Taking it a step further/Kayfa nata'amal ma'a al-hadith?

Omar G has an interesting piece on the step that ISNA's Louay Safi just can't take regarding the ongoing debate about Ingrid Mattson's election to the leadership of that organization. The comments raise some important questions about the place of hadith among North American Muslims today.

Scott Lucas even suggests that Fatima Mernissi's approach to the hadith which has the Prophet declare that a people will not prosper if they have a woman as leader risks throwing out the Sahihayn (i.e. the hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim) altogether. In a rather polemical vein, he muses that Muslims have lost so much to modernity, including the Sufi orders and the Sharia; are they also to lose the two hadith collections which are regarded (by Sunnis) as the most reliable?

Mernissi does not suggest throwing out the Sahihayn. What she does, and not without a good deal of irony, is to use the traditional method of isnad-criticism for feminist purposes. Lucas appears to be suggesting that too much scrutiny of the isnads of certain hadiths will lead to doubts being cast on the authenticity of the whole corpus, which would then presumably result in the destruction of something essential to Islam.

If this is what he in fact means, I tend to doubt it.  Down through the ages, some of the hadiths in the Sahihayn which raised the eyebrows of more than a few scholars. This did not result in such scholars then proceeding to reject the hadith in toto. What generally happened was that they found different ways of reading such troublesome hadiths, so that whatever inconsistencies or problems they found could be explained away, whether through arguments based on abrogation, grammar, or various other grounds. Modern Muslims continue to make such arguments, though often with considerably less sophistication.

But I tend to agree that in the end, isnad-criticism won't bring about the changes feminists seek. For one thing, the medieval biographical works which anyone doing isnad-criticism must use frequently do not agree on the status of the people whose names are given in the isnads: one authority may claim that X is an untrustworthy narrator or even a liar, while another may say that he is reliable. Whom to believe? What are the chances of an argument to reject a particular hadith on the grounds of problems in its isnad succeeding, when communal consensus has accepted it?

Communal consensus is only likely to change as a result of other social transformations which call this consensus into question; then, the hadith becomes embarrassing, and the argument that its isnad is problematic becomes a fig-leaf for a change in attitude. Not necessarily a bad thing (in the case of some of these hadith, I'd say it is a good thing), but nonetheless, isnad-criticism isn't spear-heading change here, it's merely approving change already well underway.

I'd suggest another approach; why not recognize several things, and take them into account in our readings of hadith:

1. The compilations of hadith we now have were not written down until at least several generations after the death of the Prophet.

2. Many hadiths exist in several (or more) variant versions. When we compare among them, we realise that they could seldom be recording the Prophet's exact words or actions. In addition, they are not simply disinterested memories recounted by his followers; often, they are related (and subsequently written down) in order to argue for a particular legal principle or course of action. Some early transmitters of hadith regarded it as permissible to relate the meaning only, rather than the exact words.

3. The hadith as a whole do not provide anything like a complete picture of the Prophet's life, or the life of the first Muslim community. Since we're on the subject of gender, it is clear that although women are at least half of any society, and there is no reason to believe that 7th century Medina was any different, women Companions don't narrate anything close to half of all hadiths. While the proportion related by female Companions varies depending on the hadith collection you are looking at, in all cases it is small.

4. A look at biographical works such as the Tabaqat of Ibn Sa'd (d. 230 AH) reveals that the majority of Companions listed are male, and that in addition, the information given about female Companions often is far more scant than that provided about their male counterparts. We know very little about the female half of the early Muslim community, and most of what we think we know is based on pretty slender grounds.

5. Hadith compilers didn't record every hadith they came across, even if it met their standards of reliability as far as the isnad was concerned. For example, Muslim clearly states that he has only included hadiths which are in accordance with communal consensus (as they defined it). This raises some interesting questions about hadiths with ramifications for gender relations in particular, given that there was rapid social change due to the conquests.

6. Historically, the acceptance (by Sunnis) of the Sahihayn as the most authentic collections of hadith is the result of a process; it did not emerge all at once.

7. There is a long history of hadith criticism, and any recourse to hadith as proof-texts should reference such critical works (and of course, read them critically as well).

Given all these points (and more, but that's a post for another day....) I'd argue that any historically and intellectually honest reading of hadith needs to be both critical and historically contextualized. Bukhari's hadith about women's leadership is unlikely to tell us what the Prophet thought about it, though this remains to be demonstrated. It is rather more likely to tell us about the anxieties of subsequent generations of Muslim (male) scholars in the formative period. Like their Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Zoroastrian and Buddhist counterparts before them, they attempted to deal with the conundrum faced by any religion which is both strongly patriarchal and yet contains communal memories, however faint, of early female leadership.

As to whether such anxieties should have a veto power over our lives today, this is yet another question quite separate from hadith criticism. Surely, any thinking person would recognize that in an age when women lead organizations, corporations, parishes, and even countries quite successfully, stubbornly maintaining that we "know" that catastrophe dogs any people who have a female leader is about as perceptive as an argument that because the Quran says that God "spread out" the earth, therefore we know that it must be flat.