The Concept of Isnad

The Concept of Isnad

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Introduction: The Purpose of Living Links

Inshallah, what I want to talk about today is the concept of Isnad in our tradition. Why we call this program Living Links. And addressing some of the problems that have arisen in the global Muslim scene because of the breakdown of a tradition that worked actually relatively well. It had its problems, but it did work for a long, long time. And attempting to contribute to the revival of that tradition. We're not the only ones trying to do this, there are others in other places.

The Question of Authority in Religious Traditions

So, the first thing, one of the most important aspects of the Islamic tradition is the chains of authority. In fact, there is a reference in the New Testament when the rabbis surround Jesus, and they ask him, on whose authority are you speaking? And that comes out of the rabbinical tradition where rabbis did not speak for themselves, but they spoke from an oral tradition because they also have an oral tradition. So, they would speak on the authority of Rabbi Gamaliel, or Rabbi Samuel, or one of the rabbis. And that would buttress whatever they were saying. And obviously, Jesus was a prophet, so he speaks with direct authority. Even though he's in a chain of prophets who are teaching the same thing, their source is the same source. So, they get the teaching directly, they don't get it through transmission of human beings. They get it directly as revelation through either angelic or a direct revelation from Allah.

The Universal Problem of Authority

So, the problem of authority in our religion is a problem, it's a problem in every religion. Every religion grapples with who has authority, what substantiates authority, where does authority come from, what's the nature of authority. Even the legitimation in government is also a major problem. Like one of the things that we're going through right now in some parts of the world is this idea of whether or not governments are legitimate or have legitimacy because they don't, for instance, reflect the voice of the people. In fact, there's a recent book written in Morocco by a Moroccan scholar arguing that the wilaya, which is government authority, is actually niaba. It's a type of representation.

And he doesn't say niaba from God, he says niaba from the people, that the government represents the people, which is a radical departure from how earlier Muslim peoples would have viewed it. They would have viewed it in a very different way. But that shows you the impact, even on Islamic scholarship, of Western political theory because we also have within our epistemology, in other words, how we substantiate things through knowledge processes, we actually have within our epistemology a political tradition that many modern Muslims would consider simply just antiquated. They would see no value in it. They would say it was written for another time,

another place. Now certain aspects of that tradition undoubtedly were written for another time and place, but the idea somehow that the ancients have nothing to tell us about the human condition and about human problems is an absurdity. Anybody who's spent any time in classical texts knows how relevant a good deal of what they are talking about.

Contemporary Examples of Authority Disputes

So it's important that you understand that this problem is not just a problem of religion. It's a problem in many, many different fields. For instance, in Egypt right now, who has authority? Is it Sisi or is it Morsi? This is a problem, and the scholars have taken different sides. Some of the scholars are saying this is what's called the Hukum al-Mutaghalib. This is what our traditional books say about the situation. Other ones say that doesn't apply anymore. So even the scholars are split.

Now one of the problems inherent in that is that it becomes very confusing for people because when you have scholars radically differing and you're looking for them for guidance, who do you follow? So who has authority? Because it has spiritual implications. It has political implications. It has economic implications. We have, for instance, if you're following it at all, but Niel Ferguson, who's a historian of economics, and Krugman, who's the Nobel Prize winner right now, are having their little blog battle about economic theories. So do we follow a Keynesian model, or should we follow an Austrian model or a monetarist model? So even within economics, who has authority? Who's speaking with authority?

The Challenge of Religious Unity Amid Diversity

These are all ikhtirafat. These are the differences of opinion that arise from the human condition because people look at things from different perspectives. So in light of all that confusion, if you can say that, in light of all that confusion, how does a religion assert itself authoritatively when the purpose of religion is actually to unite people and not to separate them? In other words, if you have a religion where all of the people are differing about what that religion is, how is that going to bring them together? They're going to end up fighting each other, disputing over it, creating their own sects.

You can see, for instance, in this city, there are probably hundreds, if not at least dozens, of churches of different denominations. And this is what happened to Christianity. It's split up. You will see within this, on this hill, many different types of Christianity are being taught in these colleges. Judaism. You can go to a reformed synagogue. You can go to synagogues in Judaism where it's not considered necessary to believe in Yahweh. You don't have to believe in God. You can still go to the synagogue and be part of a Jewish religious community and not believe in God. And I learned that from being in an interfaith dialogue with a rabbi who didn't believe in God. Because I said, well, we have the commonality of God. He said, no, we don't. I don't believe in God. And it really shocked me, but I went back and I did my research and found out, indeed, that there are reformed versions of Judaism that do not stipulate a belief in God. That it's more of an ethnic, cultural, binding tradition, religio. So it's purely on a horizontal plane. There's no vertical reality to the religion anymore.

Fragmentation in Contemporary Islam

So you can find all these differences. Now within the Islamic tradition, you can be a progressive Muslim. You can be a transgender Muslim. There's all these different types of Islam out there. And this is part of the fragmentation of the time we're living in. And so the question about authority, how did Muslims deal with this? Because, again, one of the things that we can learn from the ancients is that they went through the same things that we're going through. They had authority problems in the early part of Islam. They went through their own types of disintegration. They went through their sectarianism, their schisms. The Sunni-Shia split is a schismatic split. And the Prophet said that you will split. He told us that. It's human nature. But then he said, but one group is guided.

Competing Claims to Authority

So everybody, if they're all claiming that, how is that claim substantiated? Because the Ismailis claim that they have the Batini authority, and this is what gives them the truth. The Shia claim that they have the Ahl al-Bayt authority of the unbroken chain of the 12 impeccable imams that can't make mistakes. Within the Alawi or the Nusayri, also a sect, a radical sect of the Shia tradition, claims that they have a direct line to Ali, who's an incarnate, like the logos, like Jesus. So you have all these different competing claims. What substantiates them? What legitimates them? What enables us to discern haqq from batil, the furqan? What is that?

The Problem of Assumptions and Historical Products

And somebody was talking about assumptions earlier. It's a problem, because we assume many things. Most people were simply born in a place, and they take on the historical, cultural nature of that place they were born. One philosopher terms them historical products. They're products of their historicity. And so they're trapped in a religious, ethical, social, economic situation that determines everything that they're going to think about those things. And so we live in a time where people have prepackaged ideas, and really the great leisure domain of the time is to make people think that these are their own ideas, that they came up with them themselves, that this is some kind of self-actualization, that I believe these things, and I came to these conclusions myself.

Every Position Has a Chain of Transmission

Everything's relative. You can trace that. There's a sanad with that idea. That has a lineage. And you are in a chain of transmission when you make that statement. And we can trace that chain and see who the first people that said it were. If you say there's no God, there's also a chain of atheists. You're in a chain. You're in an isnad. Whatever position you take that you think is uniquely your own or original, you are in a chain of transmission.

The Two Fundamental Chains: Prophetic or Demonic

Now, from our perspective, and I'm talking about from believers, whether you're Christian or other traditions, because almost all these religious traditions do believe in a dark realm, those chains either go back to demonic

sources, or they go back to angelic sources. So either Iblis is at the end of the "Hadathani, Marx, Hegel," right? You go back, and then Iblis was the first rawi in the chain. And so that's your chain. It goes back to Iblis. So you're a transmitter of narrations from Iblis. He's your source. But people don't recognize that. Or you go back to "Hadathani, An Fulan, An Fulan, An Fulan, An Isa, Ibn Maryam, Jibril," right? Or from God. So these are the basic, the two-those are the two chains. You're in one or the other. There's no other chain in Dunya. You're either in the chain of Iblis' transmission, or you're in the chain of prophetic transmission.

The Reality of Occult Influences

Now Iblis, people forget, you see, that the occult, people don't want to deal with the occult. The occult is everywhere. You're dealing with occultic phenomena everywhere. There are occultic elements in the way San Francisco was designed architecturally. There's a reason why Pier 33 is the central pier in San Francisco. There's a reason why there's a pyramid embodied in the actual street structure of San Francisco. Washington, D.C. is designed in an occultic design. Why? Because there are people that have religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs, and those spiritual beliefs impinge the way they see the world, the way they act upon the world.

All you have to look up is John Parsons, one of the most important people in rocket science, developed a type of fuel that enabled the whole telecommunications period, and he was an open worshipper of whatever you want to call that dark force. He was open about it. It's on his Wikipedia site, and there's books about it. So you have scientists that are in the occult that are at the highest levels. You have people in government at the highest levels that are in occultic rituals. And this is part of the world. The Christians have a saying from Paul that our battle is not of the flesh and the blood, but it's with the principalities of darkness.

The Forces Behind Global Conflicts

And so if you want to know who's behind Syria, Iblis is behind that situation. These are dark forces working to destroy people's homes, to destroy their lives, to destroy their livelihood, to make them suffer, to put them into a state of despair to make them question God. Where's God? How could there be a God? How could he let little children suffer like this? These are the questions that Iblis always poses. And people in weakened states, when their faith is low, when they're suffering, they will succumb to those demonic insinuations. This is called talbis Iblis, the dupery of the devil. Talbis Iblis.

Normative vs. Descriptive Religion

So the Isnad is the way in which a normative, and if you study academic religion, they talk about descriptive and normative religion. There is a modern argument that many, many people in religious studies would like to put forward or do put forward, and many, many religious studies programs are rife with this concept, that there is no such thing as normative religion. There is only descriptive religion. That normative religion is a fantasy. That whatever the religion might say about itself, it's never that.

If you chip away at the formica of a South Asian Muslim, you will hit the bedrock of Hinduism. Hinduism has never left the subcontinent. We have scholars in the 19th century that wrote all the Hindu influences on the Muslim culture in South Asia. If you go to Morocco, you will find pre-Islamic pagan rituals still being practiced within Moroccan Islam. So they will argue that any religion that ever claims to take root, in reality, it's just another patch on this quilt of human behavior.

Christianity and Cultural Syncretism

If you look at Christianity, they celebrate Christmas here on December 25th. That was the Roman sun god's birthday. Mithra. They have Christmas trees, an old tide. What does snow have to do with Palestine? What does Santa Claus have to do with Palestine? But this is basically how religion manifests in human societies. It manifests with a lot of different streams flowing in, tributaries that are enlarging the river of religion. The same is true if you go to Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is—there is a Tibetan mask on Bon animism, which is the previous religion that was in Tibet before the Buddhists got there. It's filled with animistic pre-Buddhist rituals and beliefs. And so Islam is no different.

Greek Influence on Islamic Civilization

You will find many, many beliefs that came into Islam or were already in the previous cultures. The Muslims were heavily influenced by Hellenistic tradition. Greeks had a massive impact on the Muslims. They came up against the Greeks. The Arabs say wisdom came down on three, on the intellects of the Greeks, on the hands of the Chinese because they were great manufacturers, and on the tongues of the Arabs. But the Greeks had a huge impact on the Muslims.

What is Normative Islam?

Normative Islam would be what the religion actually says about itself. What does the religion say about itself? What is it? How do we know what Islam is? Is Islam simply the hijab? You see, if you go from—now, for instance, in Syria, you have a hijab, like it's a raincoat. There's nothing traditional about that. It's a European coat that however that came in there must have been some first woman that started that. But that is not a traditional dress. If you want to see a traditional Shami dress, you have to go to Palestinian villages or Syrian villages where they wear those traditional—they used to have their own little—it would tell you knew what village they were from based on the patterns on the hijab. So you would know where they were from.

But now you have—for instance, the chador, which is basically the Iranian version of the hijab, which probably is close to what some of the early Muslim women were wearing. But it wasn't black. We know that black was actually they couldn't sell the black hijabs in the 3rd century in Medina. They actually had to write some lines of poetry for this poor Iraqi hijab merchant who brought all this black cloth and none of the women wanted it. So he wrote this thing about how tempting black was on women and how good it made them look. And suddenly they were selling out of the black hijabs. Early marketing.

The Truth About Black Clothing

But the point is that Muslim women, this idea that black somehow is the—black is a mourning dress. It's what people wear for funerals and things like that. But this idea—in Tunisia, in Morocco, women wore white. They didn't wear black. If you go to West Africa, women have always worn colorful garments. In Mauritania, they wore what they call neel, which was a blue, and it actually made them blue. And the men wore the blue turbans from it, so they're called the blue men. Because they would turn blue from it. But the women actually thought it was attractive. Their whole skin got dyed blue. So you see these Mauritanian women, they look blue. They don't wear that anymore. Now they wear the colorful melhifa, which was introduced by merchants.

Normative vs. Descriptive: The Distinction

So those change. But does the hijab change? Do the essential demarcations of the hijab change? That's normative Islam. Descriptive Islam is how they choose to wear that hijab. But normative Islam is what tells you what the hijab is. There's a big difference between the two.

The Concept of Mutawatir

Now, the way that our scholars, when in the very early period of Islam, the Qur'an was clear. And the Qur'an, our usuli scholars differentiate between mutawatir and ahad. Mutawatir is factual. It's just simply historical. It's in a historical account of something. And the point between mutawatir is so many people have seen it. So many people have transmitted it. They have so many multiple sources that it could not be possible that they could have conspired to make it up.

So we know, for instance, in 1776, if you want to use that dating, if you want to use another dating. I mean, I once saw a Native American argue with Adler. And Adler said, well, surely we can agree on historical facts. And he said, like what? And he said that America was discovered by Columbus in 1492. Big mistake to say to a Native American. And he just threw it back. He said, I don't accept that fact. First of all, 1492 is not a Native American dating. So I don't accept the date. Second of all, we weren't discovered. We knew we were here.

Examples of Historical Facts

But generally, in 1776, all of us can agree, unless we have a nutcase in the audience. All of us can agree that a group of people in Philadelphia got together and they signed this thing called the Declaration of Independence. We can all agree on that. Nobody's going to disagree about that. That is mutawatir. So if you say, no, it's actually 1775. It was a scribe's mistake. Okay, prove it. You can make a historical case for that. There's a PhD in India who's a Hindu who's arguing that the Taj Mahal was built by Hindus, not by Muslims. And the Muslims just claimed it later. So he's got a PhD. He's got a website. You can go on the website. But as far as everybody's concerned, he's a nutcase. PhD notwithstanding. Because there are plenty of nutcases with PhDs.

The Holocaust and Mutawatir Evidence

So if you go against mutawatir, you're just simply denying reality. Which is one of the reasons I wrote an article called How the Holocaust Undermines Islam. And the point of that, denial of the Holocaust undermines Islam. The point of that, and I asked Dr. Khaled Blankenship, who I trust, as a really, really reputable historian who also knows Islamic tradition, did he think the Holocaust was mutawatir? And he said, yes, I would consider it mutawatir. So for me, that's enough to say that if you're denying that, you're undermining our tradition. Because what you're saying is mutawatir evidence is not proof of something.

The Qur'an as Mutawatir

So that is what, now all of the Qur'an is mutawatir in terms of its source. In terms of its meaning, because you have qat'iyyat al-nass and dhanniyyat al-nass. The qat'iyya is that it's absolutely sound in its source. That's mutawatir. But the meaning of the text, if all of the ulama agreed on it, and we had hadith that the Prophet ﷺ said, this is what it means, then we would have to say, this is the meaning of the text. But if there isn't that agreement, then it becomes dhanniyyat, it's probable, the meaning. But the meaning is exhausted linguistically. And this is why our scholars exhausted the meaning possibilities of language.

Islamic Civilization's Commitment to Knowledge

No human civilization in history, and I would call as my authority and appeal to authority, is a legitimate form of argument. It's the weakest according to scholastics. But it is a legitimate form of argumentation to appeal to authority. Franz Rosenthal, one of the great Jewish orientalists, wrote a book called Knowledge Triumphant. And in that book he argues that no civilization in human history was more committed and had as its central theme and purpose the acquisition, preservation, development and transmission of knowledge. That this is the Islamic civilization. It was about knowledge.

And so it is not fortuitous that the Qur'an begins with "Iqra." It is not fortuitous that the Prophet ﷺ said, (إِنَّمَا بُعِثْتُ لِأُتَمِّمَ مَكَارِمَ الْأَخْلَاقِ - Innama bu'ithtu li utammima makarimal akhlaq) "I was only sent to perfect noble character" (Muwatta Malik 1614, Musnad Ahmad 8595). And he also said (إِنَّمَا بُعِثْتُ مُعَلِّمًا - Innama bu'ithtu mu'alliman) "I was only sent as a teacher." The mustar is knowledge. I was sent to teach knowledge. All of these things are at the core of what the meaning and purpose of Islam is as a religion. It is about knowledge. And the highest knowledge is ma'rifah. So it has levels. We call these maratib al-ilm. The degrees of knowledge.

Three Forms of Knowledge

This civilization largely argues that knowledge is empirical. That's only one of three forms of knowledge that our civilization recognizes. Because we have empirical knowledge, we have rational knowledge, but we have revealed knowledge. In this civilization, somebody like Dawkins, who will concede to rationalism somewhat, but his central argument is that knowledge is empirical. It is what we can feel, sense, taste, touch. What we can deduce rationally from empirical evidence. So they only believe in deductive, inductive reasoning. They don't

allow for deductive reasoning. They don't believe in universal truths that we can argue from. They only believe in probabilistic, empirical truths. And that knowledge changes as time progresses and we discover new things.

The Black Swan Problem

When the black swan is discovered in Australia, all of the English naturalists were forced to concede that the swan, by definition, is not white. There can be a black swan. It's called the black swan problem in logic, in inductive reasoning.

Islamic Language Sciences

So the Muslims, because that central theme was knowledge, they set out to master the language skills, the language arts, in order for them to understand what the possible meanings of revelation are. And then they divided meaning into what they called isharat, which are, these are like, isharat are indications as opposed to significations. So they differentiated between significations, what the ma'ani were, which are the dhahira, the outward meanings, and what the inward spiritual meanings were.

If they went into the inward spiritual meaning entirely dismissing the outward meanings, they were called batiniyya, esoteric. If they went to the outward meaning denying the inward meaning, they were exoteric. They were called harfiyya, or dhahiriyya. People that deny that meanings are more than just the apparent meaning, the dhahir, dhahir al-nass. There are other meanings, tanbih al-nass. There are isharat that come.

Limited Significations, Unlimited Indications

So because they exhausted these language skills, Arabic has, the Qur'an has limited significations in terms of what we can understand when Allah says (يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ حَقَّ تُقَاتِهِ - Ya ayyuhalladhina amanu ittaqullaha haqqa tuqatihi) "O you who believe, fear Allah as He should be feared" (Quran 3:102). There are limitations to the outward meanings that we as human beings that use language to communicate can understand from that. The inward indications, the isharat, inexhaustible. You can speak about them until the Day of Judgment. But the outward significations, they've been exhausted merely by the meanings of those words that have been collated in all these massive, incredible dictionary works that our scholars did.

Muslims Invented Dictionary Science

And the Muslims, they created dictionary science. There's no dictionaries before Islam. The Hebrews didn't have dictionaries for Hebrew. They learned that from the Muslims. The Chinese had very, very esoteric dictionaries that weren't really practical in any sense of the modern idea of a dictionary. But the Muslims, right from the get-go, they established what words meant and continued to develop that. So we know every word in the Qur'an. We know what it means unless Allah hid that from us like Alif, Lam, Mim.

Meaning All the Way Down

Are those words? Are they letters? What we do know from that is unlike Western linguists who will argue in linguistics that phonemes have no meaning, that language is actually based on meaninglessness. What the Qur'an is refuting there is no, it's meaning all the way down. The letter has meaning. The sound has meaning. It's meaning all the way down. This is about meaning. And we are interpreters of meaning. It's our nature to interpret. We're constantly listening and we're interpreting and we're understanding. That's human nature. We do this constantly. And language is the great gift.

The Qur'an's Preservation

So the Qur'an, and you know, we have these people, Hagarites, and I mean most of this, this idea has been completely dismissed even in Orientalist literature. But you will have articles in the Atlantic Monthly, not that long ago, a few years back, arguing, oh, the Muslims are in a big shock. They've discovered Qur'anic manuscripts that don't jibe with the Qur'an that they have. So they're going to have to wake up to the fact that Islam has the same challenges that Christianity went through when they discovered that they had different recensions of their book. So they would love for that to be true.

But the reality of it is we have from Indonesia to California, from the furthest east to the furthest west, and everything in between, and every sect of Islam, whether it's the Ismailis, whether it's the Yemeni Zaydis, whether it's the Ibadiya of Oman, whether it's the Hanafis, the Shafi'is, the Malikis, the Hanbalis of the Sunnis, whether it's the Zahiris of Andalusia when they were there, whether it's the Shia, the 8ers, the 7ers, the 12ers, the 5ers, all of the Shia groups, every single one of the Muslims reads the same Qur'an. None of them differentiate on the Qur'an. Not one.

The Miracle of Qur'anic Unity

Why? How is that possible? How is that possible? If the Bible has all these different recensions that even the Protestants and Catholics don't agree on the books in the Bible, they don't know how the Greek was pronounced in some cases, they don't have a science of phonetics, we have Tajweed. If you go from Indonesia, if you take an Indonesian Qari and you take a Qari who learned Tajweed in California, they will recite the Qur'an exactly the same way. They might have difference in like the color of the hijab, the tone, the maqam, those aspects, but the idgham will be the same, the idhar will be the same, the ikhfa will be the same, the ghunnah will be the same, the mudud will be the same, the counts on the mudud. If you have an expert, he'll determine whether their counts are right or wrong. And we're all in agreement on that.

Points of Articulation

The 17 points of articulation, makharij al-huruf, are the same. The sifat, you will find very very slight differences about a few letters and the sifat of the letters amongst the Qur'an. Very few differences. But generally, they don't change the meaning and they're accepted. There's some debates about jim and the sifat of

the jim, things like that. Essentially the same. How did that happen? Because if you take the sanad all the way back, you will see the same reciters from the sahaba. All of the Qur'an comes from the same few men. There's no difference. And they got it from the same source. That is a proof of the isnad, right there.

Linguistic Variations in English

Because there's no way you can tell me, if you go to Watford, you know Watford in England? It's actually Watford. But they say Watford. Why? Because they don't pronounce the T. If you go to Australia, G'day mate, you know the G'day, good day, that's how they say it. G'day. In California, if you want a glass of water, you don't say water, you say I'd like some water. Because we turn the T into a D. These are all differences of attributes of the way language, elocution, the way we speak, differs based on where you're from.

If you speak, the reason comedians have field days with foreign accents, is because people from other languages, when they speak English, if they have absorbed that language, and they didn't learn English early enough, they will speak it in a very similar way. So Arabs will say, for paradise, they'll say Baradice, Baradice. And they put those heavy accents. They can't help it, because what they're doing is, they're articulating English the way they would speak Arabic. Brother. Right? It's not brother. It's brother. Right? Or, you know, there's other ways. Brother. Bro. Right? These are all different ways people speak.

Regional Dialects

Why is it, if you have all these linguistic differences in one group of people, you go down south, and they speak English in a different way. If you go to Texas, they speak English differently than the way we speak. They make fun of us. And we make fun of them. And that's in one country. We speak English differently. In fact, the English would argue we don't speak English at all. Right? It's their language. Garage. Right? They say garage. Right? I mean, they have all these different... Tomato. Tomato. They don't say tomato. Some people say tomato. Right? It's the way people talk.

The Need for Proper Pronunciation

They used to teach elocution. And you can actually still go to these courses, like people with New York accents, with a heavy New York accent. Because if you see a lawyer that speaks with a New York accent, you just, you think of all those mafia films that you've seen, and you just don't want that guy representing you. Because he sounds like some kind of wise guy on some Brooklyn street corner trying to muscle some money from some poor grocer. Right? Isn't that what happens? You know, poor German people, if you speak... People that grew up with World War II films, they just hear that Nazi... Right? When they hear a German accent in English. It's just the way it is. Right?

So all of these differences, all of these... The only way that you get to any kind of sound is through this idea of a proper way to speak. Right? Now, proper doesn't mean... Again, it's like the hijab. You can wear it a lot of

The Purpose of Isnad

This is the argument that I would make for the Isnad. That it... What it was, it came into existence in order to prevent things coming into this religion that were not of this religion. So the Qur'an is mutawatir, the meanings we differ, but because Arabic is taken from sources and this is one of the miracles of Islam is that each of the sciences of Islam in the early period of Islam, all of these incredible people emerged to preserve these sciences.

The Miracle of Islamic Scholars

Where did they come from? Where did you get something like Sibawayh? Or al-Asma'i, who just went around collecting poetry everywhere. Where did you get these people? Where did their himmah come from to do these things? What inspired them to spend years? What inspired somebody to travel all over the Muslim world to collect hadith, to go months on a journey to hear one hadith because he heard so and so had a higher chain. What inspired them? It's one of the miracles of Islam as far as I can tell.

The Seven Qira'at

When the Qur'an, if it's agreed upon, there's no debate about the Qur'an. There are seven variants. Then you have the 3 to 10. Then you have the Ahad. You go up to 14. Then you have Shudud, agreed upon. So we've always recognized that there's alternate qira'at out there. Nobody's ever denied that. Atlantic Monthly is not going to teach us anything about our religion that we didn't already know. We're not going to be in big shock to find out, oh, there's other recensions out there that don't jive with the one that they recite from. Well, how is it 1.3 billion people recite from the same one? I mean, isn't that a little odd? Right? Isn't that a little strange?

The Story of the Jewish Calligrapher

In fact, Imam al-Qurtubi in his tafsir says that there was a Jewish man in Andalusia who wanted to see who had the truth and he was a calligrapher. So he calligraphed a Torah and he put a lot of mistakes in it and he took it to a rabbi. And it was a beautiful calligraphed Hebrew Torah and the rabbi read it and he said, how is it? He said, it's beautiful. It's one of the finest editions of the Torah I've ever seen. And he said, okay, thank you. And then he did the Bible. He took it to a Christian priest and he read it. And he said, what did you think? He said, beautiful. Excellent Bible. He said, no, nothing. He said, no, it was wonderful. Then he did the Qur'an. He took it to an imam and the imam told him you have to burn this. He said, why? He said, it's filled with mistakes. I don't care how nice the calligraphy is. And he knew then that these people had a preserved book. Imam Qurtubi mentions that. That's from Isnad.

The Preservation Through Isnad

So when you study the Qur'an, you're studying a book that was preserved. There's no doubt about it. We can

differ on some of the stops, the waqfat. They differ on those things. Those are all. But the Qur'an is the same. It's the same. There's some differences about ayahs, about what's an ayah and what's not, where the ayah ends. Those are all insignificant differences. But the text is, not only is the text preserved, the Uthmani rasm is preserved. And in Mauritania, you're not a hafidh if you don't know how to recite, write the entire Qur'an according to the rasm Uthmani from scratch. You have to be able to sit in a room with paper and pen and be able to write the whole Qur'an out without any mistakes, or else they don't give you the Isnad.

Mauritanian Standards of Tajweed

Mauritania has one of the most difficult. They're easier on the tajweed because they tend to, the tajweed, you have lahn khafi and lahn jali. In tajweed, you have lahn, mistakes of pronunciation that are a result of grammar. And that's jali. You make those mistakes, it's haram. The khafi is mistakes in, like idgham, sirajan wahhaja. There's an idgham there because the huruf al-idgham yarmalun, the waw there is there, you get the tanween, so it should go assimilate. If you don't do that, if you say sirajan wahhaja and you do a idhar, that's khafi. And so the later ulama tended to be easier on that. Than the earlier. But now, if you go like Syria or some Egypt where they have a very strong tradition of tajweed, they're very strict on those things. But if you go to North Africa, they're not as strict.

The Hadith About the End Times

There's also a hadith indicating, it's one of the signs of the end of time, that Muslims would be obsessed with tajweed and they would forget the hudud of the Qur'an. They would learn the huruf but have no knowledge. He said, you know the huruf, but you don't know the hudud. He said, but the time is coming when they'll know the huruf but they won't know the hudud. They won't have fiqh of the Qur'an, understanding of the Qur'an.

Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak on Isnad

So the sanad, Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak, one of the great muhaddithin, he was a student of Imam Malik, he was from Khorasan, and he was a mujahid, very well known. He said, one of his students, Abdan, said that I heard him, they were talking about the zanadiqah, about heretics in Islam. And Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said الْإِسْنَادُ مِنَ الدِّينِ "Isnad is from the religion." It's part of the religion.

وَلَوْلَا الْإِسْنَادُ لَقَالَ مَنْ شَاءَ مَا شَاءَ "And had it not been for the isnad, whoever wanted to say something would simply just say it." And then he said, but as long as somebody says, where did you get that from? And he said, حَدَّثَنِي فُلَانٌ بَقِيَ الدِّينُ "As long as somebody makes a statement in the religion, and you can say, where is that statement from? And he can tell you, 'Hadathani Fulan,' the religion is safe."

But once you lose that, another one of the early salaf said يَذْهَبُ الدِّينُ بِذَهَابِ السَّنَدِ "This religion will go when the sanad goes." The religion goes when the sanad goes.

Women and Hadith Transmission

Now, in the early period, because the hadith, there were a lot of people putting hadith down that were not hadith. These are called mawdu'at. And it's from the fakhr of the women. Our muhaddithin mentioned that never in the history of Islam was any woman noted for fabricating hadith. This is one of the mafakhir of the nisa' because many of the women were hadith transmitters. There's no woman who lied on the Prophet. We have no recording of any woman that told a lie and invented a hadith.

Fabricated Hadiths

But many of the men invented hadith. They made up hadith. Sometimes with good intentions, believe it or not, even though the hadith says مَنْ كَذَبَ عَلَيَّ مُتَعَمِّدًا فَلْيَتَبَوَّأْ مَقْعَدَهُ مِنَ النَّارِ "Whoever lies concerning something I said, let him take his seat in hell" (Sahih al-Bukhari 110, Sahih Muslim 1). That's how serious it is. But we do have some ulama historically that would, maybe they heard something and they would just put it down.

And sometimes because they thought the hadith was true, they would add a sanad. There's people that do that, tadlis and wad'. But Qadi 'Iyad mentions a hadith about one of the salaf said, I prayed behind the four caliphs and they all put their hands at the side. Qadi 'Iyad says, we don't need this to defend the Maliki position. That his intention might have been good, but this is haram.

Why Didn't They Fabricate More?

And one of the proofs for me that the hadiths are true is that why didn't the Ahl al-Sunnah put down, if they made up all these hadiths, why didn't they put down hadiths to defend positions like khalq al-Qur'an. When the big fitna came, why didn't they just invent hadiths about the Qur'an? And so these arguments that somehow people made, Abu Bakr makes up the hadith about Aisha and the dogs barking at Hawab, just making it up. It's rubbish. Sahaba didn't make up hadith.

The Reliability of Sahih al-Bukhari

Does that mean every hadith in al-Bukhari is absolutely 100% true? No. There are many probabilistic hadiths in al-Bukhari. According to even some of the ulama, there are hadiths that shouldn't be in there. Jonathan Brown wrote a very serious study of the canonization of al-Bukhari because there were many criticisms of al-Bukhari early on, but later it becomes almost sacrosanct, impossible to... And al-Bukhari undeniably had divine guidance. I mean, we believe that. I believe that about him. He had dreams. He saw the Prophet in dreams. His memory was beyond belief. Really, beyond belief. And the only reason I do believe it is because I've met... The Mauritanians still have people that have these type of memories. Because I've met people. I've met people. I met a man in Mauritania that memorized the entire Qamus al-Muhit of Fayruz Abadi by rote. He could quote any word, tell you what page it was on, and give you a complete... Just start it, and give you the whole thing. And that's like thousands of pages, his rote memorization. So people had much better memories than they do now.

The Meaning of Isnad

So anyway, I wanted to... Isnad in Arabic, by the way, means sanada yasnutu. It's a fath al-dhamm, for those who were in my class the other day. Isnad means to... A pillow is called a masnad, because you lean on it. So the sanad is something you support yourself with. Yastanidu ala shay, or yastanidu ilayhi. Right? To depend on something. So the isnad is something you depend on. It's also called a silsila, which is why we call this program Living Links. Because the idea is that in each generation, you become a link in the chain. So you learn it from somebody who learned it from somebody, back to the Prophet, or, depending on the science, back to whatever science it was.

Example: The Ajrumiyya

So, for instance, the Ajrumiyya, right, is a book of grammar, and you can go back to Ibn Ajurum, with the sanad. So if you study it in that chain. Now, obviously, once these sciences were preserved, then the ulema became more lax on the idea of the sanad. So with hadith, obviously, the books have been preserved, and we don't have the type of memories anymore. But you still need critical editions, and the computer age is very dangerous, because things can be changed.

The Danger of Edited Texts

I'll give you an example. I have a tafsir of the Jalalayn, and there is a paragraph in there that criticizes a certain group on the Arabian Peninsula as being heretics. And that group, because there's a lot of money, they ended up buying a lot of the publishing houses. So in the new editions, that paragraph is completely taken out. But I have the original edition. So people don't realize that we're losing.

Imam al-Nawawi's Text Changed

I actually have, and Tarif al-Arabi is here with me. Years ago, we were reading the Sharh of Imam al-Nawawi. And he had an edition from Lebanon, and we were reading it, and, Tarif, you're here. You saw this. And when I studied it, I remembered there was, he said that لَا يُؤْمِنُ أَحَدُكُمْ حَتَّى يُحِبَّ لِأَخِيهِ مَا يُحِبُّ لِنَفْسِهِ "You don't truly believe until you love for your brother what you love for yourself" (Sahih al-Bukhari 13, Sahih Muslim 45). In his edition, it didn't mention that this included the Jews and the Christians. It just got taken out. And I said, you know, that's not the way I learned it. And we looked at other editions, and there it was. Imam al-Nawawi mentions Jews and Christians as being your brothers. But because there's people in that region of the world that don't want people to think of Jews as brothers, right, they just eliminated that.

Changing Chapter Headings

So we have to be very careful. There's also people changing abwab. There's a chapter, an edition of the Riyadh al-Salihin which has Bab Ziyarat Qabr al-Nabi, the chapter of visiting the grave of the Prophet. They took

grave out and put masjid. Because they don't like the idea of visiting the grave of the Prophet. So this is khiyanat al-naql. That's what our ulema call it. Being treacherous in how you transmit.

The Hadith About Carrying the Religion

And one of the things the Prophet is reported to have said, I mean it's a mursal in its sahih transmission, but the meaning is sound and our ulema transmit it, Imam al-Bayhaqi, Ahmad and others. Ahmad goes first, Imam Ahmad, and then Imam al-Bayhaqi and others transmit this. It has a lot of turuq. But the Prophet was reported to have said, يَحْمِلُ هَذَا الْعِلْمَ مِنْ كُلِّ خَلَفٍ عُدُولُهُ "This religion will be carried in each generation by its upright ones" (Sunan al-Bayhaqi al-Kubra). Khalaf are good people that come after. If it has taskeen over the 'ayn letter, it's negative. خَلْفٌ تَرَكُوا مِنْ بَعْدِهِمْ with a sukun. If it has khalaf with a bounce, the fatha, then it's good. They're good people.

So the Prophet said, good people would carry this religion from every generation who were upright, just people. يَنْفُونَ عَنْهُ "They would get rid of the..." يَنْفُونَ عَنْهُ تَحْرِيفَ الْغَالِينَ "The decontextualization of extremists," taking things out of context. They will negate that. So when they hear somebody quoting a verse, they'll say that's out of context. وَانْتِحَالَ الْمُبْطِلِينَ "And the plagiarisms of people trying to undermine the religion." وَتَأْوِيلَ الْجَاهِلِينَ "And the interpretations of ignorant people." So that's the role of the ulama.

Personal Isnad Examples

So, you know, just as an example, this is one of my athbat from my teacher, Shaykh Ahmad Jabir, who's also a teacher of Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah. He was a student of Yasin al-Fadani. He's one of the last, really, muhaddithin in Mecca. And we used to visit him whenever we went to Mecca and read with him. But these are called athbat. So these are his athbat. And this is back to his teacher.

The Chain of the Jawhara

So with the Jawhara, Jawharat al-Tawhid, which was written by Imam al-Laqqani, great Maliki, Azhari scholar. It was taught in al-Azhar. It still is. That this is, he relates it, Shaykh Ahmad Jabir relates it from Yasin al-Fadani, who was called Muhaddith al-Haramayn. He relates it from Imam al-Mahrasi, who relates it from Ahmad bin Shams al-Shinqiti, al-Madani thumma, so he went from Mauritania to Medina, who relates it from Mustafa bin Fadl bin Mamin al-Shinqiti al-Maliki, from Abdullah bin Ibrahim al-'Alawi from Muhammad bin al-Hasan al-Banani al-Maliki, great Moroccan scholar, from Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin 'Abd al-Salam al-Banani al-Fasi, from Morocco, from 'Abd al-Baqi bin Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Zarqani, from Muhammad Salmuni, Ibrahim al-Laqqani, great Maliki scholar, Imam al-Ajhuri, from al-Burhan Ibrahim bin Harun al-Laqqani al-Maliki, al-Mu'allif, so there's a chain to Imam al-Laqqani in the Jawhara, just to give you an example.

Ijazah and Jubbah

And so you study it with a teacher, this is another Ijazah, this is like a diploma, that is from another one of my