0:00 [Music] well thanks I it's really my honor to be here it's a to be able to talk to you and to be asked to share any thoughts uh I find the the title of the panel is very interesting or this talk is very interesting because um I think it in some ways it shows uh misconception of how we think about the prophet's Legacy but it also emphasizes some important aspects of it of of how we understand it
0:49 correctly so everyone here has anyone here ever heard the Gettysburg Address yes obviously do anyone here memorize the Gettysburg address in school yes okay um so actually there is no Gettysburg Address what John Georgetown Professor denies Gettysburg Address exists that's not what I'm saying in terms of something that we know the exact words to what you you want I can't have the glass yeah what up oh yeah I'll put it down here why am I playing with this pen I'm going to leave this alone go here stay there um there's actually the Abraham Lincoln wrote four
1:36 drafts we have four copies that he wrote uh one that he said gave to a newspaper afterwards he gave after he gave the speech uh two drafts he wrote beforehand and actually they differ in their wording so one version says that this nation uh shall have a new birth in Liberty another version says that this new ntion that this uh nation under God shall have a new birth so it adds under God and one version doesn't actually have that section at all so actually um even something that we memorize word for word in a school in the United States doesn't really exist in the sense of they're just being one digital yes or no version of it there's actually differences we choose one version that
2:23 we want to have as the Gettysburg Address I think that's um instructive when we think about the sun of the prophet because when you talk about the prophet's words um even if you go to the most reliable Hadith collections of bukari and Muslim you find let's say in bukari two or three or four or five different narrations of the same Hadith that might differ in some wording so you know when someone says to me is everything in bukari true I say well kind of depends what you mean by true I mean did the prophet actually sayam every single thing that's in sahkari maybe sometimes he said a statement two or three times and had a
3:08 companion different companions transmitted those different statements that explains sometimes where there's differences in wording but sometimes it's just the fact that there's this chain of transmission and like a game of telephone there sometimes people introduce uh error or mis they they remember something differently so even bukari according to his standards might have two or three different versions of something that the prophet said that actually differ from one another in some of the wording so um like the Gettysburg Address differs in the wording we don't really think about that um and a lot of times it's not important it doesn't really change the meaning but it means that we sometimes it's a m I think it's a mistake to think about um the prophets
3:53 the Hadith of the Prophet as being these literal exact uh recordings of things he said because actually you have differences in versions even amongst the even amongst the most s hadiths there's different times differences in SL slight wording between different versions of the hadiths and that doesn't mean anything profound it just means that we should think uh get away from thinking about uh this kind of digital notion of you know one zero exact recording of the Prophet speech and start thinking about the prophet Sunnah as a whole as being his is Legacy sallu alaihi wasallam so in that sense the the Islamic tradition has uh several avenues for
4:40 transmitting the sun of the Prophet that check uh one another that keep one another in check that keep one another that correct one another for example the way of transmitting the Sunnah through hadiths is that most some Scholars collected and transmitted and wrote down and compiled all these different reports about that they had heard from previous generations that went back through change of transmission to the prophet and that recorded things that he had said and things that he had done so one way to think about the sun of the Prophet is just collections of these reports these hadiths about things the prophet said and did and if you get these enough of this material together and you start trying to figure out okay what comes earlier what comes later what's a general rule what's a specific uh case what's a an exception what's a
5:28 not an exception right um you try to fit these all together you can actually try and come up with an understanding of what the prophet sunna was in terms of how Muslims are supposed to pray how Muslims supposed to do their fasting what they're supposed to believe about the day of judgment etc etc so that's one very important way of course one of the problems of that is Muslim Scholars don't know if they're putting these pieces together in the right way so we could think about as putting together a puzzle the difference between this and a puzzle is that with a puzzle you know when you're finished because there's a picture of you know whatever a fire truck or something like that or whatever you're making the puzzle of and you can see oh the picture is complete and you say well I have an extra piece or there's not there's a piece missing here so you know when you're done with hadiths you don't know when you're you
6:14 just Scholars have do their best to come up with what they understand to be the proper relationship of these reports to one another of these reports to the Quran of these reports to uh the context of the life of the Prophet so there's a there's a real possibility for disagreement and of course some of that disagreement is the cause for there being different schools of law in Islam with different schools of all within Sunni Islam because people put this data together in different ways but so there are other ways of of transmitting the sun of the Prophet one of the ways is to do it through principles so that the prophet taught certain principles to the companions principles of how to interact with one another principles of how to think about the nature of God about God's justice so
7:02 um you see in the early Muslim period in the time of the successors and the generation after the successors the generation of Scholars like Abu hanifah and Malik anas that they came up with rules about uh all sorts of areas of of life and conduct so for example you know a rule that uh you know you can't buy and sell things you don't that you don't have you can't buy and sell things that don't exist these are principles that they come up with the idea that um um that uh let's say if someone if you murder somebody you can't inherit from that person so if you know if I say well I'm going to get some inheritance for my father and I want the money now I don't
7:47 want to wait for him to die I'm going to go kill my father I'm inherit from him I might be in prison but at least I'll have money no you if you murder someone you cannot inherit any money from them even if you're their child you cannot inherit any money from them so these are these are things that were mostly uh principles that the Companions and successors learned from the prophet and these principles would sometimes help correct understandings of hadiths correct understandings of Hadith so for example if you had Hadith that um um like in the for example in the the Malaki School of Law right or um if there's a Hadith called that if you two parties and they're
8:33 buying and selling things when they until they part company they can um re uh reject the sale or recant on the sale so reneg on the sale so they can reneg on the sale until they part company until they part company now if you hear that phrase until they they part company it means you know until they let's say go their separate ways well Im Malik and others in the School said no no that's not how the um that's not how we know from the the general son of the Prophet it's not how this Hadith should be understood it means pardon company means the the verbal agreement the verbal agreement so that was how the Malaki School understood this Hadith um because of the these principles they learned from the the sun of the Prophet
9:21 um the third way so we the first way is actually just getting Hadith and trying to put together this puzzle to figure out what the prophets so was the second way is to think about the prophet Sun as a set of principles and the Third Way is the prophet sunn as a tradition that's lived by the pious community so the best example of this is prayer uh people don't learn how to pray from books they learn how to pray from their parents or they learn how to pray from their Imam at the mosque or their teachers at school and those people learn how to pray from their parents and their parents so and so all the way back to the time of the Prophet so there's certain aspects of Muslim life that are handed down gener generation after Generation Um of course these things have also have to be checked
10:08 by hadiths because as we all know sometimes you know you can have a tradition from generation to generation every generation it moves a little bit away from its previous generation a little bit farther a little bit farther so after 100 200 300 years people are doing something very different from what their ancestors were doing even though they think every generation thinks it's it's transmitting and inheriting something something and not changing it at all so you always have those hadiths that you can go back to to make sure that you're not going too far away from uh from the actual original practice of the Prophet so when we think about the sunah I think it's better we think about things coming straight from the prophet's lips Alam it's better to think about the Sunnah as the precedent of the
10:53 Prophet overall the authoritative precedent and teachings of the Prophet overall as opposed to thinking about just things that he says or reports that he said because the reports uh you know if you don't have the lived tradition of Muslim Community if you don't have principles that Muslim Scholars derive from the Quran from the Sun of the Prophet you might not understand those sayings correctly and you might not be able to put them in the right relationship with one another okay now um I just want to uh discuss a few you know a few examples I think that really help us uh should give us confidence about the overall intactness of our knowledge of the Prophet Sunnah the overall intact nature of this
11:40 tradition um of course if you read books about Islam written by islamophobes or just by generally by Western Scholars they're very skeptical about hadiths they're very skeptical about data about the life of the Prophet um part of this is because of certain religious or let's say metaphysical positions or presuppositions that these Scholars have for example they don't believe in miracles so they don't it doesn't matter if you know if a report is accurate or not they don't believe for example that the prophet made the moon split or they don't believe that the prophet uh you know that he water came out from between his fingers and filled up pool so that the comp all the companions could do their wo in that water um these are things that are well established hadiths
12:29 or referenced in the Quran so those things they just won't accept um and also in general they're uh they they don't think that any one generation or any one Community is different from any other community in history so there's the idea that the companions let's say were not able to lie about the prophet or that the prophet Alam was uh immune to error immune to to committing sins they just don't accept these principles they every all human beings are the same so that makes them just out you know flat out disbelieve lots of reports that come about the prophet Alam um they don't believe that that the prophet could be given knowledge of the future by God so anything where the
13:16 Prophet is predicting the future they'll say well this is obviously made up later because people people don't know the future now um but I want to give you some examples of of why you know that um this tradition is actually I think quite reliable now that being said all Muslim Scholars acknowledge that thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and dozens of thousands of hadiths were forged they all Muslim Scholars acknowledge that there are countless thousands of forged hadiths that are totally unreliable or mostly unreliable the the reason that Muslim Scholars came up with a science of Hadith criticism was to sort out the forgeries from the reliable hadiths so
14:03 just saying that there's lots of forged hadiths is not news that's actually the reality that caused Muslim scholars in the second third four well third fourth fifth generation of Muslim Scholars that actually caused them to construct and elaborate this science of Hadith criticism to try and figure out what the prophet really said and what he didn't sayam um but even so when we look at uh let's say the the six books in Sun Islam or the the the especially BK and muslimah you see there's a couple of um uh I think indications of real authenticity here one of them is that these are these hadiths do do not
14:52 serve the interest of some School of Law or some School of Theology in Sunni Islam so a lot of hadiths don't don't go along with any mb's rule so you're thinking well if people make this stuff up they're going to make it up to support some School of Law or some school some agenda they have some understanding of Islamic law or theology but some hadiths don't make sense according to any of these schools but they're still considered to be sah hadiths by sunnis just a couple of you know non-dramatic examples but uh for example this a man comes to the the prophet and says you know um this relative of mine he had a child with a
15:38 who's a slave woman and uh there's debate about whose child this really is and the prophet says right um the child belongs to the marriage bed F and if you're a prostitute or if you're a you know if you are or the man who commits Zena gets nothing so if the if the let's say the the the man's was not the actual father it doesn't matter the Father the child belongs to the marriage bed to the the you assume that the father is the the husband or the in this case the master of the slave woman
16:25 right this is a becomes a really important principle in Islamic law it's a very important principle in fact it's the same principle in American law uh up until um like a DNA paternity tests but even now with DNA paternity tests right how many people have kids how many people have had fraternity don't answer how many people have done fraternity tests I'm going to guess not many because if you you don't have to get a paternity test to prove you're the father of the child it's assumed if you're married to your wife or if in a relationship with this with this woman that the child is yours so actually it's the same thing the presumption is that the Father the child belongs to the to the relationship bed or the marriage bed the same thing in our still in our law
17:11 today um so this a very important principle but if you look at the context of the Hadith it's actually not a wife it's a it's a slave woman so the this there's a debate amongst Muslim Scholars it's uh there's something called means the general meaning of language versus means specific reason for a statement happening or let's say a verse of the Quran being revealed so let's say the verse of the Quran we all know this verse right there's no no compulsion in religion does that mean that that's just a general rule there's no compulsion of religion ever or was this ver ver
17:59 revealed for a specific circumstance regarding a specific person and in that case it means no compulsion for religion but not generally that's a good example of these two polls that are pulling on any Hadith or quranic verse is it a general is the language supposed to be understood generally or is it really only for a specific situation so this uh this has been understood as a general rule um even though the specific circumstance is that it's a slave woman so if it's a specific circumstance it would only apply to people who have children with slave women which doesn't happen
18:44 anymore but the general rule means marriage bed that's how jurist understood mean as meaning marriage bed so if it's a if it's understood generally it doesn't actually apply to the specific case that origin was originally set in and the original case it was set in doesn't apply to married people but so you can see here on this example this Hadith it actually doesn't really fit in any of the way that Muslim Scholars later came to understand this issue doesn't mean it's it's actually I think that means it is I think this is excellent example because it's nobody Twisted it to fit what they thought it should look like um okay so there's lots of examples of it lots of examples where you have a Hadith that it doesn't really fit into
19:32 any one School of Law you can see that there's different schools of law they're all each trying to make sense of like how do we understand this Hadith how does this fit into with our understanding of the sun overall so they're not they're not twisting material to make it fit what they think it should be they're actually keeping that intact material and trying to understand it another excellent example of the I think overall uh authentic authenticity of certainly the core of the Hadith Corpus is that it it contains extremely archaic language I mean there's language in hadiths that even the second and third Generations the Muslims they don't understand what it means it's weird desert language that comes out of the western Arabia no one I mean doesn't even make sense to people who by that
20:18 time were living in Damascus they were living in in in Basra in southern Iraq they were living in Egypt uh even though they were just one or two generations away from the prophet they were living in very different worlds the prophet lived in uh in terms of technology in terms of culture food what type of animals they were around and um I can I can I'll read you one Hadith it's a it's a bit long but it gives you an example of what this some of this material was was actually very foreign it was very foreign even to the early Muslims so I'll read you this this is from sahkari Muhammad narrated to us this is my translation saying sufyan reported to us
21:04 saying narrated to us from zahab who said H H the famous companion narrated to us saying the messenger of godam told us two things one of which I have seen and I'm waiting for the second he told us that faithfulness am Mana was placed into the roots J of men's Hearts then they learn from the Quran and then they learn from the Sunnah and he told us about its disappearance I.E The Disappearance of Faith he saide a man will go to sleep and faithfulness will be snatched from his heart until only a spot W wacket remains then he will go to sleep and it will be snatched further away from him until only a trace will remain like the callus from a blister
21:51 meel like a coal you rolled on with your foot it swelled up but now you see it as a raised up Mark but with nothing in it and people will follow each other and no one will keep their pledges and the Hadith continues but I want to just focus on that part this is anyone understand that it's a very hard under so there's a spot there's going to be just a remainder of Faith Like a spot mechet and then it's going to be like it'll disappear more faith will disappear even more from society and it'll be like a callous like when you step on a coal and it swells up and then there's nothing maybe the blister pops or something and then you're just left with with a with a
22:39 Mark or a callus or something so this is a really um unusual imagery I mean this is not something you would come up with you wouldn't be like hey I'm going to forge a Hadith I want to talk about stepping on coal I mean these are not the kind of things that someone would come up with this is very foreign imagery and at after the Hadith buhari's student alab he said he asked buhari's secretary a guy named Abu Jaffer who was the one who would help him write things down I told this to Abu Abdullah to bukari and bukari said I heard Abu aim ahmedin aim say I hear I heard Abu as a famous scholar of language say I
23:24 heard was a very famous Garian and lexicographer in the early 800s of the common er um and others so I heard saying along with others concerning the root J of men's Hearts the J is the base and source of something and W is the slight trace of something that Mark and meel is the callus left on the palm after working so even two or three generations after the death of the Prophet Muslim Scholars no no idea what these words mean they have to go and and and ask specialists in grammar who go and you know collect weird words from bedan tribes and things like that and they try and figure out what these words mean this is very foreign imagery there's
24:10 another Hadith which I I couldn't actually find I was looking for it um I didn't have enough time to find it where it's talking about the people who will enter uh cross the bridge on the day of judgment and it talks about how their their small number it's like the the hair the white hairs on the white fur on the armpit of a of a donkey what I mean just that's that's after you figure out what the words mean that you figure out it's talking about this white hair on the armpits of donkeys this is extremely unusual archaic imagery this is imagery of people who live with animals who live out in the desert who live in very poor environments they don't live in cities
24:56 or towns or anything like that so this this imagery is not being made up by people this is extremely archaic imagery that even the early Muslim scholar have trouble deciphering they have to go and and consult experts on language who all they do is go and collect weird words from ban tribes okay um so finally I wanted to end with a third I think uh really important piece of or set of information that gives us confidence in the overall authenticity of the uh the Islamic tradition overall which is the testimony of non-muslim schol non-muslim sources so we don't have um you know we don't have some it would be nice if like there
25:41 was this Byzantine or Persian tourist who happened to go to Medina in 622 and you know he was hanging out there and then suddenly he hears the singing and this guy comes into town everyone seems really happy and then he sits this is really interesting I'm going to stay here for a couple years he he writes down every day what Happ that would be great we don't have that right all we have um in terms of recording of what the prophet did in his life uh in of the details of his life comes from Muslims Muslims who pass this on for one or two or three generations and then it gets set down in writing of various forms but we do have um ear early non-muslim historians and and and and religious Scholars priests especially in
26:29 Syria in Egypt who are writing about in Iraq who actually write about their first encounters with Muslims and if you take all this information together you get something that's actually pretty good um Outsiders understanding of what Islam is even though they don't like Muslims very much they still do generally describe them accurately so here's an example in 640 so just8 years after the death of the Prophet just 8 years after the death of the Prophet there's this Christian document in Syriac language um and it's a history of the world from Adam all the way up until the year 640 and what it does actually mentions the prophet Muhammad by name just just mentions him by name so this is means
27:16 they already know the name of Muhammad and this is remember uh just two or three years after the Muslims had entered into the greater Middle East coming out of the Arabian peninsula an even earlier document in Greek uh from North Africa which is written in 634 so two years after the death of the Prophet it talks about how in Palestine this Army had come this Army of Arabs had come and they they said they were following the religion of this prophet and that he claimed to have the keys to Paradise so just 2 years after the death of the Prophet let we already have even in North Africa reports of these Muslims
28:02 who were following this Prophet not a lot of other information then in the 680s so during the time of muawiya no sorry uh right after the death of muawiya in 680 of the Common Era there's a monk writing in Mesopotamia Christian Monk and he writes um that Muslims are very lenient to Christians they they respect their monasteries if you pay their taxes they leave you alone they don't care what religion you practice he he um he says that Muhammad was the guide the guide and instructor of the Muslims he taught the Arabs to worship the one God in accordance with their ancient law and that the the Arabs kept to the tradition
28:47 of Muhammad his Sunnah uh to the extent that they punish people if they broke with the sun of the Prophet actually he has one criticism of the Muslims he says they did not persecute Jews enough he wanted them to persecute Jews more and they didn't do that um another guy writing in the 660s is our Armenian Bishop named seos he said that um that the prophet had awakened the Arabs to their abrahamic ancestry they he had reminded them that they of the god of Abraham um and that this Prophet Muhammad that when he was a child child he used to go from when he was young he used to go from the hijaz to Palestine
29:33 on trade so this it's actually non-muslim in the 660s is confirming the stories that go along with uh right so that information was already known by non-muslims um and they says that the Muslims don't eat car MAA and they don't drink wine um and this is just some examples then we have all sorts of fascinating Rock inscriptions like graffiti you know people now they write I don't know what they write graffiti what kind of stuff I don't even read what they write most of the time it's weird symbols or something back in the day people would write more
30:19 interesting stuff I'm so and so I was here God forgive me God help me they so in in the especially south southern Saudi Arabia and the southern hijaz there's a lot of rock uh writing on the on the rocks that have preserved and for example one of them says uh in the name of Allah I I'm reading it in English obviously it's in Arabic um isare wrote this at the time of Omar who died in the uh in the year 4 and 20 24 is really interesting so um one they're using hij dates already now you have to
31:05 remember some Western Scholars had said that Muslims didn't invent the hijri calendar till much later but actually here who does anyone know who invented the HRI calendar Omar invented the HRI calendar that's what Muslims said it turns out this is this is well it was being used during the time of Omar and it mentions uh it also calls him which is the title he went by right in the Muslim sources and another rock inscriptions which I think is pretty recent recently discovered it says uh I am the Scribe of Abu may God's curse be on those who murdered and those who have led to the
31:52 killing without mercy so again there's a very early doesn't say what the year is but it's extremely early because it's near this other early one we I just read and it mentions uh The Killing ofan so again this is a a very early event that uh Muslims said happened at a certain time a lot of you know non-muslim historians have said well this is you know we don't believe these stories or they're not reliable but here you have the early Rock inscriptions that are giving us external testimony of this so if you take these non-muslim sources from you know the 630s just a few years after the death of the Prophet going up into the 680s you have a vision of people who followed this Muhammad who
32:37 was their guide and their prophet he who taught them to worship the god of Abraham they he taught them uh don't drink wine don't uh uh eat C don't eat Ken right uh so this is actually not a bad description of Islam from people who don't know anything about it okay so so these the these these points together I think well for me they really provide a lot of uh a lot of uh Clarity right so first of all we talk about the prophet's Legacy we don't just speak about reports of things he said and did because those reports um they can sometimes you know you don't exactly sure what the precise
33:22 words of the Prophet were but the fact that there's all these different versions preserved shows you the Ence that Muslim Scholars had like bukari and his teachers they didn't they recorded different versions of Hadith even if there was just one word difference for example they would record the different versions but the sun of the Prophet isn't just isn't just contained in these reports right it's contained in the the legal thought the legal tradition of Muslim Scholars It's contained in the lived community of the lived tradition of the Muslim Community and the overall accuracy of this tradition is bolstered by one the fact that that it contains material that is clearly extremely archaic even for the people who were first collecting
34:07 it two non-muslim sources that are contemporary to just after the life of the prophet and in the decades just two or three decades after his death give us taken together a pretty accurate representation of Islam from Outsiders perspective and finally you have Rock inscriptions that actually back up a lot of the material a lot of the sources that the or the reports that Muslims had been treating as historically accurate okay [Music]
