TY - JOUR
AU - Eido, Issam
AB - The early Western studies of ḥadīth—since Goldziher and Schacht, then G. H. A. Juynboll, and the following generation including Harald Motzki, Jonathan Brown, and Scott Lucas among others—have addressed the seminal question of the discipline, namely the authenticity of the corpus. All of these studies have engaged with that question, through multiple genres, in the early and late period, and have presented vivid arguments using both secondary and primary sources. These studies have addressed hardly at all how the ḥadīth corpus was carried on and transmitted and what tools were used in Islamic history to preserve the texts. A few scholars have attempted to address these questions, some as a secondary subject, such as (among others) George Makdisi, Richard Bulliet, Michael Chamberlain, Dale Eickelman, Chase Robinson, and Khaled El-Rouayheb.1 Although very few, there are also some studies that have attempted to address these questions directly: among them are Jonathan Berkey, Konrad Hirschler, Asma Sayeed, Gregor Schoeler, and Mohammad Akram Nadwi.2 Davidson’s Carrying on the Tradition may be regarded as the first comprehensive work addressing the process, means, purposes, genres, and phenomena of ḥadīth transmission. In addition to the above-mentioned secondary sources, Davidson engages with a wide array of sources including those that address the concept of knowledge transmission generally, such as the work of Walter J. Ong and Martin Jaffee, and secondary sources from the Muslim world such as Omaima Abou-Bakr’s, Teaching the Words of the Prophet: Women Instructors of the Hadith,3 among other sources analysing the phenomena of auditions (samāʿ), catalogues (thabat, fihrist, mashyakha, muʿjam), and elevation (ʿulūw). Davidson’s work ushers in a new genre of Western scholarly work on ḥadīth. This genre may be thought of as focused on the ‘hardware’ of the discipline, the mechanisms of transmission. Correspondingly, the interest in ḥadīth in terms of authenticity may be thought of as the ‘software’. As someone who has specialized in and taught ḥadīth traditionally and academically, I can say that the ‘hardware’ can seem a tedious side of the science. Davidson’s work makes it vivid, fertile, and productive. His manner of presenting concepts and their origins, the genealogy of the historical phenomena of transmission, and the evolution of genres, while engaging not only with the medieval scholastic textbooks such as Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ’s Muqaddima but also with a wide array of sources, specifically the auditions, biographies, catalogues, manuscripts, transmission licenses (ijāzāt), together with the lucidity of the writing style, makes this book an irresistible read. It will help to open up new vistas in the field. The book consists of three main parts, comprising seven chapters (p. 4) arranged to show the trajectory and chronological order of ḥadīth transmission. It begins with the early period (pre-canonical or mutaqaddimīn) where the purpose of transmission is to preserve ḥadīth, followed by the late period (post-canonical or mutaʾakhkhirīn) where the purpose is to preserve the merit of isnād, a merit that distinguishes the Muslim community from others in human history. Part 1 discusses the evolution of ḥadīth transmission and the transformation of the function of isnād. It contains four chapters. The first presents the Muslim community’s approach to ḥadīth transmission ‘as an act of piety and devotion’ (p. 84) and ‘traces the debates that erupted over the obsolescence of hadith transmission in the late fourth/tenth century in the wake of the establishment of the canon’ (p. 4). Chapter 2 discusses the radical shifts that affected ḥadīth transmission and changed the function of isnād in the post-canonical period when a number of tools were used to expedite ḥadīth transmission in order to gain ijāza (pp. 4, 268). Chapter 3 attempts through a diachronic approach, to analyse the function of ijāza in post-canonical culture, and how seeking ijāza became ‘an act of worship and devotion in itself’ (p. 149). Chapter 4 discusses the social manifestations of this emphasis on expediting transmission. It discusses elevation of isnād (ʿulūw), female narrators, and the ranking of narrators in knowledge and longevity. Davidson works through the bibliographies of a number of female and male narrators, and critiques the view prevalent among scholars and general readers—among them Asma Sayeed, Akram Nadwi, and Omaima Abou-Bakr—that narrators were also scholars. Davidson demonstrates to the contrary that many of these narrators, specifically the women, were not specialists. Rather, having attended auditions in their childhood and their being long-lived, they were, in their late years, in huge demand from seekers of ijāza. Part 2 studies, again dichronically, two main genres (forty-ḥadīth alongside ʿawālī genres in ch. 5, and the catalogue genre in ch. 6) that helped to expedite the transmission of ḥadīth and indeed the provision of ijāzas even to some who had not attended auditions—we see this in respect of the catalogue genre—or attended a very brief sampling of ḥadīth—in respect of the forty-ḥadīth genre. Part 3 consists of a single chapter in which Davidson discusses ḥadīth transmission over the course of the modern era and how the age of reform affected ḥadīth transmission and helped to rationalize it and reject some superstitious elements in it. The main aim of the book is to show how ḥadīth were transmitted over a thousand years, beginning with the post-canonical period and ending with the age of reform. Davidson’s diachronic approach picks out two trajectories—a brief one starting in the pre-canonical period with the memorization (ḥifẓ) of ḥadīth for the sake of preserving the Sunna, which led ḥadīth scholars to stipulate a number of conditions to qualify for transmission, and ending with a radical shift from preserving ḥadīth (‘software’) to preserving the isnād (‘hardware’) as a means of social capital and piety ranking. This overview is supported by the more detailed trajectory, through multiple historical shifts, and a number of transmission mechanisms as listed above. The evolution and transformation of transmission is called ‘mitigating’ and ‘expediting’. The former means weakening the conditions, over the course of Muslim history, that qualify someone to transmit ḥadīth, and the latter means compressing the process of getting an ijāza and acquiring the social standing of being included in an isnād. Despite the fact that this book is so well written, draws on a wide array of sources, and provides a new approach to how we conceive of ḥadīth transmission, there are a few things that need to be addressed. Its extensive coverage of the modern period nevertheless leaves out a very important figure, namely Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (d. 1999). It also omits other important figures in the Levant, including Muḥammad ʿAwwāma (b. 1940) and Nūr al-Dīn ʿItr (d. 2020), or ḥadīth scholars in Turkey and the Indian subcontinent. These are significant omissions from the book. As an extension of early reformist Salafism of the twentieth century, the efforts of al-Albānī should be regarded as an important site for any study of the decline of ijāza- seeking in the modern era. The numbers of those who ‘heard’ from him was huge, despite his attempt to show the significance of ḥadīth by connecting with books rather than with narrators through ijāza. The record of the main ijazās of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and other canonical books in the modern period shows geographical shifts accompanying the transmission of this Ṣaḥīḥ. One of these shifts was that the Indian subcontinent was a land of ḥadīth in the early-modern era (the eighteenth–nineteenth/twelfth–thirteenth century)—the period considered by Davidson to have been a time of decline for ijāza and samāʿ. Widening the geographical scope of the book changes some of the facts related to the evolution of ḥadīth and transmission. In order to add support and colour to his ‘mitigating’ and ‘expediting’ thesis Davidson presents some bizarre cases, such as transmission through jinn, ‘Samhaj’ and ‘Shamharūsh’ (pp. 40, 42), or through a suspiciously long-lived legendary figure, ‘Ratan al-Hindī’ (p. 36). Although these cases have been mentioned in different books, it needs to be asked why these cases and anecdotes, although of serious and critical concern, are not found in the main textbooks (such as Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ’s al-Muqaddima) that students have studied throughout the history of the discipline. Davidson uses these anecdotes to show how they were used to ‘expedite’ transmission, but he does not question their validity or ask why they were absent from the main textbooks. It would be implausible to claim that they are absent because they were widely accepted as ‘normal’ means of transmission. It seems much more likely that they were left aside as unworthy of mention since they are so self-evidently irrational and occult, or because they represented aberrant, idiosyncratic practices that were not systematic or at all widespread. Davidson’s diachronic approach certainly helps the reader to follow the historical shifts and the birth and growth of genres and methods of ḥadīth transmission. Yet, the book does not tell us why sometimes there are two contradictory opinions relating to the same figure, as we see with Mālik’s opinions on the permissibility of ijāza (pp. 112, 126). According to Davidson, ‘[a]fter Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr [d. 463/1070] and al-Bājī [d. 474/1081] it is rare to find a scholar who considered knowledge a condition’ (p. 136), ‘mitigating’ the conditions for ijāza over the post-canonical period led to the permissibility of granting ijāza to children. But why are there still ḥadīth scholars, even in our modern period, who consider being of appropriate age a condition for granting ijāza (as we see in the case of al-Kattānī whose shaykh refused him an ijāza [p. 279]). It is highly unlikely that the shaykh was ‘not well versed in the protocols of hadith transmission’ (p. 279). And why do we witness ḥadīth scholars, even in our own time, stipulating specialist knowledge as a condition for granting ijaza? Is there another approach that might change our perspective and help in answering these questions? If, for example, we approach ḥadīth transmission on the basis of theory vs. practice, other serious issues would emerge, while offering solutions to many unanswered questions. In Egypt, upon a suggestion of one of Davidson’s friends, shaykh Maḥmūd Saʿīd Mamdūḥ (b. 1952) granted Karima, Davidson’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, an ijāza. But take another case: about a decade earlier, following a study under shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿItr, and writing a PhD thesis under his supervision, I asked him for an ijāza. He said that an ijāza is given upon reading. I read with him a book with some missing pages. He wrote in his ijāza: some missing papers were not attended. In his house, I witnessed a very interesting scene, when a famous religious TV celebrity visited him and asked for an ijāza. Shaykh ʿItr went to another room and came out with a small book of his and gave it to him as a gift. If Karima, Davidson’s daughter, had been there, the shaykh, I imagine, would have given her some candy. I came to understand, based upon many interactions with him and with other scholars such as Muḥammad ʿAwwāma, that ijāza is not only a means for transmission, it is also a certificate, communicating the student’s ethical and scholarly qualifications. Yet, there is evidence, as Davidson has demonstrated, showing that ijāzas were and are given to unqualified persons. Adding a theory/practice dimension to Davidson’s diachronic approach would answer many questions in the history of ḥadīth transmission. It is very rare, as a publisher told me, to find a book written and published in Arabic free of mistakes. It seems the same holds for books written in English. This one contains several mistakes in transliteration. For instance, the suburb of Damascus al-Ṣāliḥiyya is misspelled three times as: al-Ṣalahiyya (p. 89), al-Ṣālahiyya and al-Ṣalaḥiyya (p. 91). Carrying on the Tradition contributes rich information and reflection to this field and the author’s innovative approaches will help to transform the tedious side of ḥadīth transmission into a fertile, and agreeable source of knowledge. Footnotes 1 George Makdisi, The Rise of the College: Institutions of Learning and Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Richard W. Bulliet, ‘The age structure of medieval Islamic education’, Studia Islamica, 57 (1983): 105–17; Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Dale F. Eickelman, ‘The art of memory: Islamic education and its social reproduction’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20/4 (1978): 485–516; Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives: The First 1,000 Years (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016); Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 2 Jonathan Porter Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Konrad Hirschler, A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Asma Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (transl. Uwe Vagelpohl, ed. James E. Montgomery; London and New York: Routledge, 2006); and Mohammad Akram Nadwi, al-Muḥaddithāt: the Women Scholars in Islam (Oxford: Interface Publications, [2007] 2013). 3 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen Publishing, 1982); Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 bce–400 ce (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘Teaching the words of the Prophet: women instructors of the hadith’, Hawwa, 1/3 (2003): 306–28. © The Author(s) (2022). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years. By Garrett A. Davidson
JO - Journal of Islamic Studies
DO - 10.1093/jis/etac002
DA - 2022-02-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/carrying-on-the-tradition-a-social-and-intellectual-history-of-hadith-0YG0v3alz1
SP - 236
EP - 240
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -