Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins (12 page)

The prophet of Islam himself sums up these Islamic beliefs when he says in a hadith: “Verily, the most truthful communication is the Book
of Allah, the best guidance is that of Muhammad, and the worst of all things is innovation; every innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to hell.”
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In another hadith, however, Muhammad seems to retreat from this hard-line stance. He promises a reward to “anyone who establishes in Islam a good sunna”—that is, an “accepted practice”—and warns against “anyone who establishes in Islam an evil sunna.”
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This presupposes that Islamic leaders will establish new practices and that some of these practices may be good and some evil—a clear departure from the idea that “every innovation is heresy.”

Did Muhammad equivocate? Did he forbid innovation and then change his mind, or vice versa? Possibly; however, these two traditions can be harmonized by coming down against innovation while interpreting the second hadith as meaning that as new issues arise, they must be judged in light of Muhammad's words and deeds. In any case, in this as in all matters pertaining to Islamic law, Muhammad's example (along with the word of the Qur'an) is paramount, and hadiths recording that example are decisive.

The Contentless Sunna

One of the most curious aspects of Muhammad's paramount importance in Muslim law and practice is that there is absolutely no evidence that the Muslims who actually knew the prophet of Islam kept records of what he said and did. If the canonical account of the origins of Islam is true, then the material in the Hadith about Muhammad's words and deeds existed, and presumably circulated in Muslim communities, for nearly two centuries before it was finally sifted, judged for authenticity, collected, and published. Yet there is no indication of this material's presence.

The early caliphs do not appear ever to have invoked Muhammad's example. The word
caliph
means “successor” or “representative,” and in the traditional understanding the caliphs were successors to the prophet. But the first four caliphs who ruled after Muhammad's
death—known as the “rightly guided caliphs”—issued coins that proclaimed them to be the “caliphs of Allah,” rather than the expected “caliphs of the prophet of Allah.” Apparently the early caliphs saw themselves as vice-regents or vicars of Allah on earth, not as the successors of Allah's prophet.

One scholar of Islam, Nabia Abbott, contends that there is no record of the early caliphs invoking the hadiths of Muhammad because the caliph Umar (634–644) ordered hadiths destroyed. He did so, she says, because he feared that a collection of the Hadith would rival and compete with the Qur'an.
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But if Umar really did order the records of Muhammad's words and deeds destroyed, despite the Qur'an's numerous exhortations to obey and imitate him, how could later Muslims have preserved them in such quantity? Did Muslims really preserve wheelbarrows full of hadiths against the express orders of the Leader of the Believers, or hold it all in their memories with absolute fidelity?

We begin to hear about Muhammad's example from the same caliph who built the Dome of the Rock, claimed to have collected the Qur'an (after the caliph Uthman was supposed to have done it decades earlier), and created the first coins and inscriptions mentioning Muhammad as the prophet of Allah: the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik. Reigning from 685 to 705, Abd al-Malik called rebels to obey Allah and the sunna of his prophet.
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(By contrast, an earlier caliph, Muawiya, had referred to the “sunna of Umar,” his predecessor.
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) The Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, whom some hadiths report as having edited the Qur'an and destroyed variant texts, scolded a Kharijite rebel: “You have opposed the book of God and deviated from the sunna of his prophet.”
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One would think, given such references, that the sunna of the prophet was by that period a recognized corpus of laws. But just as Umayyad rulers charged their opponents with departing from the prophet's example, those same opponents invoked the sunna of the prophet to justify their own, competing perspectives and rulings.
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The historians Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds conclude that in the early decades of the Arab Empire, the sunna of the prophet did not
refer to a specific set of rulings at all: “To say that someone had followed the sunna of the Prophet was to say that he was a good man, not to specify what he had done in concrete terms…. In concrete terms, the ‘sunna of the Prophet’ meant nothing.”
¹⁴

But Abd al-Malik and his successors emphasized Muhammad's example: They presented the words and deeds of the prophet as normative for Islamic faith and practice. The necessity for every Muslim to obey Muhammad became a central and oft-repeated doctrine of the Qur'an. Consequently, the hunger for them became so intense that some Muslims traversed the entire Islamic world searching for the prophet's solution to a disputed question. An eighth-century Egyptian Muslim named Makhul, a freed slave, recounted how he searched for what Muhammad might have decreed about the particulars of distributing the spoils of war:

I did not leave Egypt until I had acquired all the knowledge that seemed to me to exist there. I then came to al-Hijaz and I did not leave it until I had acquired all the knowledge that seemed to be available. Then I came to al-Iraq, and I did not leave it until I had acquired all the knowledge that seemed to be available. I then came to Syria, and besieged it. I asked everyone about giving rewards from the booty. I did not find anyone who could tell me anything about it.

Finally, he found what he was looking for: “I then met an old man called Ziyad ibn Jariyah at-Tamimi. I asked him: Have you heard anything about giving rewards from the booty? He replied: Yes. I heard Maslama al-Fihri say: I was present with the Prophet (peace be upon him). He gave a quarter of the spoils on the outward journey and a third on the return journey.”
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That settled that—for Makhul, anyway. Not every Muslim could travel the world in search of answers. In the face of commands to obey Allah's messenger, there was an immense need for a collection of the prophetic word on various disputed issues. Islamic tradition generally
identifies the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, who reigned from 754 to 775, as the first to commission a legal manual: the
Muwatta.
Because Islamic law is based to such a tremendous degree on the words and example of Muhammad, this manual of Islamic law records a great many hadiths of the prophet of Islam. The imam who wrote the
Muwatta
, Malik ibn Anas (715–795), died a mere sixteen decades after Muhammad, making him the nearest in time of all the collectors of hadiths to the life of the man whose every action and every utterance is the focus of the Hadith.

Various editions of Malik's
Muwatta
differ from one another so widely as to raise the question of whether they are the same book at all. Different versions
(riwayat)
of Malik's teachings were written down and transmitted by different students of his. On one occasion a man approached the imam and showed him a manuscript. “This is your Muwatta, O Abu Abd Allah,” the man said to Malik, “which I have copied and collated; please grant me your permission to hand it down.” Without looking at the manuscript, Malik responded, “This permission is granted, and when handing down the text you may use the formula: Malik has told me, Malik has reported to me.”
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Some of the variant manuscripts were probably compiled after Malik died. In any case, the variations hardly inspire confidence regarding the authenticity of the
Muwatta's
material about Muhammad.

But with Muhammad held up as an exemplar, the Hadith became political weapons in the hands of warring factions within the Islamic world. And as is always the case with weapons in wartime, they began to be manufactured wholesale. The early Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Shihab az-Zuhri, who died in 741, sixty years before the death of Malik ibn Anas, complained even in his day that the “emirs forced people to write hadiths.”
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Even the caliph al-Mahdi (775–785) was known as someone who fabricated hadiths.
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Some of these were useful in justifying the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire, by placing its manifest destiny in the mouth of Muhammad. One such hadith describes an incident during the siege of Medina by the pagan Quraysh of Mecca. After ordering his followers
to dig a trench around the city, Muhammad jumps in with a pickax to help out with a particularly large rock. Three times when he strikes the rock, lightning shoots out from it.
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Muhammad then explains: “The first means that God has opened up to me the Yaman [Yemen]; the second Syria and the west; and the third the east.”
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In another version of the tale, he says the lightning indicates that the Muslims will conquer “the palaces of al-Hirah” in southern Iraq “and al-Madaiin of Kisra,” the winter capital of the Sassanian Empire, as well as “the palaces of the pale men in the lands of the Byzantines” and “the palaces of San‘a.”
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In another, Muhammad predicts that “the Greeks will stand before the brown men (the Arabs) in troops in white garments and with shorn heads, being forced to do all that they are ordered, whereas that country is now inhabited by people in whose eyes you rank lower than a monkey on the haunches of a camel.”
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Muslims also fabricated hadiths in the heat of political and religious controversies that they hoped to settle with a decisive, albeit hitherto unknown, word from the prophet. Abd al-Malik at one point wanted to restrict Muslims from making pilgrimages to Mecca, because he was afraid one of his rivals would take advantage of the pilgrimage to recruit followers. Accordingly, he prevailed upon the hapless az-Zuhri to fabricate a hadith to the effect that a pilgrimage to the mosque in Jerusalem
(Bayt al-Maqdis)
was just as praiseworthy in the sight of Allah as one to Mecca. Az-Zuhri went even further, having Muhammad say that “a prayer in the Bayt al-Maqdis of Jerusalem is better than a thousand prayers in other holy places”—in other words, even better than going to Mecca. This hadith duly appears in one of the six canonical Hadith collections that Muslim scholars consider most reliable: the
Sunan
of Muhammad ibn Maja (824–887).
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Factionalism and the Hadith

Sometimes hadiths were manufactured in order to support one party or another among early Muslim factions. The caliph Muawiya had
supplanted the last “rightly guided caliph,” Muhammad's son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Ali's son and chosen successor Husayn, and he continued to struggle against the nascent party of Ali
(shiat Ali)
, which ultimately became the Shiites. Muawiya is presented in a hadith as having told his lieutenant al-Mughira: “Do not tire of abusing and insulting Ali and calling for God's mercifulness for Uthman [Ali's predecessor and Muawiya's cousin], defaming the companions of Ali, removing them and omitting to listen to them; praising, in contrast, the clan of Uthman, drawing them near to you and listening to them.”
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Accordingly, a hadith appeared in which Muhammad declared that Ali's father and Muhammad's guardian, Abu Talib, was burning in hell: “Perhaps my intercession will be of use to him at the day of resurrection, so that he may be transferred into a pool of fire which reaches only up to the ankles but which is still hot enough to burn his brain.”
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For its part, the party of Ali had Muhammad designate Ali as the guarantor of the proper understanding of the Muslim holy book: “I go to war for the recognition of the Koran and Ali will fight for the interpretation of the Koran.”
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In another hadith that came to be beloved of the Shiites, Muhammad declares, “So know then that whose master I am, their master is Ali's also.” Then he takes Ali's hand and prays, “O God, protect him who recognizes Ali and be an enemy to all who oppose Ali.” Hearing this, Umar (who later became caliph, after the death of Abu Bakr in 634), says to Ali: “I wish you luck, son of Abu Talib, from this hour you are appointed the master of all Muslim men and women.”
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In another pro-Ali hadith, Muhammad exclaims to one of his companions: “O Anas! Is there anyone amongst the Ansar who is better than or preferable to Ali?”
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The Ansar, or “helpers,” were the people of Medina who had converted to Islam after Muhammad moved there from Mecca in the Hijra, twelve years into his career as a prophet.

The Umayyads fought back with new hadiths of their own. In one, Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha, who hated Ali for his ungallant advice to Muhammad to discard her and get a new wife when
she was accused of adultery, is told after the death of the prophet of Islam that Muhammad appointed Ali as his successor in his will. Aisha responds fiercely: “When did he appoint him by will? Verily, when he died he was resting against my chest (or said: in my lap) and he asked for a washbasin and then collapsed while in that state, and I could not even perceive that he had died, so when did he appoint him by will?”
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In another, Muhammad showers praise on the three men who immediately succeeded him: Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, each of whom was chosen as caliph instead of Ali. After Muhammad climbs the mountain of Uhud with the three successors, the mountain starts shaking, and he speaks to it: “Be firm, O Uhud! For on you there are no more than a Prophet, a
Siddiq
and two martyrs.”
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Siddiq
, or “truthful,” is an honorary title bestowed on one who is entirely trustworthy.