Download PDF | The Canonization Of Al Bukhr And Muslim, The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon By Jonathan Brown, ( Islamic History And Civilization) ( 2007).
454 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgements for this book must begin with Dr. Wadad Kadi of the University of Chicago, who served as an excellent teacher, editor and role model throughout my graduate career there. Drs. Fred Donner and ‘Tahera Qutbuddin also served generously as wonderful professors and helpful advisors on this book. I must also thank John Voll, John Esposito, John Woods, Heshmat Moayyad, Donald Whitcomb, Cornell Fleischer, Gene Gragg, Holly Shissler, Maysam al-Faruqi and Haifaa Khalafallah for assisting me in developing this project. Dr. Menachem Brinker in particular played an enormous role in helping me construct the book’s theoretical framework, and I am indebted to him for his support. My friend Dr. Scott Lucas also provided invaluable assistance with his rigorous and positive criticism. I must also thank profusely my family, in particular my mother, Dr. Ellen Brown, for showing me the joys of learning and unhesitatingly supporting my interests throughout life. My friends in Hyde Park and Washington DC also deserve my sincere thanks.
I am hugely indebted to the financial generosity of the Mellon Foundation, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, the American Institute for Iranian Studies, and the Center for Arabic Study Abroad.
I must also acknowledge the indispensable assistance granted by the Library of Congress Middle East and North Africa Reading Room; the American Research Institute in Turkey for its hospitality; the Khizana al‘Amma in Rabat; the Maktabat al-Asad in Damascus; the Siileymaniye Library, the Topkapi Sarayi Library and the Istanbul University Rare Books Library for allowing me continuous access to their unparalleled manuscript collections; and Drs. Gozashte and Pakechi at the Greater Islamic Encyclopedia (Da erat al-ma‘aref-e bozorg-e eslami) in Tehran, for their valuable assistance. Of course, this book would not exist if not for the University of Chicago, its singular Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the great Regenstein Library. I must also thank Shaykh Osama al-Syed Mahmoud al-Azhari and ‘Imad al-Din ‘Abbas Said in Cairo and Muhammad Mujir al-Khatib in Damascus for their patient assistance.
Finally, I must acknowledge the honor of working in the shadow of two great minds, Muhammad b. Isma‘l al-Bukhart and Muslim b. alHajjaj, as well as the inimitable generations of scholars who preceded and followed them in elaborating the Islamic scholarly tradition. As the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk said: “Indeed I know that I am not worthy of this, but I wish to tie myself to the train of those who transmit the hadiths of God’s Messenger, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him.
PREFACE
In the most immediate sense, this book consists of a revised version of a dissertation submitted to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Wadad Kadi. As a project, however, it represents an attempt to answer a question that perplexed me for many years before I ever sat down to begin dissertation research: in the history of Sunni Islam, why are the Sahihayn of al-Bukhari and Muslim so special, what is their true station, and how did they achieve this status? To rephrase this question more broadly, what are the origins, nature and applications of authority in the Sunni hadith tradition?
In the West, the study of the Sunni hadith tradition has focused mainly on the ‘Authenticity Question’—to what extent does the hadith corpus provide a historically reliable documentation of early Islamic political, doctrinal and legal history. In its scope (but not in its sources), the investigation of the Authenticity Question stops in the early and mid third/ninth century with the appearance of extant documentary evidence in the form of historical and legal works like the Muzwatta’ of Malik and the Sahihayn.
This book is not about the Authenticity Question. It is about the Sunni hadith tradition and its role in Islamic civilization after the Authenticity Question fades from view. Whether or not the Sahihayn or any collection of hadith truly communicate the original teachings of Islam across the gulf of time separating us from Muhammad is ultimately beyond the ken of historians. It will remain a question hobbled as much by the exigencies of faith as a paucity of sources. How the hadith tradition reflects, facilitates and informs the choices that the Sunni community has made in the thousand some years since its emergence lies more squarely within the historian’s purview: the study of continuity and change in a human tradition. It is my hope that this book will assist any reader interested in engaging this topic.
Tackling the origins, development and function of the Sahthayn canon—the two most famous books in Sunni Islam after the Qur’'an— required casting a very wide net across the diverse and preposterously rich historical landscape of Islamic civilization. In order to produce a study of any thematic consistency and manageable size, I have almost certainly done great injustice to many genres of Islamicate intellectual, literary or religious history. I can only hope that this study is worthy of correction.
Finally, this is book is not a criticism of al-BukharT and Muslim or their collections. The genius, rigor and dedication of those two scholars stand beyond my reach and abilities. To fully appreciate the Sahihayn within the context of the collection and criticism of hadiths is to move beyond a common first impression of the hadith tradition—that of an erratic and ultimately contrived game of religious telephone—to grasp the simple logic and eerie internal consistency of a widely scattered but uniformly dedicated community of scholars who, over the past 1,400 years, have repeatedly demonstrated that what we historians have deemed the limits of the possible for human memory and attention to detail simply need to be rethought.
INTRODUCTION
In 465/1072-3, the grand vizier of the Seljuq empire, a statesman so spectacularly powerful that he was hailed as Nizam al-Mulk (The Order of the Realm), heard of a scholar who possessed a particularly authoritative copy of the most famous collection of traditions (hadith) related from the Prophet Muhammad: the Sahih of al-Bukhart (d. 256/870). Nizam al-Mulk ordered this scholar brought to his newly founded college in the Iranian city of Naysabi, where the vizier gathered the children of the city’s judges, scholars and other notables to hear a reading of al-Bukhart’s Sahih.'! Why did Nizam al-Mulk order such a promulgation of the Sahih, and why did he convene the next generation of the Sunni Muslim elite in attendance?
Nizam al-Mulk stood at the intersection of the great forces of Islamic religious history at a ttme when Sunni Islam was coalescing in its institutional form. While serving the Seljuq sultans, who were generously endowing educational institutions for the Hanafi school of law, he established his Nizamiyya college network in the principal cities of the empire for the use of the rival Shafit school. Yet Nizam al-Mulk also held hadith study circles that glorified the ‘partisans of hadith (ashab al-hadith) closely associated with the contending Hanbalt school.”
These policies unfolded in the threatening shadow of the Sunni Seljuqs’ principal rival, the Ismaili Shiites, whose assassins would eventually bring Nizam al-Mulk’s career to an end.
In this divided milieu, Nizam al-Mulk sought to foster a common ground of Sunni Islam. In 469/1076-77, when the leading Shafit scholar of Baghdad tried to win Nizam al-Mulk’s support in a bitter debate with Hanbali rivals, the vizier sent him a missive refusing to intervene on his behalf: “We believe in bolstering the Sunni ways (alsunan), not building up communal strife (a/-fitan),” he explained. “We undertook the building of this [ Nizamiyya] college in order to support and protect the people of knowledge and the welfare of the community, not to create divisions amongst Muslims (tafiq al-kalima).””
By gathering the children of the empire’s scholarly and administrative elite around a reading of al-Bukhani’s Sahih, Nizam al-Mulk was reinforcing a sense of Sunni communalism. As we shall see, by the vizier’s time scholars from most of the disputing legal and theological schools that would comprise the Sunni fold had together deemed the Sahihayn, the two ‘Authentic’ hadith collections of al-Bukhart and his student Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (d. 261/875), authoritative representations of the Prophet’s legacy. By convening this reading, Nizam al-Mulk was inculcating al-Bukhari’s book as a touchstone of Sunni identity in the impressionable young minds of the next generation.
The canonization of al-Bukhart and Muslim thus forms part of the greater drama of the formation of Sunni Islam. Nizam al-Mulk’s fifth /eleventh-century world brought together all the leading characters in this saga. Among them were the textualist Hanbalis and the more rationalist Shafits, both heirs to the heritage of ‘the partisans of hadith’ but divided over the role of speculative theology in Islam. We also find the Hanafis, rooted in their own distinct, hadith-wary hermeneutic tradition. ‘These groups composed competing ‘orthodoxies,’ each independent and self-righteously justified. The canonization of al-Bukhart and Muslim is the story of how these and other disjointed segments of what became the Sunni community forged a common language for addressing the shared heritage of the Prophet’s legacy (sunna).
This drama began in the classical period, but it has continued into modern times. Indeed, the questions that arise in a study of the formation, function and status of the Sahihayn canon reflect tensions between the competing schools of thought within today’s Sunni community. Why does a modern Hanafi scholar from India seeking to defend his school against Salafi critics prominently cite a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhart on the cover of his book?* Why does a Salafi scholar insist on his right to criticize al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s collections, while his opponents vociferously condemn him for “violating the integrity of these motherbooks”?? These questions, which fuel fierce debates in Muslim discourse today, descend from the centuries of historical development that forged and maintained the canon of al-Bukhari and Muslim.
After the Qur'an, the Sahihayn are the two most venerated books in Sunni Islam. Yet until now no one has explained this undeniable reality. This study examines the canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim in order to discover how, when and why the two Safihs attained their authoritative station. It explores the nature of this authority, the tensions surrounding it, and the roles that the Sahthayn canon has played in Islamic civilization.
Thesis
Canons form at the nexus of text, authority and communal identification. Their formation, however, is neither a random nor an inevitable process. Canonization involves a community’s act of authorizing specific books in order to meet certain needs. It entails the transformation of texts, through use, study, and appreciation, from nondescript tomes into powerful symbols of divine, legal or artistic authority for a particular audience. In their own time, al-Bukhari and Muslim were accomplished representatives of the transmission-based tradition of Islamic law. Like their teacher, Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), they saw collecting and acting on the reports of the early Muslim community as the only legitimate means by which believers could ascertain God’s will and live according to it. Yet they were only two of many such scholars, with al-Bukhari’s career in particular marred by scandal. For over two centuries after al-Bukhart’s and Muslim’s deaths, the study and collection of hadiths continued unabated. Al-Bukhart’s and Muslim’s remarkable contribution came with their decision to compile books devoted only to hadiths they considered authentic (sahih). This act broke stridently with the practices of the transmission-based school and thus met with significant disapproval in the immediate wake of the authors’ careers.
In the fourth/tenth century, however, the initial controversy surrounding the Sahihayn and their authors dissipated as a relatively small and focused network of scholars from the moderate Shafit tradition began appreciating the books’ utility. These scholars found the Sahihayn ideal vehicles for articulating their relationship to the Prophet’s normative legacy as well as standards against which to measure the strength of their own hadith collections. Employing the Sahihayn for these purposes required intimate familiarity with the two books and thus spurred an intensive study of the works and their authors’ methodologies. Simultaneously, between the end of the third/ninth and the middle of the fifth/eleventh century, the broader Muslim community began imagining a new level of authority for Prophetic traditions. Scholars representing a wide range of opinion started to conceive of certain hadiths and hadith collections as providing loci of consensus amid the burgeoning diversity of Islamic thought.
One scholar in particular inherited the body of scholarship on the Sahihayn and harnessed the two works as a new measure of authenticity for evaluating reports attributed to the Prophet. Al-Hakim al-Naysabirt (d. 405/1014) recognized that the Sahthayn possessed tremendous polemical value as common measures of hadith authenticity that met the requirements of both the transmission-based scholars whom he championed and the Mu'tazilites whom he bitterly opposed. He thus conceived of the criteria that al-Bukhart and Muslim had used in compiling their works as a standard he claimed authorized a vast new body of hadiths binding on both parties. A cadre of his students, hailing from the rival Hanbali and Shafit strains of the transmission-based school, agreed on the Sahihayn as a commonly accepted tract of the Prophetic past. Drawing on developments in legal theory shared by all the major non-Shiite schools of the fifth/eleventh century, they declared that the community’s alleged consensus on the reliability of the Sahihayn guaranteed the absolute certainty of their contents.
This ability of al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s collections to serve as an acknowledged convention for discussing the Prophet’s authenticated legacy would serve three important needs in the Sunni scholarly culture of the fifth/eleventh century. As the division between different schools of theology and law became more defined, scholars from the competing Shafit, Hanbalt and Maliki schools quickly began employing the Sahihayn as a measure of authenticity in debates and polemics. By the early eighth/fourteenth century, even the hadith-wary Hanafi school could not avoid adopting this convention. With the increased division of labor between jurists and hadith scholars in the mid-fifth/eleventh century, the Sahihayn also became an indispensable authoritative reference for jurists who lacked expertise in hadith evaluation. Finally, alBukhart’s and Muslim’s works served as standards of excellence that shaped the science of hadith criticism as scholars from the fifth/eleventh to the seventh/thirteenth century sought to systematize the study of the Prophet’s word.
The authority of the canon as a measure of authenticity, however, was an illusion conjured up in the dialogic space of debate and exposition. It vanished outside such interactive arenas. Scholars directed the compelling authority of the Sahihayn only against others, and within the closed doors of one school of law or theology, they had no compunction about ignoring or criticizing reports from either collection.
Although occasional criticism of the Sahthayn continued even after their canonization at the dawn of the fifth/eleventh century, advocates of institutional Sunnism found it essential to protect the two works and the important roles they played. Beginning at the turn of the fourth/tenth century and climaxing in the mid-seventh/thirteenth, a set of predominately ShafiT scholars created a canonical culture around the Sahihayn that recast the two books’ pre-canonical pasts as well as those of their authors according to the exigent contours of the canon. The canonical culture of the Sahihayn also had to reconcile instances in which al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s methods had fallen short of what had emerged as the common requirements of Sunni hadith criticism in the centuries after their deaths.
While most influential participants in the Sunni tradition accepted the canonical culture of the Sahihayn, some hadith scholars refused to safeguard the canon at the expense of the critical standards of hadith study. The tension between the majority’s commitment to the institutional security of the Sahthayn and this iconoclastic strain came to a head with the emergence of the modern hadith-based Salafi movement in the eighteenth century. In a conflict that reflects the anxieties of redefining Islam in the modern world, the impermissibility of criticizing the Sahihayn has become a rallying cry for those devoted to defending the classical institutions of Islamic civilization against the iconoclastic Salafi call to revive the primordial greatness of Islam through the hadith tradition.
Beyond the Sahihayn’s roles as a measure of authenticity, an authoritative reference and exemplum among Sunni scholars, the canon has played an important role in a variety of ritual domains and broader historical narratives about Islamic civilization. Here the Sahihayn have become a synecdochic representation of the Prophet himself, essentializing his role as a liminal figure and medium of blessing. The two works have also come to serve as a literary trope, symbolizing the Prophet’s unadulterated teachings in the Sunni tradition’s self-perception.
Scholarship on the Sahthayn and the Hadith Canon
Western scholars have regularly spoken of ‘canonical’ hadith collections in Islamic civilization.® This recognition follows the Muslim sources themselves, which refer to this canon in a myriad of ways, such as ‘the relied-upon books (al-kutub al-mu‘tamad ‘alayha),’ ‘the Four Books,’ ‘the Five Books,’ ‘the Six Books,’ and finally ‘the Authentic Collections (Sthah).’ We can discern three strata of the Sunni hadith canon. The perennial core has been the Sahihayn. Beyond these two foundational classics, some fourth/tenth-century scholars refer to a four-book selection that adds the two Sunans of Abii Dawid (d. 275/889) and al-Nasa’t (d. 303/915). The Five Book canon, which is first noted in the sixth/ twelfth century, incorporates the Jami‘ of al-Tirmidhi (d. 279/892). Finally the Six Book canon, which hails from the same period, adds either the Sunan of Ibn Majah (d. 273/887), the Sunan of al-Daraqutni (d. 385/995) or the Muwatta’ of Malik b. Anas (d. 179/796). Later hadith compendia often included other collections as well.’ None of these books, however, has enjoyed the esteem of al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s works.
A study tackling the entirety of the Sunni hadith canon would require many more volumes than the present project allows. Because the Sahihayn form the unchanging core of the canon, and because the roles that the two books have played and the station they have achieved differ qualitatively from the other components of the canon, this study addresses only the canonization of al-Bukhart and Muslim. A comprehensive study of the Sunni hadith canon as a whole must wait until another day.
Oddly, although the broader hadith canon and the Sahihayn are frequently mentioned in Western scholarship, neither topic has received significant attention. Despite its having been published over a century ago, the work of the prescient Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921 CE) remains the most profound and detailed study of the hadith canon. His interest in the entire span of the hadith tradition and his special attention to the question of the hadith canon have made his study the most useful to date. Even Muslim authors who regularly criticize Goldziher and other elder statesmen of Orientalism quote him in order to explain when certain hadith collections entered the canon.° Following the predominant Sunni division of the hadith canon into the Sahihayn and the four Sunans of al-Tirmidht, Abi Dawid, al-Nasa’I and Ibn Majah, Goldziher devotes separate sections to each of these two groups. He fixes approximately where and by what time the four Sunans had gained canonical status and the Six Book canon had formed. He asserts that this authoritative selection coalesced gradually and was in place by the seventh/thirteenth century, perceptively adding that the Maghrib and the Islamic heartlands had varying opinions on which books constituted the canon.”
Aside from Goldziher’s appreciable contributions to our understanding of the hadith canon’s emergence, his most astute observation was that formidable questions about the canon await answers. He evinces a particular pessimism about dating the canonization of the Sahihayn: “[W Je cannot establish with chronological accuracy the date which brought the consensus publicus for the two Sahihs to maturity....”!° Goldziher also notes the extreme difficulty of determining why the hadith canon was closed and why it excluded certain collections, such as the Sahih of Ibn Khuzayma (d. 311/923), written in the same period as the Sahithayn.'' The present study will offer answers to both these questions.
Goldziher also made a rare foray into the function of the hadith canon and the nature of the veneration for al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s works. He submits that the hadith canon as a whole served as a legal “reference in order to find out the traditional teachings about a given question.”'* He touches on other functions of al-Bukhart’s work in particulary, alluding to the ritual dimension of the canon and its role in defining communal identity. He notes how oaths were sworn on alBukhari’s Sahih, an honor otherwise reserved for the Qur’an.'® Most importantly, Goldziher hints that the canonization of al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s works was a dynamic process of interaction between the texts and the needs of the Muslim scholarly community.’* In our discussion of the multivalent functions of the Safthayn canon in Chapters Six and Nine, both the insight and limitations of Goldziher’s comments will become evident.
Goldziher also makes a unique effort to explain how the Sahihayn were both venerated and open to criticism. The heart of the canonical status of the books, he explains, was not a claim of infallibility, but rather the community’s demand that these two works be recognized as legally compelling indicators of “religious praxis” on the basis of the community’s consensus on their authenticity. He says: “[v]eneration was directed at this canonical work [1.e., al-Bukhart’s collection] as a whole but not to its individual lines and paragraphs.”'? Goldziher concludes that “the veneration [of the Sahihs of al-Bukhart and Muslim] never went so far as to cause free criticism of the sayings and remarks incorporated in these collections to be considered impermissible or unseemly....”!° As we shall see in Chapter Eight, Goldziher’s assessment proves correct until the early modern period, when criticism of the Sahthayn became anathema to many scholars.
Since Goldziher, scholars investigating Islamic intellectual history or evaluating the sources for the formative first three centuries of the Muslim community have found acknowledging the existence of the hadith canon inevitable. Few discussions of Islamic thought or society fail to mention the canon and the unique status of the Sahihayn. Most scholars, however, have been content to either reproduce Goldziher’s conclusions or devote only cursory remarks to the issue.'’ The superficial character of these observations stems from the frequency with which they treat the hadith canon as ancillary to some larger topic, such as early Islamic historiography or a survey of the sources of Islamic law. Such studies have followed Goldziher by dating the emergence of the canon from anywhere between the third/ninth century and the seventh/thirteenth century, devoting little thought to the actual nature or function of the canon. In his unparalleled study of Islamic civilization, for example, Marshall Hodgson only notes the existence of “canonical collections” of hadith, adding that al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s Sahihs “came to be revered as especially holy.’”!® In his otherwise comprehensive study of the formation of Islamic dogma and society in the second and third centuries AH, Josef van Ess acknowledges the existence of the hadith canon but does not devote further attention to it.!% Likewise, other excellent studies of Muslim scholarly culture in the classical period cast only cursory glances at the hadith canon, interpreting it as a natural product of the salient role that Prophetic traditions played in Islamic thought. In A Learned Society in a Period of Transition, Daphna Ephrat thus states that “by the third Muslim century, hadith had also achieved a central place in Muslim religious life, and the basic canons of the prophetic Sunna had been codified.”?°
Scholars have generally perceived the canonical hadith collections as representative of the Sunni worldview, and as such they have discussed them as a final chapter in the development of Islamic orthodoxy in the third/ninth century. Henri Lammens attributed the success of the Six Books to “the fact that they came at the right time, at the moment when QorAanic religion was about to take definitive shape....”?! In the conclusion to The Eye of the Beholder, a study on how the Sunni com-munity articulated an image of the Prophet as an act of self-definition, Uri Rubin refers to the large collections that appeared in this century as “canonical hadith compilations” that defined orthodox Muslim stances. They “served as the venue for the authoritative formulation of an Islamic sense of spiritual and legal identity in Umayyad and early Abbasid times....”’? Rubin recognizes the intimate connection between these canonical works and the question of communal identity, but his focus on Islamic origins prevents him from pursuing this discussion further.
Other scholars concerned with Islamic historiography and the development of the hadith tradition have stressed that the Sahihayn and their authors represent the culmination of hadith study. In his Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Age, Tarif Khalidi states that in Muslim’s time “Hadith had reached its quantitative limits and spelled out its method.” “Bukhari and Muslim,” he adds, “gave definitive shape to Hadith.”** Both Rubin and Khalidi focus on the writing of the Sahthayn as one of the seals of orthodoxy, paying little attention to their role as a medium through which an ongoing process of institutional authorization and communal identification would take place.
Scholarship on the continuing development of hadith literature after the appearance of al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s collections has granted more space to discussions of the canon. It has not, however, followed the promising lead of Goldziher’s work. In his Islam: The View from the Edge, Richard Bulliet refers to the canonical hadith collections as a watershed event in the Muslim community’s transition from the oral transmission of the Prophet’s sunna to limiting it to specific texts. He prefers to identify the formation of the canon with this transition rather than with the genesis of the Sahthayn themselves. Following Goldziher, he says that the “evolution of hadith culminated in the general acceptance, by the thirteenth century, of six books of sound traditions as canonical, as least for the Sunni majority of the population.”” In his valuable discussion of the development of hadith literature in the The Cambridge Ehstory of Arabic Laterature, Muhammad Abd al-Rauf straddles the two opinions: that the special recognition of the Sahkthayn followed on the heels of their compilation, and that their final canonization took place in the seventh/thirteenth century. Thus Abd al-Rauf describes how alBukhart’s book in particular was “almost immediately and universally acknowledged as the most authentic work in view of the author’s stringent authentication requirements.””° But after the famous systematizer of the hadith sciences, Ibn al-Salah (d. 643/1245), announced that the Muslim community (umma) had decisively acknowledged the Sahihayn’s unquestioned authenticity, “no more criticism [of the two books] could be tolerated. ...”?’
Modern Muslim scholarship on this question resembles its Western counterpart in its failure to answer questions about the canon’s emergence and functions. This is largely due to the polemic motivation of Muslim authors addressing this subject. Khalil Mulla Khatir’s Makanat al-Sahihayn (The Place of the Sahthayn) (1994)”* proceeds from an orthodox Sunni standpoint and seeks to defend al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s work from opponents who criticize them. The Ibadi Said b. Mabrak al-Qanitbr’s ingenious al-Sayf al-hadd_fi al-radd ‘ala man akhadha bi-hadith al-ahad fi masa al-v‘uqad (The Incisive Sword: A Refutation of Those Who Use Ahad Hadiths in Questions of Dogma)” (1997-8) and the Twelver Shute Mohammad Sadeq Najmr’s Sayri dar Sahihayn: sayr va barrast dar do ketab-e mohemm va madrak-e ahl-e sonnat (A Voyage through the Sahthayn: An Exploration and Examination of two Important Books and Sources of the Sunnis) (2001)*° approach the issue of the Sahihayn from non-Sunni stances, seeking to expose what they consider undue Sunni reverence for the two works. Although they offer few analytical insights into the function or formation of the canon, the invaluable citations found in these three books guide the reader to pertinent primary sources. These Arabic- and Persian-language secondary sources are thus indispensable aids in studying the Sahihayn. Without them, navigating the vast expanses of the Islamic intellectual heritage would be nearly impossible.
Addressing the Sahthayn as a Canon
Scholars of Islamic history have been unsuccessful in addressing questions concerning the hadith canon in great part because they have not sufficiently articulated what precisely canons are, why they form and how they function. As Goldziher sensed, canons are not agents that simply leap onto the stage of history. They are created by communities in acts of authorization and self-definition because they meet certain pressing needs for their audiences. Studies on canons have proven that they are complicated creatures, whose emergence and functions must be examined as a network of interactions between a community’s needs, its conceptions of authority, and the nature and uses of specific texts. Goldziher realized that to understand the canonical place of the Sahihayn, one must appreciate their functions. In the absence of clear expectations about what these could be, however, Goldziher’s efforts to explore the canon could not move beyond a few initial observations. A more comprehensive discussion of the emergence and function of the Sahthayn canon requires a sensitivity to issues of communal identity, institutional authority and the way in which texts can serve as mediums for their expression.
Conversely, some scholars have cultivated an acute sensitivity to employing the term ‘canon’ when treating the Sahihayn and the other authoritative hadith collections. ‘The term ‘canon’ is so culturally loaded and so inevitably evokes the Biblical tradition that a commendable commitment to distinguishing the Islamic tradition from the Occidental has led some to deny that any hadith canon existed. Our ability to discuss the history of the Sahihayn in the language of canons and canonicity therefore requires an investigation of these fecund terms and their historical application.
Note on the Sources and Approaches of this Study The study of canonization is more a study of historical perceptions
than of historical reality. Although al-Bukhari, Muslim and their Sahihs are the centerpieces of this story, they are not its primary actors. It is the community that received, used and responded to their legacies that forged the Sahthayn canon. Establishing the background, context and historical realities of al-Bukhari’s and Muslim’s careers is certainly essential for appreciating the genesis of the canon. This study, however, is not about the Sahihayn as much as it is about the drama that unfolded around them. This interest in reception and perception spares us a prolonged focus on the questions of textual authenticity that so concern scholars of early Islamic history. As we will see in Chapter Three, surviving textual sources from the late third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries provide multi-dimensional and generally reliable biographies of al-Bukhar1 and Muslim. Sources from this period also leave little doubt that the texts of the Sahihayn reached complete, although perhaps not polished, forms during their respective authors’ lives.*! For us, however, the true significance of the details of al-Bukhart’s and Muslim’s lives lies in their roles as stimuli for later Muslims looking back at these two personages.
Of course, our interest in reception and perception does not in any way relieve us of our duty to assume a historical critical approach to our source material. Because the Sahihayn canon is one of the most salient features of Sunni orthodoxy, it has attracted a tremendous amount of sacralizing attention from the Sunni tradition. According to the historical critical method, we will exert all efforts to rely on multiple sources of close temporal proximity to the subjects they address, relying on isolated or later works only if the probability of their accuracy outweighs that of contrivance. If a source does not meet the requirements of the Principle of Contextual Credibility, which dictates that a source must conform to the known features of its historical context, and the Principle of Dissimilarity, which states that a non-‘orthodox’ account probably precedes an ‘orthodox’ one, then we must treat it as suspect from a historical critical standpoint.*” Such material, however, remains tremendously valuable in charting the development of historical perceptions about al-Bukhari and Muslim.
The Sahihayn are arguably the most famous and prominent books in the Sunni tradition after the Quran, and al-Bukhari and Muslim are titanic figures in Islamic civilization. We must thus cast a very wide net in the sources we examine for tracing the historical development of the canon. Narrative sources such as biographical dictionaries and local histories provide invaluable source material. The Tartkh Baghdad of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463/1071), the Muntazam fi tartkh al-umam wa al-mulitk of Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 5597/1200), the Szyar alam al-nubala’ and Tadhkirat al-huffaz of Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi (d. 748/1348), and the Daw? al-lami‘h-ahl al-qarn al-tasv‘ of al-Sakhawi (d. 902/1497) exemplify these two genres. In addition to providing essential biographical data, these works also record the manner in which al-Bukhari, Muslim and their books were perceived in different periods and localities.
Normative sources from the various genres of hadith literature provide another major source for the history of the canon. Hadith collections that postdate the Sahihayn, such as al-Baghawt’s (d. 516/1122) Masabih al-sunna; works on the technical science of hadith collection and criticism, such as al-Hakim al-Naysabart’s Ma ‘nifat ‘ulm al-hadith and Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalant’s (d. 852/1449) al-Nukat ‘ala kitab [bn al-Salah; dictionaries of hadith transmitters such as al-Khalili’s (d. 446/1054) al-lishad fv mavifat ‘ulama@ al-hadith, and commentaries on the Sahthayn such as Ibn Hajar’s Fath al-bart provide the bulk of data on the manner in which the Sahihayn were studied and used by the Sunni community. We must also draw from a wider range of normative sources. Works on jurisprudence, such as the Aztab al-mabsit of al-Sarakhst (d. ca. 490/1096); legal theory, such as the Aztab al-burhan of al-Juwaynt (d. 478/1085); mysticism, like the Awarif al-ma‘anf of ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234), and sectarian literature, such as ‘Abd al-Jalil Aba al-Husayn Qazvint’s (fl. 560/1162) Ketab-e naqd, allow crucial glimpses into the various usages of the Sahihayn beyond the limited realm of hadith study.
As our investigation reaches the modern period, even the most recent Muslim scholarship can serve as a source for grasping the nature and function of the Sahthayn canon. Furthermore, the modern period furnishes oral sources such as lectures from scholarly centers like Cairo’s al-Azhar University, or the recorded lectures of Salafi shaykhs like Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (d. 1999 CE).
Historians can work only with what history has preserved for them. Like all other historical data, the sources on the origins, development and function of the Sahthayn canon have been subject to the vicissitudes of time and fortune. The manner in which we collect and interpret such data is similarly prisoner to our own interpretive choices and biases. Yet we must have answers, whatever they may be, and for the period since the two books emerged as a canon their very prominence in Islamic civilization has preserved a plethora of textual sources in manuscript or published form. For the occasionally disreputable period of al-Bukhart’s and Muslim’s pre-canonical gestation, we have only what Muslim scholars dutifully preserved for us. ‘That we can even attempt a history of this early period is a testament to the integrity of those tireless ‘seekers of knowledge (talabat al- alm) who for centuries led pack animals weighed down with notebooks from teacher to teacher along the dusty road between Baghdad and Khurasan.
Problems in Approaches
In the coming chapters, our discussion of the Sahihayn canon will hinge on themes such as ‘standards’ and ‘convention’ and will ultimately involve the routinization of the Prophet’s charismatic authority. Although not consciously driven by his theory, this study is perhaps irretrievably Weberian. Readers will also note that it is imbued with the corporeal language and organic idiom intimated by British scholars like E.B. Tylor (d. 1917) and J.G. Frazer (d. 1941), who described the global phenomenon of religion as a stage in the maturation of human consciousness. In our very biological history of the Sahthayn canon, ‘needs’ will be ‘felt? and ‘met.’ Sunnism will ‘mature,’ and ‘strains’ within it will ‘develop.’ The canon ‘emerges’ and fulfils certain ‘functions.’ Using such phrasal representations to move from one thought to another or from particulars to the general betrays certain assumptions about the nature of the hadith canon and Islamic civilization. Are we justified in treating a human society or a faith tradition as organisms that are born and mature until they attain some state of advancement?
I believe this approach serves us faithfully in a study of Islamic intellectual history. Inquiring into the history of the Sahihayn is a natural reaction to their conspicuous prominence in Sunni Islam today. Yet the fact is that Islam existed as a religion and faith tradition before alBukhari and Muslim and flourished for some time after them without paying any remarkable attention to the two books or their authors. We are thus inevitably faced with a question of change, of growth or emergence. Like the compound of Sunni orthodoxy itself, the canon was not then and is now. Faced with such a stark instance of transformation or change, examining the canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim as a linear process of maturation and subsequent tensions seems reasonable or even inevitable.
Perhaps the most dangerous pitfall of employing a biological metaphor for the movement of history is the ambiguous status granted to human agency by such an approach. One could describe a ‘canon emerging’ without identifying the specific individuals or class who promulgated it. One could mention a community ‘feeling needs’ without stipulating exactly how those needs were expressed. We will try to prevent these problems by adhering closely to textual sources and emphasizing the role of individuals in the development of the canon. We will rely on historical actors to explain their own actions either directly through their own words or indirectly by reading their works critically against an established context.
We will avoid attributing individuals’ actions to broader political, cultural or economic forces unless there is explicit evidence for such a link. Certainly, we may speculate about the manner in which political context or the allocation of resources affected the canon, but we cannot definitively explain the canon as the direct result of these factors without some discernable evidence. In this way, we hope to avoid what Peter Brown describes as “drawing the net of explanation too tightly” around participants in the Islamic scholarly tradition.*?
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