This Religion Is a Science 163The moral provisions of the Shariah are made concrete through
the discipline of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, of which the Quran is
its first and most important source. The problem, however, is that the
Quran is not a book of laws. While there are some eighty or so verses
that deal directly with legal issues—matters like inheritance and the
status of women, in addition to a handful of penal prescriptions—the
Quran makes no attempt whatsoever to establish a system of laws reg-
ulating the external behavior of the community, as the Torah does for
the Jews. Thus, when dealing with the countless legal issues on which
the Quran is silent, the Ulama turn to the traditions, or Sunna, of the
Prophet.
The Sunna is composed of thousands upon thousands of stories,
or hadith, that claim to recount Muhammad’s words and deeds, as well
as those of the earliest Companions. As discussed in Chapter 3, as
these hadith were passed down from generation to generation, they
became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while,
nearly every legal or religious opinion—no matter how radical or
eccentric—could be legitimated by the Prophet’s authority. By the
ninth century, the situation had gotten so out of hand that a group of
legal scholars, working independently of one another, attempted to
catalogue the most reliable hadith into authoritative collections, the
most respected of which are the canons of Muhammad al-Bukhari
(d. 870) and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875).
The primary criterion by which these collections were authenti-
cated was the chain of transmission, or isnad, that often accompanied
each hadith. Those hadith whose isnad could be traced to an early and
reliable source were considered “sound” and accepted as authentic,
while those that could not were considered “weak” and rejected. One
major problem with this method, however, is that before the ninth
century, when the collections were completed, a proper and complete
isnad was by no means an essential element in the dissemination of a
hadith. Joseph Schacht’s extensive research on the development of the
Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged
hadith had their chains of transmission added conjecturally so as to
make them appear more authentic. Hence Schacht’s whimsical but
accurate maxim: “the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.”
But there is an even larger obstacle to using the Sunna of the