This is a clarification piece on how to understand problematic Hadiths or narrations and especially when they are not followed or implemented by the Muslims.

Hadith reports are often concise and to the point and do not indulge in extra complications as opposed to others, and keep the account crisp, to-the-point, and user-friendly. There are several examples of this. This user-friendliness of one era can cause confusion and misuse in another. The Hadith books many times recorded an incident in a concise manner and left out the surrounding aspects as it sufficed for the time. However, now people get new doubts and so one must understand the style of Hadith reports.

Another aspect of Hadith reports that one needs to understand is that they are at times compiled in scattered pieces. An incident with 10 points may be reported by one source with four points and another with five and another with one. Compiling them together will give the full picture. In our lives, we follow a similar approach as well. If you ask five people to describe a football/soccer match, they will share bits and pieces they found most fascinating with one starting from overtime and another one with some key goals and yet another person from another angle all together. Therefore, the scholars who have spent more than 30-40 years studying Islam need to be given their due importance and respect. What they clarify may appear to be against explicit texts, but they are not actually so.

To understand this idea, we have the example of Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) who instructed his son to divorce his wife. He was the closest companion of the Prophet (ﷺ) and his best friend and on apparent reading, it appears that a father can force his son to divorce his wife but that is not an Islamic ruling which the various schools of thought agree upon; they do not see that the son is forced to comply.

Another example to understand the idea is the statement of the Prophet (ﷺ) to a man: ‘you and your wealth are for your father’. When a man dies, his father is not his sole inheritor, but someone may misunderstand the Hadith. It could be a one-on-one discussion with someone within a context and we do not have sufficient details.

If there are 50 other narrations talking about a similar subject matter, all of these need to be seen together to form the bigger and proper picture, and if no picture is formed and an apparent text still contradicts the broader Islamic ruling, then we understand that the full context has not been documented. There is no contradiction, and the case is that of undocumented, missing context. One does not need to form a conclusion about missing information and the matter can be left at that.

We may come across some Hadiths speaking of death penalty for alcoholics but none of the schools of thought believe in this. The Prophet (ﷺ) said: ‘Verily, Allah will not let my nation agree upon misguidance’. The established schools of thought have not erred. The actual narration may have context, not available to us, spanning many years and/or it may be a kind of a figure of speech. We use this approach in our routine lives as well, such as someone saying ‘if I had it my way, I would slap people wearing tight skinny jeans’. He does not mean it and says it only to show his strong dislike for a certain fashion trend. Moreover, singling out this line may make him look narrow-minded and intolerant, but he may have said this statement in a two-hour long conversation.

Let’s take another example, although not the best one but it clarifies the picture: suppose we have a single line summary of an old baseball match that says ‘Mike Piazza killed it against the Yankees’. We know that there wasn’t an actual slaughter but someone who doesn’t know anything about baseball may assume otherwise. Moreover, even if we know about baseball, we don’t know for sure what the statement really means in proper detail.

We can safely conclude that an overall context is needed to understand narrations better and if no context could be found, and the text appears contradictory to the practice of scholars, we leave it at that knowing that there is an inherent limitation.

Indeed, Allah (ﷻ) knows best.