The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki.

Lucas, Scott C.

The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki. Edited by NICOLET BOEKHOFF-VAN DER VOORT, KEES VERSTEEGH, and JOAS WAGEMAKERS. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 89. Leiden: BRILL, 2011. Pp. xvi + 494. $221.

What do a peculiar manuscript of the Quran in Gronigen, Elijah Muhammad, al-Dahhak b. Muzahim (d. 105/723), and contemporary Muslim youth in the Netherlands have in common? Answer: They appear as subjects of articles in a festschrift for the pioneering scholar of Islamic Studies Harald Motzki. While the editors have endeavored to group this unwieldy array of nineteen contributions into the subcategories of Production, Transmission, Interpretation, and Reception, nearly all of the articles fall into one of two categories: essays concerning the first two centuries of Islam; and essays concerning the past fifty years of Islamists. Only three articles cover anything between AH 200 and 1350: Maribel Fierro's "preliminary framework for the study of Hadith literature in al-Andalus" (p. 63); Gerard Wiegers's chapter "Jean de Roquetaillade's Prophecies among the Muslim Minorities of Medieval and Early-Modern Christian Spain: An Islamic Version of the Vademecum in Tribulatione"; and Uri Rubin's analysis of numerous Sunni exegetes' opinions on Q 44:10-11, which he argues shed light on the post-Quranic image of the Prophet Muhammad. I shall reflect briefly on this near-exclusive focus on Islamic origins and contemporary Islamists at the conclusion of this review.

While in graduate school I found Harald Motzki's isnad-cum-matn methodology a sophisticated and compelling use of Sunni hadith literature and a welcome departure from the prevailing orientalist approach of reliance upon arguments from silence, global conspiracy theories, avoidance of the vast majority of early hadith texts, and ignoring (or simply dismissing without engaging) the internal tradition of Sunni Muslim hadith criticism. Motzki not only avoided all of these pitfalls, but actually challenged them in the best academic journals. (1) He also brought to the attention of Western scholars the extraordinary significance of the Musannaf of 'Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani (d. 211/827) for understanding the nature of Islamic law in the first and second centuries of Islam, although this massive text remains woefully underutilized to this day. (In this festschrift only the opening article by Nicolet Boekhoff-Van der Voort engages with 'Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf.)

The editors of the volume under review summarize the isnad-cum-matn method in a single long paragraph (p. 10), and they ascribe it to both Harald Motzki and Gregor Schoeler (whose short article on Musa b. 'Uqba is the only non-English contribution to this volume). In short, the method consists of three steps:

1. Collect many isnads of a single hadith in order to find common transmitters and links;

2. Analyze the textual variants, in order to sort original from copied hadith;

3. Compare the results of isnad analysis with the textual analysis; if they confirm each other, one can assume that the hadith has a real history and that the "common link" actually disseminated that hadith during his or her lifetime.

Only three of the contributions to this festschrift employ the isnad-cum-matn method. Nicolet Boekhoff-Van der Voort analyzes 163 traditions in Kitab al-Maghazi of 'Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf and argues that most of the material ascribed to al-Zuhrl from Ma'mar b. Rashid was probably part of al-Zuhri's teachings and could date to the first century. Jens Scheiner challenges Sayf b. 'Umar's account of the conquest of Damascus, which Hugh Kennedy cites in his book The Great Arab Conquests, and, after acknowledging that the sources at his disposal do not allow him to get closer than a century to the actual events they depict, argues that we can be reasonably confident that (1) Khalid b. al-Walid played a major role in the conquest of Damascus; and (2) a peace treaty was made involving a Byzantine negotiator (p. 177). Finally, in the last contribution, Ulrike Mitter applies the isnad-cummatn method to the notorious hadith, "The majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire are women." She identifies three common links, one of which is the Prophet Muhammad. Despite this finding and after citing contemporary Muslims' explanations of this hadith on websites, she argues surprisingly that the roots of this hadith are in the generation of the Companions and that this hadith is "not one which can easily be attributed to Muhammad" (p. 470). This finding raises the deeper question--is there something that a priori precludes the Prophet from being a common link if the isnad-cum-matn method is an accurate methodology?

One of the few contributions that addresses broader issues of method is Andreas Gorke's chapter, "Prospects and Limits in the Study of the Historical Muhammad." After asserting that the Quran is basically useless for reconstructing the Prophet's life, he offers five well-rehearsed arguments against the reliability of Muslim literary sources: (1) they date at least 150 years after Muhammad's death; (2) some were inspired by the Quran and cannot be considered independent sources; (3) secondary tendencies, such as later political debates, can be detected within them; (4) many reports are contradictory; and (5) authors wrote salvation history (pp. 139-40). To help us move forward, Gorke proposes the following "promising approaches": (1) focus on reports that contradict later Muslim orthodoxy; (2) isnad-cum-matn analysis; (3) analysis of "comprehensive corpora of texts," such as all the traditions that trace through 'Urwa b. al-Zubayr; and (4) analysis of linguistic peculiarities of texts, especially obscure words (pp. 142-47). Gorke is most optimistic about the third method, as it is one he applied with his mentor, Gregor Schoeler, and he argues that in certain cases it can identify reports dating to within forty to sixty years of the events they describe. However, he concedes that all of these methods are highly inefficient since they require an enormous amount of labor and, at best, yield meager results.

Two of the more insightful contributions to this festschrift shed light on second-century scholars whose names occur frequently in isnads or even as authorities, but are generally assumed not to have published any books. Maher Jarrar introduces us to Ibn Abi Yahya (d. 184/800), whom he describes as "a controversial Medinan Akhbari" who has been claimed by both Jarudi and Twelver Shi'a. His complete name is Ibrahim b. Muhammad b. Abi Yahya, and Jarrar notes that al-Shafi'i and even Ibn 'Adi had some nice things to say about him, despite mentioning his Qadari and Mu'tazili leanings. Of the eighty-five reports ascribed to him, Jarrar finds that only five are concerned with the life of the Prophet, nine reflect Imami Shi'i views, and seventy-three describe the "historical topography" of Medina. Kees Versteegh analyzes the modern two-volume compilation of al-Dahhak b. Muzahim's opinions culled from earlier sources, drawing attention to the types of exegetical information that are ascribed to him, along with his grammatical terminology. Versteegh observes that most of al-Dahhak's comments explain difficult words and phrases, and he is particularly interested in the names of people in the Quran, such as Lot's wife and Moses's sister (p. 288). The small set of al-Dahhak's grammatical terms "are valuable indications of the early provenance of his exegetical activities" (p. 296). Although al-Dahhak's most enduring legacy is his insistence that the opening verses of the ninth sura of the Quran abrogate all of the verses urging patience and peace, Versteegh argues convincingly that his actual exegetical opinions are far more diverse and interesting than this legacy might suggest.

The sole revisionist contribution to The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam is Claude Gilliot's "The 'Collections' of the Meccan Arabic Lectionary." Gilliot zooms in on the "Mec can Quran" and restates the largely discredited opinions of Gunther Luling and Christophe Luxemberg that the Meccan Qur'an is "a kind of commentary or exegesis in Arabic of a non-Arabic book, or of non-Arabic collections of 'texts' of logia, or portions of a non-Arabic lectionary" (p. 112). He bases this assertion upon the three passages in the Quran where the expression lisan 'arabl is found, with special attention to Q 16:103. Gilliot interprets the Arabic word fussilat in Q 41:44 to mean "interpreted" or "translated" and takes the expression qur'an mubin to mean "a book which translates and explains" (p. 117). He also relies heavily upon a unique report in the introduction of al-Tabari's commentary, in which the section of the Quran called al-mufassal is glossed as "the Arabic." Gilliot's translation of the report is as follows:

   The Apostle of God said: "I have been given the seven long [Suras]
   in the place of the Torah, the duplicated in the place of the
   Psalms, the hundreds in the place of the Gospel, and I have been
   given preference with the discrete [Suras or book]." Khalid
   al-Hadhdha' made a short, but pertinent, remark on al-mufassal:
   "They used to call al-mufassal: the Arabic." (p. 118)

In a footnote, Gilliot writes that "the discrete" in this context is "in the mathematical, medical, and linguistic meaning of 'composed of separate elements'," but he does not indicate that the original Arabic word he is translating as "discrete" is in fact al-mufassal. It is strange that Gilliot fails to indicate that the word mufassal appears twice in this report, since he only identifies its second occurrence, in what is obviously the transmitter's gloss on the original occurrence of al-mufassal in the Prophetic hadith. The basic message of this report--the mufassal suras were a unique revelation solely for Muhammad, since they go beyond what is found in the Torah, Psalms, and Gospels--contradicts his thesis that the mufassal suras were merely translations of earlier scriptures. How could they be translations if, according to this hadith, everything in the earlier scriptures was included in the suras outside of al-mufassall A more basic problem, which Gilliot acknowledges, is that "it is not easy to determine which Gospel text Muhammad could have been familiar with" (p. 126) and his concluding claim to have shown "that many passages of the Meccan self-referential Arabic lectionary (Quran) contain allusions to its 'prehistory' " remains little more than a tentative assertion based on a handful of verses in isolation from the overwhelming tone and message of the Quran.

The six chapters devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islam are almost exclusively limited to Islamists' debates over declaring other Muslims as apostates (takfir) or corrupt innovators; human rights; youth movements in the Netherlands; and online chat rooms. Perhaps the most discerning among these articles is Roel Meijer's chapter, "Politicising al-jarh wa-l-ta'dil: Rabi' b. Hadi al-Madkhali and the Transnational Battle for Religious Authority." Meijer traces the rise and fall in influence of this Saudi professor at the Islamic University of Medina, born in 1931 and notorious for his repeated calls for boycotting all "innovators" through public smear campaigns. One of al-Madkhali's favorite targets has been the Muslim Brotherhood, which he claims gives priority to politics over doctrine, and he wrote four books refuting Sayyid Qutb. Meijer claims that "al-Madkhali is a fascinating phenomenon that provides insight into the heart of the Salafi movement and the way it operates" (p. 397), which, if true, suggests a bleak future for this transnational movement.

While one does not expect the articles of a festschrift to tie into a common theme, the most arresting quality of this book is its obsession with Islamic origins and contemporary Islamists. This might have something to do with the geographical distribution of its contributors: twelve hail from Europe (eight of whom live in the Netherlands), two from Israel, and one each from Lebanon, South Africa, and the United States. The fascination with Islamic origins still retains significant traction among European scholars a century after Ignaz Goldziher pioneered the field of Islamic Studies, and this focus diverts attention away from the transmission and dynamics of Islamic textual sources over the subsequent millennium of Islamic civilization. Likewise, Western anxiety over Salafi expressions of Islam generally fails to connect them to late-Ottoman and colonial history, although, to their credit, Joas Wagemakers and Roel Meijer approach contemporary Salafis as thinking individuals rather than mindless extremists. While the title of this book, The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam, is belied by the approximately 1200-year gap between the origins of Islam and a handful of contemporary Salafis, its individual contributions are of a high caliber and provide valuable insight into the isnad-cum-matn method of analysis, the challenges of reconstructing early Islamic history, and intra-Salafi polemics taking place online and in print at this very moment. Professor Motzki should be proud that this book has been published in his honor.

Scott C. Lucas

University of Arizona

(1.) For an excellent collection of Motzki's writings and refutations, see Harald Motzki, with Nicolet Boekhoff-Van der Voort and Sean Anthony, Analyzing Muslim Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2010), reviewed by Jonathan Brown in JAOS 131.3 (2011): 473-76.