Lives of Hadith

Lives of Hadith Layla Sein (bio) The 51st Annual (Virtual) Conference of the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS) on "Lives of Hadith" was cosponsored by the University of Florida (UFL), Gainesville, on October 20, 2022, under the direction of Sarra Tlili (NAAIMS President and Program Chair), associate professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Florida. She welcomed the panelists and guests for their participation and thanked various UFL departments for their financial support. The conference consisted of four panel sessions. Panel Session 1 highlighted "Hadith in Contemporary Islamic Thought," with Omer Awass (American Islamic College, Chicago, IL) serving as discussant. Presentations in this session provided details about the role and status of Hadith as compared to the "authentic and authoritative" status of the Qur'an. The first presentation "Are Ḥadīth the Problem? Ḥadīth, Reform, and Modernity" was presented by Emad Hamdeh (Embry Riddle University, Daytona Beach, FL). He reviewed how today's digital age and technological developments impacted all facets of life, including religion and scriptural interpretation that "led to external and internal pressure for Muslims to reform Islam to meet the demands of modernity." Hamdeh noted that Ḥadīth fall into the following four categories in order to distinguish the authenticity of the Prophet's sayings: authentic (ṣaḥīḥ); accepted (ḥasan); weak (ḍaʿīf); and fabricated (mawḍūʿ). In addition to speaking about the difference between weak and fabricated hadiths, he examined the following three groups and their approaches to Hadith, beginning with the Qur'anists, who [End Page 120] "reject the authority of Ḥadīth;" the "Modernists, such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashid Riḍā;" and today's "modern hadīth scholars who seek to reform ḥadīth by returning to a strict commitment to the science of ḥadīth." During his discussion about the impact of weak hadiths, Hamdeh focused on the impact that the controversial Salafi scholar, Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī's (d. 1999), has on the field of ḥadīth studies and stated that according to al-Albānī', "there is a social cost that results from the use of weak ḥadīth, because they promote practices that have no authentic basis in Islam. This results in Muslims performing actions that have no basis in Islamic scripture; Sufi practices such as saint worship, dancing, and whirling dervishes are examples of 'foreign practices' that have been adopted by Muslims in many regions." The second presentation which focused on "Reflecting on Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change" by Joel Blecher (George Washington University, Washington, DC) provided a preview of the "Afterword" to Blecher's co-edited book with Stefanie Brinkmann on "continuities and changes within the tradition and genre of hadith commentary from the classical to the contemporary periods (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press)." Blecher's presentation examined how the state of the field of hadith "lacked an entry in the one-hundred year history of the Encyclopedia of Islam until 2018." He stated that an international collaboration of 13 scholars hopes to expand hadith studies "to go beyond the questions of transmission and authenticity since its inception [and examine] methods and approaches from manuscript studies, social history, and digital humanities in order to outline a future research agenda." During Q&A, the panel discussant, Omer Awass, noted that "it would be instructive to researchers to point out what contemporary hermeneutical methodologies and approaches (both Western and non-Western) could be helpful in shedding new understandings on such hadith commentaries." This was followed by Nadir Ansari's presentation (University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada) on "The Role of Ḥadīth in the Specification of the Ambiguous (ta yīn al-mubham) in the Qur'an: An Analysis of the Qur'anic Exegesis of Aḥmad al-Dīn Amritsari (d. 1936, India)." Ansari examined how the role of ḥadīth in the South Asian modernist Muslim reform was shaped by the "specification of the ambiguous (taᶜyīn al-mubham) in the Qur'an." During his talk he explained that his reference to modernist Islamic reform was an attempt to "reconcile Islam with colonial modernity through interpretation of sacred texts, while trying to remain authentic." Ansari's...

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