The Gentle Answer to the Muslim Accusation of Biblical Falsification by Gordon Nickel

Author:Gordon Nickel [Nickel, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bruton Gate
Published: 2016-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

2. Further questions about ḥadīth

Around the middle of the twentieth century, Oxford University professor Joseph Schacht took another scholarly look at Muslim traditions. His focus was Muslim legal thinking in the second century of Islam, shown in such works as the Kitāb al-umm of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820), the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795), the Kitāb al-Āthār of Abū Yūsuf (d. 798), and the Kitāb al-Āthār of al-Shaybānī (d. 805).[992] Schacht wrote that Muslim legal thinking grew out of the “living tradition” of each of the ancient schools of law around the middle of the second Islamic century, and moved from there to traditions attributed to the messenger of Islam only toward the end of the second Islamic century at the insistence of al-Shāfiʿī. He also found a tendency for isnāds to grow backwards with time: first they went back to the figureheads of the schools of law, then back to the Successors, then further back to the Companions, and finally to the messenger of Islam.[993]

Schacht laid out his investigation in detail in The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence.[994] He commented specifically on the “historical” traditions that include the stories of the collection of the Qur’an. “The important point is that to a much higher degree than hitherto suspected, seemingly historical information of the Prophet is only the background for legal doctrines and therefore devoid of independent value.”[995] Schacht wrote that it was possible to observe the growth of material concerning the messenger of Islam throughout the second Islamic century, with new traditions appearing at every successive stage of doctrine. He concluded, “A considerable part of the standard biography of the Prophet in Medina, as it appeared in the second half of the second century A.H., was of very recent origin and is therefore without independent historical value.”[996]

Schacht’s writings, drawn as they were from his careful study of Muslim source materials, naturally exerted an influence on the academic study of Islam.[997] Two British scholars published major studies on the collection and canonization of the Qur’an in the 1970s. University of Aberdeen professor John Burton and University of London scholar John Wansbrough both accepted Schacht’s conclusions about the ḥadīth[998] and found the Muslim traditions about the collections of the Qur’an “confused and contradictory.”[999] Beyond this, however, they took very different approaches. Looking for evidence outside of the traditional stories, Burton found a clue in the tendency of Muslim legal scholars to distinguish between the Qur’an and the muṣḥaf. By “Qur’an,” Muslim scholars meant the concept of the totality of revelation given to the messenger of Islam. By “muṣḥaf,” they meant the book Muslims use. Burton found Muslim scholars virtually unanimous that the Qur’an was never collected in its entirety.[1000] The traditional Muslim accounts of the collection of the Qur’an “are a mass of confusions, contradictions and inconsistencies,” Dr. Burton concluded. “By their nature, they represent the product of a lengthy process of evolution, accretion and ‘improvement.’”[1001]

Dr. Wansbrough also looked outside of the Muslim collection traditions for another approach to the question of the Qur’an’s formation.

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