Lecture
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Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
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Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
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Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
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How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
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Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
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Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
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Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Dr. Jonathan Brown - How to Approach Hadith - Verifying and Understanding Hadith
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Some might say, what does the issue of hadith have to do with the subject of this lecture? It's because the vast majority of controversial issues that Muslims encounter come from the hadith tradition. Actually, that's why I started studying hadith. The Qur'an is a relatively small book. It's not nearly as big as the New Testament. There's not a lot of controversial material in the Qur'an. It's very interesting. Sometimes people think that the Qur'an is very foreign because it's in Arabic. But it's actually an extremely accessible book when you compare it to other books, other scriptures. There's not even a book written 1,400 years ago. There's not a lot of books written 1,400 years ago that are actually as approachable as the Qur'an. It's a book that's revealed in a world of the desert in the 7th century. But its reliance on desert imagery and 7th century conceptions of the world is actually very limited. I bring that up because that's not the case for the hadith tradition. The hadith tradition is like getting your head dunked into 7th century Arabia. That's a very, very, very different world. You can imagine if you have a body of material that is collected from people who are basically trying to transmit what they heard someone in 7th century Western Arabia saying, that is going to be a view of the world that is very different from a lot of other times and a lot of other places. It's very different from our time and our place. I mean, just think sometimes you watch a movie from the 1950s and the 1940s. You think how much the world has changed. Imagine 1,400 years and all the technological and social change that has occurred.
So the hadith tradition is at the center of a lot of controversy because it's a very important source for Islamic law and beliefs. But it's also a source that if you just come across it without any mediation, it's like you've been zapped back in time into a very different world. And that's why I've tried to design or to lay out some suggestions for people to sort of have in their mind when they come across hadiths. Because as I don't know how many of you pay attention to the media or not, but most of the controversies that come up involving Islamic scripture have to do with the hadith tradition. The first thing to keep in mind is hadiths are just pieces of a puzzle. They're pieces of a puzzle. They're a puzzle that Muslim scholars are trying to put together to construct the answer to the question, what does God want from us? What is the right thing to do? What is pleasing in God's eyes in terms of our actions, in terms of our beliefs? And you can imagine if you have a revealed book like the Quran and then you have the legacy of this teacher, this figure, this prophet who brought it, you're going to try and look to that legacy as much as you can for answers to any kind of question, even if general questions, particular questions. So the hadiths are an attempt to collect this legacy. But it's very important to keep this in mind. They're just pieces of data. Just imagine following around, let's say, the President of the United States for a month and just writing down everything he says or recording everything he says. Imagine how many little snippets of information you have, not knowing what their context is, not knowing what he intends by them, are they general or specific.
You can imagine taking these little pieces of data and coming away with an image that's very different from maybe what the overall actual image is. And then imagine that over a period of 22, 23 years of someone who was the center of his community, alayhi salam, and whose companions obsessed over him, rightly so. So the first thing to keep in mind when you're dealing with hadiths is they have to be authenticated. A lot of times people will cite, let's say, oh, this hadith is in Sunan of Ibn Majah, or this hadith is in Sunan of Tirmidhi. Hey, up to a quarter of Sunan of Ibn Majah is unreliable, according to great scholars like the 14th century scholar, Zahabi. Up to one-fourth of the book is unreliable. Books like Tirmidhi have lots of unreliable hadith in it because the author himself put those in there because he wanted to show you, you know, this is what certain people think the Prophet said, alayhi salam, but I don't think this is accurate. It's not just a book of hadiths he thinks are accurate. It's a book that collects also hadiths he thinks are not accurate. So when someone cites a hadith from Tirmidhi, they might actually be citing something that Tirmidhi is putting in there that he doesn't even think is reliable. So don't just get lulled into this idea, oh, he said this, someone so-and-so mentioned this book, and he said it's in such-and-such a collection, or this hadith in such-and-such a collection. That's not a solution. Every hadith you come across has to be authenticated. Now, there are certain hadiths that say that they're in the Sahihain of al-Bukhari and Muslim. Those are vast, vast, vast majority of those have been considered authentic by Muslim scholars. But that's only two books, two books out of lots of different hadiths. Lots of the hadiths that we come across are not from the books of Bukhari and Muslim. Very important to keep that in mind. So hadiths have to be authenticated. And here's a, I mean, this is a great example.
A lot of the time, a lot of the time, the hadiths that people get really wrapped up in and the controversies around, they're actually not even reliable hadiths. This hadith, supposedly the Prophet said that, لا يدخل الجنة وللزنة The child born of zina does not enter paradise, does not enter the garden. Does anyone have a problem with that hadith? Can anyone think of a problem with the meaning of this hadith? Yes. What is it? The child didn't do anything, and we know from the Quran that لا تزر وازر تنوزر أخرى No bearer of burdens will bear the burdens of another. And lots of, this is not in any of the main hadith collections. It's not a reliable hadith at all. In fact, scholars like Ibn al-Jawzi, the great 12th century scholar of Baghdad, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Sakhawi, all consider this to be a forged or extremely unreliable hadith. So, you know, a lot of times you come across hadiths that are not even reliable. Maybe Muslim scholars condemn them as forgeries. Even in a book that is well known, for example, the Sunan of Abu Dawud, one of the famous six books in the Sunni hadith canon, the Sunan of Abu Dawud is the descending, he died 889 of the Common Era. And this is a book that's actually where the author tries to give you the hadiths that are relied upon on issues of law. And generally, the understanding is that he considered the hadiths in that book to be reliable to some degree. But sometimes there's hadiths in that book that are very unreliable. For example, I remember when I first, I was actually still in college when I first heard this, and someone came and told me about it and started complaining about this hadith, and I had no idea what to say to them. This hadith says, the Prophet, peace be upon him, supposedly said, لا يركب البحر إلا حج أو غاز أو حج أو معتمر أو غاز في سبيل الله
فإن تحت البحري ناراً وتحت ناري بحراً What does that mean? It means, let no one travel by sea, by the ocean, except someone traveling to do hajj, to do umrah, or fighting in the path of God. Why, the Prophet supposedly says? Because there is a fire underneath the ocean, and underneath that fire is another ocean. Okay, now, geology aside, this is a chart for the, this is actually a very, very rare hadith. It's not a very common hadith. There's two versions of it. The one I just read you is on the left, the blue color. It's in the Sunnah of Abu Dawood, Ibn Al-Jawzi's book, it's a book called Akhbar, Mecca of al-Faqih, the history of Mecca by al-Faqih. He died in the late 800s. Now, those three, Bashir ibn Muslim, Bishr ibn Abi Abdullah, and this guy, this unknown person, it's just a guy, literally, a guy told me this. These people are unknown. No one knows who they are. Now, inshallah, in this series we'll discuss also hadith criticism, but if there's someone who's unknown in the chain of transmission, the hadith is automatically unreliable. If there's two people who's unknown in chain of transmission, it's unreliable squared. And if there's not even any other corroborating narration to make up for that, then there's no way to make it, to turn that unreliable thing into something reliable. What is reliable is this purple version. You see, it doesn't rely on these people. No one should travel by sea except those going for Hajj, for Umrah, or to fight in the path of God. No mention of any oceans of fire, fire under oceans, right? So that hadith, before you get all wound up about, oh my God, why is the Prophet, at least that's what I'm saying, there's a fire under the ocean, an ocean under the fire,
and how do I square that with modern geography, plate tectonics, whatever, you don't have to, because it's not a reliable hadith. As the great 15th century, 14th century scholar, Ibn al-Mulakkin said, it's weak, it's unreliable by the opinion of all the imams of hadith. Now, this other one is not, it's actually fairly reliable, but, and we're going to discuss this, you can go back to the previous slide, we'll discuss this in a second, just because something's reliable doesn't mean you act on it immediately. That hadith is going to be a great example of what we're going to talk about after this, which is the way the Prophet speaks of the latest Islam. So keep that hadith in mind, because it seems to say, don't travel by sea. How many of you have gone over the ocean recently? How many of you, you know, if we didn't have airplanes, how many of us would be actually traveling by the ocean to do our commerce? Does that mean we're not supposed to do that? Finally, you get to be very careful of what you read. You have to be very careful of what you read, because the world is full of people who love to make Islam look bad, love to make Muslims look bad, and you really have to be skeptical. You really have to be skeptical. In fact, Muslims should be skeptical people, because we're not supposed to believe things unless there's evidence. Ha'tuburhanukum min kuntum sadiqeen. Bring your evidence if you're a truthful people. We're supposed to follow revealed evidence, not just anything that somebody thinks is appropriate or right or wrong, or that they think God wants. We're people who base things on dalil, on evidence. And just as an example of this, the other day I was reading this famous history of India, an Indian scholar named Badauni. Badauni from he died in the early 1600s. And he mentions this hadith he heard, and I was reading this translation from the Persian into English. It was an English translation.
And it says, this hadith says that if a man finds another man with his wife, he can kill the man, and then that's fine. That man deserves to die, which is basically kind of like honor killing in a way. So this is really weird, because that's actually the opposite of the Sunnah of the Prophet, where he makes it very clear in hadiths and Sahih Muslim and Sunnah of Abu Dawud and other books, that you're not allowed, if you murder somebody because you find them in a compromised situation, even if they're committing a serious sin, if you don't have four witnesses, you've committed murder. You've committed an illegal killing, you'll be prosecuted for that. So that's the Sunnah of the Prophet. So I was surprised. So I went and looked at the original Persian, and whoever had copied this, I just, I don't even, they didn't know what they were writing. They wrote some thing that didn't make any sense. It's like they were copying letters, they didn't know what they meant. But what the hadith originally was, was whoever wears clothing of another person and is killed because someone thinks they're that person, then it's that person's fault. If you go around dressed like someone else, if someone kills you accidentally, it's your fault. By the way, that hadith is also unreliable. So, you know, I mean, if you sat there and you got this book out of the library, and you said, I'm reading this great history of India, and you come across it, oh my God, there's a hadith that says honor killing is okay. And now I'm really feeling horrible. What do I do? You have to, at some point in the process of translation from Arabic into Persian, copying the Persian manuscript, and then translation from Persian to English, total chaos happened, so that's not reliable. This is very important, and it's also mind-numbingly, well, I won't say dull. I think it's really exciting. But it's not for the faint of heart. If you like details, this is what you should do with your life.
There are usually, the majority of the time, there are many different narrations of a tradition. So, for example, we talked, there's the hadith about not traveling by sea. Those were two narrations of the same overall saying, the prophet. You're going to see it's a sort of general message, the prophet. It's a sort of gist of what he was saying, it was one gist. But those narrations are very different from one another. Sometimes it's because somebody makes a mistake and introduces an error into the narration. Sometimes someone intentionally introduces an error to push their agenda. Sometimes maybe the prophet, alayhi salam, said something more than once in different ways. Sometimes, maybe the transmitter is citing that hadith to stress different parts of what the prophet said. And this is a good example. This is the life of hadith scholars, lots of details. Anybody who starts making fun of hadith scholars, because they think they're stupid, first go and try and just keep up with a book like Bukhari, and then tell me that they're stupid. This is one narration. Bukhari's teacher, Ali ibn Abdallah, that's Ali ibn al-Madini, if anyone cares, a very famous scholar, narrated to us saying, Abdur Rahman bin Mehdi narrated to us from Malik ibn Anas, from Makhribah ibn Sulaiman, from Qurayb, from ibn Abbas, radiallahu ta'ala anhuma, who said, I slept at the home of my aunt Maimuna. By the way, who is Maimuna? She's one of the wives of the prophet, alayhi salam. So he's sleeping at the prophet's house. Sleepover at the prophet's house. I slept at the home of my aunt Maimuna, and I said, I told her, I want to watch the prayer of the messenger of God, alayhi salam. So a cushion was laid out for him, and the messenger of God, alayhi salam, slept on it lengthwise. And he awoke, I inserted this part, and he awoke at night and started to wipe the sleep from his face,
and then he read the last ten verses from Surah Ali Imran until he finished the chapter. Then he went to a water skin that was hung up. Here, again, a different world. There's no sink. There's not even a bedpan or a pan of water. There's a skin of like a goat skin that's treated to hold water hanging up somewhere, a nail in the house. And he started performing his ablutions. Then he went to pray, and I got up and did as he did. So I've been at Abbas's house to pray as well. Then I went and stood at his side, but the messenger of God, salallahu alayhi salam, placed his hand on my head and took my ear and started twisting it. Then he prayed two prayer units, two rakahs, then two more, then two more, then two more, then two more, then two more, and then he prayed just one unit. So in this recollection of the Prophet, you can think of Ibn Abbas about what the Prophet did. There's a lot of potential material here talking about how the Prophet did his wudu, what this prayer, this night prayer he's doing, this extra night prayer he's doing is, how many rakahs it was. But then there's this, I mean, this seems kind of a little bit sadistic. Ibn Abbas was a young child, a young kid, probably about 10 years old, goes to pray next to the Prophet, and he starts twisting his ear. So if you can imagine you're an Islamophobe, you're like, ha ha ha, I knew it, right? Being mean to kids. This is just another version. Now you can see, what's happening here? We'll discuss it. Ali bin Abdullah, the same guy, same chain of transmission. Ibn Abbas says, I slept at the home of Maymunah, my aunt, who's a wife of the Prophet. The Prophet rose to relieve himself and washed his face and hands and then went to sleep again. By the way, you can see already there's new information.
The Prophet got up to go to the bathroom, alayhi salam. Then he rose and went to the water skin, untying it and performing his ablution a bit more than usual, but not like doing it twice. Then he prayed. I rushed over, not wanting him to think that I was hesitant to pray and was just watching him. And I performed my ablutions. Then he stood up for his prayer. So I went and stood at his left. Now we start to see what happened. He stood at his left, but he took me by the ear and he turned me around to his right, and he completed his prayers. And then the hadith continues. So why did Ibn Abbas, why did the Prophet grab Ibn Abbas' ear? To move him around his body, because he was standing on the wrong side of him. If you're two people, you don't stand on the person's left, you stand on the person's right. So actually here we have, this version of the hadith includes the most information. This is Ibn Abbas recalling everything that happened. Why does the other one not have this section, not have the section about Ibn Abbas standing on the wrong side of the Prophet? Because that's not the message Ibn Abbas was trying to give when he narrated that hadith. He was concerned about, does moving during prayer invalidate your prayer? Because this hadith has lots of information. It also tells us that if your kid is doing something next to you while you're praying, you can actually grab that kid and kind of maneuver them around you and that doesn't violate your prayer. So it leaves out the part about the fact that he's praying on the wrong side of the Prophet, because that's not the message Ibn Abbas was trying to give. He's trying to say in this case that it's okay to move like this during the prayer. So if you don't know that, if you don't know that there's different narrations, you come across this version where the Prophet is just grabbing a kid's ear and twisting it for no reason.
Three, hadiths have to be fit into a system. As I said before, they're just pieces of information. And with the example of, let's say, following around the President of the United States for a month or two months, you're going to get a lot of material. And if you don't know when he's speaking about one thing versus another thing, when he's speaking about something general, when he's speaking about something specific, when he's being sarcastic, when he's joking, you are going to get a lot of material. You come away with a lot of erroneous understandings or perceptions of what he's saying or she's saying. So hadiths are pieces of data. And it's a very big mistake. The biggest mistake Muslims make is to just listen to hadith and think that that's all there is to say about a particular issue. It's almost never all there is to say about a particular issue. It's a piece of data that fits into a bigger system. And that's the job of Muslim scholars. That's the whole job of Muslim scholars throughout history. Of course, they also calculate prayer times and do nikahs and things like that. But most, the job of a Muslim scholar is to try and figure out what God wants from us using this material. A great example of this is a hadith. It's a Sahih hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other books, where the prophet says, wa tumirtu anu qatil an-nas hati yiqulu la ilaha illallah wa inna muhammadur rasulullah awa yuqeemu al-sala wa yu'tu al-zaka'a wa infa'alu dhalik asama minni dima'ahum wa amwalahum illa fi haqqa al-Islam. What does that mean? The prophet says, I have been commanded to fight the people until they say there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God, and they establish the prayer, and they pay as a cat. If they do that, their blood and their property
is inviolable to me, except as Islam might deem right or just. So this hadith seems to say pretty clearly, and you've probably seen this cited on some Islamophobic website or on Fox News or something, it seems to say the prophet's saying, I've been commanded to fight people until everybody becomes Muslim. That's basically what it says. But remember, these are just pieces of data. It is Sahih Hadith. I've never seen anyone question the reliability of this hadith. But we know we can't just take it on its face. Why? Because the Quran in Surah At-Tawbah, Surah number 9, tells us that those from among the people of the book, Muslims can fight them until they become Muslim or until they agree to pay the jizya. They don't have to become Muslim. And by the way, Muslims by the late 600s, early 700s, included everybody they met as people of the book. That includes Hindus. That includes Buddhists. That includes Zoroastrians. They treated them all in this way. If Muslims conquered them, they paid jizya. And they can continue to practice their religion freely. So we know this hadith has to be modified, at least in the sense that it doesn't apply to people of the book. What else? We know from the prophet's precedent, alayhi salatu wasalam, that he didn't force people of the book to convert. When the Muslims conquered the city of Khyber, the Jewish town of Khyber in the Hejaz, the Jewish population there was allowed to remain and practice Judaism. They just paid tax to the Muslims. The Muslims conquered the city of Nejran in southern Arabia, which was all Christian at the time.
They were allowed to practice their religion freely. And their priests and their bishops were not bothered at all. They just weren't allowed to do riba. They weren't allowed to do interest. But they lived under Muslim protection. They paid tax. So we know from the prophet's precedent this isn't the case. And then finally, we look at other narrations of this hadith. For example, in Sunan al-Nasai, there's one version from Anas bin Malik, the companion Anas bin Malik, narrating this hadith, where he says, umirtu anu qatil al-mushrikeen hata yaqulu la ilaha illallah. What does that mean? I have been commanded to fight the polytheists until they say there's no god but God and Muhammad is the prophet of God. That's actually the intended meaning. Because we know that the one group that was not allowed to retain their religion under Muslim rule was the polytheists of Arabia. This is very clear. It doesn't mean polytheists. It means the mushrikeen of the central Arabian Peninsula. They were not allowed to retain their idolatry. They either became Muslim or they were fought. This doesn't apply to other polytheists, let's say if you think that Hinduism is polytheist, because Muslims treated Hindus like people of the book. From their first encounter with them in 711 when Muslims conquered Sindh, they treated them like people of the book. So it only applies to mushrikeen in Central Arabia. That's the only group that this hadith actually applies to. We know that from the Quran. We know that from the precedent of the prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam. And we know that from other narrations of this hadith. Oh, this is a good one. You read Sahih Bukhari, you'll come across this hadith. The prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam, says,
shu'am fi thalath fil faras wa fil marati wa fil daar. What does this mean? Shu'am is like a bad omen. Three things are bad omens. Horses, houses, and women. Now, I have no idea why. Certainly, horses and houses, I mean, I don't know. What are you going to say about those? Women, obviously, people are going to get upset about that. What is this? What does this make any sense? So you have to look at other narrations of the hadith in a very important narration of this in the Muslim of Ahmed ibn Hanbal. Aisha, the wife of the prophet, says, the prophet did say this. He said this. But he said it to say, this is a jahili practice that we don't accept. So it would be like me saying, some people say that it's OK to be racist. But it's not OK to be racist. Someone goes, Jonathan Brown said it's OK to be racist. Those words technically came out of my mouth. But that's not what I intended. I brought this up to say this is unacceptable. So this is actually, if you come across almost all narrations of this hadith, you will not find that very important corrective point by the wife of the prophet, alayhi salam. So this is, don't worry about reading this. I just want to show you this. This is a fascinating study I came across a couple years ago. I think 2012. This is written by an Algerian scholar. And it's in computational linguistics. And what he did is he did a linguistic study, what's called computer stylography, of the Quran and Sahih Bukhari. So looking at how often words were used, how often different grammatical patterns were used.
And he determined that the Quran and the hadiths come from two different speakers, which is not very surprising for Muslims. That's actually not what interests me. What interested me is the idea of the prophetic style of speaking. Because one of the things that you find, I mean, even if you just read 20 or so hadiths, is that the prophet, alayhi salam, really has his own way of speaking. It's amazingly consistent. It's very idiosyncratic. I mean, you immediately know this is the prophet speaking. Now, even when Muslim scholars made up hadiths, or not Muslim scholars, when Muslim people who were being naughty made up hadiths, they were trying to mimic that style. And what I think is very interesting about this is if you're Muslim or not Muslim or whatever, you can like the way the prophet talks, or you can not like the way the prophet talks. But there is a certain way that he talked. And actually, the fact that there is this stylistic consistency, for me, is one of the biggest indications that overall the hadith corpus contains reliable material. Because there's a remarkable consistency in style. And it's often a very, very foreign style. He doesn't talk like an American politician or a lawyer. He talks like a preacher and a leader in 7th century Arabia. So one of the features of the prophet's speech, one of the most definitive features of it is it's extremely hyperbolic. Everyone knows what hyperbolic means? It's not subtle. It's very often not subtle. Sometimes it's subtle. It's very often not subtle.
It's like someone saying, this is the worst hamburger I've ever had in my entire life on the planet Earth. Since the moment I was born until right now, I've never encountered a hamburger that's worse than this hamburger. That's hyperbole. Is this really the worst hamburger I've ever had? I don't know. Could you even remember all the hamburgers you've had? Do you keep track of this? Do you keep a list in your pocket or on your phone? Probably not. You're trying to say this is a bad hamburger. I'm not happy with it. That's hyperbole. And one of the things I've been thinking I should write something about this, but I've never seen actually any Muslim scholar write a list of these. It's very much a part of the way that Muslim scholars interpreted hadiths, even from the time of the companions and their successors. But I've never seen someone actually systematize it. So actually, I'll go a little bit towards offering you a semi-systematized view. Muslim scholars developed filters. You can think about them as filters, translation mechanisms for the prophetic nature of speech. So I'll go through some of those filters. First of all, severity means discouragement. Severity means discouragement. Here's an example. The hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other books, man salla ila shay'in yasturuhu. Whoever prays and they put something in front of them so that no one's going to be crossing in front of them when they're praying. And someone tries to cross in front of you, fal yadfa'hu, push him away like this. Put your arm out. Everyone knows this from the mosque. If the person refuses, you're stopping them. And they continue to try to go across. Fal yuqa' tilhu, it says, then fight him.
So literally what this means, literally, is I'm praying here in the mosque. Guy tries to cross in front of me, my arm out. He says, uh-uh. You don't tell me what to do. He keeps pushing in front of me. According to that hadith, literally what I should do is I should stop my prayer, maybe crack my knuckles, get ready, and then I start punching him. That's literally what it means. No Muslim scholar that I know of ever understood this hadith in that way for a number of reasons. One, the person passing in front of you doesn't break your prayer. It doesn't break your prayer. It's just a matter of adab. What would break your prayer is if you stopped praying and started punching somebody. That would break your prayer. There's no reason for you to purposefully end your prayer to engage in an act of violence against another Muslim. By the way, the last bit of the hadith says fight the person, fight in who's shaitan, because that person is the devil. Think about this. If you're someone, you put your arm out. Everybody gets, they don't see stuff. Sometimes they walk and they don't see somebody. OK, you put your arm out. Sorry. Imagine that you actually don't want to listen to that person. You just insist on walking in front of them when you're praying. At that moment, you are actually embodying satanic impulses. I mean, you're basically saying, I don't care about your prayer. I don't care about being rude to you while you're praying. I don't care about the fact that I know I'm not supposed to do this. My nefs is going to control me. That is satanic impulse. At that moment, you are, in fact, a tool of the devil. How do we know that Muslims didn't understand this is fighting? Because it doesn't make any sense to break your prayer to fight somebody. Two, we have no evidence ever of any of the companions ever doing this. No early Muslim understood this as fighting. What it means is push back, even fight them back like this.
Don't just let them walk in front of you. Put your arm out more aggressively. My point being, this is, the prophet could have just said, alayhi salam, if someone tries to walk in front of you, put your arm out. If they keep trying to go in front of you, push back a little bit harder. But that's not how he speaks. Because you're not going to inspire anybody if you talk like I just talked. Push back a little bit harder. That's great if you're a preschool teacher or something like that, or a lawyer. It's not great if you're a religious leader. And I remember, actually, a student came to me once and told me about this hadith. They had been sitting in a Juma prayer, and someone mentioned it. And he was really upset about this hadith. He was really shocked. It's in Sahih Bukhari. There's a couple of narrations of it that the prophet is speaking about when the call to prayer happens. If people don't answer the call to prayer, he says, I wish I could gather wood together and go and light their house on fire. Light their house on fire. Now, the hadith then continues saying, would any of you, if they're invited to a really good meal with tasty lamb, would they refuse to go to that meal? So it's clear from the whole hadith that this is almost a playful description. The prophet is saying, if you hear the call to prayer, you're being invited to a meal. Why would you not go to that meal? It's almost a playful example. And he's saying, people who don't go, it makes me so upset. I wish I could light their house on fire. Maybe then they would leave. That's hyperbole. It is not, no Muslim scholar that I ever have heard of or come across says it's licit to go and light someone's house on fire
because they don't answer the call to prayer. If you did that, you would be a literalist, but you'd also be an idiot because you'd be violating all sorts of rights that person's making. You don't have a right to light their house on fire and destroy their property and probably kill them. So then this is hyperbole. The prophet delivers these messages through a language of hyperbole. Other filters. So first filter, severity is discouragement. By the way, what's a good example of this, which we mentioned earlier? No one traveled by ocean except someone going for Hajj or Umrah or fighting in the path of God. We know that can't be a prohibition because the Quran describes that one of the signs of God is that he created boats for you that you can travel with on the ocean in the search of the bounties of God for in commerce. We also know that at the very least, Muslims are encouraged to travel to seek knowledge. So the Quran talks about seaborne commerce as one of the wonders of God. We know there's all sorts of reasons human beings should travel that are not just Umrah and Hajj and fighting the path of God. So this can't be taken literally. So how have Muslims understood that? Hadith, Muslim scholars? Like, well, Hanafi scholar named Abdul Jaslas in the late 900s. He talks a lot about this. He says that it's probably just trying to describe the dangers, emphasize the dangers of traveling by ocean. It's not something for the faint of heart, which is true, by the way, despite all the movies you see and Russell Crowe and that Heart of the Sea with the guy who plays Thor and all these other things. It's not romantic. It's dangerous, dirty work, especially prior
to night carnival cruise. If you're on one of those carnival hell ships when they run out of electricity and stuff, then you'll see it's nasty work. So my point is that he's trying to say this is actually underscoring the seriousness of traveling by ocean. It's not a joke, especially, by the way, in the Mediterranean, which is a very dangerous ocean. That's why there's all sorts of shipwrecks, always discovering Roman shipwrecks and stuff, because it's a very turbulent ocean. A lot of people died. A lot of ships went down in that ocean. OK, the second filter, laisa minna. A lot of times you'll see hadith that says, so and so, whoever does this or that or says this or that, laisa minna is not one of us. Technically, literally, that means they're not Muslim. So if they were Muslim and now they're not Muslim, then they are an apostate. They become a kafir. Literally, that's what that means. Just an example in Sunan of Abu Dawud, man ghasha falaisa minna, whoever cheats is not from amongst us. For another example, man hamala alaina silah falaisa minna, insa'ih muslim, whoever carries arms against us, whoever bears arms against us is not from amongst us. This filter doesn't mean people are not Muslims. It means they're not doing what Muslims should do. This is not the path of Muslims. They are doing things that Muslims should not do. Why do we know this is the case? Because the Quran talks about, idha fee ataamin al-mu'minina khutatala, if two groups from amongst the believers fight one another, then the prophet is supposed to reconcile between them as much as possible. So Muslims can actually fight against each other with weapons and they're still both Muslims. Both parties are Muslims. Therefore, that hadith cannot be literally the case. Second, we know, for example, that if there's
another hadith where the prophet rules that, and also in the Quran, that if you kill somebody, if a Muslim kills another Muslim, then the Muslim's family has the right to either have the person executed or take blood money or forgive them. And the prophet describes the killer still as a believer. So we know he not only carried weapons against another Muslim, he actually killed another Muslim. So this idea that whenever you see something, lais aminna, what it means is it's not the type of thing that Muslims should do. By the way, why would the prophet speak like this? Why would you use language like this? Yeah. Point across. If I say cheating is not the type of thing Muslims should do, to a kind of very upper middle class American audience who's very subtle and not used to seeing real violence on TV and things like that, that's a good way of speaking. That's not how you speak to everybody in the world. That's certainly not how you speak to Arabian Bedouins for whom violence is completely normal. Bedouins were not subtle people. They generally today are not subtle people. You have to say, you do this, you're not from one month. The person who does this is not Muslim. And it's very interesting, some Hadith transmitters later in the, let's say, the 700s, 800s of the common era, they would explain lais aminna means laisa mitlana. Not from amongst us really means not like us. Not from amongst us really means not like us. But some Hadith scholars, like a famous scholar of Mecca, Sufyan ibn Ruyayna, died around 805, 810, I would guess, of the common era. Sufyan ibn Ruyayna, he actually wouldn't explain that.
He wouldn't put the filter on when he was telling this Hadith to people because he wanted to shock them. He wanted people to be afraid of cheating. OK. Another very important thing. There's kufr and then there's kufr. There's different types of kufr. The best example of this Hadith, it's in Sahih Bukhari, it's in Sahih Muslim, it's in the Jam of Tirmidhi, where the prophet says, Sibab al-Muslim fusook wa qitaluhu kufr. If you engage in cursing, or yelling and cursing with a Muslim, another Muslim, that's iniquitous behavior. That is sinful behavior. If you fight with that person, that's kufr. So technically what that means is if two Muslims get in a fight in the parking lot of the mosque or something like that, they are now kafirs. But as Ibn Abbas says, very importantly in his discussion of this Hadith, the companion of the prophet says, hadh al-kufr, dun al-kufr. This is a type of kufr that's not the really serious kufr, like apostasy. This doesn't mean someone leaves. What does that mean? It's the same way that the prophet says that the person who's drinking wine, or who's engaging in zina, in the moment when they're drinking wine and they're engaging zina, they're not a believer. Because in the moment you're doing that act, you're really denying God. You're disobeying God so severely that your belief sort of leaves you at that moment. You're not really a believer in God if you're doing something this serious. But this doesn't mean the second you put the wine down, you're a Muslim again. So kufr can be a quality of an action. If you deny God's bounty, then that's an act of kufr.
It doesn't mean you're a kafir. It doesn't mean you've actually done kufr with a capital K. We've left Islam. It just means that action is an action of denying God. And you also find a lot of times hadiths like, la yu'minu ahadukum hatta, none of you will believe until things like, none of you will believe until I am dearer to him than his parents and his children and all the people. It's a well-known hadith. So the prophet says, none of you will believe until I am dearer to you than your parents and your children and mankind altogether. Now, first of all, that's a very difficult order to meet. And by the way, interestingly, the majority of Muslim scholars said, this is not talking about natural love. Because you can't choose how much you love your children. You can't choose to love someone more than your own children. And it's very interesting. Scholars, and this going back all the way to the 800s and 900s of the common era, they had a very keen understanding and appreciation of human nature. They knew people love their families. Parents love their children. They love their children almost at a biological evolutionary level. This is not a choice. You love your children. And you're not blamed that you love your children more than loving someone else. Because you can't control your love for your children. So this love must be the type of love you choose to engage in. To the extent that we can choose who we love, we should love the prophet more than anybody else. Secondly, anything where it says, none of you will believe until x or y, it means none of you will completely believe. None of your imams will be perfect until you believe this. It doesn't mean none of you believe. Because we know the very simple things that Muslims have to do to become Muslims. They just have to say, there's no god but God, and Muhammad is a prophet of God.
Then they're a Muslim. And their faith is, at least to other Muslims, as sound as anyone else's. You also see lots of hadiths that say, no one will yadkhul jannah man kana fi qalbihi habbatu khardalan minal kibr, or something like that. Hadith in Bukhari and other books. None of you will enter heaven if they have even a mustard seed worth of pride in your heart. OK. That is a very hard bar to meet. A mustard seed worth of pride in your heart? I mean, I don't know anybody who doesn't have a mustard seed worth of pride in your heart. You're not going to go to heaven. By the way, this is what caused the Protestant Reformation. That's what caused Martin Luther to believe that you cannot attain salvation by your actions. Because Jesus says, for example, in the New Testament, if you even look at a woman with lust in your heart, then you've committed adultery. That means basically people are constantly committing. How can you possibly meet that standard? Muslim scholars didn't have this problem, because what they said is, we know from other sound hadiths, all muwahhidun, all monotheists, are going to enter heaven eventually. So let's say you're just a really, really bad Muslim. I mean, you're an alcoholic, pork-eating, gambling, homeless person-beating, nasty, lying, cheat, murderer. I'm not going to say murderer. That's too much. You're still going to go to heaven eventually. You're just going to have to have all these sins burned off you. So you're going to be roasted in hellfire
until your sins have been purged. But we know that if you have faith in God, eventually you're going to attain salvation. So that's an established principle of Sunni theology. And I think also of Tawaf al-Shia theology. I'm not sure. That's an established principle of theology. So this hadith can't be interpreted as it seems on its face. It means if you have any pride in your heart, it's going to get burned off, even just for a second. That's going to have to be burned off. You're not going to enter heaven immediately. Last thing. This is very important. The Quran and the prophet, alayhi salam, are not science teachers. Just like none of us, well, actually some of you might be science teachers. But none of us talk like science teachers. What do I mean by that? For example, this morning, I flew up from Houston. Anyone have a problem with that sentence? You people. Oh, you're so religious people. You're so naive. What about modern science? I flew up from Houston, so Houston's below us? Houston's below us on a map that we happen to have accepted a certain view of the world where north is up and south is down. But none of you would start ripping your hair out if people started talking like that. We talk about the world like it's flat. We talk about the world like north is up. We go out west to California. Californians go back east. This doesn't really mean we believe that somehow the Earth extends from the East Coast to the West Coast temporally and spatially or something. I don't even know how we make sense of that.
This is how we talk. The Quran addresses us in the language of human beings. The prophet speaks like a normal person speaks. If he were to speak in a scientifically accurate way, people would think he's a complete weirdo, just like you would think I was a complete weirdo if I spoke in a scientifically accurate way all the time. By the way, remember, science is always changing. I have this chart. I should have brought it, but I love showing this to my students. It has a chart of all the different foods that cause cancer. And then it shows on one side all the studies that say that food causes cancer. On the other side, all the studies that say that food does not cause cancer. And if you look at the chart, everything either does or does not cause either causes cancer or prevents cause cancer. So science is not something you want to put a lot of your eggs in, specific scientific conclusions. Overall, for example, cleanliness is important. Germs carry disease. These things are established facts. But things like exactly how is the universe shaped. A lot of times, I remember reading them when I first started reading the Quran, reading it. And the Quran talks about, inna shamsu walqamr taji ila ajl almusamma. The sun and the moon each run for a certain course. The way it's translated in English, actually, is they run a certain course. And I remember thinking, oh my god, this is inaccurate. The sun doesn't move. But actually, in the Arabic, it doesn't mean it's not course. It's actually for a period of time. Ajl is a time barrier. So actually, that is true scientifically, because the sun at a certain point is going to die out or have a supernova or something like that. Hopefully, I won't be around. And then I saw something else on my Facebook.
Someone posted that the sun actually is moving. The sun's actually moving around. And all the other planets are moving. It's actually a really cool graphic. I don't know if any of you saw this. But the sun's shooting through space. And all the planets are following behind it in these different orbits. So actually, I shouldn't have been upset, because the sun is moving on an appointed course. So if you start saying, I need my scripture to always accord with the latest scientific theory, not only are you not going to be satisfied, you're also unnecessarily putting your heart through the wringer. Because that's not how people talk. That's not how language works. We don't talk to each other in that way. And God doesn't address us in that way. Finally, if you want to have a message that is going to resonate with people in all different places and times, the last thing you should do is ground it in the scientific theory of that day. If the Quran said, verily, the universe began at a certain point called the Big Bang, and there were gravitational waves, and it's expanding, but at a certain point, it's going to contract, and the sun doesn't look like it's moving, but it's actually moving. You're moving around it, and all these other things, and there's comets. I mean, imagine a Bedouin or Arab Bedouin would just say, what the heck is this? This is lunacy. Of course we're not moving. I see the sun moving around us, and the moon moves around us. What kind of idiocy is it to say that we're moving? You would have lost your audience right there. That's a very bad bet. It's a very bad horse to bet on, scientific accuracy. So the problem is that Muslims, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and to a certain extent, even Muslims today, I see this a lot, they are obsessed with what's called scientism. This is a real product of modernity,
the idea that every human being who ever lived until basically Newton and Galileo and the greats, Boyle and Kelvin, all these great 18th century, 19th century figures, they were all just totally out to lunch. No one really understood the universe. And now everything that human beings thought they know prior to the scientific revolution needs to be reconsidered. That's scientism, the idea that we at the forefront of human civilization are its best. We are constantly discovering truth and removing darkness. The darkness of the past for the truth of the future. This is the Star Trek vision of the world. That's an extremely inaccurate view of the world. First of all, it makes people think things like, and I don't know, how many of you are in kids who are in some kind of grade school? How old are you? How? 12. Did you learn about Christopher Columbus? What did Christopher Columbus do? Um. And discovered? I don't mind that. America. OK, he discovered America. They still teach this? I'm really curious. Kids, tell me. They don't say that? No. Not anymore. They don't? OK. But what is his big discovery? Who tells me? It wasn't he discovered America. He had this genius ingenious idea, which was? He went to Cuba. Went to Cuba. No, he thought the Earth was round. Everyone else thought it was flat. That's the biggest lie ever. Nobody thought. Christopher Columbus didn't think the Earth was flat. Nobody thought the Earth was flat. Nobody really has thought the Earth was flat since about 400 BC, when the ancient Greeks figured out the Earth was round.
Because if you go out and you stand on the beach and you look on a clear day, you can even see the curved surface of the Earth. Right? Everybody knew the Earth was round since 400 BC. This, the idea that Christopher Columbus thought the Earth was round, everyone else thought it was flat, this is a myth that was written in two books, one by a guy named Andrew Dixon White, another guy named Draper, in the late 1800s. And this is where the idea of the clash of science and religion came from, late 1800s anti-Catholic writing in America. And this myth still persists to this day, to the extent that when I first started teaching this, I actually had to go and look it up. I was like, I'm pretty sure Christopher Columbus discovered the Earth was round, and I'm not going to go in front of students and tell them. And I had to go look it up. That's how unsure I was. Everybody knows the Earth is round. There's a hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other hadith collections where the prophet asks his companion, Abu Dhar, hadhi ash-shams, ayna tathab? This sun, where does it go, Abu Dhar? Abu Dhar says, God and the prophet are more knowledgeable. Tathabu hatta tasjuda nd al-arsh. It goes until it prostrates before the throne of God. And it asks God's permission to rise again, and God gives it permission to rise. In the early 20th century in Egypt, this caused a huge controversy. A lot of very respected Muslim scholars said, OK, this hadith clearly contradicts what we now know about astronomy. The sun does not go anywhere. We are moving around the sun. The sun certainly doesn't prostrate anywhere. And classical Muslim scholars didn't
know this because they didn't know about modern astronomy. So they didn't have the means to see that this hadith was unreliable. Now we know this. Other Muslim scholars responded to those scholars and said, excuse me, but you're being idiotic, basically. No one ever thought the sun prostrates. For a couple of reasons. One, prostration means that you bend down on your knees. The sun doesn't have knees. The sun doesn't have joints. The sun doesn't bend or anything. So it's obviously not literal. Why are you treating this hadith literally? The Quran talks about a shamsu wa shajaru, a najmu wa shajaru yasjudan. The stars and the trees bow down. Does that literally mean the stars are bowing down to God like this? No. It means they obey the will of God. Second of all, Muslim scholars, and the earliest example I've found is from the 1000s of the Common Era, Muslim scholars knew that the sun was always up somewhere. It was always up somewhere. And they knew that because they were calculating prayer times. And if you go really far north, the sun sets. Whereas at the same time of day, really far south, the sun's up. So they knew it's always up somewhere and down somewhere else. They discovered this through calculating prayer times. The sun is actually never going somewhere to prostrate before God is strong. They thought this meant that the sun obeys God's command, just like the Quran describes other natural bodies doing. It's only, interestingly, in the 20th century when some Muslim scholars became obsessed with this idea that modern science has given us new knowledge that requires us to wipe out everything that we think we know before.
And modern science, because we've learned so much, it must mean that everybody who came before us was ignorant and benighted. This is a very, very arrogant view of the world. A very arrogant view of the world. And it's the type of thing that make people put all their eggs in the basket of the latest scientific study about what causes cancer or what doesn't and not have a sense of proportion and perspective to know that these studies are frequently disproven. And then you have to wait a long time to determine scientific consensus. And even then, that consensus might be found wanting. OK. That's it.
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