Muhammedanische Studien

In the previous article we saw how the most gifted Islamic scholar in Europe earned his bread for thirty years as the secretary of a Jewish community, how by day he kept the administration of births and burials and only after closing time, by the light of a lamp, returned to the texts he loved. Out of that nightwork, out of that double burden of humiliation and scholarship, came the book that would bind his name forever to the study of Islam. It appeared in two volumes, the first in 1889 and the second in 1890, in Halle, under a title that sounded sober in German and would prove, in its consequences, anything but sober: Muhammedanische Studien. It was no polemic, no indictment, no tract against Islam. It was something that in the long run weighed more heavily than any polemic ever could, for it was scholarship, written with love for its subject and with the calm certainty of a man who believed he at last held the tool that would let him understand the earliest centuries of Islam as they had truly been.

And precisely for that reason this is the most difficult article of this period. For Goldziher was not Snouck. He had deceived no one, taken no false name, furnished no colonial army with knowledge. On that exalted Friday in Cairo he had been more devout than ever in his life, and that devotion was sincere. But in Muhammedanische Studien, and above all in the second volume, something happened whose consequences continue to work through the Western treatment of the hadith to this very day. The man who loved the tradition of Islamic scholarship delivered the scholarly weapon that would, in Western eyes, discredit that very tradition. To understand how that could happen, we must first read carefully what the book actually claims, without caricature and without softening. Only then can the answer sound, and that answer comes not as a sermon but as a counterweight that the narrative itself carries.

What the Book Claims

The first volume of Muhammedanische Studien dealt with the tension between the old Arab tribal ideals and the new ethic of Islam, with muruwwa and din, with the way in which the early Muslim community reordered its pagan inheritance around revelation. Goldziher displayed there a familiarity with Arabic poetry and the early sources that astonished his contemporaries, and he possessed the gift of reconstructing a whole worldview from a single verse or a passing anecdote. It was penetrating, and it contained much that has proved of lasting value. But it is the second volume that shaped the history of the field, for there Goldziher turned his full attention to the hadith, to the transmission of the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ, and to the immense literature the Muslim community had built up around that transmission. What he wrote there was not intended as an attack, nor experienced by him as one, for he sincerely believed that he was rendering a scholarly service to the understanding of Islam, and he would have been astonished at the thought that his work might one day be wielded as a weapon against the religion he admired.

The central thesis can be summed up in a single sentence, and Goldziher himself gave it a formulation that has since been quoted countless times. The hadith, he wrote, serves the scholar not as a document of the childhood of Islam, but as a mirror of the tendencies that arose within the community during the riper phases of its development. One must read that sentence slowly to grasp its scope. What Goldziher claimed was not that some traditions were unreliable, for the Islamic tradition itself had always frankly acknowledged as much and raised it to a science. What he claimed was something more radical: that the hadith as a whole was not a window onto the age of the Prophet ﷺ, but a mirror of the age in which it was recorded. Whoever read a tradition was, according to Goldziher, reading in the first instance not something about the seventh century, but something about the second and third centuries of the hijra, about the parties and the interests and the pious of those later generations who had projected their own concerns back into the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ.

This idea gave Goldziher a historical explanation that was, at first glance, of great elegance. The Islamic community of the first centuries was torn by conflict, for there were the civil wars, the struggle between the partisans of Ali ﵁ and those of Muʿawiya, the rise and fall of the Umayyads, the revolution that brought the Abbasids to power, and the endless disputes between the schools of law and the theological currents. In all these conflicts, Goldziher argued, every party had need of authority, and the highest authority imaginable was the word of the Prophet ﷺ himself. Whoever had a saying of the Prophet ﷺ on his side had won the case. And so, the thesis ran, traditions arose that supplied precisely what the parties needed, traditions that confirmed a legal position, legitimized a dynasty, encouraged a pious practice, or condemned an opponent. The hadith became, in this reading, the battlefield on which the later community fought out its disputes, dressed in the language of the earliest age.

Goldziher observed shrewdly that the sunna acquired its full official recognition only under the Abbasids, and he linked that observation to his broader argument. The shift from the Umayyad to the Abbasid period went hand in hand, he held, with a shift in the way traditions were formed, used, and sanctioned. What served under the one dynasty was adapted or replaced under the other. And behind all of this stood the figure that fascinated Goldziher most and disturbed him most: the pious scholar who, out of sincere devotion and not out of cynicism, put material into circulation that he considered useful to the cause of religion. For that was the subtlest and at the same time the most painful turn of the thesis. Goldziher did not claim that the transmitters were liars in the ordinary sense of the word. He claimed that the most pious among them, precisely because they were pious, put new material into circulation for which they expected recognition, in the conviction that they were thereby serving religion.

Here the thesis touches on what is sacred to the Muslim community, and honesty requires that one name its reach without repeating it as though it were established fact. For the chain of transmission runs back to the Companions ﵃, to the men and women who had seen the Prophet ﷺ with their own eyes and heard him with their own ears, and among them to a figure such as Abu Hurayra ﵁, to whom a large part of the transmission is attributed. Goldziher’s reasoning, carried to its extreme, cast a shadow of suspicion over this chain, all the way to the first generation. It is precisely this implication that this article names clinically and does not magnify, for to reproduce the insinuation itself would be to lend it a rhetorical force that, on closer examination, it does not deserve. What matters is that one understand how far the thesis reached, and why, once accepted, it made the whole science of transmission, in Western eyes, into a suspect edifice.

Kuenen’s Method Applied to the Hadith

To understand where this thesis came from, we must return to the beginning of this theme, to the first article of the previous period, in which the Leiden School and its historical-critical method were described. There we saw how Abraham Kuenen had learned to read the Bible as a sediment of centuries, as a library rather than a book, in which each layer betrayed its own age and the task of the scholar was to lay bare those layers and restore to each its place in history. We also saw how that method possessed an internal logic that made it universal, or it was nothing at all: if the Bible was a human document that had to be explained out of the interests and conflicts of its time, then the same held for every other writing that laid claim to revelation, and therefore also for the sources of Islam.

Goldziher was the man who applied this method to the hadith, and he did so with the same seriousness, the same erudition, and the same relentlessness with which Kuenen had treated the prophets of Israel. Where Kuenen had sought in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah the interpolations of a later hand, Goldziher sought in the traditions of the Prophet ﷺ the retrojections of a later community. Where Kuenen had subordinated the prophet’s self-understanding to the interpretation of the historian, Goldziher subordinated the self-understanding of the Muslim community to his own. The believer said: this has been transmitted from the Prophet ﷺ through a reliable chain. The scholar answered: prove it, for I know only the text and the tendency it betrays, and that tendency points to a later age than it pretends.

There is in this correspondence something that must not be glossed over, for it explains both the strength and the blind spot of Goldziher’s undertaking. The strength lay in the acuity with which he saw that texts bear the traces of the hands that have touched them, that transmission never takes place in a vacuum, that the concerns of a generation inevitably leave their mark on what it preserves and passes on. That is a truth no serious scholarship can deny, and the Islamic science of transmission has never denied it. The blind spot lay in the assumption that this truth had the last word, that a text passed down by a community must therefore be reduced to that community and to nothing beyond it. Whoever may read revelation only as the sediment of its age, as we put it in the previous period, cannot but hand its reader over to that same age. And whoever may read the hadith only as a mirror of the later community will find in the hadith only that later community, for he has forbidden himself in advance to seek anything else in it.

That is the circle within which the method moves, and it is a circle that can be dressed up with great erudition without thereby being opened. Goldziher gathered thousands of traditions, he ordered them, he compared the variants, he traced the contradictions, and he showed how different parties had put different versions into circulation. All of this was real work, learned work, and many of his observations about specific traditions have remained penetrating. But the conclusion he drew from it, the inference that the corpus as a whole was a mirror of tendencies and not a document of events, did not follow from the observations themselves. It followed from the method he had brought with him, from the presupposition that a religious text had to answer before the tribunal of philology and that its own claim to vertical origin counted for nothing in advance. The hadith was condemned before the trial began, for the judge had not admitted the most important witness, the science of transmission itself.

What the Muhaddithin Did

For that is the heart of the matter, and it is a heart that Goldziher largely left untouched: the Muslim community had, long before the nineteenth century, developed a science intended to do precisely what Goldziher believed himself the first to do, namely to separate the chaff from the wheat in the transmission. This science was called the 'ulum al-hadith, the sciences of transmission, and it was no pious aside but one of the most refined critical disciplines any civilization has produced before the modern age. Whoever wishes to understand Goldziher, and whoever wishes to answer him, must know what the muhaddithin ﵀ actually did, for without that knowledge the thesis of the mirror seems irrefutable, and with that knowledge it turns out to contain an enormous gap.

The heart of the science of transmission was the isnad, the chain of transmitters that preceded every hadith. A tradition was accepted not because it sounded pious or because it was useful, but because it could be traced back along an unbroken chain of reliable people to the Prophet ﷺ. And to test that chain the scholars developed a second science, the 'ilm al-rijal, the knowledge of the men, in which the life of every transmitter was investigated down to the smallest detail. When did he live, where did he live, who were his teachers and who his students, could he really have met the person he named as his source, was he known for his precision or for his carelessness, was he pious or notorious, strong of memory or forgetful in his old age. This biographical science grew into a literature of many thousands of names, in which the transmitters were weighed and ranked, and in which a single doubtful link was enough to weaken an entire chain.

Alongside the criticism of the chain stood the criticism of the text itself, and that too was highly developed. The 'ilm al-'ilal, the science of hidden defects, concerned itself with traditions that appeared sound to the eye but on closer inspection betrayed a subtle flaw, a confusion of names, a break concealed behind a seemingly airtight chain, a text that contradicted what had been more reliably transmitted. This was work for the masters, for the few who knew so many traditions by heart that they could hear the false note the student missed. And above all this stood the principle of the jarh wa taʿdil, the impugning and the accrediting, in which the reliability of every transmitter was established with merciless honesty, even when it concerned a beloved teacher or a pious contemporary.

There is in all of this a confusion that Goldziher never cleared up and that forms the core of the dispute. That traditions were forged in the first centuries was for the Muslim scholars not a revelation but a starting point, for it was precisely against fabrication that their whole science had been built. They knew the fabricators by name, they had lists of the liars, they had categories for the weak, the interrupted, the inverted, and the forged tradition, and they rejected tens of thousands of traditions as unreliable with a severity that no nineteenth-century critic surpassed. The existence of forgery therefore proved nothing to them about the reliability of the whole, for the whole was precisely what remained after the sifting. Goldziher turned the existence of forgery into a verdict on the whole, and that is the leap the sources will not bear. Whoever demonstrates that counterfeit coins have been in circulation has not thereby demonstrated that all coins are counterfeit, and least of all when a guild of assayers existed whose life’s work was to take the counterfeit coins out of circulation.

Out of these sciences came the great collections, and it is no coincidence that they arose in precisely the period Goldziher branded as the age of fabrication. Imam Bukhari ﵀, who died in the year 256 of the hijra, traveled according to tradition for years through the lands of Islam and gathered hundreds of thousands of traditions, of which, after rigorous testing, he admitted only a few thousand into his Sahih, his collection of the sound. His contemporary Imam Muslim ﵀, who died in 261, did the same with his own method and his own severity. What drove these men was not the wish to build up a corpus that served the interests of their time, but the fear of attributing to the Prophet ﷺ something he had not said, a fear anchored in the transmission itself, for the Prophet ﷺ had warned that whoever deliberately ascribed a lie to him should prepare his place in the Fire. The science of transmission was, in other words, born out of precisely the concern that Goldziher believed himself to introduce, and it bore that concern centuries before him, and with a fineness of mesh that, on important points, was already ahead of nineteenth-century philology.

Here lies the deliberate parallel with the previous period, and it is a parallel the theme draws on purpose. When we discussed Theodor Nöldeke and his Geschichte des Qorans, we saw that he did not know or set aside the rich tradition of the 'ulum al-Qur’an, that he regarded the internal chronology of the revelation as transmitted by the Companions ﵃ as unreliable because it came from believers. Precisely the same now happened with the hadith. The Western scholar treated the Islamic critical science not as an interlocutor but as part of the material to be explained, as a pious edifice that itself required explanation rather than an instrument to be taken seriously. The science of transmission was not refuted. It was skipped over, and in the skipping over lay the whole verdict.

The Written Word

Beneath the thesis of the mirror lay a silent presupposition that seemed so self-evident that Goldziher scarcely needed to state it, and that for precisely that reason weighs most heavily. It was the assumption that the transmission in the first centuries had existed exclusively by word of mouth, that between the speaking of the Prophet ﷺ and the recording of the great collections in the third century of the hijra there lay a long, twilit period in which the words passed only from mouth to mouth, pliable and formless, and therefore susceptible to the changes that each generation wished to make to them. Whoever looked at the transmission in this way could not but distrust it, for oral transmission over a century and a half leaves room for endless reworking, and in that room Goldziher placed his whole reconstruction of the retrojection.

The assumption was attractive and it was false, and it is modern scholarship itself, partly Western and partly Islamic, that has refuted it. For there is a growing and by now well-documented body of evidence that the recording of traditions did not begin in the third century but already in the first, and even during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ. Various Companions ﵃ possessed written pages of traditions, and the early community knew writing and used it. One of the best-known witnesses to this is the collection connected to Abu Hurayra ﵁ and recorded by his pupil, a document running to many pages that recurs generations later almost unchanged in the great collections, which means that the text did not float formlessly through time but was passed on with remarkable stability. Whoever lays the earliest written witnesses beside the later printed versions finds not the rank growth that the thesis of oral pliability predicts, but a fidelity that contradicts it.

It is a historical irony that precisely the figure Goldziher suspected most deeply, the much-discussed Abu Hurayra ﵁, to whom he ascribed an improbable abundance of traditions and about whom he voiced the gravest doubts, has in this respect become a star witness for the opposing side. For that written page connected to him shows that a written anchor existed at precisely the point where the thesis assumed a free oral space. This is no conclusive proof that every tradition is authentic, and the defense must guard against that overreach as much as the criticism ought to have guarded against its own. But it deprives the thesis of its silent foundation, for once it is established that writing took place from the very beginning, the notion of a centuries-long formless transmission loses its ground, and with it the reconstruction of the retrojection loses the empty span of time it required. The scholars who laid bare and ordered this material in the twentieth century return at the close of this period, for their work is the true rejoinder to the book we are reading here.

The Case of al-Zuhri

No example shows Goldziher’s thesis more sharply, and no example shows its weakness more sharply, than the case he built around the figure of Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri ﵀, one of the greatest scholars of the second generation, to whom an enormous quantity of transmission is attributed. Goldziher built around this man a reconstruction that had the look of an airtight argument and that, when tested against the facts, falls apart into its component parts.

The reconstruction ran as follows. The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, Goldziher argued, wished to prevent the pilgrimage to Mecca because Mecca was in the hands of his rival, and therefore he built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to lead the believers there instead of to the Kaʿbah. To justify this diversion religiously, the thesis continued, the pious al-Zuhri ﵀ was given the task of putting into circulation a tradition according to which the believer might go on pilgrimage to three mosques, that of Mecca, that of Medina, and that of Jerusalem. The pious scholar, bowed beneath the power of the caliph, thus invented a word of the Prophet ﷺ in order to lend a political decision a religious standing. One sees at once why this example was so attractive to Goldziher, for it united all the elements of his thesis in a single story: the political pressure, the pious transmitter, the fabricated tradition, the mirror of later interests posing as the window onto the earliest age.

The problem is that virtually every part of this story fails the test of the facts, and that later scholarship, both Islamic and Western, has demonstrated this one by one. Abd al-Malik did not build the Dome of the Rock to divert the pilgrimage, and there is not the slightest indication that the hajj was ever moved from Mecca to Jerusalem or that anyone seriously attempted it. The tradition about the three mosques is transmitted through multiple chains and not only through al-Zuhri ﵀, which undermines the notion of a single fabricated source. And what weighs most heavily: the chronology simply does not allow the encounter that Goldziher assumes, for in the period in which the diversion would have taken place, when Mecca was still in the hands of the caliph’s rival, al-Zuhri ﵀ was still young and did not yet hold at all the position at court that the story requires. The pious scholar could not have received the commission that Goldziher ascribes to him, for the simple reason that he could not have met the caliph in that capacity in the years in question.

What then remains of the case. There remains a scholar who declared a historical possibility to be a certainty, who strung together a chain of assumptions and presented the whole as a proof of his general thesis, while each of the links, on testing, weakened or broke. This is no small detail, for al-Zuhri ﵀ was for Goldziher not a random example but the pivotal figure, the model of the pious fabricator, and the later defenders of the Sunna accordingly built their counterargument precisely around this case. That one must guard against an inverted naivety goes without saying, for the defense too can exaggerate and it too must hold to the sources. But the sober conclusion remains that the most pronounced application of Goldziher’s thesis to a concrete case was a reconstruction that rested more on the inner logic of the method than on the resistance of the facts.

The Circle of the Method

We now approach the point where the narrative turns from criticism to answer, and it is well to let that answer sound not as a counterattack but as an observation about the nature of knowing itself. For the deepest refutation of Goldziher lies not in this or that fact about al-Zuhri ﵀ or about the Dome of the Rock, however much those facts count. It lies in the question whether the method he employed could ever have found what it had excluded in advance.

Suppose that the hadith had in reality, for the overwhelming part, reliably preserved the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ. Suppose that the science of transmission had largely worked as it claimed to work, that the chains were what they professed to be and that the severity of the masters was real severity. Could Goldziher’s method have established that. The answer is no, and that is the heart of the matter. For the method was so devised that every tradition that seemed to serve a later interest was read as retrojection, and since virtually every tradition connects to one later interest or another, virtually every tradition could be read as retrojection. The piety of the transmitter became not a reason for trust but precisely a reason for suspicion, for the pious man had a motive to fabricate for the good cause. The unbroken chain became not a guarantee but a phenomenon to be explained, for a fabricated tradition too could furnish itself after the fact with an airtight chain. There was, in short, no datum whatsoever that could have refuted the thesis, and a thesis that no datum can refute is not a scientific discovery but a closed framework.

This is the place where the narrative must pause over what the Muslim tradition itself says about the preservation of the revelation, not as an exhibit in a debate but as the other pole against which the method stands out. For the community that preserved these traditions did not do so in the awareness that it was building a human archive that would be probed by the historian. It did so in the awareness that it was guarding an entrusted good, and that the guarding itself stood under a promise.

The believer reads in this verse a promise that carries the whole science of transmission, for the guarding of the dhikr comprises, in the classical exegesis, not only the text of the Qur’an but also its explanation, and that explanation is the sunna. Goldziher’s method could do nothing with this awareness, for it lay outside its competence, precisely as the claim to the inimitability of the Qur’an lay outside the competence of biblical criticism. And there lies the true tragedy of this book. The man who in Cairo had been more devout than ever, who had watched the pious and felt that he was almost one of them, wrote a work that turned the piety of the transmitters into a suspicion, not out of bad faith but because the method he loved permitted him no other outcome. Whoever may see only sediment finds only sediment. That is no discovery about the hadith. That is a consequence of the way of looking.

A Book That Worked Longer Than Its Author

Muhammedanische Studien did not immediately become the polemical tract that later generations would make of it, for it was too learned and too many-sided for that, and it contained, alongside the contested thesis about the hadith, a treasury of observations that are consulted to this day. But the thesis about the hadith was the legacy that traced the deepest tracks, and it traced those tracks in two directions at once. In the West Goldziher became the founder of what has come to be called hadith skepticism, the assumption that the transmission is deemed reliable only after it has proved itself before the historian rather than the other way around. On this foundation Joseph Schacht would build in the middle of the twentieth century, sharpening the skepticism still further in his research into early Islamic jurisprudence and making it into a system, with arguments that sought to forge from the silence of the sources a proof and that presented the chains of transmission as constructed after the fact. The road from Goldziher to Schacht is the road along which Western doubt of the hadith institutionalized itself into a scholastic orthodoxy, which in its turn would call forth its own critics.

For that is the other direction in which the book worked, and it is for this theme the most important. Precisely because Goldziher had formulated things so sharply and so learnedly, he called forth a rejoinder that did not content itself with indignation but that answered him on his own ground, with the sources in hand, with the scholarly rigor he himself had preached. That rejoinder would not take on its full shape until the twentieth century, in the work of scholars such as Mustafa al-Siba’i ﵀ and Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami ﵀, who knew the science of transmission from within and who could point to the gap that Western criticism had stepped over. To their answer this theme returns in the last article of this period, for without that answer the picture remains incomplete and the mirror would keep the last word.

But before we arrive there, we must still understand something that frees the book and its author from every easy judgment. The man who wrote Muhammedanische Studien was in those same years entangled in a friendship and a correspondence with the only contemporary who was his equal in knowledge of Islam, a Dutchman who had entered Islam in a very different and much darker way than he. While Goldziher dissected the hadith in his Budapest study, he corresponded with the man who had mingled among the believers in Mecca under a false name and who had placed his knowledge in the service of a colonial war. Two lives in mirror image, joined by nearly five hundred letters, and it is precisely in that mirroring that the thesis of this whole period becomes visible. That is the subject of the next article.

Sources

• Ignác Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols., Max Niemeyer, Halle (1889-1890)
• Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, trans. C.R. Barber and S.M. Stern, 2 vols., George Allen & Unwin (1967-1971)
• Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami, Studies in Early Hadith Literature, Cambridge (1968)
• Mustafa al-Siba’i, As-Sunnah wa-makanatuha fi at-tashri’ al-islami, Cairo (1961)
• Abraham Kuenen, De Godsdienst van Israël, 2 vols. (1869-1870)
• Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, Dieterich (1860)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill/Akadémiai Kiadó (1986)