Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’ S WAY t 165
in some form, chiefly orally, as seems likely. That much is surmise.
What we can say for certain is that there was in circulation, a
century or so after Muhammad’s death, a growing body of reports
(hadith—in English the Arabic term is increasingly used as both a
singular and a collective plural) that purported to record a saying
or act of the Prophet. Though distinctive in form, they appear in
very varied contexts, as the historical building blocks in what has
become the biographical tradition concerning Muhammad, for example,
as bits and pieces of the Muslims’ earliest attempts at interpreting
the Quran, and finally, and very consequentially, as a guide
to Muslim behavior.
In the Muslim context, a hadith or (Prophetic) tradition may be
defined technically as a report handed down, generally though not
exclusively orally, by trustworthy witnesses concerning a saying or
an action of the prophet Muhammad and so providing an authoritative
guide to permitted and forbidden action or belief. Such a
tradition is normally made up of a “chain” (isnad) of the names of
those who transmitted the report and the text (matn) of the report
itself. Taken together, these latter hadith were understood to constitute
the custom or customary behavior of the Prophet in the
same manner that individual tesserae are assembled to constitute a
single mosaic. By the end of the eighth century the legal mosaic
called the sunna of the Prophet was being put forward as nothing
less than the archetype of Muslim behavior.
From Prophetic Tradition to Law
The reports credited to Muhammad in the hadith would necessarily
be explanatory or complementary to already revealed verses
in the Quran, and hence it is this interpretation, the Prophet’s own,
and not some other imagined exegesis of the Book that should be
followed. Shafii (d. 820), the most influential of the early Muslim
jurists, tried to express this in legal terms. A Prophetic report may
simply reaffirm or complement what is already in the Quran. Or it
may render specific what is in the Quran only in general terms—
the exact times of prayer, for example, or the precise terms of the