I recently read and reviewed Misquoting Muhammad by Jonathan Brown.
Overall I recommend it although it's quite wordy and verbiose at times. It's packed with a lot of well researched information.
Here's my review:
Academically rigorous yet ultimately trivial
It's impossible not to respect the level of academic rigor that's gone into this work. Unfortunately, the book lacks a committed conclusion.
What it does best is offer a buffet of ideas that highly nuance and refine discussions around various theological creeds, verses of the Quran, and hadith. It provides a meta-framework for understanding and interpreting Islam, religions, and religious scholasticism generally.
It's more a discussion and survey on the different ways traditionalists construct ideologies and belief systems to defend circular reasoning, canon, and unquestioned assumptions than it is any particular defense of hadith as canon in light of the strongest arguments from Quranist/Quran-alone positions or western criticism.
An effort to nuance a discussion when taken to an extreme sometimes results in a kind of obscurantism of principles. All facts are equally fact, but not all facts equally matter. It's worth narrowing down the most important principles at play in a matter for sake of being able to be decisive.
The book relativizes truth statements and in so doing justifies 'white' lies and sectarianism within the Islamic faith. It admits the problem and where the problem comes from but offers obscure relativist perspectives as an alternative to the obvious solution of reform in the manner of return to scripture as per Martin Luther.
The strongest and most decisive argument of the whole book, which seems to be a response both to Quran-alone and western criticism is the following excerpt:
"The loss of tradition had become political because, phrased differently, if the
accepted framework around a discussion is removed, any claim that then assumes the
presence of a framework is in actuality imposing it.
Born in the rubble of postmodernity, contemporary critics of liberalism note that Reason cannot be the judge that rules impartially from outside discourse. It is part of the discourse, and any transcendent throne claimed for it is a stealthy grab for power. Stanley Fish observed that Reason(s) 'always come from somewhere,' and it is clear that once you have stepped outside of a tradition or leveled its authority, you cannot in fairness invoke 'Reason' without admitting its aims and assumptions and convincing others
to accept them – precisely the unifying role that tradition used to perform."
If sound, this takes us back to square one and merely relativizes reformist, modernist, and western critical efforts.
But I would argue it's not even sufficient to do that.
From a Quranist perspective, the framework in question here has less to do with 'rationality' or 'reasonableness', and more to do with taking the claims of the Quran at face value, I.E believing what it says about itself. Is it consistent, or is it not? Is it complete and a sufficient guide, or is it not? Do we accept it as a criterion?
The reason why I say this book is ultimately trivial and relativistic is through its wide survey of the many different methodologies, hermeneutics, and principles at play, it fails to ultimately make value judgments on the basis of truth and consistency.
A Toyota Yaris and a Bugatti Divo are equally cars, in the sense that they are equally belonging to the category of 'car'. But they are not equal cars.
The truism that some methodology/framework/interpretation is needed, is only carelessly and imprecisely paired with the more serious and consequential notion that all methodologies/frameworks/interpretations are equal.
It's interesting but not compelling that some traditionalists have through hermeneutical acrobatics arrived at positions mirroring that of western secular critics or Quranists.
The long-term and comprehensive solution is not hermeneutical acrobatics or the embracing of minority Sunni scholar viewpoints, it's a revaluation of methodology and hadith as canon.
'Reasonableness' appears relative and flimsy in a microcosm, but it's evidently not relative or flimsy at the macro scale. An individual who is stubborn, unreasonable, and will not take advice may still have a good life and be prosperous for other reasons, for a while. It could be that he has come into a good inheritance and does not need to be particularly productive or responsible to have a good life.
But a civilization that is stubborn, unreasonable, and unwilling to take advice, will bear fruit reflective of that attitude in much more systemic and consistent ways.
The old adage is that the proof is in the pudding. It comes back to scripture where god says in Quran 13:11:
There are guardians over everyone, both before him and behind him, who guard him by Allah's command. Verily Allah does not change a people's condition unless they change their inner selves. And when Allah decides to make a people suffer punishment, no one can avert it.
