what was the connection between the h:ad ̄ıth material on
which the seekers worked and the living traditions of Islam
before their time, and what factors of consensus operating
in earlier times paved the way for their work?
Much modern Western scholarship on h:ad ̄ıth and the
closely related subject of early Islamic law stresses the breaks
between the work of the canonizers and earlier Islam. It is
pointed out that the transmission of h:ad ̄ıths with a certifying
isna ̄d was a late phenomenon and that there is reason to
doubt that h:ad ̄ıths were formally transmitted at all in the first
century of Islam. It is sometimes questioned whether the
Prophet left any sunnahs, or traditions, apart from the
QurDa ̄n. Above all it is pointed out that the schools of law,
whose roots went back to early times, looked upon the later
h:ad ̄ıth movement as a disruptive force that threatened their
own understanding of the sunnah as the tradition of the law
schools (rather than of the Prophet himself) and undermined
the ideal of consensus.
Some modern scholars, however, notably Fazlur Rah-
man in Islam (1979), have pointed out the ultimate irratio-
nality of a critical historiography that bars the assumption
of continuity in early Islam, since the consolidation of the
sunnah and the integration of the traditional law schools into
Sunn ̄ı tradition cannot be imagined without assuming sig-
nificant elements of continuity and consensus at work from
early times. Thus Rahman holds that, from the beginning,
sunnah could not have meant the sunnah of the law schools
alone but must have focused on the Prophet, at least in inten-
tion, even if “it was not so much like a path as like a riverbed
which continuously assimilates new elements.” Accordingly,
transmission of the sunnah would have taken the form of a
“‘silent’or ‘living’ tradition” rather than a formal discipline
(Rahman, 1979, pp. 54–55). The later h:ad ̄ıth movement
formalized and, so to speak, professionalized the sunnah. But
the movement was successful, in Rahman’s opinion, because
the concept of “the sunnah of the Prophet” had always been
the implied ideal of Muslim practice, and also because a fixed
corpus of h:ad ̄ıths provided a more solid basis on which to
build a pan-traditional (“Sunn ̄ı”) consensus than did the
ideal of the consensus of the law schools.
Beyond their role in the formative period of traditions,
groups oriented toward a traditional consensus often play a
significant role in the regulation or reformation of traditions.
Brahman castes in many parts of Hindu India may be cited
as an example of tradition-minded regulators. An important
group of brahmans even goes by the name of Sma ̄rtas (from
smr:ti, “tradition”), or “traditionists.”
For an example of tradition-minded reformers, one may
point to the Pharisees in Judaism in late antiquity. Scholarly
debate continues over how best to classify the Pharisees as
a religious group and how to define their role in the reorgani-
zation of Judaism culminating in the canonization of the
Mishnah and Talmud. In the twentieth century, George
Foot Moore, Louis Finkelstein, and other scholars pro-
pounded a view of the Pharisees as representatives of a
“normative Judaism” that served as the foundation for later
rabbinic tradition. Subsequent scholarship has richly docu-
mented the religious diversity of Judaism in late antiquity,
the influence of Hellenistic culture on the Pharisees them-
selves, and the role of parties other than the Pharisees in the
making of rabbinic Judaism. The result has been to give rise
to a revisionist view of the Pharisees almost diametrically op-
posed to the earlier one. Far from being seen as the bearers
of “normative Judaism,” the Pharisees are presented as sim-
ply one sect among many in the religiously complicated
world of Judaism around the beginning of the Common Era.
That the name Pharisee may have originally meant “sectari-
an” lends support to this view.
Yet the revisionist view has its problems. The conceptu-
al problem is how to distinguish between sectarians and
traditionists. If all religious activists in a given setting are
“sectarians,” then none of them are. To put it another way,
the term sect in the history of religion has meaning only in
contrast to church or similar terms denoting broad-based tra-
ditional structures emphasizing consensus and continuity.
To be sure, the distinction between sectarians and tradition-
ists is a relative one, but without it one cannot speak about
some basic differences between religious groups. For exam-
ple, the difference between the Pharisees on the one hand
and the early Christians and the community at Qumran
(where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered) on the other
was a difference of kind, not just degree. The latter two were
sects: small bands of devotees living apart from the ordinary
world in a closely knit commune (Qumran) or preaching a
radical new prophecy with its own novel cult (Christians).
Moreover, Christians and Qumranians lived in the expecta-
tion of an approaching cosmic cataclysm that would put an
end to the historic Judaism of their day. Long before the de-
struction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, these groups had
broken with Jerusalem and the Temple by reinterpreting
Jewish tradition in terms of their own sources of illumina-
tion. The Pharisees too were innovators, but they had a com-
pletely different orientation to tradition. What set the Phari-
sees apart from Christians and Qumranians was the
assumption of continuity with the historic institutions of Ju-
daism, including the Temple, and the stress on realizing the
goals of piety in the everyday world, without new prophecies
and without a new cult.
THE MULTIFORMITY OF CLASSICAL TRADITIONS. Classical
traditions are multiform. Multiformity results from the ad-
aptation of traditions to the variegated quality of human ex-
perience, including religious experience. Nestor, the voice of
tradition in the Homeric poems, describes the problem ex-
actly: “The gods do not give people all things at the same
time” (Iliad 4.320). Talents, tastes, values, social and politi-
cal roles, age, gender, and station in life vary among individ-
uals and groups. Tradition is called upon to unite what expe-
rience divides, so that the old can communicate with the
young, the intellectual with the illiterate, the urbanite with
the rustic, the priest with the flock, the prince with the pau-
per. Unity is sought not through regimentation but throughTRADITION 9275