Cambridge 1966: the Dissertation that Refutes Goldziher and Schacht

A Tool, a Scholar, an English University

In the previous article we followed Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, the Nishapuri Imam al-A’imma who half a century after al-Bukhari ﵀ composed a Sahih of his own and thereby showed that the critical science kept working after the canon. We looked at the surviving folio from his work, a tangible written page with a chain of transmission that can be traced in the biographical dictionaries, and we saw that behind that folio stood the complete apparatus of al-Jarh wa-at-Ta’dil: the detailed criticism and confirmation of transmitters, a sifting machine with rules, levels, technical terms and a memory of generations of its own. We also saw why that tool was necessary: because a hadith has value only once we know who carried it, and because the whole edifice of acceptance rests on the reliability of the transmitters in the chain.

This closing article of the period calls for a follow-up question. What happens when a scholar, centuries after the classical muhaddithun, takes up that tool and aims it at the Western orientalist library in which it had been asserted since the nineteenth century that the whole hadith corpus was a later invention? What happens when someone pours the logic of the classical criticism of tradition, the logic of Ibn Hajar ﵀, ad-Dhahabi ﵀ and al-Bukhari ﵀, into an English-language dissertation and defends that thesis before an examination committee at the University of Cambridge?

That happened, and it happened in October 1966.

The scholar was Mohammad Mustafa Azami ﵀. In the opening of his dissertation he writes that it was submitted in October 1966 to the University of Cambridge for the degree of doctor of philosophy. His dissertation carried the title Studies in Early Hadith Literature. In his acknowledgments he names Robert Bertram Serjeant, the British Arabist who, while still attached to the University of London, first introduced him to Cambridge and later supervised his research. He names in addition Arthur John Arberry, professor of Arabic at Pembroke College, who gave him his time and wrote the foreword for the work, one of the most respected names in the English-language Islamic studies of the twentieth century.

When Arberry wrote his foreword, on 16 February 1967, he summed up his judgement of the dissertation in a single sentence that would later often be quoted: the thesis that the candidate presented, and for which Cambridge conferred on him the degree of doctor, was in his opinion one of the most exciting and original investigations in this field of modern times. It was no loose courtesy. It was, in academic language, a signature under a reversal. The polemic between the Western hadith criticism and the Islamic hadith tradition was no longer one-sided. The direction had been reversed. For the first time since Goldziher published his Muhammedanische Studien in 1890, an English-language work lay on the table that systematically put the edifice of his school, of his successors and of his pupils under pressure, not with polemic but with manuscripts.

This article is the story of that dissertation. It is also the closing piece of a period that began seventy years earlier in this theme with Goldziher’s claim that the hadith transmission was in reality a fiction of the second and third centuries. What was opened at the beginning of this map with a Hungarian orientalist in Budapest and Leiden is closed in this finale with a scholar from the Islamic tradition in a Gothic hall in Cambridge. Between those two moments lies a scholarly struggle that still shapes the Ummah.

The Orientalist Edifice

To grasp the significance of Cambridge 1966, one must first know which building was put to the test there. It was no small building. It was, for three quarters of a century, the dominant academic building in which the hadith was thought about in Berlin, Leiden, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. It carried several names, but one architecture.

The first stone was laid by Aloys Sprenger, an Arabist of Tyrolean origin. He published in the nineteenth century, partly from India and partly from Europe, a three-volume work on the life and teaching of Mohammad. Sprenger took the hadith transmission seriously enough to write about it, but doubted the genuineness of a large part of it. It was not yet the complete rejection; it was the first systematic public suspicion.

The second stone, and the heaviest, was laid by Ignaz Goldziher, born in 1850 at Székesfehérvár in Hungary, educated in Budapest, Berlin, Leipzig and Leiden. In 1890 he published in Halle the second volume of his Muhammedanische Studien, a work that would define the hadith science in the West for decades. Goldziher’s central thesis was hard and simple: the overwhelming majority of the ahadith were not what they claimed to be. They were not sayings of the Prophet ﷺ. They were, in his reading, products of the political, theological and juridical conflicts of the first two centuries after the hijra, projected onto the Prophet ﷺ after the fact to lend authority to party positions. The Umayyads had invented ahadith to legitimise their rule. The Abbasids had invented ahadith to delegitimise the Umayyads. The legal schools had invented ahadith to settle their differences of opinion with one another. Piety had invented ahadith to encourage piety. What remained, after all this layering, was in Goldziher’s picture a corpus in which one could, strictly speaking, trace not a single saying back to the Prophet ﷺ with certainty.

That was 1890. The work immediately became a foundation. It was learned, it was thorough, it contained thousands of Arabic references, and it was written by a man who commanded Arabic at a level that was rare in his generation. Goldziher was celebrated in Budapest, in Berlin, in Leiden. His book became the standard work with which every doctoral candidate who wrote about hadith in the West had to agree or disagree. Agree or disagree, but no longer pass it by.

The third stone was laid by David Samuel Margoliouth, professor of Arabic at Oxford from 1889 to 1937. Margoliouth built on Goldziher and intensified the polemical tone. In his lectures and in his revised Mohammedanism of 1911 he went further than Goldziher in belittling the early Islamic learning and in emphasising its dependence, in his opinion, on earlier Jewish and Christian materials.

The fourth stone came from Alfred Guillaume, educated in Oxford, publishing in 1924 under the title The Traditions of Islam. Guillaume added little that was original; he mainly summarised Goldziher in English-language prose for a public that did not command German. Azami would later write in his introduction that Guillaume’s book contains no original idea and draws largely on Goldziher’s work. What explains Guillaume’s importance is not his originality but his language. For the English-speaking student he became, for decades, the gateway to the subject.

The fifth stone was laid by Arent Jan Wensinck, professor of Arabic at Leiden from 1927 to 1939. Wensinck was the builder of the Concordance et indices de la tradition musulmane, the gigantic reference work that enabled Western researchers to look up every word in the six canonical collections. At the same time he wrote, notably in his work The Muslim Creed, that certain fundamental ahadith, such as the hadith about the Five Pillars of Islam, had to be a later formation on material grounds. On his confidence in the Concordance he built a second building: a hadith corpus whose central doctrines he historically distrusted.

The sixth and last great stone was laid by Joseph Schacht. Schacht, born in Silesia in 1902, professor successively in Königsberg, Cairo, Algiers, Oxford and Leiden, and finally at Columbia in New York, published in 1950 in Oxford his Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. The work was, in the academic sense, the masterpiece of the Western hadith scepticism. Schacht systematised Goldziher’s intuitions into a chronological theory. He asserted that legal ahadith almost never go back to the first century, that most legal isnads were projected back onto Prophetic authority between 770 and 850, and that the flourishing isnad culture of the early second century was in reality a consequence of a polemical race between schools that wished to outdo one another’s authorities.

Schacht’s core thesis was summed up in Origins on p. 149 in one single accusing sentence: Hardly one of these traditions, as far as they concern rules of religious law, can be considered authentic; they were put into circulation from the first half of the second century and later.

For half a century this was the paradigm. Goldziher had set the chair, Margoliouth had laid the cushion on it, Guillaume had moved it into the English-language reading room, Wensinck had tightened the bolts, and Schacht had built on the backrest. Whoever wished to study hadith at a Western university sat down in that chair or remained standing. A third option scarcely existed. The Islamic tradition of scholarship itself, al-Bukhari ﵀ and his successors, was mentioned in footnotes, sometimes with respect, but rarely taken seriously as a scholarly interlocutor.

The Boy from Mau

The man who would tip the chair was born in northern India. Mohammad Mustafa Azami first saw the light in 1932, in the surroundings of Mau Nath Bhanjan in the district of Azamgarh, in what was then British India and what after 1947 would become the state of Uttar Pradesh of the Republic of India. His name al-A’zami refers to his district of origin; thus many Indo-Pakistani scholars of his generation carry the name of their birthplace as a toponymic nisbah, in the old manner of the muhaddithun.

On the details of his earliest education the dissertation itself is silent, but in his acknowledgments he names Maulana Sa’id Ahmad Akbarabadi, dean of the faculty of theology at the Muslim university of Aligarh, who supervised his first research work. His path then led to Egypt, to al-Azhar in Cairo, the thousand-year-old university at the foot of the Mokattam hills, where he trained himself in the Arabic language and the religious sciences. It was the classical route of the Indo-Egyptian scholar of his time: from a madrasa in the Indus valley to the lecture halls of al-Azhar, with along the way a thorough knowledge of the six canonical collections, of the commentaries upon them, and of the extensive rijal apparatus that we discussed in the article on narrator criticism.

What distinguished Azami from his fellow students was not only his education but also his temperament. He had the patient, sifting mind of a librarian and the combative heart of a defender. He commanded Urdu, Arabic and Persian, and acquired in addition enough access to the Western languages to study the orientalist works. His acknowledgments draw an honest picture here: he thanks a collaborator who translated some chapters of the French version of Goldziher’s Muhammedanische Studien for him. He was thus no solitary polyglot who devoured every orientalist effortlessly in the original language; he was a scholar who, with help where needed, took in the Western material in serious breadth, something that was rare among his fellow students.

After his Egyptian years of study his name became connected with the public library of Doha in Qatar, the small emirate on the Persian Gulf that in those years began to invest in a cultural infrastructure of its own. In his acknowledgments he expresses his thanks to Sheikh Qasim ibn Hamad Al Thani, the minister of Education, who granted him study leave, and he names separately the rulers of the house of Al Thani who created the climate in which the library could build up its material. The public library of Doha, so his acknowledgments note, supplied him with part of the material on which his research would rest. It was a position that at first sight sounded modest, but in reality opened the gate to the material that would distinguish him from every predecessor.

For a librarian in Doha in those years was not merely a keeper of shelves. He was a collector. He acquired access to manuscripts of hadith works that were scarcely known in the West, and that no orientalist had consulted until then. In his introduction he writes that he had about a dozen manuscripts at his disposal. In his acknowledgments he thanks, among others, Muhammad Hamidullah and Nasir ad-Din al-Albani for supplying microfilms, and the staff of libraries in Cairo for their help. He was a man who had the material in his hands, not from book reviews.

Among the manuscripts he studied were some that would form the heart of his later dissertation, and that he himself edited and printed in the second part of his work. The most important was the Nuskhah of Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀, a collection of forty-eight transmissions, with a chain running from Suhail via his father Abu Salih to Abu Hurairah ﵁. Suhail ﵀ passed away in the year 138, which places the manuscript in the middle of the early layer of transmission. In addition he edited the Hadith of Ubaid Allah ibn Umar via Nafi ﵀, and the Ahadith of Abu al-Yaman via Muhammad ibn Muslim ibn Shihab az-Zuhri ﵀, an early authoritative source of the Maghazi and the sira. To a related Nuskhah, that of Zubair ibn Adi ﵀, Azami attached a remarkable observation. This Nuskhah had been classified by Ibn Hibban ﵀ as Nuskhah Mawdu’ah, a copy labelled as manufactured or forged, and yet about a quarter of its content proved simply to be found back in the Sahih works of al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀. The term Mawdu’ah referred, as Azami showed, not to the content but to the manner of reception: the text had been received via a defective method, not forged in its matn. Whoever reads the manuscripts as the muhaddithun read them discovers that such labels are more precise and more subtle than the orientalist suspected.

None of these manuscripts was new to the Islamic world. They were known and preserved within the chains of transmission of the Ummah. What was new was that they were edited, analysed and collated with one another in this way by a scholar who could also read the Western arguments. In his introduction Azami establishes that Goldziher had not seen these documents: had he known them, then, so Azami writes, he would perhaps have formed other theories. Schacht in his turn built his system, according to the introduction, without paying any attention to the recent discoveries of manuscripts. What held for Goldziher and Schacht held in practice for the whole school: Wensinck, Margoliouth and Guillaume had not had this corpus in their hands either.

This fact, and no more than this, would become the crowbar under their edifice.

The Road to Cambridge

Robert Bertram Serjeant, born in Edinburgh in 1915, was one of the leading British Arabists of his generation. He was specialised in South Arabian history, had done fieldwork in the Hadramawt and in Yemen, and was attached to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1970 he would become the Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, a chair that goes back to 1632 and that is the oldest Arabic chair of the English university world.

It was Serjeant who, while still attached to the University of London, first introduced Azami to Cambridge, and who later undertook to supervise his research. So Azami himself notes in his acknowledgments. The road to the dissertation thus ran through London and through the figure of Serjeant, and not through a chance discovery in a Gulf library.

The supervision finally came into the hands of Arthur John Arberry. Arberry, born in 1905, educated in Cambridge, and Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge from 1947 until his death in 1969, was a scientist with a literary temperament. He was the English translator of Rumi, of Hafiz, of the Muallaqat, and of the Quran in an esteemed version of his own from 1955. He had the gift of carrying both the philological precision and the literary beauty of Arabic texts. And he had made Pembroke College his academic home.

Under Arberry, Azami completed his dissertation. The access to manuscripts he had gathered made his work unique. None of his predecessors at Cambridge had ever worked with this corpus of early sources. The structure of his dissertation, as he himself describes it in the introduction, consists of two parts. The first part comprises eight chapters and five appendices; that is the analysis. The second part is the bundle of edited Arabic manuscripts; those are the sources themselves. No orientalist had ever delivered both at once.

In October 1966 the dissertation was submitted to the University of Cambridge for the degree of doctor of philosophy. It was accepted, and Azami was promoted to doctor of the University of Cambridge. On 16 February 1967 Arberry wrote from Pembroke College the foreword for the printed edition that would appear the following year in Beirut.

Arberry’s Verdict

Arberry’s foreword to Studies in Early Hadith Literature covers two pages. It is measured in tone, ample in erudition, with the careful formulations of a man who knew how much his signature weighed. He placed the dissertation not in a long argument about Goldziher or Schacht, but in the concrete field in which the work moved. The most important field of research for the study of the hadith, so Arberry wrote, is the discovery, verification and evaluation of the smaller collections of traditions that precede the six canonical collections. And on precisely that terrain, he judged, Azami had performed pioneering work of the highest value.

The decisive judgement came in one sentence that would become a moment of quotation within the whole field:

The thesis which he presented, and for which Cambridge conferred on him the degree of Ph.D., is in my opinion one of the most exciting and original investigations in this field of modern times.

A.J. Arberry, Pembroke College, Cambridge, 16 February 1967

It is, for whoever knows the academic culture, an extraordinary statement. A Cambridge professor of Arabic calls a dissertation from his own university one of the most exciting and original investigations in this field of modern times. Not the best of the year. Not a useful contribution. One of the most exciting and original investigations in this field of modern times. For a man who had himself translated the Quran, this field was the Western research into the Islamic source texts in its full breadth.

Whoever places Arberry’s statement beside the three quarters of a century that preceded this day sees what he in reality did. By placing the emphasis on the smaller collections preceding the canon, he acknowledged that the decisive terrain no longer lay with the printed polemic, but with the early manuscripts. He acknowledged that a scholar from the Islamic tradition, armed with precisely those manuscripts, had delivered pioneering work on that terrain. And he set his signature under it.

The foreword ends at that judgement and at the signature. There follows no long exhortation, no inflated promise. The strength of the foreword lies precisely in the soberness: a Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic who calls a work of a scholar from the Islamic tradition one of the most exciting and original investigations in this field of modern times needs no exhortation. The statement itself is the recommendation. A year later, in 1968, the first edition appeared with al-Maktab al-Islami in Beirut. In 1978 followed the second, revised edition with American Trust Publications in Indianapolis. With that the work reached the English-speaking student in America and Europe.

The Method

What exactly had Azami done that Arberry praised so? The answer lies in a method that at first sight was simple and in its execution implacable.

He had laid every central argument of his predecessors, chapter by chapter, beside the manuscripts they had not seen.

His dissertation opens in chapter I with the literary activity in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. Goldziher and Nicholson had, following Sprenger, asserted that the Arabs of the Jahiliyya and the first hijra decades knew a largely oral culture without writing worth mentioning. The Quranic references to the Pen, to contracts, to sealed letters, were dismissed in this picture as literary effect. Azami opens with a list of schools that existed in pre-Islamic Mecca, al-Ta’if, Anbar, Hira, Dumat al-Jandal, Medina and in the tribe of Hudhail, in which boys and girls together learned to read and write, attested in al-Baladhuri’s Futuh, Ibn Qutaibah’s Uyun al-Akhbar, Ibn 'Abd al-Barr’s al-Qasd wa al-Umam, Ibn Habib’s Muhabbar, and al-Maidani’s Amthal. He cites the work of Nasir al-Asad on the sources of the pre-Islamic poetry and the roughly twenty references that this researcher had collected from various poems about the writing down of poetry in the Jahiliyya. He counts the tribal agreements, the promissory notes, the personal letters, the Book of Daniel in translation, the genealogical registers and the treatises on wisdom, and he shows that Goldziher’s claim of a purely oral Arabic culture is no more than a prejudice without a basis in the sources.

In the second part of chapter I he treats the educational policy of the Prophet ﷺ. He shows that the Prophet ﷺ already before the hijra sent Mus’ab ibn 'Umair ﵁ and Ibn Umm Maktum ﵁ to Medina to teach his few followers, that after the hijra the first school was immediately built onto the mosque, that 'Abdullah ibn Sa’id ibn al-'As ﵁ was appointed as teacher in writing, that the ransoms of some prisoners of Badr were replaced by the obligation to teach ten children in Medina to write, that in the second year of the hijra a new school was opened, that there stood nine mosques in Medina that were most probably used as schools, that the Prophet ﷺ in a hadith described the teaching of writing as the duty of a father toward his son, and that he sent out at least forty teachers beyond Medina, among them the group that was murdered on the way to Bi’r Ma’unah.

In chapter II he treats the old accusation that the hadith was written down only in the second century and that the Prophet ﷺ had forbidden the writing down of ahadith. Azami shows point by point that this claim rests on a wrong reading of the terms Tadwin, Tasnif and Kitabah. Tadwin means collecting in one volume, Tasnif means thematic classification; neither is the same as the primary writing down, Kitabah. He shows that the well-known saying the first who wrote down the hadith was az-Zuhri ﵀ in reality means that he was the first who made a comprehensive compilation on state orders, not the first who wrote down ahadith. He analyses the Sahaba who according to al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ﵀ would have been against writing down, and the Tabi’in who would have felt the same, and he demonstrates that of nearly all of them texts or reports have also been transmitted in which they themselves did write or recommended writing. He collects the indications that precisely encouraged the writing down, such as the verses of Surah al-Baqarah that made the writing down of credit transactions obligatory. He defuses the central single hadith that was used as a prohibition, a transmission of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri ﵁, and shows that al-Bukhari ﵀ himself regarded this transmission as a personal statement of Abu Sa’id ﵁, wrongly attributed to the Prophet ﷺ.

In chapter III, which covers about a hundred and fifty pages, he delivers what is perhaps the heaviest piece of evidence of his whole dissertation. He enumerates, on the basis of handwritten and printed sources, the thousands of writings that circulated among the muhaddithun in the first two centuries of Islam. He organises them in layers: writings of and by Companions ﵃, writings of and by first-century Successors, writings from the transition from the first to the second century, and writings of and by the early second-century scholars. For each layer he names names, titles, places of attestation, and in many cases the present manuscript location. The sum of this enumeration is crushing. In his introduction he sums up the consequence: the number of ahadith must be raised from a few thousand to three quarters of a million. The claim that the hadith took written shape only in the second and third centuries cannot survive under the weight of this list.

Chapter IV treats the teaching methods of the muhaddithun, the places where they taught, the ages of their students, the school buildings, the atraf system by which ahadith with their chains were indexed, and the recognised methods of transmission, from oral recitation by the teacher to dictation in a circle of writers. Chapter V treats the materials on which was written, the manners of writing, the system of dotting and punctuation, and the problems of authorship. It is precisely in this fifth chapter that Azami defends the authorship of the Maghazi of Musa ibn 'Uqbah ﵀, to which we return shortly.

But the centre of gravity of Arberry’s praise, and what would give the dissertation its fame in the international academic world, lies in chapters VI and VII. These are the chapters in which Azami tests the central theses of Schacht and Wensinck directly against the palaeographical and biographical reality.

Chapter VI: the End of the Isnad Scepticism

Schacht had developed in Origins a theory he called the flowering of isnads. The thought was: the later a hadith collection, the more complete the chain of transmitters to the Prophet ﷺ. From this Schacht inferred that the isnads had gradually grown backwards, in a polemical race between schools, to outdo the authority of earlier authorities. A hadith with a chain to a Companion ﵁ was, in this picture, older in form than a hadith with a chain to the Prophet ﷺ himself; the latter was, in Schacht’s reading, projected further back at a later stage. The isnads, so Schacht argued, were thus in fact projected backwards, and at the junctions of their chains he believed he recognised a common link that would betray the place of fabrication.

Azami opens chapter VI with a history of the beginning of the isnad. He shows that the isnad as a technique does not stem from the second century, but already functioned in the very first generation, albeit in a more flexible form than the later strict variant. The system of the isnad, he writes, began in the time of the Prophet ﷺ himself. He follows the development of the isnad via Successors such as Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab ﵀, Urwah ibn Zubair ﵀ and Muhammad ibn Sirin ﵀, into the first compositions of the second century. He shows that the atraf system, in which ahadith with their opening words and their isnads were set side by side in tables, already existed in the early second century, and that these tables had made the deliberate and unseen inventing of isnads practically impossible.

Then comes the counter-test. Azami takes the specific examples that Schacht had given in Origins as proofs of arbitrary isnad formation, and he collates them with the manuscript reality. He shows that Schacht, in support of a far-reaching thesis, often adduced only one example, which gave a misleading impression, and that a theory of such general application cannot rest on such meagre evidence. Where Schacht, for example, presented the chain of Malik ibn Anas ﵀ from Nafi’ ﵀ from Ibn 'Umar ﵁ as late-formed, Azami shows that this chain occurs in many independent and geographically dispersed sources, with the same form and the same matn, a dispersion that is best explicable if the chain was already established in the first century, not in the second.

He goes on with the so-called Projecting Back theory and points out its internal difficulties. He shows that Schacht’s method refutes itself as soon as it is applied to material he had not consulted. The decisive example is the Nuskhah of Suhail ibn Abi Salih ﵀, the forty-eight transmissions that go back to Abu Hurairah ﵁ and that are largely to be found back in al-Bukhari ﵀ and Muslim ﵀. In his general conclusion on the supposed growth of the isnads Azami divides those forty-eight transmissions of Suhail ﵀ into categories and shows how their isnads behave in reality. The overwhelming part carries a uniform isnad form that cannot have arisen in a polemical struggle between schools, because the text precedes the emergence of those schools. What Schacht had interpreted as flowering of isnads proves, at the manuscripts, to be no flowering of fabrication, but the ordinary dispersion of an early established transmission.

A separate case Azami treated already in chapter V: the Maghazi of Musa ibn 'Uqbah ﵀, an early Medinan sira source. Schacht had called the authorship of this Maghazi into doubt and suggested that Musa ﵀ was dependent on az-Zuhri ﵀. Azami defends the authorship and shows that the material stands on its own and goes back to the early second century, before the struggle between schools that would have had to shape the source. And the Maghazi of az-Zuhri ﵀ himself, the man who according to the orientalist reading would have been the great fabricating systematiser, are defended by Azami in a chapter of its own on az-Zuhri ﵀ against his critics, with the care for sources and isnad precision that the muhaddithun had ascribed to him.

The chapter on the isnad ends with a final conclusion in which Azami, in academically dry language, passes a devastating judgement on the Schachtian methodology. Schacht had not worked with the manuscripts. He had worked mainly with printed legal literature, and from that literature he had picked out the defective cases and elevated them to the rule. Whoever lays the Muwatta’ of Malik ﵀ beside the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, beside the Sahihain, beside the early nuskhahs that Azami had edited, finds no flowering isnads and no projecting back, but an early established system that, as Azami formulates it, goes back to the time of the Prophet ﷺ and that was refined centuries later by the muhaddithun without its fundamental structure changing.

Azami formulated the core of all this in his introduction in a few sentences that set the tone for the whole work: The conclusions of the present research stand in sharp contrast to those of Schacht. So I have inevitably had to check and examine his results.

It was no polemical sentence. It was a methodological sentence. It says: I did not come to combat Schacht; I came to study the hadith, and in studying it I could not pass him by, and in working around him I found that he did not hold up.

Chapter VII: the Five Pillars Hadith and the Refutation of Wensinck

Chapter VII treats the authenticity of the hadith in a general sense and focuses in addition on one specific, heavily weighed case: the famous transmission of the Five Pillars of Islam. About this transmission Wensinck had argued in his work The Muslim Creed that it had to be a later formation on material grounds.

Wensinck’s reasoning, as Azami renders it, turned on the question whether the doctrinal content of the transmission could belong in the Prophetic period at all. Wensinck argued among other things that the confession of faith, the Shahadah, could not be an authentic Prophetic saying because it forms part of the Tashahhud in the prayer, and he built a related argument on the standardisation of the call to prayer, the adhan, and of the prayer itself. From that supposed late standardisation he inferred that the summarising hadith about the five pillars had to be a later formulation, projected back retroactively onto the Prophet ﷺ.

Azami tests this argument and dissects its presuppositions. He shows that the reasoning rests on assumptions about the late standardisation of adhan, Shahadah and prayer that are themselves not tenable, and that, as soon as those assumptions fall away, the whole construction about the supposed forgery of the Five Pillars hadith loses its ground. In his own words, the whole hair-splitting argument about the forgery of this transmission thereby becomes meaningless. The proof for the late formulation proves to be nothing other than the assumption of the late formulation: a circular argument.

The conclusion of the chapter is without pretension but sharp. The material criticism of Wensinck on the Five Pillars hadith Azami calls very weak, unreasonable and based on ignorance, and he concludes that the conclusions about forgery must be radically revised. The transmission withstands the test and remains standing, according to every reasonable criterion of early Islamic hadith science.

What Azami Did Not Do

It is as important to see what Azami did not do as what he did do. He nowhere claimed that all ahadith in every collection are authentic. He knew, as a seasoned expert of al-Jarh wa-at-Ta’dil, that the muhaddithun themselves had rejected thousands of ahadith, that al-Bukhari ﵀ had included in his Sahih only a selection out of an enormous number of transmitted ahadith, and that the whole classical discipline was built on that labour of sifting. Nor did he claim that Schacht was wrong about everything. He claimed that Schacht’s central thesis, namely that the legal hadith corpus was a second-century fabrication, could not hold up against the manuscript reality that Schacht had not consulted.

He wrote in his introduction himself: It is not my intention to study his work critically and in detail, nor do I have sufficient time for that. But it seems that a thorough study would reveal weaknesses in his work.

It is a typically academic understatement, and it is treacherous. In practice Azami had carried out, in his chapters VI and VII, a more thorough test than anyone before him.

The Publication and the Silence

In 1968 the first edition appeared in Beirut with al-Maktab al-Islami, in a well-produced English printing with the Arabic manuscript appendix in a second volume. In the Arab world the work was noticed and discussed in learned circles. In the Western academic world something else occurred: a silence that would last for years.

There were reviews. There were acknowledgements. But there was no embrace. Wensinck had by then passed away, Schacht would die in 1969, and the generation that had built the paradigm slowly disappeared. Western hadith study went on in part as it was, with curricula that kept using Schacht’s Origins as a handbook as if nothing had happened. In some syllabi Azami’s dissertation was indeed mentioned, but rarely treated on an equal footing with Goldziher or Schacht.

This is, for whoever knows the academic culture, a recognisable reaction. A paradigm is seldom replaced all at once. It is replaced when a new generation no longer reads the old books in the same way. For hadith study this meant that Azami’s work was taken up in the English-language discussion only gradually, in the course of the eighties and nineties. Researchers such as Harald Motzki began in the nineties to correct the Schachtian chronology systematically. Motzki’s own early study focused on the early Meccan fiqh, on the circles around Ibn Jurayj and ‘Ata’ and the Musannaf of 'Abd ar-Razzaq, and he developed his isnad-cum-matn method largely independently. His conclusions, however, converged with those of Azami where the early dating of the material was concerned, and together they shifted the centre of gravity of the debate.

In 1978 the second edition appeared with American Trust Publications in Indianapolis. With that the work reached the English-speaking student in America. From that moment the recognition began to penetrate more broadly at the Western universities. Azami put works on the shelf in the following decades that removed further stones from under the wall: On Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, and finally The History of the Qur’anic Text of 2003, which in the theme of the Quran compilation would become the standard refutation of the textual Quran scepticism. In 1980 he was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for his service to Islam, a distinction that sealed his stature in the Islamic world.

He passed away in 2017 in Riyadh. His work outlived him, and is still growing in influence.

What This Means

The question that the Muslim of today asks himself when he encounters the names Goldziher, Schacht and Wensinck in a secondary or university syllabus is a serious question. He sees there three scholars of fame, with the authority of Berlin, Oxford and Leiden, who tell him that the hadith corpus on which his life is built is for the greatest part a later fabrication. The student looks up from his syllabus and asks himself: what am I to do with this.

The answer of Cambridge 1966 is simple and liberating. The answer is: these three scholars have been referenced, tested, and refuted in the essential parts of their argumentation, not by polemic but by precisely that type of research they themselves claimed to practise. The test was done by a scholar from the Islamic tradition who had read their works, and who worked with manuscripts they had not consulted. The test was recognised by a Cambridge examination, with a foreword by A.J. Arberry. The test lies in print, in English, in two editions, since 1968 and 1978.

The Muslim in a secular environment who encounters Goldziher in his syllabus is not defenceless. He has, since 1966, a tool. The tool is called Studies in Early Hadith Literature. It is written in his language or in the language his lecturer reads. It covers eight chapters and five appendices. It contains a second volume with the edited Arabic manuscripts that settle the case. It is defensible in every seminar room in which the old orientalist arguments are raised.

With that not everything is said. Scholarship goes on. New manuscripts are discovered, new methods are applied, new voices are heard. But the central paradigm in which Goldziher and Schacht determined the Western discourse on the hadith for a hundred years has, since Cambridge 1966, no longer been dominant in its pretension of uncontested authority. The chair has been tipped. Whoever still sits on it does so against the advice of a Cambridge professor of 1967 and against the manuscripts of Suhail ﵀, of Ubaid Allah ibn Umar via Nafi ﵀, of Musa ibn 'Uqbah ﵀ and of az-Zuhri ﵀.

Closing of the Period

With this article the second great period within the theme The History of the Islamic Sciences closes. The first period, The Compilation of the Quran, closed with the seven canonical qurra ﵃ and the standardisation of the qira’at. This second period, The Science of the Hadith, closed today with a Cambridge dissertation that reversed the polemic.

The arc we have followed was the arc of a science. We began at the opening of this map with Goldziher in 1890, with his claim in Halle that the hadith was a fiction. We followed the build-up of the orientalist line through Margoliouth, Guillaume, Wensinck and Schacht. We followed in parallel the Islamic defence: the Sahifah as-Sadiqa of 'Abdullah ibn 'Amr ibn al-'As ﵁, the scribes of the Prophet ﷺ, the first question to a transmitter, the origin of the isnad, the birth of the great canonical collections, the muhaddithun culture of travel and compilation, the science of al-Jarh wa-at-Ta’dil as it was set out in the article on narrator criticism. Today, in this finale, those two lines came together in an English university hall and the Islamic line proved that its history was not only lived but also defensible.

The period is thereby completed. What remains is a greater theme that has yet to unfold in this project.

For the science of the hadith is only one of the six classical disciplines that the Ummah has carried in its learning. The others await their own maps. We shall, in the future sub-maps of the theme The History of the Islamic Sciences, open the following periods. Usul al-Fiqh, the science of legal methodology as it was systematised by imam ash-Shafi’i ﵀ in his Risalah, will ask for its own story. Fiqh, the practical jurisprudence, with the four remaining madhahib of Abu Hanifah ﵀, Malik ﵀, ash-Shafi’i ﵀ and Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, and the detailed history of their origin, their controversies and their rich literature. Aqeedah, the doctrine of faith, with the articulation of Ahl as-Sunnah wa-al-Jama’ah against the currents that challenged it. Tafsir, the Quran commentary, from at-Tabari ﵀ to al-Qurtubi ﵀ to Ibn Kathir ﵀. Tasawwuf, the science of inner purification, from al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ via al-Junaid ﵀ to al-Ghazali ﵀ and after. Each of these disciplines has a history that comprises hundreds of scholars, thousands of works and centuries of development.

What they have in common with the science of the hadith that we close today is this: they are all built on the foundations that the muhaddithun laid. Whoever studies Fiqh leans on the hadith. Whoever defends Aqeedah cites the hadith. Whoever writes Tafsir consults the hadith at every aya. Whoever lives Tasawwuf bases himself on the hadith of Jibril ﵇ about the three levels of islam, iman and ihsan. The science of the hadith is the mother-navel from which the other sciences feed.

And so this period closes with a gratitude. Gratitude to al-Bukhari ﵀, Muslim ﵀, Abu Dawud ﵀, at-Tirmidhi ﵀, an-Nasa’i ﵀, Ibn Majah ﵀ and their predecessors and successors. Gratitude to ad-Dhahabi ﵀ and Ibn Hajar ﵀ for preserving the names. Gratitude to Mohammad Mustafa Azami for defending that whole line in the language of the Western academy. Gratitude to A.J. Arberry for the honesty with which he set his signature under a work that corrected a large part of his own traditions.

The Reminder spoken of in this aya is first of all the Quran. But the Ummah has always taught that the preservation of the Quran cannot be seen apart from the preservation of the Sunnah, because the second explains the first and brings it to life. What Allah ﷻ has promised for the Book, He has in practice granted for the transmissions that accompany the Book. A cave near Mecca, a living room in Medina, a souk in Mosul, a library in Doha, an examination room in Cambridge: the transmission travelled, but it did not disappear. What was built up at the beginning of this map as an orientalist claim was refuted in this finale as a scholarly fact. In between lay a century of work of the Ummah, and that century was brought together in October 1966 on one table in Pembroke College and accepted.

The next maps of this theme will, insha’Allah, open the other sciences. But this map, the map of the hadith, closes here. With a dissertation, with a signature, with a grateful awareness that the transmission which the Companions ﵃ carried in their hearts was recognised anew thirteen centuries later in an English hall for what it is: the second great light that Islam has given to humanity, beside the first.