Meanwhile, as scholars in Europe were busy prodding and yanking at the mighty fabric of their ancestral scriptures, their counterparts in the Islamic world had attained a whole new plateau of complacency. Back in the eighteenth century, at around the same time as Gibbon was embarking on his great history of Rome, Muslim jurists were concluding that they had at last learned every lesson to be gleaned from the example of the Prophet, and that the “gate of interpretation”37 was therefore closed. Even Gibbon, the inveterate sceptic, had been impressed by the reams of evidence that the would-be biographer of Muhammad seemed able to draw upon. To him, and to other European scholars, the depth and detail of Muslim writings on the origins of Islam came as a revelation; nor did they ever doubt that Muhammad’s career and character could authentically be known. “It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder,” Gibbon wrote. “[T]he same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina, is preserved, after the revolutions of twelve centuries, by the Indian, the African, and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran.”38 In comparison with the great figures of the Bible, Muhammad seemed possessed of a striking and enviable solidity. As Renan—a diligent Arabist when not putting the cat among Christian pigeons—memorably put it: “Islam was born, not amid the mystery which cradles the origins of other religions, but rather in the full light of history.”39 Ibn Hisham could not have put it any better.
Except that there was the hint, just the nagging hint, of a problem. Like the tiniest patch of dry rot, it was not, perhaps, immediately apparent; and even those who did spot it were content, in the main, to turn a blind eye. When Gibbon, in a discreet footnote, coyly acknowledged that none of the historians he had consulted for his biography of Muhammad was a writer “of the first century of the Hegira,”40 he chose not to pursue the implications of this striking confession. A hundred years on, however, and in the wake of all the exacting criticism to which the origins of Judaism and Christianity had been subjected, the realisation was starting to dawn on certain scholars that Islam too, just perhaps, might have its own issue with its sources. The particular focus of their attentions was that vast network of struts and supports which underpinned the Sunna, and with it, most Muslims’ understanding of their Prophet: the hadiths. Perhaps this was only to be expected. In an age when Jewish and Christian scholars had presumed to question the most fundamental tenets of their own faiths, those among them who turned their gaze to Islam were almost bound to raise an eyebrow at the sheer volume of sayings posthumously attributed to Muhammad. The question they asked was a simple one, but no less devastating for that: were the hadiths actually genuine?
Now, as it happened, a number of towering Muslim scholars had fretted over the same identical issue a full millennium before. Their researches had been exacting, and their conclusions notably severe. They had freely acknowledged that innumerable hadiths had been faked; that Caliphs, lawyers and heretics had invented them willy-nilly to serve their various purposes; that many hadiths contradicted one another. Nevertheless, Muslim scholars had insisted, there did remain gold, priceless gold, out there amid the dross. Accordingly, concerned to identify which sayings of the Prophet could be enshrined as genuine and authoritative, and which were to be junked, they had toured all the various lands of the Umma, collecting hadiths wherever they could find them, and then subjecting each and every one to the most rigorous examination. Of al-Bukhari—the most proficient and celebrated hadith hunter—it was said that he had collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the Prophet, and dismissed all but 7225. His collection of hadiths—along with those of five other great scholars—was, in effect, what constituted the Sunna. As a result, to question their value was to question the entire basis of Islamic law. It was also, in the ultimate reckoning, to question the truth of the portrait of the Prophet himself. The risk of heresy was palpable. Unsurprisingly, then, the vast majority of Muslims had always dreaded to take such a scandalous, such a blasphemous step.f
But this, of course, was hardly a consideration fit to rein in the exacting scepticism of the modern West. Beginning in 1890 and continuing to the present day, a succession of scholars have delivered a series of body-blows to the credibility of the hadiths as a record of what Muhammad himself might truly have said. Even the greatest collectors, even al-Bukhari himself, had failed to spot the clues. Heroic though all their efforts at panning for gold had undoubtedly been, yet their rigour had been largely in vain—for the ability to distinguish a fake will invariably require a certain measure of distance, both of sympathy and time. Modern scholars have been in a position to recognise, as al-Bukhari was not, how even the most seemingly authentic hadiths wear a glitter that is all too often that of fool’s gold. Far from bearing witness to the opinions of Muhammad, they in truth bear the unmistakable stamp of controversies that were raging two whole centuries after the hijra. Over and again, the Prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival, and often directly antagonistic, traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs, or the superstitions of infidel peoples. What the jurists of the early Caliphate had succeeded in pulling off, by means of “a fiction perhaps unequalled in the history of human thought,”41 was the ultimate in lawyers’ tricks: a quite breathtaking show of creativity and nerve. Stitching together a whole new legal framework for the infant empire, it had become the habit of these ingenious scholars to attribute their rulings, not to their own initiative or judgement, but rather to that ultimate in authorities: the Prophet. The dry rot of fabrication, in short, was endemic throughout the Sunna. Joseph Schacht, a German professor schooled in the severest tradition of Teutonic textual criticism, and who in 1950 wrote a groundbreaking study of how precisely the hadith collections had come to be manufactured, was blunt in spelling out the implications. “We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions,” he declared flatly, “that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.”42 In other words—as a source for the origins of Islam, the hadiths were worse than useless.
What about the “supports”—the “isnads”—that had been deployed with such care and attention to buttress the sayings of the Prophet? Their function was, of course, precisely to stamp the hadiths as genuine: to provide the Muslim people with tested chains of transmission, grappling hooks cast back across the tumult and upheaval of the centuries, anchors that could serve to moor them to the lifetime of the Prophet. Yet if the statements were fakes, then so too, it went without saying, were the isnads. Nor was that the worst. Even supposing that a hadith had authentically derived from the time of Muhammad, its value to any would-be biographer of the Prophet was unlikely to be much enhanced by the fact. Context, for the historian, is all—and no Muslim scholar or lawyer who quoted the Prophet ever had the slightest interest in establishing what the original context of his sayings might authentically have been. To brandish a hadith was to take for granted that the advice contained within it was timeless and universal. That Muslims in the heyday of the Caliphate were living under circumstances that would have been unimaginable to Muhammad himself never so much as crossed their minds. As a result, where the isnads were not being deployed to disguise a blatant fabrication, they were serving to obliterate all memory of the setting in which the Prophet’s sayings had first been delivered. Rather as in an Agatha Christie novel, where it is invariably the suspect with the most ornate alibi who proves to be the murderer, so similarly, in the field of hadith studies, it turned out that there was no surer mark of fraud or distortion than a really exacting attention to detail. As Schacht, with the knowing disillusion of a Poirot, put it: “The more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.”43 The lavish name-dropping of references, in anything affecting to cite the Prophet, was a mark, not of reliability, but of precisely the opposite.