Sublime

The Sunna is composed of thousands upon thousands of stories, or hadith, that claim to recount Muhammad’s words and deeds, as well as those of the earliest Companions. As discussed in Chapter 3, as these hadith were passed down from generation to generation, they became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while, nearly every le

(For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.)

nearly one sixth of all “reliable” hadith can be traced back to Muhammad’s wife Aisha.

While some hadith may in fact contain an authentic historical core that can be traced back to the Prophet and his earliest Companions, the truth is that the Sunna is a far better reflection of the opinions of the ninth-century Ulama than of the seventh-century Ummah. After all, to quote Jonathan Berkey, “It was not Muhammad himself who defined the

Born in the deserts of Najd to a devout Muslim family, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab displayed his religious zeal at a young age. Recognizing his talent for Quranic study, his father sent him to Medina to study with the disciples of Shah Wali Allah, who had only recently launched his campaign against Indian Sufism. Abd al-Wahhab was deeply influenced

What seems certain, however, is that Muhammad, like all the prophets before him, wanted nothing to do with God’s calling. So despondent was he about the experience that his first thought was to kill himself.

Added to this group is the Shi‘ite school of law founded by Ja‘far as-Sadiq (d. 765), which will be dealt with in the following chapter. The