Tuesday, March 05, 2013
The Intellectual Thoroughness of Three-Year Olds
The
Intellectual Thoroughness of Three-Year Olds
(The
second in a three part series)
By
Pamela Taylor
You
may remember the email I shared with you last week, the one describing the
rewards pious women were to receive for such deeds as nursing their infants, or
consoling their husbands after a hard day at work, and so on. (If not, you can see the glorious details in
the first of this series, The Moral Maturity of Two-Year Olds.) This document declared in its headline that
it bore “Glad tidings of Heaven for pious women in the light of hadith.”
This
claim that the information in the email was derived from hadith was backed up
by no references. No allusion to Bukhari
or Muslim, Abu Dawood or Ibn Majah, or even to scholars who had quoted from
these works. No mention of
narrators. No Aisha said, or Abu
Hurairah reported. The supposed hadith
were not even in the form of “Prophet Muhammad said.” It was simply a list of good deeds (or at
least what the author of the list considered to be good deeds) and the rewards
we are supposed to receive for them. I
imagine you have been sent this sort of email yourself. Or perhaps you have come across mimeographed
sheets left in the front corner of your masjid or been handed one by youngsters
after Salatul-Eid.
Unfortunately,
it seems as though many Muslims approach these kinds of documents with the
intellectual thoroughness of a three-year old.
If you have ever taken a three-year old for a walk, you know that she or
he will pepper you with questions along the way. Why is the sky blue? Why does the concrete have cracks? Why is that flower all brown and floppy? You will also know that when you reply,
“Because there is water in the air, because in the winter concrete freezes and
breaks, because the flower’s stem broke,” he or she will nod sagely as though
your answer solved all problems and answered all questions. An older child will ask, “How does the water
make the sky blue? Why does concrete
crack when it freezes? Ice doesn’t crack
when it freezes. Why does breaking
the stem make the flower wilt?”
And a few years later that kid will challenge your answer -- “Are you
sure? How do you know?” But a three-year old simply absorbs what you
say as fact, incorporates it into his or her world-view, and moves on.
Confronted
with a laundry list of good deeds and commensurate rewards (or duas to say at
various occasions, or the evils of jinn, or the benefits of marriage, etc, etc,
etc) far too many Muslims react in the manner of a three-year old. We hungrily scan the page, seeking the reward
for this good deed, the punishment for that bad deed, soaking up the answers as
though they were indubitable fact and as though they could solve all individual
and global ills. Put something on a
sheet of paper, dress it up in a robe and turban and we think it represents
God's own Word! Let it drop from the
lips of a scholar, whether it makes sense or not, whether it has an authentic
source or not, and we would stake our very life on it.
Who
says so? Where did this information come
from? Is this accurate? These are the very first questions we should
ask, closely followed by “Why would the Prophet say this?” and “How can I apply
it to my life?” (For more on this topic,
see installment three, The Linguistic Literalism of Four-Year Olds.)
Even
if the email comes from a good friend or references a noted scholar, or the
page is distributed by the imam of our masjid, we should demand a modicum of
intellectual rigor from our scholars and from ourselves. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves --
and to God -- to determine if information we intend to incorporate into our
deen is actually from Prophet Muhammad or not.
Obviously, to accept any assertion that something is hadith, or from the
Qur’an without checking that it actually is, is intellectually irresponsible
and potentially disastrous for the accuracy one’s practice of Islam.
This
textual laxity not only allows wrong practices to seep into the religion, but
creates intellectual dependency and immaturity of thought process. The word of the scholar becomes the final
authority, not the words of the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad. The knowledge and understanding of the alim
relieves the individual of cultivating his or her own knowledge and
understanding. The uncritical acceptance
of what one is told reinforces an attitude of carelessness towards matters of
deen.
The
classical hadith scholars used specific terms for the precise manner in which
hadith were transmitted -- recited to the teacher, written with the teacher watching,
written and then read aloud to the teacher, etc. They only accepted narrations from people of
good character and did a great deal of research to determine the character of
various narrators. The exegetes
explained meaning based upon precise wordings.
They were not sloppy, making recommendations on almost accurate wordings
of Qur’an or hadith. Obviously, we
cannot all reproduce the efforts of Bukhari or Muslim (and it would be foolish
to do so), we cannot all have the command of Qur’anic Arabic of an Ibn Kathir
or a Suyuti, but we can approach our deen with the same sincerity, and the same
intellectual integrity that they did.
Until
the ummah matures intellectually, until the scholar’s opinion and the printed
page are no longer treated like Commands from Upon High, it is highly unlikely
that we will be able to escape the rigidity, extremism, and simple error in
religious practice that currently plague us.
¶ 9:33 AM
