68 No god but God
Ignaz Goldziher has documented numerous hadith the transmitters of
which claimed were derived from Muhammad but which were in real-
ity verses from the Torah and Gospels, bits of rabbinic sayings, ancient
Persian maxims, passages of Greek philosophy, Indian proverbs, and
even an almost word-for-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer. By
the ninth century, when Islamic law was being fashioned, there were
so many false hadith circulating through the community that Muslim
legal scholars somewhat whimsically classified them into two cate-
gories: lies told for material gain and lies told for ideological advantage.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, a concerted effort was made to sift
through the massive accumulation of hadith in order to separate the
reliable from the rest. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years, anyone who
had the power and wealth necessary to influence public opinion on a
particular issue—and who wanted to justify his own ideas about, say,
the role of women in society—had only to refer to a hadith which he
had heard from someone, who had heard it from someone else, who
had heard it from a Companion, who had heard it from the Prophet.
It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to say that quite soon after
Muhammad’s death, those men who took upon themselves the task of
interpreting God’s will in the Quran and Muhammad’s will in the
hadith—men who were, coincidentally, among the most powerful and
wealthy members of the Ummah—were not nearly as concerned with
the accuracy of their reports or the objectivity of their exegesis as
they were with regaining the financial and social dominance that the
Prophet’s reforms had taken from them. As Fatima Mernissi notes,
one must always remember that behind every hadith lies the entrenched
power struggles and conflicting interests that one would expect in a
society “in which social mobility [and] geographical expansion [were]
the order of the day.”
Thus, when the Quran warned believers not to “pass on your
wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha),” the early Quranic
commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s
warnings on the subject, that “the sufaha are women and children...
and both of them must be excluded from inheritance” (emphasis added).
When a wealthy and notable merchant from Basra named Abu
Bakra (not to be confused with Abu Bakr) claimed, twenty-five years