Joseph Schacht- Islamic law and Justice, 1950. Chapter 4
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Good review about Western versus Traditional Muslim hadith analysis
Hadith Criticism?Differing Methodologies between Western and Muslim ScholarsThe difference between the approach of Muslim hadith scholars and Western scholars of hadithrests on a fundamental difference of approach to the Islamic tradition as a whole. A traditional Muslim attitude toward hadith is summed up in the following quote??the sunna, or we may say hadith, of the Prophet?is the second main source of Islamic law, valid forever, and the life of the Prophet is a model which ought to befollowed by Muslims irrespective of time and place. For this reason, the Companions, even in the life of the Prophet, began to diffuse the knowledge of the sunna and they were ordered by the Prophet to do so.? ?M. M. Azami,Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature, American Trust PublicationsIndianapolis, 1977, p. 46. In other words, hadith have a central role in Islam, this has been the case from the start, and because of this, Muhammad and his companions set out from the very beginning to preserve them accurately for posterity.
The traditional view of the means by which hadith were preserved by the early community is described in this quote by Anas ibn Malik, Muhammad?s servant We sat with the Prophet, maybe sixty persons in number and the Prophet taught them hadith. Later on when he went out for any necessity, we used to memorize it amongst us, when we departed it was cultivated in our hearts. To Muslim scholars, who believe that Islam was established by an omniscient God through an infallible prophet, it is entirely plausible that Muhammad would have foreseen the form his religion would take when more fully elaborated centuries later. He could have foreseen the centrality of hadith to this religion, and therefore taken steps from the very beginning to establish an authoritative body of hadith. This view of hadith finds support in the hadith themselves, such as the following ?Pass on knowledge from me even if it is only one verse.? (Bukhari) and ?God illumines the man who hears hadith from me, preserves it carefully, and passes it on to others.?(Ibn Hanbal).
To Western scholars, it is not plausible that hadith, stories and sayings of Muhammad, would have been recognized and collected as hadith in a technical sense already in Muhammad?s lifetime. A more believable scenario for them is that Muhammad spoke and acted rather more un-self-consciously than the above accounts would suggest, realizing maybe that he was a model for his community, but not someone whose every action and word would be emulated to the smallest detail by Muslims for centuries. After the death of Muhammad, members of the earlycommunity looked for guidance in the face of radically new situations, such as the conquest of a good portion of the known world. Additionally, converts to Islam from other religions looked for instruction in their new faith, sometimes asking questions emerging from their own cultural tradition that had never before occurred to the community. To answer such questions, examples from the life of Muhammad were recalled, and not always accurately. This body of recollections was eventually formalized as the sunna of Muhammad, made up of thousands upon thousands of hadith, some genuinely describing his words and deeds and others not. Consider the hadith quoted above from the perspective of Western scholars ?God illumines the man who hears hadith from me, preserves it carefully, and passes it on to others.? While this story is proof to Muslims that Muhammad endorsed the practice of scrupulously verifying,collecting, and reciting hadith, it is taken the opposite way by Western scholars. In this hadith Muhammad speaks self-consciously of hadith in a technical sense, something Western scholars assume it would not have occurred to Muhammad to do. For them, it is an example of a hadith circulated after Muhammad?s time for the sake of endorsing a particular, late evolving practice?the collection and authentication of hadith?as were many hadith, and is only further proof that a good number of hadith accepted as authentic by Muslims are later accretions to the tradition.
It is not only Western scholars who question the authenticity of some hadith. That there were many forged hadith is a fact recognized by both Muslim and Western scholars. Their approaches to this problem and to the question of what portion of hadith can confidently be declared authentic differ rather drastically. What follows is a brief overview of their respective methods of hadith criticism.
Starts from page 15 to page 20
http//74.125.77.132/search?q=cachew4mGLVgjPPkJwww.mideasti.org/files/Library-Resources/Koran-and-Hadith-Bibliography.pdf+muwatta+versus+koran&cd=22&hl=en&ct=clnk
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Following is some important points raised by Joseph Schacht in his book
The ancient schools shared not only a common attitude to Umayyad practice and, of course, a considerable body of positive religious law but the essentials of a legal theory, the central concept of which was the 'living tradition of the school'. This idea dominated the development of Islamic law and jurisprudence during the whole of the second/eighth century. Retrospectively it appears as the sunna or 'well-established precedent', or 'practice' ('amal), or 'ancient practice' (amr qadim). This 'practice' partly reflected the actual custom of the local community of Muslims, but it also contained a theoretical or ideal element, so that it came to mean normative sunna, the usage as it ought to be. Already at this early stage, a divergence between theory and practice manifested itself. The ideal practice was found in the unanimous doctrine of the representative religious scholars of each centre. This consensus of the scholars, representing the common denominator of doctrine achieved in each generation, expresses the synchronous aspect of the living tradition of each school. It is significant that the real basis of the doctrine of each school is not the consensus of all Muslims (which also exists) but of the scholars; the function of the class of 'ulama' in Islamic society was firmly established in that early period.
The need of creating some kind of theoretical justification for what so far had been an instinctive reliance on the opinions of the majority, led, from the first decades of the second/eighth century onwards, to the living tradition being retrojected, and to its being ascribed to some of the great figures of the past. This process, too, began in Kufa, where the stage of doctrine achieved in the time of Hammad b. Abi Sulayman (d. I20/73 was attributed to Ibrahim al-Nakha'i (d. 95-6/7I3-I5). The Medinese followed suit and retrojected their own teaching to a number of ancient authorities who had died about the turn of the century, some of whom later became known as the 'seven jurists of Medina'. At the same time as the doctrine of the school of Kufa was retrospectively attributed to Ibrahim al-Nakha'i, a similar body of doctrine was directly connected with the very beginnings of Islam in Kufa by being attributed to Ibn Mas'ud, a Companion of the Prophet who had come to live in that city, and Ibrahim al-Nakha'i became the main transmitter of that body of doctrine, too. In the same way, other Companions of the Prophet became the eponyms of the schools of Medina and of Mecca. One further step in the search for a solid theoretical foundation of the doctrine of the ancient schools was taken in 'Iraq, very early in the second/eighth century, when the term ' Sunna of the Prophet ' was transferred from its political and theological into a legal context, and identified with the sunna, the ideal practice of the local community and the corresponding doctrine of its scholars. This term, which was taken over by the school of Syria, expressed the axiom that the practice of the Muslims derived from the practice of the Prophet, but it did not as yet imply the existence of positive information in the form of ' Traditions ' (Hadith), that the Prophet by his words or acts had in fact originated or approved any particular practice. It was not long before these Traditions, too, came into existence, and the persons who put them into circulation were the Traditionists.
The ancient schools of law themselves represented, in one aspect, an Islamic opposition to popular and administrative practice under the later Umayyads, and the opposition group which developed into the Traditionist movement emphasized this tendency. As long as a Companion of the Prophet had been the final authority for the doctrine of a school on a particular point, it was sufficient for a divergent doctrine to be put under the aegis of another Companion of equal or even higher authority, as happened in Kufa where all kinds of minority opinions were attributed to the Caliph 'Ali, who had made Kufa his capital. But after the general authority of the Prophet himself had been invoked by identifying the established doctrine with his sunna, a more specific reference to him was needed, and there appeared detailed statements or 'Traditions' which claimed to be the reports of ear- or eye-witnesses on the words or acts of the Prophet, handed down orally by an uninterrupted chain of trustworthy persons. Very soon the emphasis shifted from proposing certain opinions in opposition to the ancient schools to disseminating Traditions from the Prophet as such, and the movement of the Traditionists, which was to develop into a separate branch of Islamic religious learning, came into being. It was the main thesis of the Traditionists that formal Traditions from the Prophet superseded the living tradition of the school. The Traditionists existed in all great centres of Islam, where they formed groups in opposition to, but nevertheless in contact with, the local schools of law. Initially the ancient schools offered strong resistance to the disturbing element represented by the Traditions, but they had no real defence against their rising tide; they had to express their own doctrines in Traditions which allegedly went back to the Prophet, and to take increasing notice of the Traditions produced by their opponents. Finally the outlines and many details of Islamic law were cast into the form of Traditions from the Prophet. In this way, one of the greatest and most successful literary fictions came into being.