Academia vs. Logic
Logic and Rationality refer to when someone uses a proper thinking process and evaluates evidence and arguments to reach a conclusion. In our view and as we have seen, hadith sciences are based on a logical procedure of evaluating whether narrations are likely to be from the Prophet (SAW).
Academia is something more specific. It can refer to two things: 1) The specific procedures of making arguments, writing papers, and reviewing them according to the methods of academia and the historical-critical method, and 2) The state of the field of what popular papers or scholars believe and what views on a subject are built upon and taught in academic contexts today.
The historical-critical method (HCM) refers to the investigative tools and arguments used by historians to study ancient texts. There are many aspects to the HCM which I will not delve into here, but it involves attempting to situate texts in their historical context while taking into account their motivations and intentions.
There are many foundational problems in the HCM, but one major problem is that it has a naturalistic bias. Meaning, the HCM by default rules out the possibility of the supernatural.
This procedural problem affects hadith because of the fact that many hadith describe supernatural events. As such, the procedure of academia will always be biased towards considering hadith as a whole inauthentic, because deeming the process of hadith scholars reliable would bring the field closer to accepting supernatural events.
However, much more bias comes from the state of the field, because popular views in academia, although moved or overturned by good arguments, still have a staying power and inertia, which means academia does not just represent the direct conclusions of logic and academic procedure but also the accumulated paradigms and perspectives of scholars who wrote influential works in the field.
In the case of Islamic sources and origins, several influential scholars in the 20th century were ultra-skeptical about both the Quran and Sunnah. Over time, the views of academia have softened and become less skeptical, but there is an inertia. For example, a few decades ago, it was a prominent view that the Quran may have been made in the time of the Umayyads, but now academia overwhelmingly accepts that the Quran was compiled in the khilafah of Uthman (RA), like what Muslim history reports.
So, both the procedure and state of academia impede their acceptance of hadith as authentic sources of knowledge.
Different Positions of Academia About Hadith
Some people in academia have even proposed doubting the attributions of books to their authors, like the attribution of the Muwatta to Imam Malik. This position has largely been abandoned even in academia, because of the numerous ways of proving the attribution of a text to its author. You may refer to this article which discusses this position and why even academics reject it.
To understand the other views in academia about hadith, you need to understand the idea of common links. Academics termed any narrator who was the locus of all the chains of a hadith the Common Link (CL).
In the above hadith, Sufyan ibn Uyainah, a Makkan regional collector in the same generation as Imam Malik, would be termed the CL.
We already discussed how regional collectors like Zuhri and specialized teachers like Hisham ibn Urwah in the third and fourth generations could become the main source for a hadith because of them having better access to their teachers and disseminating hadith in large classes.
In this case, you can see Sufyan learned this hadith from this teacher and disseminated it to more than 10 students, which was then recorded in different hadith collections through different students.
A major opinion held in academia, advocated by prominent academics who studied hadith like Schact and Juynboll, is that CLs fabricated hadith, and that is why they were alone in transmitting a hadith.
They argue: If Abd Rabbih (Sufyan’s teacher) actually narrated this hadith, other students of his must have narrated it. In the same way, if Amrah or Aisha had narrated the hadith, other students must have transmitted it as well. The only reason Sufyan could be alone is if he fabricated it.
The answer is: The argument does not make sense once you understand the origin of hadith as we discussed before. The reason Sufyan is a CL is because he was a regional collector who learned from many teachers and taught hadith in classes. So, many students narrated the hadith from him. As for Abd Rabbih and Amrah and Aisha (RA), they did not have as many students nor did they teach hadith in classes. So, it is not surprising that a narration of theirs only got passed down through one student.
This is why academics like Joshua Little wrote rejecting the authenticity of the hadith of Hisham ibn Urwah from Urwah from Aisha that she married the Prophet (SAW) when she was 9.
As for us, we take into account the context of narrators to determine whether them being alone is justified, and we take into account the reliability of narrators to determine whether we should trust their narrations.
Urwah ibn al-Zubayr, despite being a prominent scholar of Madinah, had two main students who transmitted hadith from him: his son Hisham and the regional collector Zuhri. It is not at all surprising in this case that Hisham was alone in narrating the hadith from his father, and Hisham was a reliable student of his father. This is also putting aside the fact that there are indeed some narrations from Zuhri on this topic.
A more recent view, advocated by academics like Motzki, is that it is possible in some cases to trace hadith beyond CLs using a method called Isnad-cum-Matn Analysis.
Isnad-cum-Matn Analysis
Isnad-cum-Matn Analysis (ICMA) has gained prominence in academia today, and it is mainly done when one hadith has multiple strands and multiple CLs below the ultimate CL.
For example, consider the following simplified diagram for the hadith of Ibn Umar (RA) prohibiting the prevention of women from going to masjid:
There are more chains for this hadith, but I am summarizing them for the example. In this hadith, Zuhri, A’mash, and Ubaidullah are CLs (also called partial common links or PCLs), but Abdullah ibn Umar is the ultimate CL.
There are two steps to ICMA:
- Establishing the independence of the multiple strands
- Tracing back a core part of the matn to the ultimate CL.
One way academics establish independence is looking for unique aspects to the different strands of the hadith. These unique aspects indicate, in their view, that the CLs did not get the hadith from each other.
In this hadith, Zuhri transmitted it, “If your wife asks your permission to go to the masjid, don’t prevent her.”
A’mash transmitted it, “Give your wives permission to go the masjid at night.”
Ubaidullah transmitted it, “Don’t prevent the female servants of Allah from the masjids of Allah.”
All of these transmissions have unique aspects not present in the others. Zuhri has the clause “If your wife asks your permission” which the others do not have. A’mash has the words “at night.” Ubaidullah has the phrase “female servants of Allah.”
This would be an example of how to establish independence using ICMA.
As for Islamic hadith scholarship, although some of these methods might have merit to them, we have a more direct way of establishing independence: We know that Zuhri, A’mash, and Ubaidullah were all extremely honest and reliable scholars. So, we do not need to doubt whether they got the narration from each other. We can trust the chains the reliable narrators tell us for the hadith.
The second step to ICMA is tracing a core of the matn to the CL. In this case, the core of the matn all strands agree about is the aspect of allowing or not preventing women from going to the masjid.
As for us, we do not limit ourselves to only tracing back the agreed-upon part of the matn. We consider all the transmissions Sahih because they were all transmitted by reliable narrators through reliable chains. We do not say the exact words of each transmission are accurate, but we say the meaning of all transmissions are Sahih.
So, A’mash’s transmission of “at night” would be authentic even if others did not transmit it. (In reality, others did transmit it, but I didn’t mention those chains in this simplified example.)
This is a simplified explanation of ICMA. The two steps have more sophisticated techniques academics can apply in different situations, including more aspects of the historical-critical method.
Biases of ICMA
Both steps of ICMA and their failure to take into account the reliability of narrators lead to biases in the conclusions ICMA can arrive at.
The first step, which is to establish independence (especially) using the unique qualities of the different strands, biases ICMA against those hadith that were transmitted exactly by multiple chains. So, ironically, this means ICMA can work better on hadith that had more problems in transmission so that the different strands have unique qualities.
The second step, tracing a core of the matn back to the CL, is more skeptical than rationally required. If a teacher teaches something, it is unsurprising that one student remembers one aspect and another student remembers another aspect. So, just because a part of the narration is not preserved in multiple strands does not mean it is unreliable.
That is why our methodology evaluates the narrators and chains themselves to establish whether a hadith or part of it is authentic.
