“In the absence of authentic evidence it would indeed be rash to attempt to express the most tentative opinion as to which parts of the hadith are the oldest original material, or even as to which of them date back to the generations immediately following the Prophet’s death.”
Ignaz Golziher, p. 2
Goldziher speaks in the first chapter of a factor that has confounded the task of preserving Muhammad’s original tafsir of the Qur’an (hadith), namely that the original matn has been embellished and obscured by his followers and their successors for roughly two centuries after his death. He states that it is therefore impossible to recover exactly what it is that Muhammad said, thereby lessening the absolute authority of the hadiths and causing them to resemble more closely the ambiguous passages of the Qur’an rather than the clear ones. In the same breath, however, Goldziher notes that there is solid evidence that the process of writing down hadiths (and the succession that established their authority) was not a late development, but was likely something that happened from the beginning.
If the written evidence that is available to us, though polluted, still contains the original account of Muhammad, that would theoretically allow it to be subject to historical-critical study in the same way that a New Testament scholar would study the redactional history of the Gospel of John or a liturgiologist would attempt to date developments in the text of a liturgical document. Attempts to study New Testament and early Christian liturgies in particular suffer from the ever-present possibility (and likelihood) that they were originally part of an oral tradition that was written down and solidified later. In such cases, it would be absolutely impossible to recover the earliest forms of the pre-written liturgies or narratives. But if what Goldziher was saying about writing down the hadiths is true, then the original words may still be contained within the texts as we have them today, and it would be theoretically possible to attempt to discern the most ancient layers.
Methods for doing such a thing would entail a process of dating redactions, which would require that the texts of the hadiths would be compared amongst themselves and with other texts from that area for the purpose of locating similarities in themes, linguistic usage, concerns of the time, etc. (In the New Testament, for example, one can attribute the ambiguity in St. Paul’s teachings on divorce in the Epistles and the Evangelists’ teachings in the Synoptic Gospels on the Stoic-Cynic controversy, and then date the authorship of that specific epistle or Gospel accordingly.) Perhaps there are confounding factors to this issue, but to attempt to do such a study would not appear to cause greater confusion about Muhammad’s words than already exists as a result of the additions and embellishments of his followers.
Paul Elhallal 