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The Nature and Role of Hadith: An Analysis of a Re-evaluation
By
Dr. Robert D. Crane
[Dr. Robert (Farooq)
D. Crane, Former advisor to late US president Nixon and Former US
Deputy Director (for Planning) of the National Security Council.
Robert D. Crane has been a personal advisor to American presidents,
cabinet officers, and congressional leaders during the past four
decades. From the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the
beginning of Nixon’s victorious campaign for the presidency in 1967 Dr.
Crane was his principal foreign policy advisor, responsible for
preparing a “readers digest” of professional articles for him on the key
foreign policy issues. During the campaign Dr. Crane collected his
position papers into a book, Inescapable Rendevous: New Directions for
American Foreign Policy, with a foreword by Congressman Gerald Ford, who
succeeded Nixon as President. On January 20, 1969, Dr. Crane moved into
the White House as Deputy Director (for Planning) of the National
Security Council. The next day, the Director, Henry Kissinger, fired
him, because they differed fundamentally on every single key foreign
policy issue. Kissinger was determined to orchestrate power in order to
preserve the status quo. Crane was equally determined to promote justice
as the only source of dynamic and long-range stability.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed Dr. Crane to be U.S. ambassador to
the United Arab Emirates, but this also was short-lived. President
Reagan’s best friend, Judge William Clark, who became Director of the
National Security Council, wanted Crane, as the first Muslim American
ambassador, to pursue two-track diplomacy by developing relations with
the various Islamist movements in the Middle East. The new Secretary of
State, Alexander Haig, whose entire career was promoted by Henry
Kissinger, wanted none of this.
Since then, Dr. Crane has worked full-time as a Muslim activist in
America. He started as Director of Da’wa at the Islamic Center on
Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. In 1985 he joined the
International Institute of Islamic Thought as its Director of
Publications, and then helped to found the American Muslim Council,
serving as Director of its Legal Division from 1992 to 1994. From 1994
until the present time he has headed his own research center, located in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C. Since 1996 he has also been a
board member of the United Association for Studies and Research and
Managing Editor of its Middle East Affairs Journal.]
A highly controversial document is circulating among Muslim
intellectuals calling into question the validity of hadith as a source
of guidance. This document, an 80-page monograph, entitled Hadith: A
Re-Evaluation, was written about 1990 by Kassim Ahmad and was somewhat
sanitized in 1997 by Syed Akbar Ali to remove some of its politically
and ideologically sensitive baggage.
The present analysis of Kassim Ahmad’s production is divided into four
sections: 1) background intelligence analysis, so we know where the
author is coming from; 2) purpose and objectives of the author in
writing this particular piece, so we know where he is going; 3) major
contribution of this piece to the thinking and literature on the
subject; and 4) weakness of the author’s arguments.
Background Intelligence
One approach to any potentially enlightening study is to determine
initially where the author is coming from by glancing through the
bibliography, footnotes, index, and table of contents, in that order,
and only then to consider the text.
My first conclusion from this “background check” is that this
translation has left out some of the original, and that the apparent
omissions suggest that the original was prepared before Rashad Khalifa
destroyed his credibility in the late 1980s. What is left of the
original indicates that Kassim Ahmad was not only familiar with Rashad
Khalifa, but used Rashad’s translation of the Qur’an as his favorite
(p.77). He also bought into Rashad’s ‘Number 19” theory (p. 68), which
has been exposed by computerized analysis as a deliberate fake designed
to corrupt the words of the Qur’an in order to fit his theory.
As old-timers will remember, Rashad was the most powerful force during
the mid- and late 1980s in bringing Euro-American women to Islam,
especially the most able, creative, and dynamic of them, such as Karima
Omar, who had a fantastic humor column every month in Islamic Horizons.
He then built on his asserted discovery of what Kassim Ahmad on page 68
refers to as “The Miracle of Code 19” to assert further that this
revelation to him from Allah proved that he was a prophet. He developed
this to assert that he was the fifth most important prophet, right after
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. He then proceeded to introduce new
customs, like encouraging women to lead the prayers of both men and
women together. As a result he was assassinated. His most promising
students hung together for awhile, but some of them then left Islam and
most simply disappeared, which was a major tragedy in the history of
Islam in America.
In his introduction on page one, Kassim Ahmad writes that his book
builds on Ibn Khaldun’s formula of hadith interpretation. This, he says,
“requires all acceptable traditions to be validated by the Qur’an and
rational criteria. This position, however, though a scientific one, was
still not clear enough until in 1985 the works of an outstanding
Egyptian Muslim scholar, Dr. Rashad Khalifa, particularly his The
Computer Speaks: God’s Message to the World, Qur’an, Hadith, and Islam,
and his superb translation of the Qur’an opened for me a way to solve
the problem of the hadith: how they came about; the social factors that
brought them into existence; a review of the classical criticism; the
actual place of the hadith in relation to the Qur’an; their negative
effects on the Muslim community; their connections to the decline and
fall of the Muslims; and the way out of this impasse.” This seven-fold
task is exceptionally well accomplished.
Nevertheless, this monograph has unnecessary baggage. The most recent of
Kassim Ahmad’s forty-four bibliographic entries are in the 1980s, except
for two, Mahmud Saedon A. Othman’s Al Sunnah in 1990 and the quite
anomalous listing of Lyndon La Rouche’ s The Science of Christian
Economy, published by his Executive Intelligence Review in 1991. The
text that had once referred to Lyndon La Rouche was deleted from the
translation, no doubt because La Rouche, although brilliant and
exceedingly well informed, was and is a demagogue and a kook. The fact
that Kassim Ahmad was taken in by these two brilliant imposters, Rashad
Khalifa and Lyndon La Rouche, shows a lack of discriminating judgement.
Fortunately, the most compromising parts of the original appear to have
been deleted ex post facto in 1997 in the translation, though the above
mentioned traces remain.
Purpose and Objectives
The objectives of this monograph are the seven he enumerates
on page one, as listed above. These are to “solve the problem of the
hadith [by showing] how they came about; the social factors that brought
them into existence; a review of the classical criticism; the actual
place of the hadith in relation to the Qur’an; their negative effects on
the Muslim community; their connections to the decline and fall of the
Muslims; and the way out of this impasse.”
The author’s underlying or overarching purpose is developed in beautiful
prose throughout the monograph, as in a work of literature. He proceeds
from appropriate verses of the Qur’an, since his entire theme is that
the only authentic source of divine guidance is the Qur’an, and not the
hadith, and that failure to appreciate this is the cause of
civilizational decline.
His first two chapters are introduced by such verses. The introductory
chapter one, entitled “Why We Raise this Problem,” is introduced in a
heading quoting Surah al Zumar, 39:17-18: “Therefore,
congratulate My servants who listen to all views, then follow the best.
These are the ones guided by God; these are the intelligent ones.”
This sets the tone for the entire monograph.
Kassim Ahmad lists his favorite English translations of the Qur’an and
praises the magnificent one by Muhammad Asad. Asad’s comment on the
above ayah from Al Zumar reads: “According to Razi, this describes
people who examine every religious proposition (in the widest sense of
this term) in the light of their own reason, accepting that which their
mind finds to be valid or possible, and rejecting all that does not
measure up to the test of reason. In Razi’s words, the above verse
expresses ‘a praise and commendation of following the evidence supplied
by one’s reason (hujjat al’aql), and of reaching one’s conclusions in
accordance with [the results of] critical examination (nazar) and
logical inference (istidlal)’.”
Chapter Two, entitled “Refutation of the Traditionists Theory,” is
introduced by a heading quoting Surah al Isra’ 17:36: “Do not
accept anything that you yourself cannot ascertain. You are given the
hearing, the sight, and the mind in order to examine and verify.”
Although some commentators restrict the target of this ayah to slander
and detraction (humaza and lumaza), Kassim Ahmad prefers to extend its
meaning to the entire realm of cognitive psychology, perhaps because of
the immediately following ayah, “And walk not on the earth with haughty
self-conceit.” Of course, this interpretation can turn into a
double-edged sword, as shown by some later conclusions that could be
understood to support the fatal hullucinations of the author’s apparent
mentor, Rashad Khalifa.
The author’s overall purpose in writing this monograph, as stated on
page 4, is to encourage “the Muslim community and their intelligentsia
to critically re-evaluate the whole heritage of traditional Islamic
thought, including theology and jurisprudence, [in order] to seek the
true causes of Muslim decline and thereby to lay the ground for a new
Muslim Renaissance.” As stated this might appear to be self-serving
narcissism by a Muslim seeking to transform his glorious past into a
utopian future at the expense of everyone else or at least with
indifference toward the “other.” In fact, the purpose is much broader,
namely to correct the errors of both Muslim and European post-Christian
thought so that all civilizations can build a better global future
through interfaith reliance on the transcendent.
He opposes both modernist and “traditionalist” theses on how to build a
better world, because they both fail to appreciate the wisdom of what he
calls “the first scientific-spiritual culture in history,” namely,
classical Islamic thought. He writes on page 5, “The modernist thesis,
in brief, states that the Muslims declined because they remained
traditional and have not modernized themselves according to Western
secular values. The traditionalist thesis, on the other hand, blames the
secularization of Muslim societies and the neglect of orthodox Muslim
teachings as the major cause of Muslim decline.” Both of these extremes
he refers to as false ideologies. These spread only because the Muslims
failed to follow the “powerful and dynamic Islamic ideology as preached
in the Qur’an,” which subjected all knowledge, both local and foreign,
to its own discriminative teachings and methodologies in order to gain
insights into the justice and mercy inherent in the Will of God.
“The thesis of this book,” he writes on page 8, “is that mankind,
including the Muslims, have deserted the true teachings of God. … Modern
secular rebellious Europe not only turned against its own religious
priesthood, in which action it was right, but also against religion
altogether, in which action it was wrong. This is the cause of the
present Western impasse.” A similar fate befell the Muslims, who
abandoned the Qur’an by elevating the ahadith and sunna to a divine
source of truth in competition with it in order to support competing
political powers and supportive religious movements. “So it came about,”
he writes on page 9, “that while Europe embraced either liberalism or
Marxism, the Muslim world embraced the hadith, with the philosophies of
secular humanism infecting the elites of Muslim societies.”
Since this monograph is not a political tract, at least not in its
edited version, it is not clear whether Kassim Ahmad here is referring
to the Muslim Brotherhood, which under Syed Qutb metamorphosed into a
modern political movement patterned after Western secularism, or whether
he is referring to the still more radical Wahhabis and Deobandis who
carried the logic still further and eventually produced the likes of the
pseudo-religious Osama bin Laden who want to save the world by
destroying it.
The purpose of this monograph is perhaps best developed on page 64,
where Kassim Ahmad gives his prognosis for the future of the world. He
forecasts: “”Despite the heresy of certain concepts like taqlid or blind
imitation that have been dominant since the 12th century, there has
always been a strong anti-taqlid movement that has manifested itself
through the likes of Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and
Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762). The anti-taqlid movement obtained its
strongest impetus from the reform movement of Muhammad Abduh toward the
end of the nineteenth century. It is most likely that within a short
period of a few decades, the anti-taqlid movement in Islam and the
theistic spirit that is growing in Europe will unite and return to the
Qur’an in its entirety.”
He cautions that, “A return to the Qur’an does not mean that we destroy
all the books of hadith and all the books of the religious scholars, nor
do we mean that we no longer need the religious scholars. It only means
that we must refer to the Qur’an alone as infallible guidance.”
He concludes: “Muslims have three major tasks. Firstly, they must
evaluate critically everything that has been inherited from their
Islamic tradition, in strict accordance with the bidding of the Qur’an.
Secondly, Muslims have to learn to accept things that are from outside
their fold but which by themselves are inherently good and therefore
originate from God. … The third and final task is to build the second
Islamic civilization that will doubtless be far superior to the first
because it will be the combined efforts of all united humanity. All
these three tasks are interrelated. Our Muslim thinkers must also seek
to reach out to those intellectuals and thinkers in other faiths and
cultures, for they also seek to do good in the world. They must
cooperate with the followers of other religions, those ‘who believe in
God and the Last Day and do good’.”
In our effort to elicit the full purpose of this monograph, as written
before the death of Rashad Khalifa, we should note portions of the
monograph that might be regarded as mutashabiyat, from the root sh-bi-ah
(make similar; compare; be doubtful), referring to portions of the
Qur’an and of any writings that can have more than one meaning and
therefore are doubtful except through interpretation by experts. On page
71, Kassim Ahmad states his preference for the school of thought that
such portions of the Qur’an can be known and that “a class of people,
the experts, can have such knowledge by God’s leave.” He cites in proof
thereof Surah al Baqara 2:30-34 where God tells us that He “has endowed
man with the ability to know all of His creations, above the knowledge
even of His angels.”
Ironically, on page 19, perhaps the key sentence in the entire monograph
is Kassim Ahmad’s assertion that, “This means, on the one hand, that the
Qur’an explains itself, and, on the other, that God will, at the proper
time, give man the necessary knowledge to understand it.”
Major Contribution to Thought and Literature
Perhaps the single most controversial sentence in this monograph is
Kassim Ahmad’s assertion on page 47 that, “The majority of the hadith in
the six [classical] collections cannot be accepted any more.”
The bulk of the monograph is designed to substantiate this conclusion.
The evidence has been marshaled many times before, among others by
Fazlur Rahman, who thereby became one of America’s most controversial
scholars.
Ahmad goes through the standard critiques. The role of the hadith as a
source of law was not adopted until Imam Shafi’i did so 200 years after
the death of the Prophet and decades after the death of even the last of
the taba tabi’in. And the “Six Authentic Books of Hadith” of the Sunni
majority (Bukhari, d. 256; Muslim, d. 261; Abu Da’ud, d. 275; Tirmidhi,
d. 279; Ibn Maja, d. 273; and Al-Nasa’i, died 303) were not compiled
until after that, mainly from the years 220 to 270; and the four Shi’a
collections (Al-Kulaini, d. 328; Ibn Babuwayh, d. 381; Jaafar Muhammad
al Tusi, d. 411, and Al-Murtada, d. 436) until a century after that,
when it was simply impossible reliably to ascertain the isnad of any
hadiths.
Ahmad then does a creditable job in trying to show, as he put it on page
27, that, “The so-called Prophetic traditions did not originate from the
Prophet. They grew from the politico-religious conflicts that arose in
the Muslim society then, during the first and second centuries. It
constituted a new teaching altogether, seriously deviating from the
Qur’an that the Prophet Muhammad brought to them. It was done against
his will, but skillfully attributed to him.” He goes into some detail to
show that the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs forbid the
collection of any hadiths, and that the justification for doing so came
from spurious hadiths invented for this purpose.
Ahmad concludes on page 29-30 that, “Many hadith began to emerge and
multiply at the same time as the emergence of divisions in the early
Muslim community in three civil wars, beginning under Ali’s rule right
up to the end of Mu’awiya’s rule. … Power struggles giving rise to
divisions led to the fabrication of hadith to support each contending
group, and the fabrications of hadith further deepened divisions.”
He notes the odd phenomenon of the hadith being elevated to an idol in
the form of a source of guidance in competition with the Qur’an (p. 26)
and even to a form of “spirituality … for Muslim fundamentalism” (p.
62), while the Qur’an itself is undermined by using the hadith to
declare the doctrine of abrogation, so that whatever parts of the Qur’an
might conflict with one’s favorite hadith are declared to be abrogated
by a part or parts that agree with this hadith. Perhaps in observance of
the political correctness that governed prior to 911, Ahmad does not
point out that the Wahhabi practice in the modern world has been taken
to the extreme of abrogating several hundred Qur’anic verses, so that
this divine revelation is gutted of all meaning or perverted into a
travesty of truth.
The specific conflicts between ahadith and the Qur’an are well
documented, such as the lashing of adulterers prescribed in the Qur’an
and the stoning invented later in the hadith (p. 48); the Qur’anic
provision for freedom of religion and the bizarre hadith in Bukhari and
Abu Da’ud, “If anyone leaves his religion, then kill him” (p. 50); and
the five pillars of the aqida in the Qur’an (“Anyone who disbelieves in
God, His angels, His scriptures, His messengers, and the Last Day has
indeed strayed far away,” which does not include the so-called sixth
pillar, Qadr. Ahmad laments that this sixth pillar, which appears in the
hadith, has been used for centuries not to recognize that the ultimate
planner is Allah but to instill a fatalism that more than anything else
has caused the absurd situation today where the followers of the Qur’an
are the most despised and oppressed people on earth.
All this is old hat for advanced students of the Qur’an and hadith.
Although such critical analysis must always be maintained, this bulk of
Ahmad’s monograph, Hadith: A Re-Evaluation, is not really a contribution
to the thinking and literature on the subject.
The major contribution of this particular analysis of the nature and
role of the hadith is Kassim Ahmad’s emphasis on principles in an
iterative process of inductive-deductive-inductive reasoning. This was
emphasized by the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, and
by all the classical scholars, who developed the maqasid al shari’ah
over the course of many centuries. This great intellectual paradigm of
thought culminated in the hierarchy of human responsibilities and rights
propounded by Al Shatibi and never again even approached in any other
civilization, but now essentially dead.
A corollary of this emphasis on principles is the focus on
distinguishing between principles and historically determined forms.
Ahmad states on page 23 that, “Whenever God pleases, He provides us with
both the principles and the methods, … but the punishments of
hand-cutting for theft and a hundred lashes for adultery mentioned
in the Qur’an are forms, not principles, of punishment.
Furthermore, these forms are connected to specific historical
circumstances. … The Qur’anic principles for punishment are two:
firstly, that every crime must be punished in accordance with the
severity of the crime, i.e. the principle of equivalence; and secondly,
the principle of mercy.”
Similarly, the principles of governance, which come under the shari’ah
purpose (maqsud or universal principle) known as haqq al hurriya,
according to Kassim Ahmad, are “sovereignty of the people under God’s
sovereignty, government based on just laws, complete freedom of
religious worship, obedience to God and due obedience to leaders,
leadership to be exercised by those who are competent and morally
upright, and government through consultation. But methods and
institutions vary according to time and circumstances. The [specific]
methods and institutions used by the Prophet are not universally and
eternally binding.”
Ahmad explains the difference on page 75 in his conclusion that, “A
careful study of the Qur’an would reveal that its contents consist of
two types of statements: the universal and the particular. The universal
statements refer to absolute truths, while the particular statements
refer to relative truths that are limited to certain concrete
situations.” He uses the famous command from which the second surah of
the Qur’an, Surah al Baqara, gets it name, when the Jews of the time
were asked to sacrifice a cow, and they got hung up deliberately on the
form of the cow, asking repeatedly about its size, age, and color, in
order to avoid the principle.
The most useful contribution of the entire monograph is the set of rules
for Qur’anic interpretation, based on the principle that the Qur’an is
not only the best but the only reliable source for its own
interpretation. He distinguishes nine principles of Qur’anic
interpretation that come from the Qur’an itself. These are:
1) Two types of verses must be distinguished, which establish the
principle of distinction between straightforward and metaphorical
language (Qur’an 3:7);
2) The principle of unity of the Qur’an’s contents, meaning that its
verses are not contradictory, but in perfect harmony (4:82);
3) The congruence of Qur’anic teachings with truth and logic,
establishing the principle of truth, and its congruence with science and
right reason (41:41-42, 42:24, 23:70-71, 8:7-8, 17:81, and 10:100);
4) The principle of self-explanation, i.e., that Qur’anic verses explain
one another (55:1-2 and 75:18-19);
5) The principle of good intention, i.e. that the Qur’an cannot be
comprehended by anyone who approaches it with bad intention (41:44,
56:77-79, and 17:45-46);
6) The principle of topical context, i.e., that the meaning of any verse
or verses must be understood in the context of the topic under
discussion (17:58, 53:3-4, and 59:7);
7) The principle of historical context, i.e., that verses relating to a
particular historical condition must be interpreted in the light of that
condition (4:25 and 92:4-3);
8) The principle of easy practicability, i.e., that the teachings of the
Qur’an are meant to facilitate and not to render things difficult for
mankind (22:78, 20:2, 5:6 and 101-2, and 4:28); and
9) The principle of distinction between principle and methodology and
putting principle above methodology (22:67 and 2:67-71).
Much of this erudite monograph is devoted to examples of how to apply
these principles in practice. Ahmad laments that he needs many years
before he can apply such guidelines in detailed evaluation of all the
hadith in the major collections, but implies that he is now doing
precisely that.
Weakness of the Author’s Arguments
Compared with what Kassim Ahmad offers to the student of Islam,
emphasizing his methodological and substantive weaknesses would appear
to be merely nit-picking.
The only major fault that I find with his whole approach, and one of
which most authors are guilty, is suggested in his statement on page 63:
“In the realms of philosophy, religion, the social sciences, and the
arts … there can only be one optimum form which will maximize the
efficiency of all social behavior in human societies.”
The weakness of this approach is its failure to distinguish between
human-made systems or realms, in which there can be no “optimum” form,
and divine revelation, in which by definition there is an optimum, even
though exactly what this is will always remain beyond human certainty.
Secondly, in his statement lumping philosophy and the social sciences
and the arts together with religion, Ahmad fails to distinguish between
essence and form. In philosophy, there clearly is a distinction between
the essence of positivist relativism, which denies the existence or even
possibility of truth, and the essence of what America’s founders called
traditionalism, which denies the truth of such relativism. In religion,
on the other hand the essence of all religions, regardless of the
diversity in outward expression, is awareness of an ultimate reality
beyond all forms, which Muslims and Arabic-speaking Christians call
Allah and some Christians call Being (which is beyond existence) or even
Beyond Being (beyond the trinity). The essence of religion, furthermore,
involves recognition that from the Oneness of the ultimate comes
ineluctably the coherence of existence, which Muslims call tawhid.
Thirdly, Ahmad’s statement about optimum form seems to contradict his
apparent preference for tolerance, diversity, and pluralism, which are
three ascending levels of the same thing, namely, a respect for what
Allah has created and planned, whether it is in the color of one’s skin
or in one’s choice of religion.
The struggle to overcome this mindset of “optimum form” is beautifully
explored in William R. Hutchison’s new book, Religious Pluralism in
America: the Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, which will be
reviewed, in sha’a Allah, on behalf of the Islamic Foundation in
Leicester, England, in the next issue of this online journal,
www.theamericanmuslim.org
Hutchison, who teaches the history of religion at Harvard’s
Divinity School, is considered to be the leading authority in the world
on the history of religion. His thesis is that America, despite its
nominal claims, has not advanced very far up the ladder of progress from
tolerance to diversity to pluralism.
Tolerance, by my own definition, is what the Soviet Communists used to
call “peaceful coexistence,” which is a codeword and in Soviet
jurisprudential literature a well-defined legal term meaning a tactical
truce in a strategic war finally to liquidate the enemy. This contrasts
with recognition of diversity as a simple fact of life. This, in turn,
contrasts with pluralism, which recognizes the pluralism in the
universe, ranging from atoms to trees to clusters of galaxies and on to
religious traditions as part of the divine plan as an essential means to
recognize the Oneness of God.
Rashad Khalifa may claim secret knowledge of the “ultimate form,” but
the Qur’an warns us not even to discuss anything about which in this
life we can have no knowledge.
Another perhaps related weakness is Kassim Ahmad’s penchant for
categorical statements about the realm of the ghraib. He appears to
contradict his own maxims when he makes the categorical statement on
page 65 that, “There will be no Second Coming of Christ and neither will
there be any superhuman savior to save the world. Our salvation lies in
our own hands and through applying the teachings of the Qur’an
creatively and scientifically.” He adds on page 37, “Encouraging the
Muslims to hang their hopes on something called the Mahdi is actually a
subtle attempt to make defeatists and pessimists of them. The
suffocating belief in fate: to make the Muslims submissive to other than
God and to wait for someone to come along to save them. The truth is
that no one will help us unless we help ourselves first.”
Yet, on page 69 he accepts the “coming of Gog and Magog and the
Anti-Christ toward the Last Day,” and states, “We are required to
believe in them, but we are to leave them to be interpreted by God and
those who are experts in this field.” The details of both the Mahdi and
the Anti-Christ come from the hadith. His rejection of the Mahdi because
he does not like the possible effect of a messiah on Muslim dynamism,
and his acceptance of the Anti-Christ apparently because he sees no
harmful effect of such a belief, seem to exemplify subjective selection
of what Muslims should and should not believe.
His failure to consider alternative interpretations of the Qur’an is
exemplified by his categorical statement on page 71 that the word
mutawaffika (from the root wa fa ah, to complete, perfect, fulfill)
“cannot mean other than what it says, that is, that Jesus died, though
not on the Cross.” He dismisses Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of
this passage, “And remember when Allah said, ‘O Jesus! Lo! I am
gathering thee and causing thee to ascend to me, and cleansing thee of
those who disbelieve’,” and counters it with Rashad Khalifa’s
translation, “Thus God said, ‘O Jesus, I am terminating your life on
earth, raising you up to me, and ridding you of disbelievers’.”
There has always been a minority position among the shuyukh of Azhar
that the Qur’anic statement that Jesus did not die on the cross,
although he appeared to do so, means that spiritually he did not die.
Denial of Jesus’ death undermines the entire basis of Pauline
Christianity, which is based on the belief that original sin requires
the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’s death on the cross for any person to
go to heaven. This indeed is one of the passages of the Qur’an that
appear to be muhkamat or “clear and decisive,” based on the root mah ka
ma for “exact and firm,” but, in fact, may be among the mutashabihat or
unclear passages and therefore not subject to categorical statements.
Entire sections of this monograph are simply weak in their arguments.
The most egregious would seem to be his contention on page 19-20 that,
“We do not learn to pray from the hadith”; that, “The salat prayers
today were not originally given to Muhammad during the Night Journey”;
and that neither the Qur’an nor the hadith are needed to teach us how to
pray, because “The Qur’an clearly states that the obligatory prayers and
all other religious observances of Islam were originally taught to
Abraham.”
From this he concludes on page 54 that the forms of prayer do not have
to come from the hadith but have been inherited one generation after
another from Abraham. This may be Rashad Khalifa’s basis for innovating
in the form of prayer by encouraging women to be imams. This
free-wheeling approach to the forms of prayer seems to conflict with his
statement on page 76 that the ordinary forms of prayer are required in
principle, but that “only under normal circumstances are we required to
perform these prayers in the usual way.” This leaves the way open to
define subjectively what is normal and abnormal.
The reader will find many such surprising views, but the most surprising
and suspect is his contention on page 72 that, “God puts the believers
and the Prophet on the same level.” This is meant to counter the
idolization of Muhammad, but it can be interpreted to permit reverence
for someone living today as a prophet.
In summary, we might say that this monograph by Kassim Ahmad carries a
lot of baggage, but that its overall message and most of the analysis is
needed today more than ever to help Muslims understand their own
religion better so that they can explain it to well-meaning non-Muslims
who are willing to learn.
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