Last Update: February 25, 2003
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What is the Text of Islam ?
By Mohammed Al-Omari
Before this question can be discussed, an important definition must be asserted here, that is: What is Islam ?
One can say what Islam is NOT. Islam is neither a nation nor a community. Islam is not even a group of people. To define Islam, one must first begin with the actual literal semantics.
Islam in Arabic literally means "submission," implying submission to God, the Creator of all things.
Islam centers its entire belief system around the Greatness of God, the Creator and Sustainor of all things.
Islam can be better understood as a text, a complete literary text. It is a text consisting of two essential parts: the first being the Absolute Word of God (the Quran), it is not what God said through the author, rather God is the Author; and the second being the collections of the sayings of the Prophet of God (the Ahadeeth of Mohammed).
This text (consisting of two parts) can be thought of as a prescription for an entire day-to-day way of life, covering every aspect of human contemplation and endeavor.
Acceptance of Islam would inevitably mean the acceptance of the Quran as the 100% unaltered Holy Revelation of God to Mohammed and in addition the acceptance of the Ahadeeth (sayings) and the Sunnat (actions) of the prophet. (Hadeeth is singular, Ahadeeth is plural)
The compilation and printing of the Quran (in the sense of written documents) were made during the lifetime of the prophet.
In the last years of the life of the prophet, every Ramadhan (the holiest month in the Islamic calendar), the prophet would recite the Quran from beginning to end in a specific passage-by-passage order, the very same ordering of any present-day copy of the Quran.
The Quran was subsequently memorized in its entirety by thousands of people and written down in scroll form, all in the prophet's lifetime. The prophet commissioned four desciples to write down the Quran during his lifetime.
The fact that the Quran was written down and put to memory by many during the prophet's lifetime was essential in preserving its content and ordering. It made the job of compilation and printing a great deal easier; that there was always both definite oral and written sources dating back to the prophet.
It was third Caliph (successor to the prophet) Othman who took on the task of printing and publishing the Quran in modern standard book form, as opposed to scroll form, to be circulated throughout the land.
The Quran is therefore free from variations.
Any Arabic copy of the Quran would be the same as any other Arabic copy; and it has remained unchanged since the time of the prophet.
The Quran is important in outlining the doctrine of Islam and laying down fundamental concepts of laws to be followed. However the details of these laws were to be elaborated by the prophet.
Consistently throughout the Quran it is stated: "Follow and obey God and His messenger."
The doctrine of Islam is clearly and explicitly outlined in the Quran.
However to practice Islam, as the Quran says: "To obey God" one must "follow and obey the Messenger Mohammed."
So acceptance of Ahadeeth/Sunnat (Sayings/Actions of the Prophet) is very essential in Islam. For instance, prayers are consistently mentioned in the Quran as incumbent on all Muslims. However the details of performing the prayers were left up to the prophet to explain.
A new problem arises, however: whereas the compilation of the Quran was originally done during the prophet's lifetime, the compilation of the Ahadeeth/Sunnat (Sayings/Actions) were not done until two centuries after the prophet's death.
Many have, and continue to today, argue that the credibilty of any hadeeth is severely in doubt because the overwhelming majority of the Ahadeeth were not written down until two hundred years after the prophet's death. In addition, the fact that the compilations which were made could have been subjected by to the prevailing norms of the society at the time of compilation which might have differed with the norms of the prophet's society; or even that, the compilation could have been subjected to the personal preferential bias of the compiler himself.
Most of the Ahadeeth were being circulated by word of mouth. Many did not have any chain of source narration (isnad); in other words: "From whom did you hear this particular hadeeth ?"
By the middle of the second century of the Islamic State (about the 700's AD), many Ahadeeth began appearing not only without isnads, worse yet some were contradicting others, and some even went so far as to contradict the Quran.
So serious was this problem, that by the end of the second century of the Islamic State, the leading literary scholars of that time decided that detailed criteria must be laid down to be able to sift through the tens of thousands of Ahadeeth in circulation at that time.
By the third century of the Islamic calendar (or about 800's AD), a thorough detailed and strict literary criterion was laid down by these scholars (each working individually and each publishing his own literary compiling work).
The criteria which was established were as follows:
Each authentic saying had to have two essential parts: the isnad or chain of authoritative narration, and the nus or actual words of the prophet.
(i) The Nus or actual words of the prophet must not in any way contradict the Quran, whether explicitly or implicitly. To make such a crucial decision requires of one a deep and very thorough knowledge of the Quran.
(ii) Each saying must include the isnad or chain of authoratative narration, a complete list of all narrators of that saying from the actual compiler (the person collecting the Ahadeeth) to the person that told him the saying, to the person that told the person who told the compiler, and so on until the last person mentioned is the Prophet Mohammed himself. Each list of narration must in turn satisfy certain requirements:(a) The chain of narrators must be an unbroken one, no one person left unknown or unmentioned (without any exceptions). A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, or in this case its weakest narrator.
(b) Each narrator (again without exceptions) in the chain must in turn have the following qualities:
(1) He (or she) must be well-known for his (or her) honesty and reliability as truthful; each one must never have been known to tell a lie.
(2) The narrator must have an excellent memory, not simply just a good memory, rather an outstanding memory.
If any of the above conditions were not met (even such a thing as all conditions met except that one narrator just had an average memory) then the hadeeth would not be accepted as true and authentic; it might be a good one, but since there is at least one narrator without an excellent memory, the wording would not be exactly the wording of the prophet. Of course, sayings without any isnads at all were rejected outright, because of its lack of authority.
With these very strict criteria laid down, nearly one hundred thousand or so sayings were narrowed down to about six thousand.
There were six major compilations of the Ahadeeth by six major scholars. In these six major compilations, many of the sayings were not surprisingly very close and similar. Many of the sayings overlapped one another; some contained sayings which others did not include because one compiler might have heard a saying which the other compilers might not have heard of.
These six thousand or so sayings or Ahadeeth now became the established and accepted 100% sound and authentic sayings of the prophet, called "Saheeh" (authentic) sayings.
This literary feat saved Islam from falling to the same fate of other religions; that of having sayings of the founders of the of the religion written in anonymity, (no chain of authority).
Most often, other religions had anonymous writers writing books attributed to the their founder or master (with no definite clues as to the identity of the narrators).
The Islamic framework for choosing correct authentic sayings from a giant pool of sayings was accepted by the overwhelming majority of Islamic scholars. These bodies of compilations (of Ahadeeth) became the standardized text material for all Muslims on the sayings of the prophet. The compilation of the Ahadeeth solidified Islam's literally foundation.
The compilations (of Ahadeeth) came at a crucial time, to make sure that fallacious sayings were not being invented and attributed to the prophet, and to keep the set of accepted Ahadeeth pure and authentic. So in effect this approach to history (compilation of Ahadeeth) is indeed scholarly, efficient, and rather precise in its literary critique and accomplishment.
The fact that the compilations were made two centuries after the prophet is not a discrepancy in history; it was a reaffirmation of history. Prior to the second century of the Islamic calendar (700's AD) there did not exist a serious problem in the circulation of Ahadeeth without isnad, because the isnad chain was still small enough (two or three people) that they could be memorized. It was not until the third century (as generations grew) that the chain subsequently grew.
The literary concern and reaction of the Islamic scholars (to develop such a detailed critique) showed the sincere concern in maintaing the literary credibility rating of the text of Islam; not simply to accept a saying of the prophet out of just faith, but by literary scholarship as well.
For a scholar or researcher to really understand Islam, then he must refer directly to the Text of Islam---the Quran and Ahadeeth/Sunnat.
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