Discourse on Hadith in Germany

There was a time when the Arabs enjoyed intellectual pleasure while the Christians in the West lived a barbaric life.  That is what Carra De Vaue has told us, as quoted by Arnold Alfred in The Legacy of Islam, Oxford 1931.  We read here that the Arabs, who were Muslims, had enjoyed intellectual glory and great civilization in the world history.  They established universities and sites for scientific researches that attracted the scholars across the world. 

After the fall of Baghdad in 1258, however, Muslims started losing their intellectual ethos and independence.  They were entirely absorbed in the intellectual legacy of their predecessors, without being able to criticize and/or develop them further.  The precious classical literatures and manuscripts were abandoned, eaten by worms and maggots, until Western scientists come and save them.

Those Orientalists came, collected the manuscripts from various places, and then displayed them in their libraries.  They studied and published them.  As the result, they established the Faculty of Arab and Islamic Studies at Heidelberg (the oldest university in Germany) in 1585, with the main goal it was to promote the manuscripts of the Muslim world.  Almost all universities in Germany have the Faculty of Islamic Studies (Islamswissenschaft) to this day.  Those faculties have delivered scholars such as Gustav Weil (1808-1889), Alois Sprenger (1813-1893), JulliusWellhausen (1844-1918), Teodor Noeldeke (1836-1930), August Fisher (1865-1949), Brockelmann (w. 1956) etc., who contributed a lot to the world of Islamic studies.  Those remarkable libraries have undoubtedly invited Muslim scholars and researchers to study the Qur’an, as well as Hadith, in this country.

Alois Sprenger (d. 1893) initiated the study of Hadith (Traditions; the records of Prophet Muhammad’s precepts, actions and life) in the West and expressed his skepticism about the authenticity of Hadith.  William Muir shared the same skepticism.  The attack on the Hadith literatures achieved its peak when Ignaz Goldziher wrote his Muhammedanische Studien, which is regarded among the most important criticisms on Hadith in 19^th century.  Goldziher, with his impeccable research effort, including his extremely solid documentation, showed that a vast number of Hadith are outright forgeries.  Therefore, he rejected Hadith as the source of information in the time of Prophet Muhammad, but considered it as a valuable source for conflict mapping and information on the generation following the first generation of Muslims.  L. Caetani, Henri Lammens, John Wonsbrough, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook shared his claim. Goldziher’s book and thesis, published in 1890, found no significant revision until Joseph Schacht published his The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence in 1950, where he discussed hadith ahkam (traditions on laws) and its development.  Schacht’s thesis is that the isnad (the chains of transmitters or narrators of Hadith) tended to extend and the number of rawi (narrator) tended to increase in the late generation (proliferation of isnad) and moved backward, which meant that the narrators tended to base their narration on the previous generation. His theory of common link influenced the next scholars.  Like Goldziher, Schacht observed that majority of hadith were not valid.  However, he believed that one could come to a conclusion on the time when certain hadiths were issued by a profound study and criticism of them.  Joseph van Ess, on the other hand, adopted the method of Schacht while G. H. A. Juynboll developed it afterward on the wider scale. 

Although monumental, Goldziher and Schacht’s works are not prone to criticism in the West.  Muslim scholars such as Fuat Sezgin, Mustafa Azami and Mustafa al-Sibai criticized their theses and premises. Sezgin and Azami observed that the companions of Prophet had written the Hadith of the Prophet and that the transmission was also held in the written form until their codification in the third century of Hijra.

Historical criticism is a never-ending task. The attacks were now made on Muslim scholars’ methodologies. This methodological attack came from G. H. A. Juynboll, a Dutch scholar who spent a half of his lifetime to researching Hadith.  Juvnboll said that Sezgin and Azmi have used unreliable sources; therefore, he rejected their premises and conclusions.  For more than 30 years, Juynboll then developed some theories as method of analyzing hadith.  The terms such as spider, single strand, diving, partial common link, common link and argumentum e silentio, appeared in his study, where the last two are direct development of Schacht’s study.  He did not believe that any Hadith is historically reliable. He believed that the Muslim’s method of Hadith verification is unreliable (thiqa) to validate the authenticity of hadith.

Should we reject these serious studies simply because their conclusions are fundamentally detrimental to Islam? Juynboll’s methodology, or why he ended in the conclusions he made, is more interesting to me than the conclusion itself. The use of a similar methodology doesn’t necessarily breeds a same conclusion. This is the benefit of studying hadith in the nest of orientalists. However, no single Muslim scholar has responded seriously to the method and premises that was used in Juynboll’s study.

Hence, studying hadith in the West is different from studying it in any other places such as the Middle East and Indonesia. The study of hadith in the Middle East or Indonesia emphasized the takhrij ofhadith (i.e. to confirm or not a hadith within the collections of six narrators), to determine the authenticity of that hadith. Meanwhile, the study of hadith in the West emphasized the dating of hadith to trace its historicity and to build the historical reconstruction on the events that allegedly occurred in the beginning of Islam. Learning the methodology of both tendencies will enrich our methodology and enable us to reveal the historical fact of the Prophet’s life. However, orientalist’ criticism of the stable methodology of the study of hadith needs to be further responded by Muslim scholars. It is naïve to reject an intellectual tradition outright, without knowing the essence of that tradition. This is our common challenge.