profound intervention in the field, opening a new research trend and becoming the starting point for any further scholarship on hadith."--Walid Saleh, Professor of Religion, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto

From the Inside Flap

“Joel Blecher’s work is truly pioneering in calling attention to the importance of the hadith commentarial tradition for Muslim history. Said the Prophet of God is that rare ambitious work that draws on textual analysis from early and classical Arabic sources as well as anthropological fieldwork. This is a major contribution that opens new lines of inquiry and will quickly become a classic.”—Asma Sayeed, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Director of the Islamic Studies Program, University of California, Los Angeles

“This is a beautifully written book tackling one of the most important Islamic textual sources. Blecher convincingly unlocks an overlooked commentary tradition and does so in a dauntingly wide-ranging fashion. The reader is taken on a fascinating journey from Spain via Egypt to South Asia, from the ninth century to the present, and across a variety of methodological approaches. A real pleasure to read.”—Konrad Hirschler, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Institute of Islamic Studies, Free University of Berlin
 
“Said the Prophet of God is a first-rate monograph on a topic that has so far never been researched—the commentary tradition on hadith literature. Bridging historical periods and linguistic mediums, Blecher states that hadith is a universal Islamic phenomenon that needs global attention and a theoretical lens that looks beyond time periods and language barriers. This book makes a profound intervention in the field, opening a new research trend and becoming the starting point for any further scholarship on hadith.”—Walid Saleh, Professor of Religion, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
 
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Said the Prophet of God

Hadith Commentary across a Millennium

By Joel Blecher

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Joel Blecher
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29594-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi, 
Note on Transliteration and Conventions, xiii, 
Introduction, 1, 
I. ANDALUSIA IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE UMAYYADS, 19, 
1. The Perils of Public Commentary, 21, 
2. The Inner World of the Interpretive Tradition, 30, 
II. EGYPT AND SYRIA UNDER THE MAMLUKS, 47, 
3. For Sultans, Students, and Scholars, 49, 
4. Rivalry and Revision in the Manuscript Age, 65, 
5. Oratory in the Shade of the Sultan's Garden, 80, 
6. Gatekeepers of the Law, 98, 
7. Mysteries of the Thresholds, 111, 
8. The Art of Concision, 129, 
III. EARLY MODERN INDIA AND BEYOND, 141, 
9. Trustees across the Ocean: Gujarat to Deoband to Bhopal, 143, 
10. Lost in Translation: Arabic to Urdu to English, 164, 
Epilogue: Islamism, ISIS, and the Politics of Interpretation, 184, 
Acknowledgments, 197, 
Notes, 201, 
Works Cited, 247, 
Index of Names and Titles, 263, 
Index of Subjects and Terms, 267, 

CHAPTER 1

The Perils of Public Commentary

If he answered yes, all would judge him, justifiably,
the readiest and most gratuitous of impostors;
if he answered no, he would be judged an infidel.

— Jorge Luis Borges

In the fifth/eleventh century, after having traveled to Mecca to study hadith, an Andalusian scholar returned to the Iberian Peninsula with a report whose plain meaning offered a provocative suggestion: "Muhammad did not write well, but he wrote." For at least a century prior, a powerful and popularly received doctrine had evolved that held that the Prophet's status as "unlettered" (ummi) was a miraculous proof of his sincerity. After all, they claimed, an unlettered Prophet could not have been capable of composing the Qur'an. Interpreters pointed to a verse from the Qur'an in which God tells Muhammad, "You did not inscribe it with your right hand lest those who falsify have cause for doubt." A hadith that suggested otherwise required serious explanation.

While many Muslim scholars of the time circumvented this hadith in various ways, Abu al-Walid al-Baji (d. 474/1081) chose to take the text at face value: Muhammad did write by hand. But Baji did not scribble this interpretive impression in the margins of a gloss, where it could easily be forgotten. He offered this reading in public, at a session in which he interpreted hadith for a live audience (majlis min tafsir al-hadith). A local and transregional fiasco followed in its wake, which drew poets, preachers, politicians, and the populace into the fray, some going as far as to say that Baji had committed a capital offense and to demand that he be held accountable.

For one recent historian, the event marked but one data point within a larger trend of polemical debates about the status of the Prophet during this period, and how they went beyond the restricted circles of hadith scholars, even "spilling over into public demonstrations." But the Baji affair also offers us rare insight into the dynamics of an early live commentary session on the hadith. Centuries later, live reading sessions on Sahih al-Bukhari would reach new heights at the citadel in Mamluk Cairo, where readings took place in the presence of the sultan, the chief justices, and the civilian elite. But even at this early date — one of the earliest documented live hadith commentary sessions — the Baji affair teaches us that live commentaries could serve as a highly visible forum in which standards of excellence as well as material and social rewards were at stake.

By examining the Baji affair in greater detail, then, I hope to convey a larger historiographical point: reading in Islamic societies, embodied by live performances and handwritten materials, can be rewardingly understood at the intersection of both social and intellectual history. After all, the Baji affair teaches us that while commentators interpreted and debated in order to compete for survival in the everyday scholarly scene, they were simultaneously reading to achieve certain interpretive excellences that were defining of and defined by the cumulative tradition of commentary.

DID MUHAMMAD WRITE BY HAND? A LIVE DEBATE

The story of the Baji affair begins in the seaside town of Denia, on the southeastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, in the latter part of the fifth/ eleventh century. This was an era of intense political turmoil in which the Umayyad caliphate in Cordoba sighed its last breath, giving way to an era of party kings. In addition to the political and economic tumult, or perhaps because of it, travel from Iberia eastward to the Near East for study and commerce declined. Denia was one of some twelve cities across the Iberian Peninsula in which Muslim scholars are known to have studied, taught, and worked, although it was on the periphery. At the time, almost a third of Muslim scholars documented had settled in Cordoba, since it offered relatively greater stability during the unrest.

Hadith had been circulating in the Iberian Peninsula by the third/ ninth century, many of which were introduced through legal compendia and collections of traditions, such as Abu Dawud's Sunan and Malik's Muwatta', the latter of which held the highest status in the Andalusian context. Sahih al-Bukhari's circulation in the Islamic West only preceded the Baji affair by approximately half a century, as a hadith scholar from Tripoli is credited with the earliest systematic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari in the West. Alongside Khattabi's, it would have been the earliest such work worldwide.

Prior to the fall of the caliphate, a number of Andalusian scholars who traveled eastward for business, study, or pilgrimage returned home having received recitations of Sahih al-Bukhari on high authority. This fed the growing interest in the science of evaluating hadith transmitters ('ilm al-rijal) in Andalusia. One hadith scholar from this period who had spent time studying hadith abroad was so devoted to this practice that it was said that Bukhari appeared to him in a dream in order to settle a technical question on the reliability of a transmitter who had fallen short of the compiler's standards.

Likewise, Baji, a major voice among Maliki hadith scholars after the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, had spent years in Mecca immersed in study with some of the greatest living authorities on hadith. One of them was from as far east as Herat, in what would be modern-day Afghanistan. Just as Baji had returned home, in the middle of the fifth/ eleventh century, two of the earliest Andalusian authorities on Bukhari's collection passed away, al-Muhallab ibn Abi Sufra of Almeria (d. ca. 435/1044) and his better-known student, Ibn Battal of Cordoba (d. 444/1052–53 or 449/1057). Although students were still busy copying and transmitting Muhallab's and Ibn Battal's written commentaries on Bukhari's collection within Andalusia, local audiences no doubt turned to Baji as the nearest living authority on it. Indeed, Baji's personal link to the chains of transmission to this collection was so prestigious that his dictation of it to a student was used as the basis for later manuscripts in the Islamic West for the centuries that followed.

Thus Baji traveled from town to town, including Denia, teaching, transmitting, and interpreting canonical collections of hadith that he had committed to memory while abroad. Although Baji never composed a systematic commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari in writing, his multivolume commentary on Malik's Muwatta' (The well-trodden path),a legal compendium with even greater stature within the Andalusian context, established him as an enduring authority in the cumulative tradition of hadith commentary.

So one can understand why, in little Denia, Baji's live commentary session on hadith from Bukhari's collection would have been a sight to see and a place to be seen, a high-profile forum in which one's professional reputation could be made — or even broken — and where key theological and intellectual commitments could be challenged or affirmed. Apparently Baji proceeded smoothly through the live commentary until he arrived at our provocative hadith on the day Muhammad wrote.

According to this hadith, in the year 628, some six years after Muhammad and his companions fled persecution in Mecca and took refuge in Medina, Muhammad was ready to form a pact with his opponents that would permit him and his companions to at last return safely to Mecca and fulfill their duty to perform their pilgrimage. But when both parties convened at Hudaybiyya, on the outskirts of Mecca, to put the treaty into writing, a sticking point emerged that threatened to derail the negotiations. The early believers thought the document ought to refer to Muhammad as "God's Messenger." Their opponents maintained that Muhammad should be referred to simply as the son of his father, ?Abd Allah. According to this variant of the hadith, Muhammad, no doubt growing impatient as the squabbling wore on, "took the document, and while he did not know how to write well, he wrote, 'This is what Muhammad, son of 'Abd Allah, agreed upon.'"

When it was time for Baji to explain this hadith on the Prophet's truce at H. udaybiyya in his commentary session in Denia, a controversy erupted. As a Muslim historian retold it some two centuries later:

It was said to Baji, "To whom does the pronoun he refer to in the phrase, 'he wrote'"?

Baji replied, "To the Prophet."

So it was said to Baji, "He wrote by hand?"

Baji said, "Yes. Do you not see it stated in the hadith, "The Prophet took the document and while he did not know how to write well, he wrote, 'This is what Muhammad, son of ?Abd Allah, agreed upon?'"

While a swell of love for the Prophet and the preservation of his example had brought Andalusia's elite and popular audiences to Sahih al-Bukhari, had a plain reading of the text ironically called the Prophet's extraordinary status into question? The very status that the unbelievers at Hudaybiyya had refused to acknowledge?

A Sufiascetic, Abu Bakr ibn al-Sa'igh, who, either having been present or having heard about the controversial explication afterward, accused Baji of unbelief on the grounds that claiming that the unlettered Prophet was capable of writing was tantamount to a denial of the authenticity of the Qur'an. As the news spread, so did public denunciations, condemnations, and curses of Baji in Friday sermons. Preachers and poets alike asked that they and their communities be safeguarded from Baji. In that vein, the poet 'Abd Allah ibn Hind prayed, in verse:

Keep me safe from the one who gains the world but pays with his afterlife! Keep me safe from the one who says, "the Messenger of God wrote!"

In this couplet we can glimpse, in a nutshell, the dialectical tension that would animate hadith commentarial culture well into the modern period: in the arena of the commentary, worldly ends and ends internal to the tradition were at stake, and while both were mutually constitutive, they sometimes appeared to be at odds.

On the one hand, as a public figure with influence, Baji's performance as a commentator offered him material and social rewards in his everyday life. Baji was risking all of this and more by doubling down on an unpopular interpretation, risking not only his livelihood but also his very life. And yet, as the poet alludes, Baji is the one who "gains the world but pays with his afterlife." Perhaps what the poet meant by this was that even notoriety creates an audience and an opportunity to promote one's prestige, consolidate patronage and, as Baji eventually did, compose and circulate a book, Tahqiq al-madhhab (Verification of the way), in defense of his very survival.

On the other hand, Baji's reputation meant little if he could not also persuade his audience that he had conformed to certain standards of excellence as they were defined by and defining of the cumulative tradition of commentary. In the immediate aftermath of this commentary session, it appears he failed to persuade his local community that deference to the apparent meaning of an authenticated hadith bolstered one's faithfulness in Muhammad's sincerity rather than compromised it.

News of Baji's interpretation — and the uproar it caused — soon reached the ear of the emir of Denia, who appealed for outside help to settle the controversy and restore order. He received answers from Muslim scholarly authorities from Sicily, Iraq, and other parts of the Islamic West and the Islamic East. Although some conceded there was evidence for his position, many others wrote systematic refutations of him and his position.

For his opponents, the only possible way to maintain the Prophet's status as unlettered would have required Baji to look beyond the apparent meaning of the hadith to the meaning implied (taqdir): one must infer that Muhammad ordered someone else, perhaps his cousin and son-in-law, 'Ali, to write down the pact by hand. This was not a theory without basis in textual evidence. After all, a variant in Sahih al-Bukhari reported that Muhammad merely scrubbed out the designation "God's Messenger" in a treaty that Muhammad had ordered 'Ali to write. Other authoritative collections contain hadith that state more explicitly that Muhammad ordered 'Ali or someone else to write his name. Despite the availability of these other textual resources, Baji nevertheless chose to rely on the apparent meaning of the variant that suggested Muhammad himself wrote the pact of Hudaybiyya himself. Why? It is to this question we now turn.

A WRITTEN DEFENSE AND A "DOUBLE MOVEMENT"

We have already considered some of the social and material rewards motivating Baji's choice to rely on this hadith's apparent meaning, but what were his interpretive justifications? Baji's defense of his interpretation of this hadith filled a lengthy written volume, Tahqiq al-madhhab. I will try, however, to summarize his arguments in two broad categories that are pertinent for our understanding of early hadith commentary.

The first category of intellectual justifications concerned the evaluation of the authenticity of the hadith and the chains of narrators by which hadith were transmitted. While he largely affirmed the authenticity of the variant hadith that stated Muhammad had scrubbed out his name and ordered 'Ali to emend the treaty, Baji averred that the phrases "he scrubbed out his name" and "he ordered 'Ali" were not part of the hadith's sound phrasing. No such questions arose concerning the variant transmitted by Bukhari that suggested Muhammad wrote by hand. He also pointed to other authenticated hadith that corroborated the idea that Muhammad did not pass away until he learned to read and write. Lastly, he appealed to the authority of a famous hadith scholar with whom he had spent years studying hadith in Mecca, Abu Dharr al-Harawi (d. 434/1043–44). Baji recalled that Abu Dharr, who was considered one of Sahih al-Bukhari 's most faithful transmitters, had long asserted that Muhammad wrote at Hudaybiyya. Defending his fidelity to this variant of the hadith — and, by extension, his fidelity to the Prophet himself — Baji was not only competing for his social survival but also championing his commitment to certain standards of excellence internal to the tradition.

Baji's second broad category of justifications concerned the way that hadith are, in theory, expected to bolster and specify, but never cancel out, doctrines enjoined by the Qur'an. Here, Baji justified his position using a hermeneutic we might call a double movement. While he maintained that Muhammad once wrote, he just as forcefully maintained the doctrine of the "unlettered Prophet." He argued that Muhammad's ability to write at Hudaybiyya was among his miracles (mu'jizat), akin — although not on par with — his miraculous ability to recite the Qur'an. He went further, asserting that the doctrine of the "unlettered Prophet" only guaranteed that Muhammad did not know how to read or write prior to the revelation of the Qur'anic verses that said so. It did not preclude the possibility that Muhammad might be able to inscribe a document later in life. In this way, Baji was attempting to use the authority of the hadith to bolster, rather than challenge, the larger doctrinal orthodoxy. In other words, Baji's position was more nuanced than the one attributed to him by the poets and popular preachers. He was, so to speak, just as committed to his "afterlife" as they were.

In some ways, Baji's double move would seem to be a subtle accommodation to his rival — and the rival of many other established Maliki judges — Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064). Ibn Hazm was a key figure in the so-called Zahiri school, and he and others had taken a great interest in the study of hadith transmitters and canonical collections of hadith like Sahih al-Bukhari. While Baji famously defended analogical reasoning (or qiyas) from Ibn Hazm's withering attacks, he did so referencing hadith authenticated by Bukhari and other canonical collections. In other words, while Baji maintained preestablished Maliki positions, he relied on the kinds of hadith that would hold weight with the Zahiris.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Said the Prophet of God by Joel Blecher. Copyright © 2018 Joel Blecher. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520295943
• ISBN 13: 9780520295940
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286