Michael Muhammad Knight - Muhammad: Forty Introductions

Table of Contents

ALSO BY MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT

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Impossible Man

Journey to the End of Islam

Why I Am a Five Percenter

William S. Burroughs vs. the Quran

Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing

Why I Am a Salafi

Magic in Islam

MUHAMMAD: FORTY INTRODUCTIONS

Copyright 2019 by Michael Muhammad Knight

All rights reserved

First Soft Skull edition: 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Knight, Michael Muhammad, author.

Title: Muhammad : forty introductions / Michael Muhammad Knight.

Description: New York : Soft Skull, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018040347 | ISBN 9781593761479 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Muhammad, Prophet, -632Hadith. | Muhammad, Prophet, -632Biography. | HadithTexts.

Classification: LCC BP135.8.M85 K65 2019 | DDC 297.6/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040347

Cover design by salu.io

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

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To Azreal with love, from Azreal Wisdom

CONTENTS

Ali bin Hujr reported to us that Ishaq bin Najih reported to us on the authority of Ibn Jurayj, on the authority of Ata bin Rabah, on the authority of Ibn Abbas, who said:

The Messenger of God (God bless him and give him peace) said, Whoever preserves for my community forty hadiths from the Sunna, I will be an intercessor for him on the Day of Resurrection.

Who is this Messenger of God for whom the stakes of memory are so high? For more than twenty years now, I have worn his name as my own, but still ask the question. If the above narration serves as our first glimpse of him, what does it show us? How much of the man could we retrieve from the promise he makes here?

Before approaching his words, we must first walk through names. This narration comes to us from the Forty Hadiths collection by Imam al-Nasawi (d. 915), who cites as his sources chain of teachers: al-Nasawi reports from a scholar of the preceding generation, Ali bin Hujr (d. 859), who cites an earlier authority, who in turn cites an older scholar than himself. At the end of the chain, we find Ibn Abbas, Muhammads cousin, telling us what Muhammad had said.

After the chain of names, we encounter Muhammads title, Messenger of God (rasul Allah), and immediately after this we read a prayer for peace and blessings upon him: our knowledge of Muhammad comes to us through those who loved him and believed in his prophethood. Finally, we arrive at the message: Muhammad tells us that anyone who preserves forty hadiths from the Sunna will have Muhammad himself advocating for that person on the Day of Resurrection.

The narration introduces key terms. The word used here for narration, hadith, literally means news or report and signifies the sayings and actions of Muhammad, or things said and done in his presence to which he did not object; this particular hadith therefore speaks on the virtues of the body of knowledge to which it belongs. Sunna, meaning custom or precedent, has come to represent the body of reported memories concerning Muhammads statements, habits, and preferences, establishing both his teachings and personal behavior as a template for how to live as a human in the world.

This hadith tells us that there is a Day of Resurrection and that the Messenger of God, many centuries after the end of his prophetic mission and earthly life, continues to play a crucial role in the salvation of humankind. He can act as our lawyer, interceding on our behalf. We see that an articulation of Islam centered primarily on the hadith tradition could offer a profound departure from one centered on other sources, such as the Quran; the Quran does not clearly name Muhammad as an intercessor on the Day, and many readers interpret the Quran as expressing a generally pessimistic view of humans prospects for intercessors with God. It is within the hadith tradition that Muhammads advocacy becomes available, and the narration informs us that it becomes available specifically to the person who preserves forty hadiths from the Sunna.

The Arabic word used for preserve in this narration carries meanings associated with memorization. For historical settings in which oral tradition wielded greater authority than written textsand in a world before paper technology, let alone the digital storage of informationto preserve knowledge meant becoming an embodied archive. The hadith memorizer commits to defending Muhammads historical memory against the losses wrought by time and, by doing so, serves the broader salvation of humankind, and thus earns Muhammads help for his or her own salvation. This hadith empowers its own narrators, promising them extraordinary privilege in the next world.

The Messenger did not leave behind a written autobiography or a copy of his daily schedule; we know him only through the memories of those who had been in his presence, who shared their recollections with those who had been born too late to know him. The names we walk through here show us the mediations by which Muhammad becomes the Muhammad whom we can access. Family members and friends who gave their reports as eyewitnesses to Muhammad, designated with the capitalized title Companions, became powerful custodians of the sacred past, and themselves continue to speak via their students, their students students, and so on. The Muhammad we find on this page is not simply an individual person who lived at a particular moment in history, but an assemblage formed by encounters between generations. In addition to being a specific body that lies entombed in Medina, Muhammad is also an oral tradition spanning centuries.

The scholarly producers of this oral tradition, while reporting with conviction in Muhammads supreme authority as the Messenger of God, in turn authorize him: they wield the power of their reputations as scholars and pious Muslims to vouch for these words as reflecting Muhammads actual speech. In this roster of scholars reporting on Muhammad (and one another), we witness the prophetic assemblage as it takes form.

The collected body of oral traditions reporting Muhammads words and actions is not the work of a single scholar, but of thousands of individuals. Nor is this marked as the domain of a united Muslim community held together by shared methods or a uniform roster of trustworthy experts. The people who knew and followed Muhammad in his own lifetime appear in the sources as having disagreed with one another on matters of correct belief and practice, and often gave conflicting accounts of what Muhammad had said. In the generations after Muhammad, networks of transmitters based in specific geographic centers came to be associated with particular theological, legal, or sectarian positions. But as scholars traveled between cities such as Basra, Kufa, and Baghdad to collect narrations of the Prophet, these local networks increasingly blended into one another, giving the appearance of a singular, monolithic body of scholarship. The collection of oral traditions into book form further masked the heterogeneity of Muhammads reporters, presenting these thousands of scholars as collaborators in a shared project.