Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

166 t CHAPTER SEVEN
alms-tithe. Finally, and this is where Quran and sunna are treated
equally as revelation, there is the case “where the Prophet establishes
a sunna (a custom) about which no part of the Quran has
been revealed.”
If the sunna of the Prophet, which had thus become normative
in the matter of the law, unfolded in word and deed at Mecca and
Medina under divine guidance, it follows that the hadith that severally
express it must be regarded as a form of revelation. Generally,
traditional Muslims have not shrunk from this identification,
though some have attempted to distinguish between the Quran’s
direct and verbal “revelation” (wahy) and the more subtle and
suggestive “inspiration” (ilham) given the Prophet in other circumstances.
If nothing else, the stylistic and lexical difference between
the Quran and the hadith is distinctive and unmistakable. Yet in
legal terms, the sunna of the Prophet was a full partner with the
Quran in prescribing Muslim behavior, perhaps even a senior partner
since the hadith are far more detailed and prescriptive than the
Quran on legal matters.
A Growth Industry
Once the hadith began to weigh more heavily in the lawyers’ efforts
at fashioning, if not a formal body of Islamic law, then at
least a jurisprudence, such traditions not unnaturally began to
multiply as supply went out to meet demand. Collectors fanned
out across the entire Abode of Islam in search of these precious
recollections and returned to the great legal centers in Iraq, Syria,
and Arabia with their heads crammed with hadith. The enormous
amount of material collected on these “hunting expeditions” was
obviously quite inconsistent in quality. There were mutually contradictory
traditions, those with incomplete chains of transmitters
and others with multiple weaknesses. The reports themselves contained
material that ranged on occasion from the trivial to the superstitious,
or was transparently Jewish or Christian in origin. A
great many were overtly and outrageously political in their inspiration,
like the hadith that have Muhammad praising his uncle