Unit 11 · Reading with the Tradition

A hadith is a short report. It tells something Muhammad said, something he did, or something he saw and allowed. Muslims believe these reports show how the Qur’an was lived out. A hadith has two parts. The chain of people who passed it on is the isnad. The words of the report itself are the matn.

A typical hadith begins like this: "A told me, from B, from C, that the Prophet said…" Each name is a link. Muslim scholars checked every link. Did A really meet B? Was C known to be honest? Did C have a good memory? A report with a strong chain was called sound. A report with a weak or broken chain was called weak.

Hadith are not part of the Qur’an. Muslims hold the Qur’an to be the word of God, and hadith to be reports about the Prophet. The two are kept in separate books. But for most Muslims, the hadith are the second source of guidance after the Qur’an, because they show how the Prophet understood it.

Two centuries after Muhammad’s death, hundreds of thousands of reports were in circulation. Some were sound. Some had been made up to support a ruler, a group or an opinion. Muslim scholars set out to sort them. The most famous were Muhammad al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875). Each produced a collection called a Sahih, meaning "sound."

Al-Bukhari, tradition says, traveled across the Muslim world for years gathering reports. He is said to have examined about 600,000 and kept only a few thousand. Muslim followed a similar method. Four other collections, by Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah, joined them. Sunni Muslims call these the Six Books.

Shia Muslims have their own collections, gathered in the 900s and after. The best known is by al-Kulayni (d. 941). Shia scholars also value reports passed through the Imams, whom they hold to be Muhammad’s rightful successors. Sunni and Shia collections overlap in many reports but differ in others.

Modern historians read hadith differently. Some accept the traditional sifting. Others argue that even sound chains cannot prove what was said two hundred years earlier. This is an open scholarly debate. Muslims and historians alike agree that the collections shaped Islamic law and life for centuries.

The Qur’an tells Muslims to pray, but it does not spell out every step of the prayer. It tells them to give zakat, a share of wealth, but does not fix every rate. Muslims believe the Prophet showed how. His way of doing things is called the Sunnah. The hadith are the records; the Sunnah is the pattern they show.

The Qur’an itself points to the Prophet as a model. Surah 33, Al-Ahzab, ayah 21, calls the messenger of God a good example. It says this is for those who hope in God and the Last Day. Surah 59:7 says to take what the messenger gives and leave what he forbids. Muslim scholars read these verses as the basis for following the Sunnah.

This is why Muslim practice includes many things the Qur’an does not describe in detail. The number of daily prayers is one. The words of the call to prayer and the details of fasting are others. Different groups of Muslims follow the Sunnah in slightly different ways. They trust different reports, or they read the same reports differently.

Tafsir means explanation. A tafsir is a book that goes through the Qur’an, often verse by verse, and explains it. Who is speaking? What does this rare word mean? What event was this verse about? Muslims believe the Prophet was the first explainer. Surah 16, An-Nahl, ayah 44, says the Remembrance was sent down so that he could make clear to people what was revealed to them.

The most famous early tafsir is by Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923), a scholar from northern Iran who worked in Baghdad. For each verse he collected reports from the Prophet’s companions and the next generations. He gave each report with its chain of names. Then he weighed them. Often he wrote, in effect, "the strongest reading in my view is this one, because…"

Al-Tabari’s method became the standard. Later commentators added grammar, law, theology and their own reasoning. A commentator was expected to know Arabic deeply, to know the hadith, and to know what earlier readers had said. The readers of tafsir were students, judges, preachers and anyone who wanted to know what a verse meant.

One point matters for our study. A tafsir is one reader’s account of the text. Two commentators can be equally learned and still disagree. When this course says "al-Tabari reads this as…," it is reporting one reading, not settling the question.

Isma’il ibn Kathir (d. 1373) lived in Damascus, in what is now Syria. He was a historian and a scholar of hadith. His tafsir follows a clear order. To explain a verse, he first looks for other verses of the Qur’an that speak of the same thing. Muslims call this method "the Qur’an explains the Qur’an." Then he brings in hadith, then the sayings of the companions.

Ibn Kathir was careful about weak reports. He often warned readers that a story in an older commentary came from Jewish or Christian lore and had no sound chain back to the Prophet. Arabic scholars call such material isra'iliyyat. Al-Tabari had included much of it; Ibn Kathir trimmed it. This is one difference between the two.

Ibn Kathir’s tafsir is shorter than al-Tabari’s, and it has been translated into English and many other languages. In mosques and study groups across the United States it is one of the commentaries most often on the shelf. Other Muslims prefer other commentators. Al-Qurtubi (d. 1273) is valued for law; al-Zamakhshari (d. 1144) for grammar; al-Razi (d. 1210) for philosophy.

The Qur’an speaks about how it should be read. Surah 3, Al ’Imran, ayah 7, says the Book has two kinds of verses. Some are clear, called muhkam, and they are its foundation. Others are mutashabih, less certain in meaning. The verse warns against people who chase the ambiguous verses to cause trouble. Then it says that only God knows their true meaning. The well-grounded in knowledge say, "We believe in it."

Here is the puzzle. In the Arabic, the sentence can be stopped in two places. Read one way, it says: only God knows the meaning; and those grounded in knowledge simply believe. Read the other way, it says: only God and those grounded in knowledge know the meaning. The written text has no punctuation to settle it.

Commentators took both sides. Many Sunni readers, including al-Tabari, favored the first reading: some meanings belong to God alone. Some others, and many Shia and Sufi readers, favored the second: deep knowledge can reach the ambiguous verses too. This one pause mark shaped how bold or how cautious a commentator would be.

Which verses count as ambiguous? Scholars list the mysterious letters at the start of some surahs, verses about the end of the world, and verses that describe God with a hand or a throne. How to read those descriptions became a major question in Muslim theology.

Some verses of the Qur’an seem to give different rules about the same thing. On wine, one verse says there is harm and benefit in it, another tells believers not to pray while drunk, and another calls it something to avoid. Muslim scholars explained this as naskh, abrogation. Rules came in stages; the later verse replaced the earlier.

The idea rests partly on Surah 2, Al-Baqarah, ayah 106, which says that when God causes a verse to be forgotten or sets it aside, He brings one better or like it. Classical scholars wrote whole books listing which verses abrogated which. Their lists did not agree. Some counted more than two hundred cases; al-Suyuti (d. 1505) trimmed the list to about twenty.

The debate matters most for the verses on fighting. Some medieval jurists argued that Surah 9:5, the so-called sword verse, canceled the many verses that urge peace and patience. Most classical and modern scholars disagree. They read 9:5 as tied to a specific broken treaty, and they hold that verses such as 2:256, "there is no compulsion in religion," still stand.

Modern Muslim scholars take a range of views. Some keep the classical tool. Some, like the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), reduced its use sharply. Some argue that 2:106 refers to earlier scriptures, not to verses within the Qur’an. This is an ongoing discussion inside the tradition, and this course reports it without deciding it.

Sunni and Shia Muslims share one Qur’an, with the same 114 surahs in the same order. The split between them began over leadership after Muhammad’s death in 632. Sunnis accepted Abu Bakr as the first caliph, the community’s leader. Shia Muslims held that Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, should have led, and that leadership passed through his family, the Imams.

This shapes interpretation. For Shia Muslims, the Imams are guided interpreters of the Qur’an, and their sayings carry great weight in tafsir. Shia commentators such as al-Tabrisi (d. 1153) read verses about "those in authority" (4:59) and "the people of the house" (33:33) as referring to the Prophet’s family. Sunni commentators read those verses more broadly.

A small example shows the pattern. Surah 5:6 describes washing before prayer and mentions the feet. Because of how the Arabic word for feet is voweled, the verse can be read as "wash your feet" or "wipe your feet." Most Sunni scholars read "wash," supported by hadith. Most Shia scholars read "wipe," supported by their reports. The text is shared; the reading differs.

Sunnis make up the large majority of Muslims worldwide, commonly estimated at 85 to 90 percent. Shia Muslims live mainly in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Lebanon, with communities everywhere, including Chicago. Both groups pray, fast, give zakat and make the pilgrimage, and both hold the Qur’an as God’s word.

Sufism is the name for the mystical side of Islam. It is the search for closeness to God through prayer, remembrance and self-discipline. Sufis are found among both Sunni and Shia Muslims. When Sufis read the Qur’an, they often look for an inner meaning, called batin. It lies beneath the outer or plain meaning, called zahir.

Take Surah 24, An-Nur, ayah 35, the Light Verse. It says God is the light of the heavens and the earth, and compares that light to a lamp in a niche, in a glass shining like a star, lit from a blessed olive tree. The scholar al-Ghazali (d. 1111) wrote a whole short book on this one verse. He read the lamp, the glass and the niche as levels of the human soul and mind.

Sufi commentators such as al-Qushayri (d. 1072) went verse by verse looking for such senses. Most of them insisted that the inner meaning never cancels the outer one. A verse about Musa (Moses) and Pharaoh is still about Musa and Pharaoh. It may also be about the struggle inside each person. Critics within Islam warned that inner readings could drift too far from the text. Sufis answered that the Qur’an itself invites reflection.

The ulama are the learned: people trained in Arabic, the Qur’an, hadith and law. There is no single head of Islam, no one person who decides what the Qur’an means. Instead, the ulama debate, teach and issue opinions. A trained scholar’s opinion on a question is a fatwa. Another scholar may disagree, and often does.

Between the 700s and 900s, the ulama formed schools of law, called madhhabs. Sunni Muslims have four main schools, named for their founders: Hanafi (Abu Hanifa, d. 767), Maliki (Malik ibn Anas, d. 795), Shafi’i (al-Shafi’i, d. 820) and Hanbali (Ahmad ibn Hanbal, d. 855). Most Shia Muslims follow the Ja’fari school, named for the Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (d. 765).

The schools agree on most things and differ on details: how to hold the hands in prayer, what breaks a fast, how contracts work. They differ because they weigh the sources differently. One school leans harder on hadith; another gives more room to reasoning by analogy or to local custom. A Muslim in Chicago may follow any school. A mosque in Bridgeview and a mosque on Devon Avenue may follow different ones and pray side by side.

The scholars also distinguish levels of authority. The Qur’an comes first. The Sunnah comes second. Then come the agreement of scholars and reasoning from the first two. Later law books are human work and can be revised. This ranking is itself part of how Muslims read the Qur’an: it tells them which text settles a question.

Surah 2, Al-Baqarah, ayah 238, tells believers to guard the prayers and "the middle prayer." Which prayer is the middle one? The verse does not say. Muslims pray five times a day, so the question is real, and readers have argued it since the first century of Islam.

Al-Tabari gathers the reports. Some companions said it was the afternoon prayer, ’asr. Others said the dawn prayer, or the noon prayer, or the sunset prayer. He lists each opinion with its chain of names. Then he judges. He favors ’asr, because a hadith reports the Prophet naming it during a battle. Ibn Kathir, four centuries later, reaches the same conclusion by a shorter road: he cites the hadith directly, then notes the other views briefly.

Read the two together and you can see the tradition at work. Both scholars use the same tools: the text, the reports, the companions’ views. Al-Tabari shows all his work; Ibn Kathir shows the strongest evidence. Neither says the other views are foolish. A student who reads only one commentary sees a verdict. A student who reads two sees a conversation.

This is the skill this chapter has been building. When you meet a claim about what the Qur’an means, ask: which reader, which tools, which century? The answer will not tell you whether the claim is true. It will tell you where it comes from, and that is what the study of a scripture can offer.

Muslims believe the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic, and the book says so of itself. Surah 12, Yusuf, ayah 2, says it was sent down as an Arabic Qur’an so that people might understand. For this reason, Muslims recite it in Arabic wherever they live. A child in Indonesia, Nigeria or Chicago learns the sounds of Arabic before learning what the words mean.

Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim rule stretched from Spain to Central Asia. In many of those lands, Arabic became the language of government, learning and daily life. Iraq, Syria, Egypt and North Africa are examples. In others, such as Persia, people kept their own language. But they took in thousands of Arabic words and, above all, the Arabic alphabet.

That alphabet was the Qur’an’s alphabet, and it traveled far. Persian and Ottoman Turkish were written in Arabic letters. So were Urdu in South Asia, Swahili on the East African coast and Malay in Southeast Asia. Some still are. When Omar ibn Said wrote in North Carolina, he used the same letters. A scribe in Baghdad had used them a thousand years before.

Walk into almost any historic mosque and you will see words on the walls: verses of the Qur’an in flowing or angular letters. Most Muslim artists, following hadith that warn against images, avoided pictures of God, prophets and, in religious buildings, living beings. Writing took the place that painting holds in a church. To write the Qur’an well became the highest visual art.

The earliest Qur’ans were written in Kufic, a bold, angular script, often on parchment in wide pages. One famous example, the Blue Qur’an, was written in gold on parchment dyed blue in North Africa around the tenth century. In Baghdad, the scribe Ibn Muqla (d. 940) worked out rules of proportion for a rounder script. His system led to the naskh script, in which most Qur’ans are printed today.

Beside the letters came pattern. Artists filled walls, tiles, carpets and book pages with interlocking stars, polygons and vines. Muslim writers often said the endless repeating patterns reflect the idea of one God whose creation has order without end. Whether or not one accepts that reading, the patterns spread from Spain to India and are still made today.

The Arabic word for mosque, masjid, means "place of bowing down." The Qur’an names the first house of worship as the one at Mecca (3:96). Muslim tradition says the Prophet’s mosque in Medina was a simple courtyard with a shaded side. From that plan grew later mosques. Damascus, Cordoba, Cairo, Istanbul and Chicago all follow it.

A few parts are found almost everywhere. The mihrab is a niche in one wall; it marks the qibla, the direction of Mecca, which Surah 2:144 tells believers to face. Beside it stands the minbar, a set of steps from which the Friday sermon is given. A tower, the minaret, carries the call to prayer. Inside, there are no chairs and no images, only carpet, light and words.

The words are the Qur’an. Around the mihrab, along the ceiling, over the doors, verses are carved, painted or set in tile. Mosques also became schools. In many, a teacher sat against a pillar and a circle of students learned the Qur’an by heart. Some of the oldest mosques house libraries that hold Qur’an manuscripts a thousand years old.

As Islam spread, most new Muslims did not speak Arabic as a first language. They recited the Qur’an with mistakes. Tradition says that a governor of Iraq heard a reciter misread one vowel and change the meaning of a verse, and ordered scholars to fix the problem. Whether or not the story is exact, the need was real: the text had to be read the same way everywhere.

In the city of Basra in Iraq, scholars began to study Arabic as a system. The greatest of them was Sibawayh (d. c. 796), a Persian by birth. His book, known simply as The Book, describes the grammar of Arabic in detail, using the Qur’an, old poetry and the speech of the Bedouin as its evidence. It is still the foundation of Arabic grammar today.

Grammar fed straight back into tafsir. Recall from the last chapter that 3:7 can be read two ways depending on a pause, and that 5:6 turns on a vowel. A commentator needed grammar to argue for one reading. Dictionaries followed, then studies of rhetoric that asked what made the Qur’an’s style unlike other Arabic. The study of the book created the study of the language.

The Qur’an sets a lunar calendar. Surah 2:189 speaks of the new moons as markers of time for people and for the pilgrimage. Surah 2:185 ties fasting to the month of Ramadan. A month begins when the new crescent is seen. To know when Ramadan starts, Muslims needed to predict the moon. The five daily prayers are timed by the sun. Every mosque must face Mecca.

These needs made astronomy a religious science. Muslim astronomers built observatories and refined star tables. They worked out how to find the qibla from any city on earth, a hard problem in geometry. The astrolabe is an instrument for measuring the sky. It was improved for prayer times and became a standard tool across the Muslim world.

In the early 800s, in Baghdad, the caliph al-Ma’mun supported a circle of translators and scholars often called the House of Wisdom. Greek, Persian and Indian works on mathematics, medicine and the stars were translated into Arabic. Al-Khwarizmi, who worked there around 820, wrote the book that gave us the word algebra. The word algorithm comes from his name.

Historians debate how much of this science flowed from the Qur’an itself. Some of it came from the wealth and curiosity of a huge new empire. Both were at work. What is clear is this. The Qur’an’s calendar and qibla gave astronomers a daily reason to look up. And the Arabic language, spread by the Qur’an, let a scholar in Spain read a scholar in Persia.

A madrasa is simply a school. In the Muslim world the word came to mean a school for religious learning: Qur’an, hadith, grammar and law. Early teaching happened in mosques. By the 800s and 900s, wealthy patrons were founding buildings with classrooms, a library and rooms where students could live. The teacher had a salary; the students had a place to sleep.

Some of these schools still exist. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, was founded in 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, according to tradition. Al-Azhar in Cairo opened around 970 and remains a leading center of Sunni learning. The Nizamiyya in Baghdad, founded in 1065, set a model that was copied across the Middle East. Al-Ghazali, whom you met in the last chapter, taught there.

Madrasas trained the ulama. A student memorized the Qur’an, then learned grammar, then hadith, then the law of one school. When finished, a teacher gave the student a license to teach a particular book. This chain of teacher and student, like the chain of a hadith, was written down and kept. Madrasas spread to India, West Africa and Southeast Asia and still exist alongside modern schools.

The Arabic Qur’an moved into worlds that spoke other languages. Muslim scholars generally held that a translation is not the Qur’an itself. It is an explanation of it. That view allowed translation while keeping recitation in Arabic. Tradition says the first full Persian rendering was made in the 900s. Al-Tabari’s tafsir was translated then for a ruler in Central Asia.

Persian became the second great language of Islam. Poets such as Rumi (d. 1273) wove Qur’an verses into their verse. Ottoman Turks carried the book to the Balkans and wrote it in their own script based on Arabic. In South Asia, Urdu grew up as a language written in Arabic letters, and Urdu commentaries are read by millions today.

On the East African coast, Swahili Muslims wrote poems about the prophets in Arabic script. In Southeast Asia, Malay was written in a script called Jawi. The Qur’an reached the islands of Indonesia, today the country with the most Muslims in the world. In each place, the sound stayed Arabic and the explanation took the local tongue.

The first translation of the Qur’an into a European language was made in 1143. Peter the Venerable, abbot of the great monastery of Cluny in France, paid an Englishman named Robert of Ketton to render it into Latin. Peter wanted Christians to know what Muslims believed so they could argue against it. His purpose was not neutral, but his project put the text in European hands. That Latin version was printed in 1543.

English came later. In 1649 Alexander Ross published an English Qur’an, but he translated from a French version, not from Arabic. The first English translation made directly from Arabic was by George Sale in 1734. Sale, a lawyer, added a long introduction and notes drawn from Muslim commentators. His book was read for two centuries. Thomas Jefferson bought a copy in 1765.

In the 1800s came J. M. Rodwell (1861), a clergyman who rearranged the surahs into what he thought was their historical order, and E. H. Palmer (1880), a Cambridge scholar who aimed for plain speech. Each translator had a purpose. Reading them side by side shows how much a translator’s choices shape what a reader hears.

Until the 1900s, nearly every English Qur’an was made by a non-Muslim. That changed with Marmaduke Pickthall. He was an English novelist who became a Muslim in 1917. He worked in India under the patronage of the ruler of Hyderabad. In 1930 he published The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. Note the title. He called it the meaning, not the Qur’an. That follows the scholars’ view that a translation is an explanation.

Pickthall’s English is deliberately old-fashioned, with "thee" and "thou" and "hath." He wanted it to sound like the King James Bible his readers knew. His translation is now in the public domain in the United States. That is why this course quotes it. Four years later, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an Indian civil servant, published a translation with thousands of notes. It became the most widely printed English Qur’an of the century.

Since then, dozens of English translations have appeared. Some are by Muslims of many backgrounds, some by scholars who are not Muslim. Some aim for modern plain English. Some try to catch the sound of the Arabic. Some add long commentary. Muslim readers in Chicago often keep two or three on the shelf and compare them, much as al-Tabari compared reports.

The Qur’an came to America before the United States existed. Historians estimate that a meaningful share of the Africans enslaved and brought to North America came from Muslim regions of West Africa, though the numbers are uncertain. Many were literate in Arabic. Most left no record. A few did, and their writings are among the oldest Muslim documents in the country.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also called Job ben Solomon, was enslaved in Maryland in the 1730s. Taken to England, he is said to have written out the Qur’an from memory. Bilali Muhammad, enslaved on Sapelo Island, Georgia, wrote a short Arabic manuscript on Islamic law and practice in the early 1800s. It is kept at the University of Georgia. And Omar ibn Said, whom you met at the start of this chapter, wrote his life in North Carolina in 1831.

These writings raise hard questions. Omar’s story praises his owners and mentions attending church. Some scholars read this as real change; others see a careful man writing for readers who held power over him. His manuscript begins with a surah about God’s kingdom. Both readings are possible, and the debate itself shows how much a text depends on who reads it and why.

In 1765, a young lawyer in Virginia named Thomas Jefferson bought George Sale’s English Qur’an. He was studying law and wanted to know other systems. His copy is still in the Library of Congress. Historians note that Jefferson’s interest was legal and comparative. He did not become a Muslim, and his views on Islam were mixed.

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition. Beside it met the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first large gathering of the world’s faiths. Among the speakers was Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb. He was an American journalist and former diplomat who had become a Muslim. He spoke about Islam to an audience that had mostly never met a Muslim. The Parliament is remembered today as a starting point for interfaith conversation in the United States.

In 2007, Keith Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to Congress. For his ceremonial oath he placed his hand on Jefferson’s copy of the Qur’an. The Library of Congress lent it for the day. The moment tied together three things. The founder’s library, the enslaved scholars who came before, and the Muslim citizens of the present.

The Chicago area today has one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States. Estimates vary widely, but they run to several hundred thousand people. They come from South Asia, the Arab world, Africa, Bosnia, Turkey and Southeast Asia. Many are African American families whose Muslim roots in the city go back a century. Dozens of mosques serve them. They range from the large Mosque Foundation in suburban Bridgeview to storefront prayer rooms on Devon Avenue.

The city has its own chapter in American Muslim history. The Nation of Islam, founded in Detroit in 1930, made its headquarters in Chicago. Its teachings differed from those of most Muslims worldwide. In 1975, under Warith Deen Mohammed, most of its members moved toward mainstream Sunni Islam, one of the largest religious shifts in American history. Their descendants read the Qur’an in Chicago mosques today.

Everything in this unit can be seen in the city. Children in weekend schools memorize surahs in Arabic. Study circles read Ibn Kathir in English. Sunni and Shia mosques stand a few miles apart. Sufi groups gather for remembrance. Calligraphy hangs in homes. And at interfaith events, heirs of the 1893 Parliament, Muslims read the Qur’an aloud beside Jews reading the Torah and Christians reading the Gospels, each explaining their book to the others.