Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 440-449 www.brill.nl/ils

Islamic Lawand

Society

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156851911X594717

Book Reviews

Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī Ḥadīth. By Harald Motzki, with Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort and Sean W. Anthony. Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and Texts, vol. 78. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xvi + 520. ISBN 978-90-04-18049-9. €174.00; $258.00.

I am convinced that we can choose between more than fire and water, and between gullibility and skepticism. It is a flaw in reasoning to presume that the rejection of skepticism necessarily implies gullibility.

Harald Motzki (p. 223)

It could have been so easy: Had Zayd b. ābit, the Prophet’s personal scribe, written a biography of Muḥammad, ideally on parchment and in multiple copies, there would have been no need for this review nor for the book it treats. In the absence of such a work, however, all our information on the origins of Islam and on the life of its founder—beyond a few scattered snippets of evidence from the first Islamic century—comes in the form of ḥadīth or prophetic traditions. Each ḥadīth report contains an anecdote (the matn) that promises to take us back to the prophetic age, as well as a chain of transmission (the isnād), which serves as a caveat to notify the hearer that the anecdote is the product of a multi-generational transmission process and thus not of certain authenticity. e gullible will disregard the caveat and uncritically embrace the content of the ḥadīth, while the skeptic will longingly envision Zayd b. ābit’s imaginary biography and declare that nothing less will do. In their search for certainty, some skeptics have grasped the above-mentioned snippets of information in non-ḥadīth sources, e.g. early inscriptions or written reports by non-Muslims, and then tried to reconstruct the whole of early Islamic history on the basis of such fragmentary evidence. Unfortunately, this method has proven as reliable as recreating a house in ruins solely on the basis of its surviving door handle. e resulting visions are so radically incommensurable and fanciful that, beyond providing a motivation for further research, they have little substance to offer regarding the historical narrative; compare, for example, the account of Nevo and Koren in Crossroads to Islam with that of Crone and Cook in Hagarism.

Is there a possible third way between gullibility and skepticism? A way of using the enormous trove of material found in ḥadīth works by deploying a consistent methodology that can distinguish reliable reports (or elements of reports) from spurious ones, or at least establish a terminus ante quem for individual reports? e

Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 440-449 441

most important research agenda for such a third way to have emerged in Western scholarship on ḥadīth has been the so-called isnād-cum-matn analysis, most extensively developed by Harald Motzki. While Motzki is well-known in the field of Islamic studies, to date a significant part of his work has been available only in German. e book under review bridges this gulf by providing English translations of four of his most significant articles, accompanied by an as yet unpublished piece by Motzki as well as two studies on ḥadīth by younger scholars, Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort and Sean Anthony.

What might at first glance seem like a haphazard collection of articles turns out upon closer scrutiny to be a well thought-out volume whose elements build on each other to present a coherent exposition and demonstration of the isnād-cum-matn method of analysis. e first two chapters—“e Jurisprudence of Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī” (originally published in 1991) and “Whither Ḥadīth Studies” (1996)—confront two towering skeptics in the field of ḥadīth studies: Joseph Schacht (1902-1969) and G. H. A. Juynboll (1935-2010), respectively. Drawing on the examples of al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) and Nāfiʿ (d. 117-120/735-738), Motzki argues, pace Schacht and Juynboll, that a substantial amount of the material narrated by these two prolific transmitters can be traced back to the beginning of the second Hijri century, and that some of the material can in fact be credibly attributed to the first Muslim generation. Motzki’s argument proceeds in three steps. First, he gathers all available chains of transmission for a particular ḥadīth report and draws up a transmission tree that synthesizes the chains into a single diagram. Second, he examines and compares the various versions of the actual content of the ḥadīth. And third, he combines the results of these two analyses by correlating patterns of variance in the content with the structure of the transmission tree.

Motzki initially follows Juynboll’s overall methodology and terminology by identifying “common links,” that is, transmitters whose role is corroborated by the large number of individuals to whom they are recorded as having transmitted a particular ḥadīth. But then he parts ways with Juynboll. He criticizes both Juynboll and Schacht for not including older and more extensive works on ḥadīth and consequently in many cases identifying the common link a generation or so later than it actually was. He also faults them for categorically considering the common link the earliest historically tenable point at which the ḥadīth’s existence can be assumed. Common links generally appear in the early second Hijri century; prior to this watershed, most ḥadīth reports carry only single chains of transmission. Motzki demonstrates (pp. 52-54) that this phenomenon can be explained by considerations outside the world of isnāds by drawing on the sociology of knowledge. He argues that the common links—prominent among them al-Zuhrī and Nāfiʿ—represent the first systematic collectors of ḥadīth, who, in turn, became sought-after teachers of ḥadīth, thus giving rise to the multiplicity of transmitters in the next generation.

As the subsequent chapters show, this argument was understood by others to mean that Motzki assumes a priori that ḥadīth reports predate their common links, a misunderstanding that he emphatically disavows. Rather, Motzki is merely open to

442 Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 440-449

the possibility that a ḥadīth could be dated earlier than its common link. For example, al-Zuhrī is the common link for a ḥadīth from Muḥammad’s wife ʿĀʾisha regarding the legal effects of giving breast milk to adults. Motzki reasons (p. 44) that since this ḥadīth contradicts the legal position held by al-Zuhrī himself, he would have had little motivation to invent it, which makes it likely that the ḥadīth in fact goes back to al-Zuhrī’s alleged informant ʿ Urwa in the first Hijri century. e same reasoning holds for ʿUrwa, whose position corresponds to al-Zuhrī’s. is suggests that the ḥadīth in question indeed originates with ʿĀʾisha.

Chapters three and four consist of Motzki’s review (“e Prophet and the Debtors,” Der Islam, 2000) of Irene Schneider’s book on debt slavery (Kinderverkauf und Schuldknechtschaft, 1999) in which she used a combination of approaches including Motzki’s, and his reply to her reply (“al-Radd ʿalā l-radd,” Der Islam, 2001). Chapter five contains a previously unpublished rebuttal (“e Origins of Muslim Exegesis”) of Herbert Berg’s application of the isnād-cum-matn analysis in the latter’s contribution to Method and eory in the Study of Islamic Origins (ed. Berg, 2003). is engagement with interpretations of his earlier work forces Motzki to think through his method aloud, so to speak, achieving a level of methodological self-reflection absent in earlier statements. Most importantly, Motzki insists that his method is not a mathematical formula into which one can feed data to achieve results in a mechanistic way. He emphasizes that the isnād-cum-matn analysis requires judgment and the weighing of evidence. He does not claim to have discovered any universal truths about ḥadīth (thus rejecting Berg’s assertion that Motzki has declared most ḥadīths to be authentic). Nor does Motzki claim that a report that in one instance is attributed to Muḥammad and in another to a second-generation personality must necessarily be assumed to originate with either the latter or the former. Rather, he stresses the need to develop methodological tools specifically to fit the particular context of the reports in question (pp. 211-13). His review of Schneider is a masterful example of methodological rigor, paired with a willingness to draw broader and more speculative but still convincingly argued conclusions from the results of the isnād-cum-matn analysis.

Chapters six and seven, authored by Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort and Sean Anthony, respectively, apply the isnād-cum-matn method to examine particular incidents during Muḥammad’s life. In her study of “the raid of the Hudhayl,” which is part of a wider investigation into the sources of Muḥammad’s biography, Boekhoff-van der Voort traces two independent narratives of the raid to the ḥadīth scholar al-Zuhrī and the historian Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767). She thus argues that reports about such a raid circulated already a generation before these two scholars. Her chapter fits well with the following study by Anthony, who deals with a specific report relating to a crime and its punishment in the Medina of Muḥammad’s time. Beyond establishing the report’s existence in late first-century Basra, Anthony uses isnād-cum-matn analysis to track mutations of this early narrative among various types of transmitters. He concludes (p. 464) that John Wansborough’s hypothesis regarding the emergence of Muslim historical narratives is untenable: rather than forming part of an original Heilsgeschichte that was later dismembered by ḥadīth scholars for the purpose of

Book Reviews / Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 440-449 443

lawmaking, this report originated as a ḥadīth narrative that was subsequently adopted and elaborated by Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī (d. 207/823).

Seen as a whole, the volume under review makes a strong case for the robustness and viability of the isnād-cum-matn analysis as a research agenda for investigating early Islam. e first two chapters demonstrate its methodology, the following three chapters carry the discussion to the meta-level, and the final two chapters show two successful applications of the method by the next generation of scholars. e growing popularity of this approach among young scholars in both Europe and the United States is not surprising: it provides a critical methodology for utilizing the vast amount of available material and for dating each ḥadīth on a case-by-case basis, in contrast to the sweeping judgments of earlier modern scholarship on ḥadīth. As the most comprehensive book-length formulation and defense of the isnād-cum-matn analysis, Analysing Muslim Traditions raises the standard of theorization of ḥadīth and promises to invigorate the debate on how to study early Islam.

Motzki’s account of the isnād-cum-matn analysis, is, however, a work in progress that has at least one significant blind spot. e method of examining both the isnād and the matn of each ḥadīth under study represents the closest approximation of Western scholarship to the classical Muslim science of ḥadīth criticism—in terms of methodology, that is, rather than conclusions regarding the status of individual ḥadīth. is raises the question of why Motzki declines to address this relationship. While he does draw on the auxiliary literature of classical ḥadīth studies, such as biographical dictionaries, ḥadīth collections appear in his work primarily as depositories to be mined for chains of transmission; the process of sifting that went into the composition of these works remains untheorized. It would seem that a sustained intellectual engagement with the classical ḥadīth sciences in their early literary manifestations from the third to the fifth Hijri centuries would add a new dimension to the capabilities of the isnād-cum-matn analysis. Recent studies by al-Sharīf Ḥātim b. ʿĀrif al-ʿAwnī, Scott Lucas, and Jonathan Brown have begun to show what such engagement might look like, and it remains to be seen whether and how its insights will be integrated methodologically into the isnād-cum-matn approach.

Ahmed El Shamsye University of Chicago