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An Exegesis of a Hadith:Part-1
By Mohammad Asghar
In terms of religious importance, hadiths i.e. the sayings of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, come second after the Quran. Those narratives, which describe how he conducted himself or lived his life-all collectively called “Sunnah”- are also known as hadiths. Muslims are encouraged to emulate the Sunnahs of the Prophet to earn reward from Allah. Killing Islam’s enemies and marrying six year-old infant girls by Muslim men are two of the many virtuous deeds the Prophet of Islam himself performed during his own lifetime. Muslims have Allah’s permission to replicate those deeds in their lives in order to gain access to heaven after becoming martyrs or after dying their natural deaths.
While all Muslims believe that what the Quran contains are the exact words of Allah (God in English), words, on the other hand, found in hadiths are either from Muhammad or from their narrators through whom all hadiths came to Muslims over three hundred years after the Prophet’s death.
Muslims’ aforesaid claim, which is presented as being the main foundation of Islam, is not supported by the Quran. It does not say that Allah ever spoke directly to Muhammad, nor does it say that what the angel Gabriel is believed to have relayed to him over a twenty-three year period were the exact words that came originally from Allah’s mouth.
The story, narrated by Bukhari in the form of a hadith (Volume 1, Book 1, number 3), dealing with angel Gabriel’s appearance in the cave of Hira and his command to Muhammad to ‘read’ in the name of Allah is also unfounded. The hadith says that when Gabriel commanded Muhammad to read (the Arabic word “Iqraa” also means to recite, to proclaim), he is believed to have told the angel that as he was an illiterate person, it was not possible for him to read what he wanted him to read. It is said that Muhammad was able to read only after Gabriel had pressed his chest against his own three times.
With the belief that the Quran is truthful, let us assume that Muhammad was really an illiterate person. Since such a person is not expected to be able to read anything, Muhammad failed to read what the angel had asked him to read. If we accept this scenario to be a true one, in that case, nobody should have any difficulty in concluding that Allah is an ignorant being and that He did not know that Muhammad was an illiterate man. Otherwise, why would He have asked the angel to present His message to an illiterate person in a written form?
But that was not what the hadith infers had actually transpired between Muhammad and the angel. According to Aisha (Muhammad’s youngest and most favorite wife) who narrated the hadith, the angel asked Muhammad to read, we presume, without producing anything in writing. In such a situation one may ask: What was Muhammad supposed to read when there was nothing for him to read from, or did Aisha misstate the meaning of the word “Iqraa”?
The possibility is that Aisha misstated the meaning of the word. Since she did not say that there was, indeed, something for Muhammad to read from, it is safe to assume that the angel must have asked him to ‘recite’ following what he himself was reciting. And this Muhammad could have done very easily, even if he had been an illiterate man. Of course, Muhammad would have faced a major difficulty had he suffered from deafness. This deficiency in him would have prevented him from hearing what the angel was telling him. But, from what we read about him in the Quran, it also does not appear to be a fact, for, Allah has never addressed him in a manner He would have addressed a deaf person.
Notwithstanding the form of the messages that Allah is believed to have given to Muhammad from time to time, let us read the first five verses of the first message that he said he received from Him through angel Gabriel in the cave of Hira. This message came to the would-be Prophet of Islam without any advance notice from its sender. The remaining fourteen verses of the Sura came later. The first five verses read as under:
“Proclaim (or Read) in the name of thy Lord and Cherisher who created- created man, out of a (mere) clot of congealed blood: Proclaim! And thy Lord is Most Bountiful,- He Who taught (the use of) the Pen,- Taught man that which he knew not” (Sura 96-as translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali).
The angel is not reported to have either introduced himself to Muhammad nor did he greet him with the words of Islamic salutation. He also did not ask Muhammad to say “Bismillah” before forcing him into recitation of what he wanted him to recite.
The words with which the first verse is constructed do not prove in any way that the message had come to Muhammad from Allah, and that the words the angel spoke were from His mouth. On the other hand, it should not be very difficult for anyone to conclude that it was the angel, if there indeed came one to Muhammad, who was ordering him, in his own words, to recite (or repeat) after him what he was saying in the name of his (i.e. Muhammad’s) Lord.
The manner in which the angel is believed to have paid his first visit to Muhammad raises a number of questions. Some of them are:
Contrary to the Muslim belief, the Quran does not say that the words it contains came from Allah’s lips. But as all Muslims are dedicated to keeping this false belief alive in them, a respected Muslim translator and commentator of the Quran intentionally slipped this dogma into the translation he rendered of verse 2:88. Consequently, his translation reads thus:
“They say, “Our hearts are the wrappings (which preserve Allah’s Word: we need no more).” Nay, Allah’s curse is on them for their blasphemy: Little is it they believe” (Translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali).
Interestingly, the words in parenthesis cannot be found in the Arabic text of the verse. This is verifiable from the translations of other English translators. According to most of them, the verse says only the following:
“And they say: Our hearts are covered. Nay, Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief; so little it is that they believe” (Translated by Shakir).
The unscrupulous manipulations undertaken by many Muslim intellectuals to present the Quran as being the holder of Allah’s words did, indeed, help them keep the untrue Islamic dogma alive amongst the ordinary Muslims in the past, but this is not the case for the present, as many have already found out, from the Quran itself, the truth about the speaker of the words it contains. It declared:
“Say (O Muhammad, to mankind): Who is an enemy to Gabriel! For he it is who hath revealed (this Scripture) to thy heart by Allah’s leave, confirming that which was (revealed) before it, and a guidance and glad tidings to believers;” (2:97-as translated by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall).
It is clear from the above verse of the Quran that the angel never spoke a word to Muhammad. What he did, with Allah’s leave, was to inspire him through his heart (to the Arabs, their hearts are the depository of their intelligence). Muhammad then narrated the inspirations to his followers in his own words.
Pointing out to the earliest accounts of Muhammad that say that he received his revelations from Allah in or accompanied by a state of vision or quasi-dream, Prof. Fazlur Rahman appears to concur with our conclusion, for he wrote:
“…Now the view of the Prophet and Prophetic Revelation, that his level of consciousness was ‘normal,’ was something encouraged and, indeed, explicitly formulated by orthodoxy much later. This was supposed to guarantee the externality of the Angel or the Voice in the interest of safeguarding the ‘objectivity’ of the Revelation. The attempt may seem to us intellectually immature, but at the time when the dogma was in the making, there were compelling reasons for taking this step, particularly the controversies against the rationalists. A great deal of Hadith, commonly accepted later, came into existence portraying the Prophet talking to the Angel in public and graphically describing the appearance of the latter. Despite the fact that it is contradicted by the Qur’an which says ‘… We sent him (the Angel) down upon your heart that you may be a warner’ (Qur’an; 26, 194, cf. 2, 97), this idea of the externality of the Angel and the Revelation has become so ingrained in the general Muslim mind that the real picture {i.e. the inspiration received by Muhammad through his heart) is anathema to it” (Islam, pp. 13 &14).
There is another way for us to ascertain whether the Quran contains Muhammad’s words or not. This we can do by comparing his words, as those appeared in the hadiths, with those of his, which the Quran contains. Both of them are identical; one can hardly find any dissimilarity in them.
The belief that each word of the Quran is from Allah has put the Muslims’ backs against the wall. Despite being faced with a death-and-life like situation, they do not find enough courage to ‘reconsider’ any of the things the Quran tells them to do, for, they fear, doing this would amount to challenging by them the supposedly all-encompassing wisdom of Allah. The belief that whoever challenges Allah’s dictations would burn forever in the inferno of hell is another deterrent that prevents even the most enlightened Muslims from going against its impractical and obnoxious dictums.
Muslims shall have to shake off this fallacious belief from their lives soon, and start treating the Quran in the same manner in which the Christians treat their religious book. This would allow them to adjust the Quranic injunctions in accordance with the demands of their times.
And the ability on Muslims’ part to adjust themselves in keeping with the needs and priorities of their time would not only bring them to the mainstream flow of the world’s tide, it would also ensure for most of them a decent and peaceful life. Anything short of it is not going to bring prosperity and self-respect to the Muslims. It is, therefore, in their own interest to change the belief they hold on the authorship of the Quran. Failure to do so would only bring them sufferings, indignities and the world’s ridicule.
Should not Muslims aspire for a respectable and prosperous life for them as well as for their posterity?
December 10, 2004