The Re-Formers of
Islam
The Mas’ud Questions
© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995
SOURCE :http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/masudq3.htm
Question 3 Re-Forming Classical Texts
By Shayk Nuh Ha Mim Keller
In the 1409/1988 printing of this work, published by Dar al-Huda in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, under the inspection and approval of the Riyasa Idara al-Buhuth al-‘Ilmiyya wa al-Ifta’ or “Presidency of Supervision of Scholarly Studies and Islamic Legal Opinion,” the same section has been changed to agree with Ibn Taymiya’s view that setting out to visit the Prophet’s tomb (Allah bless him and give him peace) is disobedience. (It only becomes permissible, according to this point of view, if one intends visiting the mosque of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace).) The re-formed version reads as follows, italics showing the alterations made to Nawawi’s text:
The same printing has completely dropped nearly a half page of the section of tawassul (supplicating Allah through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)) when visiting the Prophet’s tomb—apparently to promote the Wahhabi doctrine that this is shirk or “assigning co-sharers to Allah.” They have attributed the above words to Imam Nawawi without mentioning that it has been altered in any way. This should not surprise Westerners, who have had before them Muhammad Muhsin Khan’s translation of Sahih al-Bukhari for some years now. In it, we find Bukhari’s heading about the effects of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace): “and of his hair, his sandals, and his vessels, of that which his Companions and others used to obtain blessings through after his death (yatabarraka bihi As-habuhu wa ghayruhum ba‘da wafatihi),” in which the words yatabarraka bihi have been rendered as “were considered as blessed things” in the English (Khan, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4.218). The Arabic verb tabarraka bihi signifies “He had a blessing; and he was, or became, blest; by means of him, or it” (Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, 1.193), or often, “he looked for a blessing by means of,” or “regarded as a means of obtaining a blessing from,” him or it (ibid.)—in either case actually obtaining, or hoping to obtain, a blessing by means of these things, a nuance quite different from the passive “were considered as blessed,” which does not entail any special benefit from them. Or consider the seventy-three-page “introduction” to volume one of this same translation, a tract that explains the Muslim Trinity: Tawhid al-Rububuyya, Tawhid al-Uluhiyya, and Tawhid al-Asma wa al-Sifat—the (1) Tawhid of Lordship, (2) Tawhid of Godhood, and (3) Tawhid of Names and Attributes. By way of preface to it, Dr. Khan notes that many Western converts enter Islam without knowing what belief in the Oneness of Allah really means. He clarifies that tawhid is not one; namely, to say and believe the shahada of Islam with complete conviction—as it was from the time of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) until the advent of Ibn Taymiya seven centuries later—as new converts might imagine, but must now be three in order to be one, and cannot be one without being three. While such logic may be already familiar to converts from Christianity, Imam Bukhari (d. 256/870) certainly never knew anything of it, and its being printed as an “introduction” to his work seems to me to qualify as “tampering with classical texts”—aside from being a re-form of traditional ‘aqida, in which Islam, in the words of the Prophet of Islam (Allah bless him and give him peace), “is to testify that there is no god except Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah . . .” (Sahih Muslim, 1.37: 8). Another example is found in the commentary of the famous Maliki scholar Ahmad Sawi (d. 1241/1825) on the Qur’anic exegesis Tafsir al-Jalalayn of Jalal al-Din Mahalli and Jalal al-Din Suyuti, in which he says of the verse “Truly, the Devil is an enemy to you, so take him as an enemy: he only calls his party to become of the inhabitants of the blaze” (Qur’an 35:6):
This passage is quoted from the ‘Isa al-Babi al-Halabi edition published in Cairo around the 1930s. It was also printed in its entirety in the Maktaba al-Mashhad al-Husayni edition (3.307–8) published in Cairo in 1939, which was reproduced by offset by Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi (3.307–8) in Beirut in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, the Salafi movement, or oil money, or some combination of the two, had generated enough of a market to tempt Dar al-Fikr in Beirut to offset the same old printing, but with a surreptitious change. In the third volume, part of the bottom line of page 307 and the top line of 308 have been whited out, eliminating the words “namely, a sect in the Hijaz called ‘Wahhabis,’” venally bowdlerizing the whole point of what the author is trying to say about the modern counterparts of the Kharijites in order to sell it to them. The deletion was virtually indistinguishable from an ordinary spacing mistake, coming as it does at the ends of the two pages, though Dar al-Fikr made up for any technical shortcomings in this respect in 1993 with a newly typeset four-volume version of Hashiya al-Sawi ‘ala al-Jalalayn, which its title page declares to be “a new and corrected (munaqqaha) printing.” The above passage appears on page 379 of the third volume with the same wording as the previous coverup, but this time in a continuous text, so no one would ever guess that Sawi’s words had been removed. Or consider the example from the two-volume Qur’anic exegesis of Abu Hayyan al-Nahwi (d. 754/1353), Tafsir al-nahr al-madd [The exegesis of the far-stretching river] condensed mainly from his own previous eight-volume exegesis al-Bahr al-muhit [The encompassing sea], arguably the finest tafsir ever written based primarily on Arabic grammar. Abu Hayyan, of Andalusion origin, settled in Damascus, knew Ibn Taymiya personally, and held him in great esteem, until the day that Barinbari (d. 717/1317) brought him a work by Ibn Taymiya called Kitab al-‘arsh [The book of the Throne]. There they found, in Ibn Taymiya’s own handwriting (which was familiar to Abu Hayyan), anthropomorphic suggestions about the Deity that made Abu Hayyan curse Ibn Taymiya until the day he died. This was mentioned by the hadith master (hafiz) Taqi al-Din Subki in his al-Sayf al-saqil (85). Abu Hayyan, in his own Qur’anic exegesis of Ayat al-Kursi (Qur’an 2:258) in surat al-Baqara, recorded something of what so completely changed his mind:
This is of interest not only because it documents (at the pen of one of Islam’s greatest scholars) that Ibn Taymiya had a “double ‘aqida,” one for the public, and a separate anthropomorphic one for an inner circle of initiates—but also because when Abu Hayyan’s work was first printed on the margin of his longer exegesis al-Bahr al-muhit in Cairo by Matba‘a al-Sa‘ada in 1910, the whole passage was deleted—intentionally, as the guilty party later confessed to Muhammad Zahid Kawthari, who quotes the above passage in a footnote to al-Sayf al-saqil and then says:
The deception was perpetrated anew when Abu Hayyan’s Tafsir al-nahr al-madd was printed on its own in Beirut with the same deletion by Dar al-Fikr in 1983, and was not rectified until Dar al-Janan and Mu’assasa al-Kutub al-Thaqafiyya in Beirut brought it out using original manuscripts of the work in 1987. I think these examples are sufficient to give a general idea of the process, though the motives may differ from case to case. And Allah knows best. |
