The Ḥadīth. Edited by Mustafa Shah. Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies. London:Routledge, 2009. Pp. 1,704. £650.00.This is a magnificent collection of essays on the subject of ḥadīth scholarship. TheRoutledge series of ‘Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies’, for those who areunfamiliar with the format, marks an important new initiative in the publication ofmaterial on the subject. Unlike the Variorum presentation with which most of us havelong been familiar, the articles in these volumes are completely re-typeset in acommon format and each volume is continuously paginated, all of which gives amuch greater homogeneity and elegance to the whole. All the collections amount tobetween three and six full-length volumes. Among the other collections in the serieswhich are likely to be of interest to students of early Islamic studies are Colin Turner’scollection on The Koran, Paul Luft and Colin Turner on Shi’ism, and Lloyd Ridgeon’stwo collections on Sufism and Islam and Religious Diversity.In four volumes Mustafa Shah has collected no fewer than 61 papers reflecting manydifferent approaches to the subject. All the papers come from the Western academictradition and all of them are in English. The editor stresses that they are all peerreviewed, though quite how far the term ‘peer review’ can really be used ofGoldziher’s work is debatable. Suffice it to say that all the articles and chapters (forsome of the pieces chosen are particularly important sections from full-length books)are by established scholars in the field, and I think it is fair to say that every single oneof them makes important and relevant points. There are, so to speak, no weak links.The material is arranged by topic and themes, though, as Shah points out, many of thethemes overlap and many of the articles deal with more than one of them. Volume I isconcerned with ‘Codification, Authenticity’, Volume II with ‘Isnāds: Transmission,Terminology and the Issue of Dating’, Volume III with ‘Scholarship, Perspectives andCriticism’ and Volume IV with ‘Narrative, Context and Content’. In addition to the‘Introduction’, there is also a chronological table which arranges all the articles bydate of publication, ranging from Goldziher in 1889–90 (although his ‘Ḥadīth andSunna’ is presented in Stern’s 1967 English translation) to Jonathan Brown’s ‘How dowe know early ḥadīth critics did matn criticism and why is it so hard to find?’ of 2008.This is a long time span, though it is worth noting that Goldziher’s contribution is theonly one which dates from before 1950, and the collection as a whole demonstratesthe vast explosion of scholarly interest in ḥadīth studies which was characteristic ofthe second half of the twentieth century and shows no signs of diminishing in thetwenty-first.The book opens with a substantial introduction by the editor. Considering the wealthand variety of material in the four volumes, his summary is a masterpiece of clarityand erudition, introducing the reader to all the main themes of the collection. Inparticular, he takes Albert Berg’s division of scholars of ḥadīth into two separatecamps, the sceptical and the sanguine, and sees how different scholars fit into it.There can be no doubt that the overriding theme in the collection, and indeed in thewhole scholarly discussion, is the question of dating and authenticity. The first papersets the agenda. It is often said that all Western philosophy is essentially footnotes toPlato: it sometimes seems as if all of academic Islamic studies are essentially footnotesto Goldziher. It was his essay, reproduced here, which raised for the first time the ideathat the ḥadīth as we have them now were essentially generated in the second/eighthand third/ninth centuries to propagate a vision of Islam which had little if anything, todo with the Islam of the time of the Prophet. Few now would accept his image of theUmayyads as arrogant and godless tyrants, indeed recent scholarship has tended toenhance the reputation of ʿAbd al-Malik, among others, as a serious figure in thedevelopment of Islamic law, but his view of the elaboration of ḥadīth as a deliberateconstruct of learned men still commands some support. And in the footsteps ofGoldziher comes, of course, Schacht with his almost blanket dismissal of Prophetictraditions.In the other, sanguine, camp Shah places Nabia Abbott, a brilliant textual historianwhose work is sometimes underestimated, Fuat Sezgin and Mustafa Azami, all ofwhom stress the antiquity of the earliest written ḥadīth. At the same time he points outthat the debate has in many ways moved beyond this sharp polarisation: HaraldMotzki, for example, seeing the apparent dichotomy as far too clear cut to reflect thereality of many much more nuanced points of view. At the same time GregorSchoeler’s work on the complex interaction between the oral and the written hasadded a whole new element to the discussion.One of the great strengths of a collection like this is that it enables the student or thescholar approaching the subject for the first time to gain an overview of the wholequestion or rather of all the questions. Shah’s choice of papers means that we can seeall the great names at their most cogent, staking out their territory clearly, without thereader having to track down rare and obscure articles in hard-to-find periodicals. Andthere are pieces on subjects that are all too easily overlooked, like Maribel Fierro’sessay on the introduction of ḥadīth into Andalusia. The final volume moves awayfrom issues of dating and reliability into interesting discussions of the more literaryaspects of ḥadīth narratives, with chapters on narrative discourse and modern literarytheory, ethics and aesthetics in ḥadīth, dreams as means to evaluate ḥadīth and afeminist interpretation of knowledge, women and gender in the ḥadīth.This is an excellently chosen and carefully edited selection of papers. In many ways itis a much better introduction to ḥadīth studies than any single text book could be,because it gives an insight into the whole scope of the subject, not just the wellrehearsed variety of opinions on dating and authenticity, but the wide variety ofdifferent approaches with which people come to the subject.HUGH KENNEDYJournal of Quranic Studies, volume 13, no 1, 2011
