Summary
Title: Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam
Author: Ram Swarup
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1591020174
Pro:
• Provides insight on a source of Muslims beliefs rarely given specific treatment
Con:
• An even longer book might have been nice - perhaps a sequel for other Hadith collections?
Description:
• Text and commentary from an authoritative Hadith collection
• Explains and important source of Muslim beliefs and traditions
• Shows the wide variety of issues Muslim scriptures address
Book Review
People’s interest in learning more about Islam has grown in recent years. The question is, do people know where to go in order to learn what they need to know? There is quite a lot of good secondary literature, but at some point people need to take a look at primary sources as well. Unfortunately, most of the information people get in both types of sources tends to revolve around the Qur’an — but that isn’t the only source of Muslim tradition and belief.
A second and often equally important source of beliefs in Islam is known as the Hadith. Hadith literally means “tradition,” and it constitutes for most Muslims the second set of religious scriptures — almost, but not quite as important as the Qur’an. Collected into authoritative books, these represent reports about the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate followers while he was alive.
Why did the Hadith develop? According to tradition, once Muhammad died, his followers may have still had the Qur’an, but they no longer had his personal, authoritative guidance. When a religious group is based solely on personal charisma, it has little chance of surviving the death of its founder. In order to continue, religious communities need some sort of legal and official framework. The Qur’an filled that role, but not enough — Muhammad himself was too personally active in the early development of the Muslim community in a way that Jesus, for example, could not have been.
What the community needed was an established, authoritative reference of tradition. They needed something to refer to when making decisions about the many issues which were not addressed in the Qur’an. This role was filled by the development of the Hadith. Unfortunately, Hadith collections are generally quite huge and involve matters which might be rather boring to the casual reader. How, then, is the non-Muslim to begin to understand what the Hadith has to say?
This is where Ram Swarup’s book Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam comes in. Swarup, a leading intellectual from India, explores the Sahih Muslim, one of the main Hadith collections encompassing over seven thousand traditions divided into more than one thousand chapters. Swarup quotes representative selections on topics like faith, purification, marriage, divorce, crime, punishment, and much more.
