Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy by Jonathan A. C. Brown (review)

One of the most poorly-understood conflicts, at least in the West, is the internal struggle within Sunni Islam between traditional, madhhab-trained scholars, and Salafis, who generally insist upon the unmediated application of scripture. While the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict can be framed as the legacy of an early political succession dispute and continuing disagreement over the scope of religious authority granted to ʿAli and Fatimah’s descendants in articulating Islam, the Sunni traditionalist-Salafi struggle defies simple explanations. First, both parties claim to be following the Qurʾan and Sunnah, as articulated in the canonical Sunni collections, although Salafis generally reject weaker hadiths more readily than do madhhab-affiliated scholars. Second, there are blurry lines between the parties, since some traditionally trained scholars are influenced by Salafi thought, and many Salafis, especially from Saudi Arabia, are really just loyal Hanbalis. And finally, to further complicate matters, no less than the pro-democratic Muslim Brotherhood, which is one of the most senior Salafi organizations in the Arab world, is viciously attacked by Gulf-sponsored Salafi preachers, who consider democracy antithetical to Islam. How did all this come to be?

Jonathan Brown’s most recent book, Misquoting Muhammad, is an indispensable guide for anyone perplexed by these transnational Sunni debates. At the outset, Brown justifies his focus on Sunni Islam in order to keep the book to a reasonable length, and suggests that many of the developments discussed in this book are also found in Shiʿi Islam (5). This restriction strikes me as a wise choice because it allows Brown to highlight a core issue Sunni Muslims face, regardless of where they live: how does one interpret and apply the vast ocean of Sunni hadith, especially those which conflict with ethical values that, in much of the world, have changed over the past century?

Before he can address specific case studies, Brown devotes detailed chapters to mapping the Islamic interpretative tradition and discussing the nature of scripture in Islam and other religious traditions. He shows that the tension between traditional Sunnism – characterized by law schools, Ashʿari theology, and Sufi orders – and the ‘austere iconoclasm’ of individual scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), developed over the centuries into revivalist movements, some of which are clear predecessors of Salafi movements today. He also reminds the reader that the pernicious practice of takfir, Muslims declaring other Muslims to be apostates, often to justify waging war against them, expanded during the eighteenth century. The big rupture, though, to the Sunni interpretive community, was European colonialism and imperialism, which displaced the authority of traditional Sunni scholars and triggered a ‘crisis of confidence’ among many Muslims in the Islamic scriptures. Brown’s deployment of the story of Tawfiq Sidqi, a medical student who was troubled by the infamous ‘hadith of the fly’ in Bukhari’s Sahih, is particularly helpful in clarifying the new challenges twentieth century science brought to the traditional scholarly community.

Misquoting Muhammad takes the reader through an array of topics in which Sunni hadiths (and occasionally Qurʾanic verses) present many contemporary Muslims with ethical quandaries. These topics include jihad, the right of a woman to serve as head of state or judge, child marriage, ‘honour killing,’ usury, and the seventy-two virgins in heaven allegedly promised to martyrs. While Brown stays true to his promise not to provide solutions to these challenges, he does employ his formidable scholarly abilities to analyse and dispute the authenticity of three of the hadiths in question in the appendices to Misquoting Muhammad.

Even more valuable is the chapter, provocatively titled ‘Lying about the Prophet of God,’ about the fuzzy nature of truth and the controversy over Plato’s ‘Noble Lie.’ Brown ties the concept of the Noble Lie to the centuries-old Sunni debate over the use of weak or even spurious hadith...