What are Hadith? With Prof Jonathan Brown (2022-02-18) ​

0:00:01 Well hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I am delighted to talk to Jonathan 0:00:08 Brown - you are most welcome sir! Thank you for inviting me I'm happy to be here, as salamu aleiykum.
0:00:15 Wa alaykumu s-salam. Now Professor Jonathan A C Brown is an American Muslim scholar of Islamic 0:00:22 studies. He is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign 0:00:30 Service at Georgetown University, and Jonathan has very kindly agreed today to tell us about hadith. 0:00:37 Now he has published a critically acclaimed book entitled Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy 0:00:44 in the Medieval and Modern World, and that's now into its second edition with additional chapters. 0:00:50 I really recommend this book it is an excellent introduction to a rigorously scholarly approach to 0:00:56 hadith and i'll link to the book below if you want to get your own copy. So perhaps we can begin by 0:01:04 asking some basic questions Jonathan: what are hadith? Well yeah funny you should ask the 0:01:15 hadith are reports about things that the prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa salaam said 0:01:22 or did, or things that were done in his presence and that he did not object to 0:01:28 right so the assumption being that if somebody did some somebody did something his presence 0:01:32 like ate a certain kind of food and he didn't say you know don't eat that or you shouldn't 0:01:36 eat that that it's acceptable to eat that thing so even things done in his presence are useful. 0:01:41 Now sometimes people talk kind of about the Qur'an and hadith as these two 0:01:46 found foundational scriptures of islam and in a way that's correct in the sense that 0:01:53 you know you know you can go and get the Quran off a shelf it's in a book and you can 0:01:58 go and get books of hadith and you know look at them and their their texts and things like 0:02:02 that but i think uh it's more accurate to think about the foundations of Islam being the Quran 0:02:08 and the sunnah of the prophet the sunnah of the prophet s-u-n-n-a being his authoritative 0:02:14 precedence the authoritative precedent of the prophet muhammad so the the sunnah is as
0:02:24 Muslim scholars have long written i was just reading actually in the works of Shah Wali 0:02:30 Allah the famous Indian scholar died in 1762 the definition which as i hadn't seen earlier was is 0:02:38 the sunnah of the Prophet is the infallible application of the book of God it's the Quran 0:02:45 lived out and applied by the Prophet Muhammad and that's why the Quran talks about sending down 0:02:53 the book and the wisdom the wisdom being the sunnah in the sense that God inspires the 0:02:58 prophet with wisdom to apply the Quran's message in his life, and then sunnah can take the form of 0:03:06 adding to the Quran for example adding rules. Like you know the Quran says we can't eat 0:03:12 you know basically you can't eat let's say pigs um whereas the the Sunnah adds that we can't eat 0:03:21 animals that are that have canines that are predators you know so you can't eat lion meat 0:03:25 or something like that um the the sunnah clarifies and explains the Quran. So the Quran says you know 0:03:34 that the thief male or female cut off their hand as an exemplary punishment for what they've done 0:03:39 but we know from the sunnah of the prophet that this only applies to items that are 0:03:43 above a certain value in which the the that aren't certain things like 0:03:50 food stuffs or things like that and also that the thief has to admit that they did this if they just 0:03:55 if they just deny that they did or they thought it was theirs then you won't have that punishment it 0:04:00 would drop down to a discretionary punishment if you interested in this you can link to my article 0:04:05 in Yaqeen Institute website about it's called Stoning and Hand Cutting - which i think is a very important article 0:04:10 so you know the this is sort of the irony of people who are kind of um you know kind of 0:04:16 quran only or only want to understand the islam through the quran is that you would be left with
0:04:24 with having to punish any thief for you know stealing like a pen you'd have to cut their hand 0:04:28 off whereas this is absolutely not absolutely not the the understanding of islamic law and that that 0:04:33 that explanation and clarification comes from the sunnah of the prophet the son of the prophet so it 0:04:40 can uh add it can explain clarify it can restrict um and it can affirm the message of the quran now 0:04:53 the relationship between the sunnah and the hadith is sometimes people will get confused about this 0:04:57 hadith are a way of knowing about the sunnah of the prophet you can think really about muslim 0:05:02 scholars thought about the sunnah in you know three or four ways and they didn't talk about 0:05:08 this so much this is more my classification but i think it's useful and i think it's accurate 0:05:13 um first they thought about it you know as hadiths right so if you wanted to know about 0:05:18 the prophet's precedence how he acted what he said how he lived what his judgments were what 0:05:23 principles he lived by right how he understood the koran you could just go back and collect as many 0:05:29 reports about things he said and did and things that were done in his presence as possible 0:05:34 and then sort of like building a puzzle trying to figure out okay which piece 0:05:38 um fits with which you know which something he said it was a general 0:05:41 rule versus something he said it was for a specific situation or what's something he said 0:05:45 early on in islam and then the rules chained later on right or what's something he said 0:05:51 uh that applies to one group of people and not to another group of people um something he said that 0:05:55 maybe he was saying in a hyperbolic way like he's preaching people so he's using kind of 0:06:00 exaggerated language versus something where he's being very legally specific almost like a lawyer 0:06:06 speaking so and of course then as well i'm sure we'll discuss there's the challenge of figuring 0:06:11 out whether or not these reports are actually things the prophet said or not or if they were 0:06:16 invented later on but let's assume you could authenticate them all you would have a bunch of 0:06:20 pieces of a puzzle and then you'd be trying to fit these pieces of puzzle the puzzle together 0:06:24 and this is in fact what um one of the main ways that muslim scholars all muslim scholars 0:06:30 understood the sunnah the second way is to think about the sunnah as a um a kind of a a method of 0:06:38 problem solving a way of thinking a way uh but if you think about maybe like the letter of the law 0:06:43 versus the spirit of the law this would be more like the spirit of the law how would the how would 0:06:47 the prophet deal with the situation um and you can see this very clearly for example in the the 0:06:53 practice of the early muslim caliphs like abu bakr and omar uh especially omar because he 0:07:00 did so much legislating that he would see find a situation and he would sometimes he wouldn't quote 0:07:06 the prophet but he would come up with a rule that he thought that best implemented this is what the 0:07:13 prophet would do in the situation so for example he suggested when muslims started to encounter 0:07:18 a lot of non-muslims outside of arabia you know he was like you know he said i would discourage 0:07:24 muslim men from wearing marrying non-muslim women because as you can see like wait you know you 0:07:28 we were allowed to do this but now it seems like there's going to be a problem of 0:07:32 muslim women not having enough men to marry so we discouraged this 0:07:36 so that but that was you know you could see him sort of how would the prophet 0:07:40 have acted in this situation and what's interesting is you don't actually find a 0:07:44 lot of hadiths from the very senior companions of the prophets sometimes just because they die you 0:07:51 know abu bakr died only two years after the prophet said uh but people like omar or ali
0:08:04 don't see as many narrations from them nowhere 0:08:06 near as many as you see from younger companions like ibn abbas even omar
0:08:15 those senior companions they sort of lived the prophet sunnah and carried it on not by 0:08:22 remembering to the things he said but by like he his personality had acted sort of imprinted 0:08:27 on theirs like they had been shaped by their years with him by their many many years with him 0:08:32 and constant contact with him so you know one way you think about the sun is 0:08:37 hadith now the second way is kind of a method of problem solving the third one would be a 0:08:43 practice of a pious community that you know the muslim community that is built by muhammad ali 0:08:49 in medina actually its practice it's way of doing it how when you go into the mosque what do you do 0:08:57 when you're standing for prayer what do you do where do you stand how far apart do you stand 0:09:01 how does the prayer i mean actually describing to somebody exactly how to do a prayer is kind 0:09:06 of hard you know first you raise your hands up to the this part of your hand you put them 0:09:10 down it's kind of hard it's a lot easier to show somebody how to pray so the son of the prophet 0:09:15 as something that is just kind of practiced by the muslim community and of course this is very 0:09:21 as you see this in all the muslim schools of law they all talk about this but it's 0:09:25 especially prominent in the maliki school of law i'm just going to say absolutely i it is a really 0:09:30 important uh uh quote uh from your book that i mentioned you said contrary to popular opinion 0:09:36 and this is an opinion i've heard mentioned in the media both in america and elsewhere the bulk of 0:09:40 islamic law does not come from the koran but from hadith it's very remarkable and you've already 0:09:47 alluded to the way uh hadith in a sense qualify uh the rulings on cutting of thieves hands but 0:09:54 there are many other examples so so what is the great bulk of israel of islamic law comes from 0:10:00 the the president of the prophet and his teaching and so on i definitely i mean if you if you were 0:10:05 to kind of look at this proportion of the details of islamic law i mean a very small 0:10:10 portion would come from the quran i mean the quran doesn't isn't really a book of law i mean 0:10:15 one scholar even in the middle of sahani in the 1700s and i think he counted about 80 to 100 0:10:21 verses in the quran that deal with with legal issues right uh i think amanda after he talked 0:10:26 about uh something like actually i'm gonna misquote it so i'm just gonna forget about that 0:10:32 but um uh yeah so i mean basic things like the you know the number of prayers how you pray i mean 0:10:39 these are basic parts of the religion that are not really either explicitly or mentioned or grant 0:10:44 or mentioned at all in the quran uh so um yeah definitely and then this hadiths are a huge you 0:10:51 know maybe like if you're thinking about a consent you know portions let's say of the of the sharia 0:10:56 a very small portion would come from the grand i know a big big chunk would come from hadith and 0:11:01 of course there you have a kind of maybe also a spectrum in the sense that um there are certain 0:11:08 hadiths that muslim scholars can all agree are reliably traceable back to the prophet there are 0:11:14 certain hadiths that are not really reliable or not as reliable but were really important for law 0:11:22 and that their main the main strength of those hadith isn't really that you could 0:11:28 find a chain of transmission that goes back to the prophet narrated by all reliable people who met 0:11:32 each other and etcetera has lots of corroboration for example that would make a hadith or sound 0:11:38 but its strength really comes from its communal practice uh for example i mean this is just an 0:11:44 obvious example but um there's you'll find in books of law or hadith you know that the murderer
0:11:54 the murderer does not inherit right so if you if somebody murders their dad quranically speaking 0:12:00 your son will automatically inherit from their father right it doesn't matter if the father 0:12:03 doesn't like them he can't there's nothing you can do but you know let's say oh i'd like to get 0:12:07 some money so i'm going to kill my dad and get inherited but if you murder somebody you can't 0:12:11 inherit from that person and um there's not really a reliable hadith about this but you find in books 0:12:18 of hadith in books of law that the prophet said the murderer does not inherit the strength of 0:12:24 that hadith is really that it's been this is you know all muslim scholars agree on this you know 0:12:29 this is sort of like it's its strength actually is is comes from communal practice so you see here 0:12:34 like a blending of hadith in communal practice uh then of course a huge chunk of uh islamic law 0:12:41 comes from either the opinions of the companions of the prophet or from and from and or from legal 0:12:51 reasoning based on the quran based on the son of the prophet based on the early muslim community 0:12:56 either through analogical reasoning so you know women don't have to breastfeed when they're um 0:13:04 you know when they're uh sorry you don't have to fast if you're traveling 0:13:09 oh you don't and you don't have to fast if you're sick therefore you don't have to fast if you're 0:13:13 breastfeeding so this is an analogical reason or uh you know and then of course other types of 0:13:19 um reasoning like um kind of what are the aims of the sharia what are its objectives um if we don't 0:13:26 have any evidence from the quran or the son of the prophet or the early muslim community you know can 0:13:29 we just sort of reason on our own to think about what would fulfill the aims of the sharia so 0:13:34 these are all different sources of islamic law but definitely hadith are a major major source 0:13:39 okay a natural question to ask is how did muslim scholars detect forgeries because i i've heard 0:13:45 that particularly in the early centuries it was like a veritable industry of uh pumping 0:13:50 out forged hades to justify certain practices or certain political agendas or certain sectarian 0:13:57 rivalries so this became a problem really early on so how did uh hadith scholars uh the the ummah 0:14:03 the muslim scholars actually go about detecting these uh these problems these forgeries yeah 0:14:10 yeah so i mean there's a the quran gets written down very early so the quran gets written down 0:14:16 i mean in an official form by 650 of the common era i mean so you're talking within two decades 0:14:23 of the death of the prophet that islam and there's not really any debate about what the contents of 0:14:28 the quran is there's not you know some you know alternative version of the quran that's that's 0:14:33 out there that people are citing or something um now you could people can argue until the 0:14:38 cows come home about what the quran means but that's as a source it's it's sort of bounded 0:14:45 and set in stone so to speak uh the hadiths are very different and all those notions of sunnah 0:14:50 that i talked about are very different because they're all um they all have strength and they 0:14:55 all have weaknesses the strength of the kind of sunnah as a way of problem solving is that it's 0:15:01 as i said it really kind of allows you to carry the spirit of the law into situations where the 0:15:06 letter of the lies a little bit is doesn't seem to apply it's not giving you a clear answer on 0:15:11 the problem with that is that this you know spirit of the law reasoning can be can kind 0:15:16 of get out of hand so you say well if you know if i'm allowed to not fast because of hardship 0:15:22 well you know it's hard to not drink coffee during ramadan like i really feel terrible if i don't 0:15:28 drink coffee and so i i kind of feel like i should not that's sort of like what god wants in this 0:15:32 situation and that's not very good argument right um or uh or you know um with communal practice 0:15:40 it's really sometimes especially as you get farther and farther out of 0:15:44 away from medina of the prophet's time in space and time you know what muslims do muslim
0:15:52 know i'm very peop and so you see people say you know in my in my muslim country you know men's 0:16:00 go out and play you know back or you know backgammon and drink 0:16:05 and smoke shisha and women sit at home and cook so that's the way islam should be well 0:16:08 that's not the way islam necessarily should be that's just one particular country right so 0:16:14 custom also is uh can be corrupted um with hadith the problem was it's very it's a great 0:16:21 way to get a really fine detailed description of things that prophet says and said and did 0:16:28 the problem is that um well one as i said you have to kind of be able to fit the pieces together 0:16:33 but also it becomes extremely clear in the time of the the successors so essentially by 0:16:40 you know six uh the late 600s that um lots of hadiths are being forged and this 0:16:47 makes i mean sometimes it can be mistakes right so sometimes somebody would sit would 0:16:52 think they remember the prophet saying something when in reality it's one other companion saying 0:16:56 something right or sometimes somebody could just get confused and mix two hadiths together 0:17:02 and those are not necessarily forged i mean they are in effect forgeries in the sense 0:17:06 that there was something that probably didn't say but they're they're they're unintentional 0:17:10 they're byproducts of just the process of humans remembering and transmitting information uh but 0:17:16 then you have intentional forgeries that was done remember muslims you know within the first
0:17:21 140 years of islamic history muslims fight three civil wars three major civil wars in addition 0:17:30 they spread from the hijabs to spain and india and you know all the different cultures and religions 0:17:40 and foods and clothings they encounter and people are starting to become muslim in north africa and 0:17:45 india and all these places and of course they're bringing their own traditions their own questions 0:17:49 their own agendas into the mix so you have political disputes sectarian disputes cultural 0:17:56 disputes legal disputes etc etc etc and what better way to advance your cause or your ideas 0:18:01 than by saying that the prophet of god said this or said that so there's a huge huge huge engine 0:18:07 of forgery that just starts chugging especially in the early 700s and that really keeps chugging 0:18:13 hard through the 800s and even into the 900s of the common eras i think when the really the bulk 0:18:19 of this material is forged so muslim scholars have a challenge how do you sort out what's authentic 0:18:25 authentically the words of the prophet and what's uh what's for forgery 0:18:29 i'm happy to talk more about that unless you want to know i'm just very i'm just very interested 0:18:33 because the role of the this word is a bit of technical jargon here uh what is the island 0:18:39 and the problem of fortune snads as well but this idea of having a reliable transmission from person 0:18:45 to person known people uh who who could have met each other did meet each other who were 0:18:50 who were known to be reliable uh and so on and so on there are various kind of checks that were made 0:18:55 weren't there to see if uh you know of this hadith and its alleged authenticity really was authentic 0:19:01 and this is became quite a uh a serious academic scholarly pursuit hadith criticism you can call it 0:19:07 yeah um and that produced ultimately these amazing you know what called sahih collections 0:19:12 uh bukhari famously and muslim as well which are the the gold standard of hadiths uh today 0:19:20 which everyone now looks to for you know really solidly reliable hadiths um but that but that 0:19:26 came quite late didn't it and it was almost controversial these sahih collections before 0:19:31 that they there weren't these sari collections there were all sorts of different kinds of hadees 0:19:37 yeah um so you'd i think a good way to think about this is that you know muslims all muslim scholars 0:19:45 like as muslims develop their own scholarly class so amongst the companions there's companions who 0:19:52 are seen as particularly knowledgeable malaysia they dive in uh omar right um ibn abbas uh 0:20:01 uh these are companions to really look to for their understanding of the the korans 0:20:07 of the prophet and then they teach the next generation of scholars in medina like even museum 0:20:18 harajuku and zeta
0:20:30 in egypt in yemen in syria there's an and then you should have heard the second and third generations 0:20:36 you really have these very clear scholarly figures emerge and they're all uh presented with this this 0:20:41 problem which is okay we have a huge problem which is we don't know what is really saying 0:20:47 to the prophet what isn't and there's you can kind of think of a couple different ways to solve 0:20:53 this uh one is maybe the way that emerges really clearly in kufa especially around the thinking of 0:21:02 the scholar named abu hanifo dies at the 150 767 of the common year which is to say that 0:21:08 you know in kufa you know i remember also this is really important which is that there's not like 0:21:14 some uh internet you know there's not some book of hadith you can go to the library in kufa and check 0:21:19 out right and there's no there's no if you're in kufa the way you know about islam is because 0:21:23 a bunch of muslims showed up well they built the city of kufa right outside of hira in iraq 0:21:28 and the muslims who happen to settle there are the ones who tell you about islam and if they remember 0:21:33 certain things the prophet said and they forget other things and the guy in egypt the companions 0:21:37 you remember certain things the prophet said and don't remember other things you're going to have 0:21:40 kind of two different ver two different versions of islam in a way and of course they're not very 0:21:44 different but that's one of the reasons we have different schools of law is because you have this 0:21:49 early um plurality of remembering what the son of the prophet is so that someone like abu hanifa and 0:21:56 kufra he's saying okay look we there's certain hadith that we have here and some of them really 0:22:02 lay down clear principles uh you know really clear principles like um the prophet saying 0:22:07 that the person who benefits from something is also liable for it or the person who's liable for 0:22:12 something also benefits from it that seems like a principle and so when he comes across a hadith 0:22:19 that doesn't seem to fit with that principle or they seem to contradict it contradict it he might 0:22:25 not say i don't think the prophet said this he just doesn't think this is representative of the 0:22:28 son of the prophet so they try to kind of look at the quran and look at the hadiths that they feel 0:22:34 are kind of reliable in kufa and then extract from those sources some rules about 0:22:41 law making about norms and then those rules are definitive and if you come across a hadith that 0:22:47 seems to conflict with those you just sort of dismiss it it's probably not something the prophet 0:22:51 said it doesn't make sense in the system they've established um other scholars who are actually 0:22:58 more concerned with theology uh which is this group called the motezolites which emerge in the 0:23:03 kind of mid to late mid 700s especially in basra and baghdad later on in baghdad they're uh they're 0:23:12 much more influenced by kind of theological discussions coming out of the greco-roman 0:23:18 near eastern world of christian theology of jewish theology of greco-roman philosophy 0:23:23 where you have you know certain way how do you get certainty in life you get certainty through sense 0:23:28 perception you get certainty through the first principles of reason you get certainty through 0:23:33 uh just unambiguous uncontested transmission like you know i've never been to china i don't 0:23:40 know if you've been to china but uh i mean i i'm prepared to say that china exists although 0:23:45 i've never actually seen it right there's a we we are just we've just been bombarded with so 0:23:49 much transmitted evidence that we don't we don't doubt this so they're much more concerned these 0:23:55 more tesla's much more concerned with like these debating with with you know christians or jews 0:24:00 and coming up with a way of of sort of rooting islam and epistemological uh and pistological 0:24:08 sources that are certain and that are not going to to carry any doubt so they're very skeptical of 0:24:14 somebody coming and saying you know so and so told me that someone so said that the prophet said this 0:24:19 like ah that doesn't that's like for them it's like a game of telephone now they understand the 0:24:23 sun of the prophet is essential they understand what is lights are muslim right these are not 0:24:27 people who are you know insane heretics or something right they but they they were saying 0:24:32 like look this is not really going to cut it right this is not really going to cut it for what we 0:24:36 want especially for theology maybe for law you can get something from these rules but what they say 0:24:41 is if you really want to know that the prophet said something it has to agree with the quran 0:24:46 it has to agree with the established sunnah as we know it it has to agree with first principles 0:24:51 of reason as we understand them and this is a big deal big difference and or has to be agreed upon 0:24:58 by everybody and here is where you uh we get to the third group the sort of third approach 0:25:05 which is criticizing both of the previous ones and this approach ends up being the sunni approach the 0:25:12 approach that produces those hadith collections that you talked about like sahih bukhari 0:25:16 muslim um and what this group says and it's uh you know forms around figures like uh abdallah mubarak
0:25:39 what this group approach says is look here's a problem with these two approaches prior to this 0:25:46 which is that they both are setting up sort of standards for deciding what the prophet said 0:25:56 or didn't say that are too much the creation of their own 0:26:01 worldview right so they're they're they're putting their own minds in a way their own minds 0:26:08 in the position of being the judge of what the profit setter didn't say 0:26:11 yeah yeah there's a problem here right which and this is a really good i mean they have a good 0:26:16 point right if imagine this if i if i tell you that um there's more women in paradise than men 0:26:26 or let me let me make it easier for you if i tell you that there's more men in paradise than women 0:26:32 you're going to say i don't i don't think that's true that seems kind of sexist like that doesn't 0:26:35 seem fair you know i'm not sexist i don't think that's fair but actually you have no idea and i 0:26:41 haven't i mean you have no idea like if someone's a prophet of god and god tells them information 0:26:46 that comes from the unseen what i mean for all we know there are more men or more women in paradise 0:26:52 rather we don't know i mean we can say like this seems sexist or not but that's just us talking 0:26:56 about what our values are so the problem is that there's certain you know if we were to generally 0:27:02 like sit around and evaluate things we hear we could talk about notions of fairness or justice 0:27:08 but really when it comes to things that are from the unseen we actually don't know the answers we 0:27:12 don't know what the unseen is right um so that reason is starting to get humbled here 0:27:20 second uh if for example if i say well hadith can't contradict the quran that makes sense by the 0:27:26 way all muslim scholars agree on this but here's the problem and this is what the sunni scholars 0:27:31 pointed out they said what's the difference between contradiction and explanation if i say 0:27:39 that um you know the the quran says that carrion dead animals has been prohibited free that's what 0:27:46 the quran says now we then refine hadith that the muslim companions of the prophet find a dead 0:27:51 whale washed up on the beach for the red sea and that they eat from the meat of this whale 0:27:56 and then they come back and tell the prophet they did this and he doesn't object to it this is fine 0:28:00 this technically contradicts the koran but nobody actually rejects this hadith 0:28:06 they say this as an explanation ah the koran is talking about land animals not 0:28:13 sea animals in fact we have other hadiths that also talk about the contents of the ocean being 0:28:17 pure to eat right so what's the difference between contradiction and explanation how do you know 0:28:24 when something is concerning the grand versus explaining or creating an exception to a quranic 0:28:29 rule or expanding a quranic rule the second uh so they would say to someone like the khufans someone 0:28:36 like abu hanifa look we understand you have these principles that you've derived from hadiths and 0:28:43 these actually might be good principles but you're rejecting this hadith because you think 0:28:48 it violates your principle but actually it just might be an exception to your principle 0:28:53 it might just be an exceptional situation the prophet is making to this 0:28:57 rule the second objection they have this is more kind of to the more tesla likes is the 0:29:03 montez lights for example were very confident in the ability of human reason to come to knowledge 0:29:09 about god and to come to knowledge about right and wrong independent of revelation um now
0:29:18 the problem is that as the stanley fish the literary scholar said you know reason always 0:29:22 comes from somewhere there's reason isn't uh you know maybe there's certain basic fundamental 0:29:27 things like the rule of non-contradiction a can't be a and not a at the same time in the same way 0:29:32 okay that maybe everyone can agree on but other times of reason are really uh kind of culturally 0:29:37 rooted or rooted in a certain tradition so for example the teslas were really they couldn't 0:29:42 accept hadiths that talked about god moving around right so this one verse this one hadith 0:29:49 in muslims another book says god in the very late at night god comes down to the lowest heavens 0:29:56 and he listens to the prayers of those who are awake at night praying right um montez 0:30:02 lights just could not they this sent them into apoplectic fit fits because 0:30:08 the god's moving around what do you mean guys if god's moving around 0:30:12 i mean god's in a body that means god's over here and he's not over here so what's that 0:30:16 what is this shape what is the shape of god what is god's body like how does god move around does 0:30:21 he have like a scooter you know what is what's going on i mean what this they couldn't accept 0:30:27 because they came they had been so much so influenced by the kind of greco-roman tradition 0:30:33 of uh of theology and of course philosophy yeah that talked about um let's say boethius talking 0:30:41 about divine simplicity that god can't be you know god can't be composite because something 0:30:47 that's composite can come into parts then those parts could exist separate from him and then you 0:30:51 have things that are not god that are eternal or the idea of motion in the aristotelian cosmos
0:30:59 the prime mover or in the kind of the theistic world god is outside of creation anything inside 0:31:06 of creation inside the sphere of the fixed stars is part of the world of um change of time right 0:31:17 um and something can't move around unless it's inside that world you can't talk about 0:31:24 movement outside of the fear of the spirit of the big stars because that's like another 0:31:29 another realm like god can't be moving around because that means he'd be part of our world 0:31:33 in effect now um okay fair enough my teslites but uh what's all that got to do with islam i 0:31:41 mean you go back and you read let's say the old testament and it's talking about 0:31:45 god walking and god doing i'm not saying that that's accurate but my point is that clearly 0:31:49 you know if you want to talk about kind of a semitic imagination they do not have a problem 0:31:54 talking at least talking about modern language that is anthromorphically inflected at least uh 0:32:00 metaphorically or figuratively so and then the the early sunni said to the montez lights by the way 0:32:07 what tesolates you guys are not consistent because look you're muslims you believe 0:32:12 in the quran we believe in the quran and the quran talks about you know god and his angels
0:32:20 god and his i think it's right
0:32:26 for god and his angels come in ranks they come in ranks so god's coming in ranks with the angels 0:32:33 the tesla yeah yeah but that's figurative it's the power of god is coming it's like okay that's 0:32:39 figurative why don't you do a figurative interpretation for that hadith that you 0:32:42 reject maybe it's not god's you know uh coming down maybe it's god's mercy coming down and in 0:32:48 fact this would be the interpretation of later ashari sunni scholars they'd say that it's not 0:32:53 actually god coming down it's the mercy of god or the knowledge of god come approaching us um so 0:33:00 the they were saying it you look you're willing to interpret the quran figuratively when it seems 0:33:04 to go against your ideas of reason but you're not when it comes to hadith you just throw it out why 0:33:11 so what the the early sunnis proposed is if you want if we want to figure out what the prophet 0:33:17 said and what the prophet didn't say uh we we are saying that we're we're recognizing that 0:33:23 human reason is a liability here uh it's it it means taking means sort of giving too much power 0:33:31 to your own culture to your own understanding of reason to your own backdrop background assumptions 0:33:36 so let's try and take reason out of the equation and let's just look at transmission let's see okay 0:33:42 where did this material who who's who narrated this where did you get this hadith 0:33:46 where did that person get where did that person get the hadith okay let's look at these people 0:33:51 let's look at what they transmit um if so and so if paul let's say is narrating from uh uh 0:34:01 his teacher and he narrates you know abc things then the other students in this teacher also 0:34:08 narrate abc from this teacher but now like it seems like these guys are all narrating 0:34:13 the same thing so you know they might be reliable but let's say one student narrates fg lmnop also 0:34:21 from the teacher and that student only studied with that teacher for three months or something 0:34:25 whereas you studied with him for 10 years whoa wait a second this this student is claiming 0:34:31 things from the teacher that are not corroborated by the other students so once you start looking 0:34:36 at what somebody narrates from their teachers is it crowded by other students of those teachers 0:34:41 you can start to decide is that person a reliable transmitter once you've decided they're a reliable 0:34:45 transmitter you can say things that come from this person from another person and we say this person 0:34:50 met that person they lived at the same time in the same city they said i heard this from that 0:34:55 guy right or that girl then uh that these people become reliable transmitters and through a process 0:35:02 of evaluating the reliability of transmitters and then looking for corroboration or the lack 0:35:06 of corroboration for reports we can decide what are reliable hades to profit and what aren't and 0:35:12 so that was the method that was developed really in the hijaz uh and um iraq and uh horuson in the 0:35:22 essentially late 700s early 800s and then really perfected in the mid 800s by scholars like bukhari 0:35:29 and muslim and their students and they produced a set of collections that um you know were fairly 0:35:38 quickly appreciated although a different not every collection was appreciated and valued 0:35:44 in the same way at the same time but especially buhari muslims books really came to be seen as 0:35:49 the pinnacle of the critical rigor of this process and seen as the most stringent um yeah in terms of 0:35:58 what authenticating what the prophet said yeah and your phd is actually on that very subject isn't it 0:36:04 the sahih collections of bukhari and muslim which yeah yeah how they were how they attained that 0:36:10 position yeah which is what we're worth getting and can be purchased by the way on on this 0:36:14 whole subject that jonathan just mentioned i do recommend uh his acclaimed book hadith muhammad's 0:36:20 legacy in the medieval and modern world which i said before i will link uh to below it's really 0:36:25 worth uh reading um just something that really interests me in that book i've just mentioned 0:36:31 um i often hear by the way that uh particularly from christian missionaries for some reason i'm 0:36:37 not sure why that we have no hadith that can be traced back to the companions of the prophet yet 0:36:43 uh in your book you mentioned that we now have things called sahih or sahih apostrophe s if 0:36:50 you add the english plural which are kind of these small notebooks um and there's a fascinating story 0:36:56 here i i think where um you know i got a friend of mine who happens to be a muslim scholar in the 0:37:01 hanover tradition and he said when i spoke to him about this that um the the ideas used to be passed 0:37:06 on are passed on orally in his tradition and they have been like forever for generation generations 0:37:12 and then in your book you mentioned that in the 20th century um an actual small notebook 0:37:19 that ultimately uh traces its um the words back to herrera the companion of the prophet was actually 0:37:27 physically discovered and the contents of that actually are the same as the orally transmitted 0:37:34 hadiths that my muslim uh scholarly friend knew of from oral tradition so this kind of 0:37:40 an extraordinary opportunity perhaps a rare one to confirm corroborate the reliability 0:37:46 or the accuracy of oral tradition uh in handing down these cities but could you just say a bit 0:37:52 more about these sahifa what they are and why and and that particular discovery in the 20th century 0:37:59 yeah um so well you're partially right i guess in some ways i'm going to defeat some of your 0:38:06 balloon but i think you're you're generally on the right track uh which is that you know um 0:38:14 so first of all the the writing materials that the early muscles have are very primitive 0:38:19 and they're not very permanent i mean things like a parchment 0:38:23 and papyrus are very expensive sometimes you would write on
0:38:29 essentially like the bark of palm trees you can kind of cut into sections uh and other uh sources 0:38:35 as well so uh you know it was very expensive to write things down and a lot of this material 0:38:42 you know there's a lot of movement a lot of change a lot of uh some of this a lot of early material 0:38:48 doesn't really survive um we have some you know pages of most hops of the quran that come from 0:38:54 extremely early from maybe even the lifetime of the companions of the prophet definitely from 0:38:58 the lifetimes expanded probably you know certain pages of the quran but when it comes to hadiths 0:39:04 you know we have uh there are certain uh hadith collections that have we actually so there's 0:39:11 two questions here so one is um when are hadith written down in a more systematic way and 0:39:21 the second question would be how reliable are how reliable or how confident can we be 0:39:29 that a later book claiming to be accessing those early written collections is actually 0:39:35 is that is that is that a sound claim yeah okay so uh in terms of muslims writing stuff down 0:39:42 um they we know they're writing small things down because at least as far as we can tell 0:39:49 they're talking about like a letter that the prophet let's say wrote to the people of 0:39:54 yemen he writes a letter that he can that contains rulings about compensation payments for injuries 0:40:02 and that letter is then transmitted in a family like from a dad to his son to his son right 0:40:07 there's other reports that are that claim to be the sahifas sort of notebooks 0:40:14 that are basically written i mean you can imagine imagine just like imagine you have one piece of 0:40:20 parchment okay you have one sheet of parchment which is actually you know you can wash and like 0:40:26 this these things are pretty rugged as long as you don't let it rot or something like that so you can 0:40:30 imagine like a companion of the providence son or children writing down things that profits that 0:40:35 this rules he said yeah and then this actually being handed down in a family yeah this is what 0:40:42 a good example is of the uh which goes ultimately back to the companion abdullah muhammad alas 0:40:50 from the quraish uh and you can see like you can in some hadith collections like the muslim 0:40:56 humble you actually see a quotation of this sahih almost in its entirety like it's just 0:41:03 a bunch of rules and sometimes they're not even connected just like rule rule rule rule um 0:41:10 so uh clearly from what we can tell muslims start to write things down 0:41:17 very early but these are very limited writings they're not systematic they're like done by 0:41:24 a family or a person in a family and they kind of pass on in that family 0:41:28 uh the companion of the prophet who narrates the most hadiths from him actually only knows the 0:41:33 prophet for about two or three years he mostly is hearing other hadiths hearing from other 0:41:38 companions saying that the prophet said and there are reports that he actually is also collecting 0:41:45 and copying these sahipas that he can find right now um we have uh one such sahifa the 0:41:56 from the student of abu hura but we don't we don't have like hamam's 0:42:03 written version we have one that can be dated back to the early 800s right so let's say that 0:42:09 would be about 70 years or so after hamam's death i see um maybe it's the rib we can date it back 0:42:18 to that original um now that's not surprising right because if you want a book to survive 0:42:25 anything to survive uh you have to i mean you can either put it in like a vacuum whatever sealed 0:42:32 bag or something right but i mean eventually it's going to get worn down to pieces and so 0:42:37 especially a few people are using it so you need to recopy it yeah so that gets us to the 0:42:42 so we sorry sorry we have actual physical pages of hadith collections or of people's written 0:42:50 compilations of hadith from the mid 700s from the late 700s from the 800s 0:42:57 right really going back to like kind of the mid 700s is probably the earliest actual physical 0:43:04 copies of things we have that have survived right okay um now in the time of 0:43:10 the younger successors so around let's say the early 700s successors like azuhari said 0:43:20 start to write down hadiths more systematic so now they're actually writing down more things 0:43:27 they hear uh they're actually trying to write down a lot of their hadiths that they hear they're not 0:43:32 just trusting that they're remembering them uh it's not just sahifa from their family they're 0:43:37 writing they're actually trying to collect and compile but they're again they have very small 0:43:40 amounts of material uh maybe uh their scrolls are about like uh you could carry it in their saddle 0:43:47 bags on their camel would be no problem to do that whereas by the time you get to like ibn hambal um 0:43:53 in the mid 800s i mean his library if hadith is like 12 and a half camel loads of books because by 0:43:59 that time by the way by the time it's late 700's muslims have gotten paper the technology of paper 0:44:05 which is cheap and you can write as much stuff as you want right it's not you don't just have like 0:44:10 a small amount of papyrus or a small amount of parchment that you can write on okay so
0:44:17 we have um
0:44:21 texts like uh from the late 700s in actually the texts themselves dating back from the 1800s but 0:44:28 very limited now um then the the final question is if you have later books later actual physical 0:44:37 copies you can date like the 100s or something from the 900s um or the late 800s to what extent 0:44:45 can you be confident that they're actually reproducing things from earlier uh there 0:44:51 you know you have to look at the right works of scholars like harold monsky the later almost i 0:44:56 think he died in about 2014. i'm not mistaken where he look he's looked at a lot of um of 0:45:02 these what's early early with sun the fact books which are basically books organized by topic um
0:45:11 who died i think around 827 of the common era of in the 1940s of um 0:45:19 the seer of ibn is hawk and what he's what he's done by looking at all these different 0:45:25 sources and sort of saying okay these people are claiming to narrate from a common link and 0:45:32 they're all sort of narrating the same thing and then these other people are also narrating from 0:45:36 the earlier generation they all kind of agree and then you start looking you see look 0:45:40 here's a here's a version of the report that has you know the content has let's say a b and c in it 0:45:46 and it's transmitted along certain paths and there's another version that has 0:45:50 b c and d in it and that's transmitted along certain paths and if you look you don't see 0:45:56 a on this path over here so you're seeing that the the contents of reports are really 0:46:02 consistent with the change that they're getting transmitted by 0:46:05 so and then maybe also some of those transmitters are saying things like like for example azure 0:46:11 or his student uh alamo like his student um uh evangel age or something right they'll say 0:46:20 i don't know what this word means or i don't understand what he meant by this 0:46:27 or they'll transmit something that disagrees with what they think the correct idea is so 0:46:33 why would somebody make up something and then say like i don't understand what he meant by this or 0:46:38 i don't this is what he said i don't know what the word means or it just actually disagrees 0:46:42 with my opinion so all these things together that i mentioned gave motski a sense of confidence that 0:46:48 you could date specific reports not necessarily the entire hadith corpus but you could if you 0:46:54 start just looking at individual reports you can start to date them back to the late 600s of the 0:46:59 common year kind of the time that they're actually still companions of the prophet alive like 0:47:04 malik and so that i think is the uh it doesn't necessarily it doesn't help you say that sahih 0:47:14 bukhari is 100 accurate or the muatta of malik is 100 accurate but what it does tell you is that 0:47:22 muslim scholars were able to accurately transmit material from the very early period and uh 0:47:31 by the way what's interesting is that a lot of times when they are let's say when errors or 0:47:42 misinformation or forgeries are entering into this sometimes it's uh well muslim scholars 0:47:47 are aware of it and sometimes they were you know not necessarily averse to it i'll explain that in 0:47:54 really quickly right so for you to say that for somebody to say you know is everything inside 0:47:59 bukhari true did the prophet say everything is insane bukhari well i mean the answer is no 0:48:07 but the question is wrong right the question is wrong because there are insane bukhari let's say 0:48:15 sometimes five or six different versions of one hadith narrated by different chains 0:48:20 of transmission and they might differ in details you know once as the prophet did trade two prayer 0:48:27 cycles before he did this the other one said the prophet prayed the two prayer cycles after he did 0:48:32 this um which one is correct uh is you know they might all have authentic change of transmission 0:48:41 is somebody just misremembering something are both of them actually remembering something but they 0:48:46 were on different occasions or who did someone in the change on the mission get confused so
0:48:54 buhari himself will like talk about this and later scholars will talk about this but uh 0:48:59 you uh they can't in one sense they can't both be true in a sort of digital sense of like you know 0:49:05 either right wrong um but they're all like they're definitely giving you the most accurate possible 0:49:12 picture of what people remember about the prophet sayings and his actions 0:49:17 the second thing is that a lot of these reports that people are very suspicious about 0:49:23 and you can i mean if you got if you gave the list of the hadiths that you know can people get 0:49:30 people get upset about being and that says
0:49:36 you could pretty much say that they all come from certain chapters of those books they all 0:49:40 come from chapters about the beginning of time the end of the world the day of judgments they come 0:49:47 on things about like uh campaigns of the prophet things that happen out on campaign uh the virtues 0:49:54 of people like such and such a person is so good because of this right and those are topics as far 0:50:00 as we as we can trace back the science of sunni hadith criticism sunni hadith scholars were saying 0:50:08 haditha deal with law akam how you worship how you fast what you can eat or you can drink right what 0:50:16 they saw is the core areas of the religion they were very strict about the islands for this they 0:50:22 said on other issues like the virtues of people what happens at the end of time what happens at 0:50:30 the beginning of time you know the rewards you get for certain actions et cetera et cetera 0:50:34 manners duas you make right you know invocations you make they said we're we're relaxed about this 0:50:41 because they didn't see this as core issues and you know like okay moses was so great that he 0:50:47 did this we know moses is great already he's a prophet you know was he this great or that great 0:50:52 i mean it doesn't it sort of doesn't matter um you know uh the prophet said that it's really good to 0:50:58 teach your children good manners we know it's good to teach your children good manners that's 0:51:01 not changing anything you know if teaching your child good manners gets you this reward in the day 0:51:05 of judgment as opposed to that reward this is sort of not really a big deal for them because it's all 0:51:10 it's not changing anything that's that they don't already know so uh that's where a lot of the 0:51:18 sometimes not so much in like sahih bukhari but certainly in the other collections a lot 0:51:23 of the material that people find problematic is actually in subject matters subject areas that 0:51:30 muslim hadith critics themselves were admittedly lacks about because they didn't see it as as 0:51:36 detrimental they didn't see themselves as betraying the sum of the profit in doing this 0:51:41 okay that's very helpful but perhaps finally my final question as we uh as you've been uh 0:51:46 discussing this for uh nearly an hour now um is to do with the western historical critical method you 0:51:52 mentioned briefly how motsky this very uh esteemed german scholar who just died a couple of years ago 0:51:57 hugely uh influential figure a western scholar non-muslim i think i assume he was non-muslim 0:52:04 um but in terms of historical critical method which is distinct and separate from the uh the 0:52:10 muslim hadith critical method what assumptions does the western historical method make about the 0:52:17 world and about god and how does this impact on western discussions about the historical 0:52:22 reliability of hadith because it tends to produce quite different conclusions i think in terms of uh 0:52:28 what is and isn't accepted in the hadith so if you want to share with your uh audience there's 0:52:34 on yourkeeninstitute.org there's a i think it's basically a a sample from my hadith book and i 0:52:41 added material as well i think it's called blind spots if you look up kind of on your institute 0:52:46 something called blind spots it's essentially the chapter of my hadith book on this circle critical 0:52:50 method that i actually also add material to so sort of like an enhanced chapter and this will 0:52:55 be good for your readers if for your viewers if they want to to learn more about this absolutely 0:53:01 um the way that you know if you think about how like we you know we in the kind of modern west 0:53:07 think about what's true and false in history what's true and false about religion uh this is 0:53:12 not an objective methodology you know human beings don't drop out of the womb and automatically view 0:53:20 the world the way a french person views the world today right or the american person views the world 0:53:24 these are specific traditions they come from and if you look back at the way that if you look at 0:53:29 the way that muslim western scholars approach not just their own religion but also islam and 0:53:34 kind of questions of authenticity and reliability you see how it's shaped by the specific experience 0:53:41 of western europe with christianity and the classical greco-roman tradition essentially 0:53:47 from the renaissance until the modern period right just briefly i mean a few things that are really 0:53:52 important are the discovery in the fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred and seventeen hundreds that 0:54:00 there are a lot of gospels that weren't had totally different understandings of jesus's 0:54:07 message that didn't make it into kind of the official christian corpus second that
0:54:19 the early church christian church introduced a lot of ideas that were not present 0:54:27 in the earliest material we can date back to let's say the christian community or jesus or you know 0:54:33 et cetera et cetera right yep uh third that the old testament itself had was not the product of 0:54:40 you know let's say the five books of moses were not written by murders but in fact were 0:54:44 the product of um uh multiple authors in different contexts with different aims 0:54:51 yeah uh so a couple of assumptions just that we can talk about quickly and i think your your 0:54:57 viewers would benefit from reading the blind spots article um i think if they're interested in this 0:55:02 yeah just do it and i think these are the ones that kind of end up being the most 0:55:06 uh influential in the way people western scholars talk about islam today not all western scholars 0:55:11 some western scholars is that uh there is this absolute conviction that religion change so 0:55:20 what the original christianity the original message of jesus was not what eventually ended 0:55:27 up being expressed in the four canonical gospels of the new testament right so that's sort of that 0:55:33 becomes in some ways like an article of faith by the late 1700s in the early 1800s amongst western 0:55:40 academic scholars of religion and then later on even by pious believers of those religions 0:55:48 in some ways not all of them but some of them right um this idea that that orthodoxy 0:55:56 is a historical creation and then orthodoxy goes back and changes what came before it to make it 0:56:03 look like it wanted history to create some sacred history yeah uh that scriptures can't be intact 0:56:13 because the bible is not intact so you know no other scripture you know just scriptures are are 0:56:20 doctored they're forged they go through changes orthodoxy is a later creation it goes retro 0:56:25 back projects uh its own vision of the religion and history on to the past and so they just 0:56:32 assume this is the case for islam now there may be aspects of this that are true i mean there's this 0:56:40 is a big discussion i mean there's clearly aspects of different schools of islamic theology that are 0:56:48 later developments and not necessarily identifiable in the earliest song period 0:56:53 so you you mentioned the mutasmalites who said were muslims and obviously they're 0:56:58 influenced by hellenistic philosophy and their interpretation of hades presumably that doesn't go 0:57:02 back to the original community yeah exactly i mean precisely this is what they were criticized for 0:57:07 right um now however what this this end up with kind of bizarre situations where uh you know if 0:57:17 you remember a few years ago when they did if the birmingham library birmingham university found the 0:57:22 these pages of the most hops of quranic pages they had that they carbon dated back to like the time 0:57:28 of abu bakr yeah right and then you saw some of these scholars like i think gabriel sayed reynolds 0:57:33 is one of them a very kind of skeptical scholar at notre dame he's like this can't be right uh 0:57:38 this must be later right um and then someone it came out that actually the range of dates 0:57:45 was could be it could have been as early as like the 550s or something like before the 0:57:50 life of the prophet and gabriel was like but it could be from the 500 so wait a second it can't 0:57:57 it has to be either later or it's earlier than the prophet why not from the prophet's lifetime 0:58:02 i mean why why is that such a quick look you can think you know non-muslim scholar we're talking to 0:58:08 you don't have to believe muhammad was a prophet you can believe he was a total fraud you can 0:58:12 believe he made up the whole quran right you know that's your opinion but what's so crazy about 0:58:18 saying that the quran comes from his time i mean why is that such a ludicrous idea but it's almost 0:58:23 like you can see this is almost a candidate like a reflex that they they push it to the extreme 0:58:29 but not the obvious thing which is well maybe it came from his own lifetime why not you know yeah 0:58:35 there's just this obsession with that or you know the thing is like you know you have um 0:58:42 just the other day it's really funny i mean around the time that 0:58:46 uh that the u.s pulled out of afghanistan and i think it was august or september of this year 0:58:52 and there was you know there's this headline it was like u.s leaves bagram air leaves afghanistan 0:58:58 in middle of night you know it's like bbc headline right you go back a couple of years the onion 0:59:05 onion comic comedy newspaper had a headline from i think it's 2019. us leaves afghanistan in middle 0:59:12 of night so over uh so what uh you know how do you know something is is made up like you know 0:59:23 sometimes it's you know yes like you could make up something based on historical facts but sometimes 0:59:29 it's not clear what comes first the historical fact or somebody imitating historical fact right 0:59:34 so a good example of this is um like the in the when the quake i think his name is thomas 0:59:41 naylor or something this quaker uh kind of leader in britain in the 1600s he enters i 0:59:48 think the city of bristol and he's he enters it on a rioting a donkey and people are like 0:59:55 throwing palm fronds in front of him so okay what if you were um okay that that's according to um
1:00:09 according to like the way western scholars think about islam and islamic scripture right uh what 1:00:15 that would mean is that they that guy's followers then wrote something in the bible that talked 1:00:23 about jesus entering jerusalem all riding a donkey with people throwing pom-pons in front of them 1:00:30 so they would go back and doctor scripture to make it sort of prefigure or presage this leader's 1:00:37 entrance into bristol in the city in the in the 1600s but of course that's ludicrous because we 1:00:43 know that the i mean whatever that the wrongdoing the bible is it definitely 1:00:47 comes from way earlier in the 1600s in britain right so um what's what's happening here is 1:00:53 thomas i forget his last name i think it's if i'm wrong you'd be corrected in the in the i'm sure 1:01:00 box underneath or whatever which is that what he's doing is he's acting out scripture yes 1:01:07 so uh like in the case in in the case of hadith there's a hadith that talks about um the prophet 1:01:14 talking about the black banners will come from the east like the kind of the mahdi the messiah will 1:01:19 come the messianic figure will come from the east and coruscant and carrying black banners 1:01:26 now the abbasid caliphate the ambassador revolution started in a horus on and their 1:01:31 colors their banners were black their uniforms were black the bassett caleb's all wore black 1:01:36 right um so what scholars western scholars would say is that this hadith was invented to 1:01:44 kind of uh legitimize the basset movement as like this messianic movement bringing justice 1:01:51 and filling the world with justice as it had been filled with injustice okay that's possible 1:01:56 but it's also possible like this quaker fellow in in the 1600s in britain that there's an existing 1:02:04 hadith that talks about black manners coming from horus on that maybe the prophet actually said 1:02:09 and so the ambassadors are like hey like uh what color are we going to wear it's like i know 1:02:14 well we'll wear black because of this hadith and we'll get like that well you know they might have 1:02:18 actually structured their movement in part around that hadith so which comes first you know the 1:02:25 chicken or the egg or that's not a good example because that's a conundrum but which comes first 1:02:30 the scripture or the imitation or the reality creating scripture or scripture shaping reality 1:02:36 the western kind of presumption or bias is that scripture and religion is always being doctored 1:02:44 to fit to the present or the desire yeah there's any kind of skeptical suspicious methodology 1:02:51 that's uh never never quite taking you know if a profit actually is a profit predicts things in the 1:02:56 future i mean from an islamic point of view that's kind of automatically discounted because hey we're 1:03:02 suspicious westerners and we we don't believe that god acts in the world anyway and there aren't real 1:03:06 prophets that god speaks through and make actual predictions that actually come true so there's 1:03:10 a whole world view here which is uh suspicious looking for ulterior motives looking for uh are 1:03:16 the post-facto creations and you know retrofitting narratives and it's a very kind of conspiratorial 1:03:24 um i mean i would say i would say it's conspiratorial and skeptical beyond even what 1:03:32 their own premises would call for what i mean is that okay western scholar i know you're not muslim 1:03:39 i know you don't believe the prophet muhammad was a prophet that's fine i understand okay 1:03:43 but you've got to admit that even somebody who thinks they're a prophet or who says their prophet 1:03:48 is going to do things like prophesy right they're going to say they'll come a day when x happens 1:03:53 right so let's and if they did that and that there's these prophecies they made that are known 1:03:59 in the community it's entirely possible that the abbasids let's say would shape or tailor literally 1:04:06 tailor their clothing to fit that prophecy right so you know even like we're not even 1:04:11 asking i'm not asking that non-muslim scholars all except prophets and all except revelations 1:04:16 are like no but you know sometimes the skepticism goes beyond even what's called for by their uh 1:04:24 their own premises their own uh sort of starting points to the point where sometimes it becomes 1:04:30 more insane to believe what they're proposing than just to believe that like the prophet 1:04:36 actually said something like the prophet clearly said something in 23 years of being a prophet he 1:04:40 didn't just sit there and not say anything for 23 years right but you'll find people like patricia 1:04:45 cronus saying you know essentially every hadith cannot be is is cannot be assumed to be true 1:04:52 i understand like you know you want me to believe that all this stuff was made up 1:04:59 you know or as in my i wrote an article about this i think it's on my web page about tom hollands and 1:05:04 his in the shade of oh sword right where he has this idea that the five daily prayers actually 1:05:09 comes from zoroastrianism in like the 700s and his evidence is like a zoroastrian guy 1:05:16 talking about how their astringent converts still like to drink after they become muslim 1:05:23 okay i mean tom holland is a british historian almost must be very respectful towards british 1:05:29 historians however uh your debate with him uh which you can see online i think is even 1:05:34 on youtube or something absolutely hilarious and and the way you kind of unpicked and uh 1:05:39 uh demonstrated the uh really extreme lengths he goes to avoid the obvious um is is almost i almost 1:05:46 found it almost funny because i mean the fact of the matter is like look we the koran says that 1:05:53 islam is building on existing religious traditions it literally says that right so it's i mean 1:06:00 why is it that crazy to think that muslims have these five daily prayers i mean maybe they got who 1:06:05 knows where it came from but the point is this is what god and the prophet commands right and 1:06:10 is it that crazy to think that muslims why does everything have to be made up later on why does 1:06:14 everything have to come from like some zoroastrian conspiracy in the 700s yeah you know i mean 1:06:20 yeah i know we talked to um uh tom holland he's he's very respectful to people like tom wright 1:06:25 uh former bishop adaram that uh very ultra conservative christian scholar i mean he's a 1:06:30 great christian scholar um uh tom riley nt wright so he's kind of he he's very kind of um accepting 1:06:37 and sympathetic towards that kind of biblical christian methodology when it comes to the 1:06:41 gospels and the historicity but when it comes to islam there's a very different kind of methodology 1:06:46 and uh darwin says skepticism uh to do with the sources there so there's a slight inconsistency 1:06:52 i would suggest yeah um but um well perhaps we can draw that to a conclusion uh there um 1:07:00 i've been absolutely fascinating uh jonathan thank you so much for uh sharing your expertise with us 1:07:05 um i i you mentioned several items we can look to for further reading uh the blind spots and there's 1:07:11 other articles and i'll link to those below but i also want to mention one of my favorite books 1:07:15 which is this um misquoting muhammad the challenge and choices of interpreting the 1:07:21 prophet's legacy which also covers all of these subjects the early hadith the community the quran
1:07:30 so much for material i won't even go into it but this is a really excellent uh 1:07:33 general book introduction to islam for the general reader um so i recommend that very much as well um 1:07:40 so in conclusion jonathan you want just to say in summary before we conclude uh i mean i'm grateful 1:07:46 for your work i follow it i enjoy it and um thank you keep doing keep doing what you do with people 1:07:51 like me enjoy and benefit from it in charlotte well thank you for your incredible uh work oh i 1:07:57 always ask uh well i try and always remember to ask uh the scholars i have on are you working on 1:08:02 anything uh particularly now or have you just produced any work that we might yeah i just 1:08:06 finished the book actually i'm just doing the last read-through right now of uh islam and blackness 1:08:11 which is kind of a coda to my previous work a book islam and slavery yeah and slavery in islam 1:08:19 sorry slavery islam and then islam and blackness and then after that i have to finish the book 1:08:24 that i have sitting on the back burner which is almost done i've been on the back burner for now 1:08:30 almost seven or eight years on uh on justice and islamic law the mavalam so madalem legal reform 1:08:38 and legal reform right so it's basically about how muslims conceptually and institutionally deal with 1:08:44 instances in which their kind of law body of law and expectations of justice don't match up
1:08:55 is that due out imminently is that to be published this year yeah i'll submit it in you know once i'm 1:09:01 done literally the pile of paper right behind my computer once i'm done reading that i'll send an 1:09:07 email to the publisher and then they'll get it out whenever probably i think in the fall is my guess 1:09:12 in trouble okay interesting i look forward to that well once again thank you so much sir and um 1:09:18 uh as i always say until next time and thank you very much for your expertise today pleasure