Ajiss34 3 Sample

VOLUME 34 SUMMER
W 2017 NUMBER 3
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC SOCIAL SCIENCES

In this issue
AMERICAN JOURNAL
OF
ISLAMIC
ARTICLES
A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy: An Annotated
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Translation and Analysis of al-Suyutis Attaining the
Hoped-for in Service of the Messenger (s)
Jonathan Brown
Can Islam Accommodate Homosexual Acts? SPECIAL ISSUE
Quranic Revisionism and the Case of Scott Kugle
Mobeen Vaid ISLAM AND HOMOSEXUALITY
REVIEW ESSAYS
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCE, SYMPOSIUM, AND PANEL REPORTS
VOLUME 34 NUMBER 3 SUMMER

I
W 2017
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT

ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page a
Editor-in-Chief Editor
AbdulHamid A. AbuSulayman Ovamir Anjum
International Institute of Islamic Thought University of Toledo
Assistant Editor
Basit Kareem Iqbal
University of California, Berkeley
Copy Editor
Jay Willoughby
Editorial Board
Hussein A. Agrama Andrew F. March
University of Chicago Yale University
Mehmet Asutay Shuruq Naguib
Durham University Lancaster University
Jonathan A. C. Brown Ahmed El Shamsy
Georgetown University University of Chicago
Marcia Hermansen Ousmane Kane
Loyola University Harvard Divinity School
Sherman A. Jackson Ermin Sinanovi
University of Southern California International Institute of Islamic Thought
International Advisory Board

Khurshid Ahmad Mehdi Golshani
Akbar Ahmed M. Kamal Hassan
Manzoor Alam Mohammad H. Kamali
Khalid Blankinship Enes Karic
Katherine Bullock Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Charles Butterworth James P. Piscatori
Ahmet Davutoglu Anne Sofie Roald
John L. Esposito Tamara Sonn
Sayyid M. Syeed
A publication of
The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
Mailing Address:
All correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at:
AJISS, P.O. Box 669, Herndon, VA 20172-0669 USA
Phone: 703-471-1133 Fax: 703-471-3922
www.iiit.org www.ajiss.org
ajiss@iiit.org
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page B
Note to Contributors
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) is a double-blind, peer-reviewed in-
terdisciplinary and international journal that publishes a wide variety of scholarly research on
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AJISS is indexed in the following publications: a) U.M.I. (16 mm microfilm, 35 mm microfilm,

105 mm microfiche for article copies of 1990 issues and after); b) Religion Index One: Period-
icals and Index to Book Reviews in Religion (1987 and after). These indexes are part of the
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lected material is indexed in the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. Opinions
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International Institute of Islamic Thought

ISSN 0887-7653
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VOLUME 34 SUMMER 2017 NUMBER 3
AMERICAN JOURNAL
OF
ISLAMIC SOCIAL SCIENCES
A double-blind and peer-reviewed

interdisciplinary and international journal
SPECIAL ISSUE
Islam and Homosexuality

ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page C
CONTENTS
Editorial ................................................................................................................v
Articles
Translation and Analysis of al-Suyutis Attaining the Hoped-for
in Service of the Messenger (s)
Jonathan Brown ..................................................................................................1
Can Islam Accommodate Homosexual Acts?
Mobeen Vaid .....................................................................................................45
Review Essays
Islams Foundational Equality
David Raeburn Finn .......................................................................................................98
Timeless or Timely? Vantage Points of Mosque Design
Tammy Gaber ................................................................................................................113
Book Reviews
Islamophobia and Racism in America
(by Erik Love)
Todd M. Michney ..........................................................................................................125
Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe
(by Daniel G. Knig)
Eyad Abuali...................................................................................................................129
Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism
(by Tristan James Mabry)
Brendan Newlon............................................................................................................132
The Emergence of Modern Shiism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran
(by Zackery Heern)
Liyakat Takim ................................................................................................................135
Disagreements of the Jurists: A Manual of Islamic Legal Theory
(by al-Qadi al-Numan; ed. and trans. Devin Stewart)
Yasmin Amin..................................................................................................................137
Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine
(by Catherine Besteman)
Saulat Pervez.................................................................................................................141
The Muslimah Who Fell to Earth: Personal Stories by Canadian Muslim Women
(by Saima S. Hussain, ed.)
Katherine Bullock .........................................................................................................145
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page D
Conference, Symposium, and Panel Reports

The Islamic Association of Social and Educational Professions in Germany
Paul M. Kaplick ............................................................................................................149
Current Trends in the Middle East
Muhammed Haron .......................................................................................................151
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page v
Editorial
Elements of a Prophetic Voice of

Dissent and Engagement
In your hands is another thematic issue of AJISS, one that consists of two main
contributions that address the Islamic traditions prohibition of the homosexual
act. Jonathan A. C. Browns essay analyzes the authenticity of pertinent hadith
traditions, whereas Mobeen Vaids essay explores the Quranic perspective.
Both articles had their origin in presentations by a number of scholars at a col-
loquium held at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon,
VA, on November 1-2, 2015. Although an earlier version of Vaids essay is
available online, its original intent and thematic complementarity with Browns
essay on hadith merit its inclusion here. Together, they make crucial contribu-
tions to the scholarship that has reopened the question of how the Islamic scrip-
tural and jurisprudential traditions view this particular sexual practice. In the
same workshop, I presented my reflections on the stakes of the rise of new pro-
homosexual (or at least neutral) laws and cultural formations for Muslim schol-
arship as well as politics, which I share in a modified form in this editorial
essay. In keeping with this issues theme of sexual ethics, we also include David
Finns critical and extensive evaluation of Aysha Hidayatullahs important Fem-
inist Edges of the Quran (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Scholarship does not always need to address burning issues; however,
scholarship on Islam is often unable to provide the quiet anonymity that serious
scholars often crave. What is at stake for American Muslims in the wake of
the U.S. Supreme Courts 2015 Obergefell decision on gay-marriage, the me-
teoric rise of homosexual assertiveness over the last few decades in the country,
and the sea-change lets label it homonormativity in cultural and intel-
lectual norms that this decision has ushered in? As Muslims around the world
are avid consumers and targets of American culture, norms, policies, and wars
on terror not to mention presidential sermons about the essence of Islam
the repercussions of its culture and norms in this era of globalization and Amer-
ican hegemony are not limited to American Muslims. Yet no one is more di-
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vi The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
rectly affected by the former, nor better placed to most intimately understand
and critically evaluate its imperatives or exports. IIITs aforementioned collo-
quium intended to do precisely that.
This editorial seeks to frame the political as well as religious issues raised
by homonormativity and suggest why and how Islamic norms, despite their
origins in what was, as Dreher and his likes have argued (see below), a radically
different time and place, remain relevant. As a minority residing under non-Is-
lamic legal norms, Western Muslims may be justified in disarticulating their
political and legal stances from their moral, cultural, and religious lives. With-
out claiming to offer political advice or critique, I wish to highlight the stakes
involved in Western Muslims support for or opposition to same-sex marriage
and in the arguments proffered for these positions.
One index of the stakes of the Obergefell decision can be found in the
sobering words of Rod Dreher, an American Christian and editor of The Amer-
ican Conservative magazine, who writes in his bestselling The Benedict Option,
The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties
for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been slowly but
steadily happening for years. The U.S. Supreme Courts Obergefell decision
declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of
religious conservatism. It was the moment that the Sexual Revolution tri-
umphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the
1960s, came to an end. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about
the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable
prejudice and in a growing number of cases, punishable. The public
square has been lost.1
Whether this is all mere hyperbole remains to be seen; however, the unde-
niable fact that a large number of conservative Americans felt this way served
as one of several reasons why many voted against the Democrats in the fateful
2016 presidential election. The ongoing electoral upset is epoch-making indeed,
and yet it only reinforces trends long underway in American politics toward
cultural liberalism and political conservatism. After citing the declining reli-
giosity among young Americans (one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put re-
ligion aside), Dreher turns to those who claim to be religious and finds even
greater cause for concern. A 2005 sociological study of American teenagers
from a wide variety of backgrounds found the most common religious views,
regardless of the formal affiliation and denomination, to be a mushy pseudore-
ligion that the researchers labeled Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). It
has five basic tenets:
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Editorial vii
A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human
life on earth;
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the
Bible and by most world religions;
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself;
God does not need to be particularly involved in ones life, except when
he is needed to resolve a problem; and
Good people go to heaven when they die.
The author highlights the unsettling vindication of these results in the experi-
ences of American Christians at large: America has lived a long time off its
thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War [t]hat is all finally
being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and lib-
eral individualism.2
The decades-long ideological shift has made homosexuality not merely an
issue of personal choice, but also the newest frontier of human rights, the de-
cisive definition of what it means to be on the right side of history. Late-modern
capitalism and its favored ideology of liberal humanism have finally moved to
banish the last remnants of interdiction, sanctity, and prohibition from the sov-
ereign path of individual desire.
But, one might ask, have not Muslims in the West lived in substantial num-
bers for nearly half a century alongside norms that violate their own? Why
should Western Muslim intellectuals and ulama not treat this recently estab-
lished homonormativity as just another such norm? What is it about this issue
that poses a greater challenge to people of faith than, say, general sexual promis-
cuity and non-marital sexual relations?
Some reasons may be suggested as to why the stakes are higher. Homo-
normativity has arguably sealed the fate of the founding blocks of the American
society that had been based upon a bedrock of Christian (lately dubbed Judeo-
Christian) norms and that have been under attack since the 1960s.3 Barack
Obama, who presided over this sea-change during his presidency, expressed
the uneasiness of this shift well when he wrote, on the same page of his memoir
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, our
law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-
Christian tradition and yet Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a
Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a nation
of nonbelievers (p. 218). One may note the paradox reflected in these words:
The same category of non-Christian that makes room for nonbelievers also
affords breathing space to Muslims.
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viii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
There is little point in disputing the fact that the opposition to homonor-
mativity is often accompanied by an inveterate hatred for Islam and Muslims,
an all-encompassing cruelty to all who are not white males, and both planet-
threatening and willful ignorance. Lone voices (such as Professor Robert
George, see below), notwithstanding, the complicit silence of American con-
servatives is deafening. To Muslims who simply wish to avoid ending up in
concentration camps or that American bombs would stop incinerating ever
more people and referring to them as collateral damage, allying with the right
appears suicidal. Fateful ironies loom over any options American Muslims may
adopt. Pious Muslims cannot avoid seeing the Faustian overtones of the bargain
they have struck with the left, often by simply keeping silent. The legacy of
black resistance and the civil rights movement, whose masterful deployment
fuelled the politics of gay rights, also remains American Muslims only haven.
Yet what has made the United States more hospitable to Muslims at a cultural
level than Europe is precisely its lingering Christianity and conservatism, the
same forces that, in their current forms, are bent on annihilating them.
Homonormativity aggravates the distance between Islams foundational
socio-familial makeup and the American legal establishment, such that devout
Muslims will be even more likely (whether individually or communally) to
construct a cocoon for themselves, thereby disengaging from the larger society
as the Orthodox Jews and the Amish have done. The assimilated Muslim main-
stream will then become increasingly torn between Islam and the United States,
a situation that can only lead them down the path of marginalization and alien-
ation familiar to European Muslims. All of Germanys Muslim MPs voted in
favour of same-sex marriage, reads the title of a news-piece from the Inde-
pendent, whereas German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian
Democratic Union, has faced criticism for opposing the bill and announcing
that marriage is between a man and a woman.4
To many religious American Muslims, the new sexual and gender norms
heighten the cost of integration. Whereas anti-racism has been wholeheartedly
Islamized as a cause that creates cross-cultural connections and anti-sexism
has been embraced in a qualified form, normalizing homosexuality could shake
the very foundations of Islamic moral community unless, of course, this new
chasm is met by the creation of sustainable and peaceful prophetic intellectual
and counter-cultural movements and alliances.
Apart from pro-gay Muslim activists, two kinds of Muslim opinion leaders
have encouraged indifference to the countrys shifting sexual mores and gender
norms, which I labeled above as homonormativity: (1) those who strategi-
cally prioritize the communitys civil rights over religious concerns and (2)
those who postulate a sharp separation between the political sphere and social
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page ix
Editorial ix
mores and who hope to be outside even while being inside the country,
perhaps even advocating that the community selectively disengage from the
larger culture. Some versions of this option rely on a logic of pragmatic reci-
procity. Others have invoked the pluralistic model of pre-modern Islamic tol-
erance of or indifference to the objectionable practices of other communities
to argue that a similar indifference may be justified in this case.
The presuppositions underlying this logic invite further questions. Many
scholars of the modern state point out its ability to penetrate and reshape its
societys culture; modern states are not empty political shells, but active agents
that shape norms. Supreme Court decisions are not merely temporary dispute
resolutions between opposing groups governed by legal formalism, but are ac-
tual articulations of norms based on political views that, unless actively chal-
lenged, define ethics and morality for American society.5 Unlike the pre-modern
Islamic world, in which society governed itself through a communally
grounded legal tradition that communities could interpret and negotiate, the
modern state governs the individual inside and out. Such critics argue that the
role of law, culture, and state in the United States cannot be wished away and
that the pre-modern Islamic posture of political apathy, which perhaps once
made sense in the context of legally pluralistic and minimally intrusive gover-
nance, cannot be used to justify Muslim indifference to these tectonic shifts in
the American landscape.
It is no wonder, then, that for the vast majority of American Muslim indi-
viduals and institutions, American cultural norms are the backdrop and justifi-
catory framework within which Islamic norms are reformed and selected, and
not the other way around. According to one recent poll, for instance, 42% of
American Muslims showed support for gay marriage.6 A 2007 PEW poll re-
vealed that 27% of American Muslims supported homosexuality as a lifestyle
and that 61% opposed it. According to the same poll, 50% of Muslims were
unsure as to whether the Quran was literally true. Another survey put the num-
ber of American-born Muslims who abandon Islam at 23 percent. All else being
equal, this rate of loss, about half that of Christians, will in all likelihood in-
crease in the next generation due to greater assimilation.7
A passive acceptance of homonormativity among conservative Muslims
(as among Christians) may be accompanied by vague hopes of a reversal of
trends or by a pessimistic view that, morally speaking, the United States is a
lost cause, that it is fast traversing the path of decadence already trod by Europe
and that there is no stopping it. Regardless, those concerned with the effects of
American foreign policy abroad and with political and social justice at home
find little choice but to align themselves with the left. Alternatively, some con-
servative Muslims may ally themselves with conservative Americans in their
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x The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
moral dissent against the dissolution of sexual and social mores. Princeton Uni-
versity professor and influential Catholic intellectual Robert P. George is a rare
and unheeded advocate of such an alliance with American Muslims.8 A healthy
development of principled conservative interfaith discourse at a political level
might have helped temper the rights antipathy toward Islam. The recent swing
of American politics in the ultra-right direction appears to have dampened any
such hopes for the time being.
***
In addressing the challenges raised by homonormativity and the emergence of
those Muslims who advocate for it, scholars must explore a number of inter-
related fronts. The traditional Islamic case against sodomy, conventionally un-
derstood as being unanimous, needs to be explored afresh at both the legal and
ethico-philosophical levels. But the applicability of these norms to the phe-
nomenon of contemporary homosexuality requires great caution. In order
to make a compelling moral and ethical case for the continued relevance
and soundness of Islams norms, scholars must examine the historical condi-
tions that enabled homosexualitys rise as well as the context, meaning, and
implications of the relevant pre-modern prohibitions. Finally, such scholarship
cannot disregard the human cost of whatever conclusion it reaches or recom-
mendations it makes, and must consider the pastoral and political strategies
that Muslims can use to respond to this new homonormativity in an ethical,
compassionate, and effective fashion. The two contributions featured in this
issue, focused as they are on the exegetical task, are important steps in an on-
going discourse.
In broaching the challenges involved in formulating Muslim intellectual,
political, and social responses to homonormativity, we must recognize that tra-
ditions of faith in God are tied to divine interdictions whose reasons, they be-
lieve, are not always discernible to the human intellect. These interdictions and
the social order they envision stand in the way of modernitys evisceration of
all limits limits not just on sexual conduct but also the environment; con-
sumption; aesthetics and beauty; the human body; the realm of passions, de-
sires, and emotions; and interpersonal ethics. Catholics call it the natural law;
Islamic law has notions of firah and a natural order of ease and human felicity
that is believed to be built into the Sharia.9 But this divinely ordained and thus
natural social order (a contradiction in secular terms), in which marriage is
tied to procreation, chastity, and honor, and, more broadly, the virtues of self-
restraint, humility, and charity are desirable, is fundamentally at odds with the
political and economic order of unbridled self-interest and systematic trans-
gression that defines capitalism (as many economic philosophers from Adam
Smith to J. Maynard Keynes10 have reiterated).
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Editorial xi
The conditions of late-capitalist modernity, sometimes called postmoder-

nity, are structurally suited to such transgression because once projects of tran-
scending natural limits (from the bio-technological refashioning of humans to
cloning and age-defying technologies) are normalized, any ethical and creedal
system grounded in respecting those natural limits is made to seem irrelevant
and irrational. If procreation is undesirable for a planet that is already held to
be overpopulated, a lifestyle that seeks pleasure without procreation, whether
heterosexually or homosexually, is preferred. Similarly, where a secular welfare
state bureaucratically manages all insurances and goods previously furnished
by God, the family and community, ranging from laws and guidance to safety
nets, marriage and family become inexplicable burdens. Put differently, homo-
normativity is structurally related not only to ethical and religious decline and
the political success of a vocal minority, but also to the fundamental dynamics
of late-modern politics and economy.
Muslim thinkers have been only too willing to rethink Islam in a way de-
signed to fit into the (often seemingly erratic) developments of the twentieth
century, first the welfare state and then neoliberalism, rather than effectively
questioning these developments. This post-hoc approach to change is a result,
I argue, of the lack of a political philosophy that could help them envision the
larger interests of Islam and its community and help replace the tired language
of catching up with the times with discourses better grounded in Islams own
vision. Note that I do not mean here merely the maqid-based approach to
fiqh, which although certainly helpful, in the absence of further checks and bal-
ances, can equally be used to justify the instrumentalization of Islamic law for
any externally imposed ends. If fiqh chooses not to theorize political life in a
fashion grounded in a coherent vision, then it nonetheless becomes politicized
but in a way that is reactionary and ethically irrelevant.
The Limits of Consent and the Autonomy of the Self

The key issue underpinning homonormativity is consent. Any kind of sex is
ultimately permissible, under this vision, so long as it is consensual. Consider
the advice given by professionals to those who suffer from virtuous pe-
dophilia: to exercise restraint, remain virtuous, and not act on their desire.11
Thus, the concepts of self-control, abstinence, refraining from acting out ones
desire, and living without sexual fulfillment until ones death are not foreign
to the liberal world. What makes this case different from homosexuality, how-
ever, is the presumption that children are incapable of expressing consent. And
yet intractable philosophical as well as legal problems continue to afflict the
conceptualization of consent.12 As feminist and political theorist Carole Pate-
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xii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
man argued in her The Sexual Contract (1988) and ever since, the very notion
of consent becomes meaningless if neither the structural factors (e.g., politics
and economy) nor the contractual limitations that individuals place upon them-
selves are considered.
In the liberal account, consent is an expression of the human self that
mysterious entity which in the modern secular world cannot be judged but
which judges all things. Yet the self also has a history. The pre-modern religious
self (nafs, in the Islamic tradition) was thought to be both the source of all
desire and also an object that one had to discipline and cultivate. Human desires
were either good or bad; they could be judged by their singular creator, master,
and sustainer. Good desires were natural, part of ones firah, and bad ones
came from the Devil and had to be resisted. But in nineteenth-century Europe,
a number of modernitys prophets (from Darwin and Nietzsche to Freud and
Weber) killed God to their satisfaction and discovered a new one: the human
self, which is supreme and sovereign.
For Kant, the self is autonomous because not only does it choose to act in
accord with what is right, but it also defines or discovers for itself what is right.
Nietzsche saw through this charade, for once there was no God or God became
irrelevant to the discovery of morality (as Kant would have it), the self was
both free and inscrutable. Nietzsche thus reasonably declared that all declara-
tions of good and evil and all judgments related to desire were baseless. He
taught that all ethics were a tale cooked up by the slaves and the weak to keep
the few true men, the supermen, chained. It is often acknowledged that there
can be no morality without God. But what is less understood is that with God
there was no inscrutable self, that the self is governed territory. And precisely
because the self is governable, there was no need for the sovereign modern
state and its projects of refashioning the self. The self was governable under a
regime of beliefs and norms that addressed and directed it. According to the
Quran there was nothing worse than the unrestrained self (haw), for it is the
playground of the Devil.
Freud, arguably the greatest prophet of modern unbelief, freed the self
from God by theorizing it in terms of a repressed, inscrutable desire, just as
Gods prophets had explained the human nafs and its origin: the divine breath
(r). Freud taught that the self was a world unto itself, only a tiny fraction of
which comprised discursive reason. He used the analogy of a vast city under
the sway of barbarians, only a small castle of which has been conquered by
modern science and examined by objective discourse. Only the tip of the ice-
berg was known to us. Our desires came out of an inscrutable world, the id,
that could neither be judged nor disciplined because no knowledge or agency
could be superior to the human self.
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Editorial xiii
This is the first element of consent an expression of the sovereign self

or psyche that could only have been posited and sustained in a Godless world.
Within this world, human desires (ahw) cannot be judged. Elsewhere,
whether in Aristotelianism, Thomism, or Islam, the self is there to be judged,
disciplined, and trained, whether according to rational or revelational principles.
This is why homosexuality could not have existed as a selfs identity in the
pre-modern world: In its place, only an assemblage of desires and acts could
be found, already judged by scripture and religious traditions as an abomina-
tion. Even in the Greek world, Plato considered male-male sex unnatural de-
spite its immense popularity; whether it was good or bad was determined by
whether it was natural and good, not simply because it was an irrepressible ex-
pression of the self. This is also why Christians and Muslims could relatively
easily integrate Greek ethical philosophy, because despite having a radically
different theology it did not contradict the Abrahamic notion of the human self
as teachable, as a site of the battle between good and evil.
Of course, the secular self does not automatically lead to homonormativity
in twenty-first-century America. Certain political and economic conditions of
modernity that can be best captured as late-capitalism have led to a world in
which desire reigns supreme and the conditions of excessive affluence in win-
ner societies never mind the enormous corresponding deprivation in the
losing societies provide the context in which inscrutable desires could be
properly worshipped; not merely satisfied, but idolized, legalized, and infinitely
extended and explored. And why not, for what else is there in a world that has
lost its God and its raison dtre? After having demolished the community and
the extended family, the biological and nuclear family is merely the latest fron-
tier in the march of capitalism. Whatever else may be said about capitalism, it
is inconceivable without secularism, but (like nationalism) it has often been
fueled by foolish religious fervor, passion, or discipline.13
The non-liberal alternative to the modern, capitalist self was the Marxist
self a place that, while awash with passion for equality and revenge, was fun-
damentally empty. Capitalism can tolerate a religion that restricts itself to man-
aging the poor, fueling its ideals, justifying its winners and losers, and/or
quenching its guilt. But Marxism, bent on ideological consistency and purity,
refused to traffic in even this nominal religion. Marxism, ultimately more mod-
ern and rational than capitalism, would fall with the rise of postmodernity, a
condition best seen as a continuation or logical extension of, rather than a re-
jection of, modernity.
Unlike capitalism, which promotes greed or expanding desire as a principle
and thus leaves the self to freely (liberally) choose its own myriad means of
satisfaction and extension (limited only by the infinitely disputable principle
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xiv The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
of no-harm), the Marxist self sought to limit itself by its dogma of materialism
and the desires of which it approved. Having vanquished its nemesis, late cap-
italism has now overcome politics and democracy as well. The task of man-
ufacturing consent, to use Noam Chomskys well-known phrase, may have
been pioneered by the nation-state in times of war, but global capitalism, in its
current neoliberal phase, has dwarfed states and taken over the task of manag-
ing mass desires while deepening the illusion of individual choice and freedom.
A world set against divine interdictions and sanctions has proven unsustainable
not only in the spiritual but also in the material sense, leading us ever faster to-
ward an economic and ecological apocalypse.
The Limits of Historicism and Social Construction

It is widely acknowledged that whereas same-sex sexual activity has been
recorded in nearly all past societies, homosexuality, the idea that certain per-
sons are to be identified by their sexual preference, on the grounds that this is
a fundamental part of their identity, is socially constructed and historically
novel. Furthermore, whereas the biological and cultural bases of such desire
are debated, science has returned empty-handed from its quest for a gay
gene. According to the new tawl, however, the results are carefully couched
in a postmodern framework to draw our attention to the constructedness of
all categories.
That homosexuality is a cultural construct as opposed to a biological con-
struct does not mean that it is based on something other than a real, strongly
felt, desire. But as Imam al-Ghazali said, intention, the basis and determinant
of all actions, is semi-voluntary at any given instance. In other words, one
cannot instantly purify and simply will to be as pious as one wishes. Our pas-
sional constitution is comparable to our physical one; just as one builds muscle
over a long period of time via a process that depends on training, discipline,
diet, as well as other environmental and genetic factors, so is our emotional
make-up multi-dimensional and only semi-voluntary. From an individual and
instantaneous perspective, however, the source of ones desire may appear
moot. The misery of a pious homoerotic individual may indeed be great and
is definitely worthy of compassion and support, but one must also be aware
of the deployment of such tropes in accounts that are, in fact, key to construct-
ing homonormativity.
Aside from homoerotic desire, which has been documented in almost every
society, the homosexual identity that fortifies it as a right is a modern construc-
tion. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault famously shows that Western soci-
etys views on sex have undergone a major shift over the past few centuries.
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Editorial xv
Same-sex relationships and desires certainly existed before but homosexuality

was never considered a biological type or social identity. Besides Foucault,
various historians have argued that the idea of a homosexual role and stereo-
typical behavior emerged in late-seventeenth-century England.14
Psychologists, at that time still working under the remnants of Christian
morality but without Christian belief, sought to replace religion and super-
stition and to categorize all untidy phenomena systematically. In this quest,
they recast sodomy as a disorder (seen as harmful to the family, which was
then regarded as an indispensable engine of national progress). When such
vestigial Christian moralism came under fire, homosexuality became a new
normal, an identity to which some people were simply biologically wired.
Later on, Foucault established the relative novelty (and thus historical con-
tingency) of both the idea that our desires reveal a fundamental truth about
who we are and the conviction that we have an obligation to seek out that
truth and express it.15
More broadly, postmodernist critique opposes not only sexual truths about
oneself, but also truth in general. Religious truths or religious differentiation
of gender roles are thus no less constructed than homosexuality. In other words,
the postmodern case for homonormativity argues not that it is an essential part
of ones being, but that since there is no essential norm or truth or self, and thus
no rational obligation to discipline the self, homonormativity is just as good or
bad as any other option.16
Historians of Muslim societies tell a similar story about the wide attestation
of homosexual behavior, but also the absence of anything like contemporary
homosexual identity. Khaled al-Rouayheb shows that in the traditional Muslim
world, lustful or romantic behavior toward beardless boys was quite common.17
He quotes countless testimonies to the spread of sodomy and pederasty, to
which one may add the following from al-Aqhisari, a zealous seventeenth-cen-
tury Ottoman reformer who wrote that
In this time, sodomy [Michot translates this as homosexuality] has spread

in this Muhammadan community and expanded among its Arabs and its non-
Arabs, its learned ones and its ignorant ones, its elite and its commonality. It
has reached such a point that they are proud of it and blame someone who
has no beardless friend (amrad), speak evil of him, and say that he is not a
human (adami) and has no taste (madhaq).18
Such accounts, even when corrected for some reformist exaggeration,

serve to call into question the widespread pious romanticization of pre-modern
Islamic societies. In particular, the reference to the learned ones among the
pederasts is significant. Remarkably, despite all the incentives to do so and the
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xvi The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
power of custom in Islamic law, the ulama never justified this practice. In fact,
denying its prohibition was considered unbelief by consensus, and disagree-
ments revolved only around such issues as whether someone who permitted
sodomy with a male slave was a believer or should be excommunicated not
for practicing it, but for believing that it was permissible!19
Although pederasty was at times widespread, especially among the elite,
those who engaged in such behavior never claimed to be a distinct type of in-
dividual with distinctive desires. The pious simply deemed them sinners. One
might say that Muslims saw this behavior in the same way as drinking wine;
there was never a question about its impermissibility, even as some or even
many, indulged in it.
But what does this argument about the historicist construction of social
categories entail for the Muslim present? Some use an exaggerated dichotomy
between modern homosexuality and pre-modern sodomy to deny the applica-
bility of the Quranic prohibition of homosexuality.
[Al-Rouayhebs] seminal work and that of Dr. Scott Kugle clearly indicates
that by excluding women and those who do not indulge [in?] the act of anal
intercourse, the category of mabun does not define queer individuals. When
will conservative Muslim leaders recognize that paraphrasing legal texts is
not helpful today? Muslim academic Dr. Kecia Ali has indicated that past ex-
egetes and jurists addressed superfluous desire that could be channeled to-
wards women instead of the exclusive innate orientation towards member of
the same sex.
Past exegetes and jurists operated in the context of age and status asym-
metrical relationships between unequal partners. The 14th century exegete
Ibn Kathir noted that Muslim leaders, jurists and memorizers of the Quran
were complicit in liwat anal intercourse inflicted on males that included
youth, slaves, or those classified as mabuns.20
Based on the conjecture that the Quran and medieval jurists were con-
cerned with condemning the homosexual act primarily, if not exclusively, due
to the absence of consent, in terms of its being an abuse of power between un-
equal partners, and given that contemporary homosexuals feel an exclusive
innate orientation toward member of the same sex, this argument suggests
that the divine judgment expressed in scripture from the Torah to the Quran
and Hadith is simply outdated. The basis of this unusually harsh scriptural judg-
ment, we are told, was the absence of consent and the subsequent humiliation
attached to the inferior party. Vaids essay challenges, at great length, the spec-
ulation that truly felt inclination was precluded from the Islamic or Biblical
classifications of crimes or acts. My concern is with the historical element of
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Editorial xvii
the claim that the nature of pederasty condemned by pre-modern religious tra-
ditions is entirely different from the modern, consensual, or uniquely involun-
tary urges of a homosexual person. I have already pointed out the difficulty
if not the actual impossibility of pinning down consent. We have every reason
to think that consent is also socially constructed, and that a class or race of peo-
ple can be conditioned to accept and even demand a particular kind of treatment
that would be seen as denigrating in other cultures.
The politics of desire and consent remains complicated. For instance, some
of those who self-identify as homosexual claim to choose to be who they are
even when reprimanded by advocates of homonormativity that such admissions
are politically inconvenient.21 The primacy of the desiring self and individual-
ism that center the idea of consent are certainly modern; however, we have no
way to preclude the possibility that some pre-modern individuals who served
as passive partners enjoyed or felt naturally inclined toward such a relationship.
More importantly, if scripture and tradition had so harshly condemned sodomy
only because it meant degradation for the passive partner, or only because the
latters consent was socially or structurally conditioned and hence not fully
fledged, the same should have been said of concubinage or other heterosexual
relationships that scripture did sanction. But clearly rape, which is universally
condemned in all traditional law as an act of illegitimate intercourse, is cate-
gorically distinct from the case of legitimate but unequal relations, for both the
Old Testament and the Quran permit sexual relations with ones concubines.
Whatever behavior or politics one wishes to endorse today, the Biblical and
Quranic judgment on sodomy cannot be chalked up to the passive partners
degradation or lack of consent.
We now turn to the class of arguments indebted to a hard Foucauldian
(i.e., strong social constructivist) approach to conceptual history, one that pos-
tulates the social construction and hence the deconstructibility of all norms.
When applied to this case, the argument effectively claims that the concept of
male-male sex was identical enough through the 2,500 years that separated
the prophets Lot and Muhammad, peace upon them, that the Quran, the
Sunna, and the subsequent tradition clearly sustained the Torahs judgment
against it. Yet once early modern psychologists in Europe invented the cate-
gory of homosexuality as social type several centuries ago, the divine judg-
ment suddenly became ineffective, outdated, irrelevant, and/or inapplicable.
According to this view, notions of sex changed significantly only once in
recorded history: in early modern Europe.
Implausible as this may sound, the argument is of a piece with a larger cat-
egory of claims concerning whether divine norms can survive significant con-
ceptual change in history. The post-structuralist, historicist, or deconstructionist
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xviii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
trend in conceptual history popularized since Nietzsche and then Foucault is,
in itself, quite useful as a partial tool, a lens through which one can interpret
enormously complex developments in human history and that has successfully
exposed the universalist pretensions of modernity and positivism. In this view,
all concepts have histories or genealogies. But in its strong form this view leads
not only to nihilism, but also undoes itself (i.e., every claim of construction is
itself a construction). Even atheists are more attuned to truth and in agreement
that it is worth searching for than pure constructionists, who, as existentialists,
consider the idea of a true God too superfluous to even refute.
According to this strong version of social constructivism, all concepts are
in flux and socially constructed: the afterlife, good and evil, and the very notion
of the human being all have histories. But and crucially since nothing sur-
vives historical conceptual ruptures, no religion revealed in the past can affect
any meaning or authority outside this historical flux. The notion of one om-
nipotent and omniscient God, in the historicists view, is the product of the so-
called axial age.
A weaker version of social constructivism would hold that certain types
of concepts (say, metaphysical ones) can perhaps survive historical disconti-
nuities, but not social institutions. In other words, specific Quranic laws may
be deemed outdated without invalidating its general imperatives. This view
can yield a critique of the Islamic tradition that, in my view, requires careful
and sustained attention by scholars.
Unless one believes that modernity is a unique and singular rupture in
human history, an event of such magnitude that Gods scripture could not an-
ticipate it, it is still difficult to justify the wholesale a priori rejection of Islamic
norms and mores for which many modernists and progressivists argue. This is
because the Quran offers its own history and philosophy of the secular world,
just as the secular world wishes to historicize the Quran. Revealed in the sev-
enth century, the Quran upholds many of the Torahs central laws, including
the prohibition of the homosexual act and usury (rib), given over 1,500 years
earlier to Moses, while relaxing some peripheral ones. Consider usury, for an
analogy: The Quran explicitly chastises the Jews for their consuming of
usury, when they had been prohibited from it (Q 4:161). One historian of the
rabbinical prohibition of usury has chronicled how the Jews upheld and ex-
panded the prohibition of Mosaic law for several centuries, but then started to
rationalize it when confronted with the complex Roman commercial expansion
in the name of what we might call ijtihd.22
All of this happened before the sixth century, and so the Quranic chas-
tisement can be understood as the divine judicial review of this ijtihd, so
to speak. The point here is that the logic of historical, social, and conceptual
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Editorial xix
change to explain away the prohibition of usury did not serve our Jewish
brethren well. Nor did God spare them, it would seem, on account of the kullu
mujtahid mub (i.e., the Islamic legal principle that every qualified legal rea-
soner is correct, so long as he or she does his best) principle. Some interdic-
tions, the Quran seems to suggest, are meant to permanent.
The Imperative to Draw Reasoned Boundaries

Concepts as well as norms change over time and in a way that baffles as well
as humbles systematic scholars and utterly eludes others. Many of our modern
concepts, including homosexuality, did not even exist in the recent past. The
Quran itself abrogated many of the previously revealed divine laws, and his-
torical change may be offered as one explanation for this. But how adequate
is historical change as a causal explanation and in what cases? Taking the
premise upheld by all Islamic theological schools that God knows the future
as well as the past and hence could not have failed to anticipate a changing
world requires that the line between which norms or concepts can be discarded
and which cannot has to be drawn from within Islamic tradition, based, if you
will, on divine cues.
Not all advocates of an Islamic sexual revolution base themselves on scrip-
ture or tradition; however, those who believe that that guidance must be sought
within divine scripture must grant that its systematic interpretation can only be
carried in conversation with the tradition that has preserved it and made sense
of it for over a millennium. We must recognize that Islams marvelous but im-
perfect (because human) tradition of legal and theological reflection has never
seen such a dramatic change in its long and far-flung existence. Socio-economic
conditions have indeed dramatically changed, as has our epistemology itself.
And yet all that our belief in the continued guidance of divine scriptures re-
quires, I believe, is that these changes must be traceable and comprehensible.
This puts the onus on Islamic scholars and thinkers to document and calibrate
both the changes and their implications. Those who deny the significance of
this change or the rupture with the past are often excoriated, and deservedly
so. What I think is less often appreciated and critiqued is the passive acceptance
of certain developments as inevitable, rather than historicizing and hence re-
sisting the necessity of changes that, if accepted, render Islams legal and ethical
guidance utterly incoherent and meaningless.
If the terms, norms, and criteria imposed by late capitalism, the modern
state, and their global transformations are accepted, then Islamic fiqh and eth-
ical norms can only become progressively irrelevant. It is this passivity of the
Muslim mainstream that I wish to question also in the case of the rise of homo-
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xx The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
normativity. In an overpopulated and over-stuffed late-capitalist world, pro-

creation is neither deemed terribly important nor is it exclusively dependent
upon a traditional male-female family. Most Muslims have welcomed the rise
of the nuclear family, which is allergic to cousins, uncles and aunts, parents
and in-laws, along with the modern need to be mobile and independent a
lifestyle that both reflects and requires consumerist capitalism rather than the
thick, organic, mutually supportive, and extended families and communities
that so many Islamic norms, laws, and mores presuppose. Put differently, the
Sharias concern, comparable to that of Jewish Halakha and Christian ethics,
to protect family, lineage, and sexual virtue are steadily outdated if the terms
of capitalism and the modern welfare state are fully embraced. The more func-
tions a secular bureaucracy takes away from the family and organic commu-
nity, the less relevant the sexual ethics and laws preached by the Abrahamic
religions become (I use the qualifier organic not in the Durkheimian sense,
but rather to distinguish local, mosque-, and neighborhood-based community
from the global religious community).
What is at stake in late modernity is not only what Islam is (a private reli-
gion or something else), but whether Islamic norms make any sense. The so-
lution advanced by Muslims to many socioeconomic changes has often been
no more than piecemeal and reactionary ijtihd. Heroic, prophetic struggle
against fundamental wrongs and structural corruption is reserved only for the
radicals and crazies, as if Islam proper is only the religion of docile, middle-
class functionaries. Unless a larger alternative vision of prophetic resistance
and rebuilding makes Islam coherent and gives a proactive, visionary edge to
fiqh, this appears to be our foreseeable future.
Endnotes
1. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian

Nation (Sentinel, 2017), 9.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. One watershed event in LGBT history was the Stonewall protest of 1969.
4. Greg Wilford, Independent, 2 July 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
europe/angela-merkel-chancellor-germany-same-sex-marriage-vote-lgbt-
muslim-mps-berlin-bundestag-cdu-sdp-a7819391.html (accessed 3 July 2017).
5. Brian Leiter, an American philosopher and legal scholar at the University of
Chicago Law School, argues that despite what the people are told, the Supreme
Court judges personal moral and political judgment, rather than formal legal rea-
son, are of decisive importance in how they fulfill their role and how they are ap-
pointed. See idem., Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the Supreme Court
as Super-Legislature, Chicago Unbound, 2015, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page xxi
Editorial xxi
edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1976&context=public_law_and_legal_theory
(accessed 4 July 2017).
6. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, about 42 percent of Amer-
ican Muslims support same-sex marriage. See Robert P. Jones, Attitudes on
Same-sex Marriage by Religious Affiliation and Denominational Family, 22
April 2015, Public Religion Research Institute, https://www.prri.org/spotlight/
attitudes-on-same-sex-marriage-by-religious-affiliation-and-denominational-
family/#.VZ02XcZVikr (accessed 26 Jun. 2017).
7. Hindus, Muslims and Jews Have Highest Retention Rates, PEW Research Cen-
ter, 5 May 2017, www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-2-religious-switching-
and-intermarriage/pr_15-05-12_rls_chapter2-02/ (accessed 28 Jun. 2017).
8. See, for instance, Robert P. George, Muslims, Our Natural Allies, 2 February
2014, First Things, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/02/
muslims-our-natural-allies (3 July 2017).
9. Islamic thought has historically oscillated between two poles: (1) reasoning that
is primarily self-referential or inward-looking, based on the norms derives from
revelation, and (2) reasoning that is primarily dialogical and outward-looking,
accepting reason or common sense as the common-ground to persuade non-
Muslims of Islams truth. In this case, I think it is dialogical reasoning that is
called for: demonstrating not only what Islam says, but why it says so.
10. Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the
most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone, a statement widely
attributed to the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes.
11. Alan Zarembo, Many researchers taking a different view of pedophilia: Pe-
dophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life.
Now, many experts view it as a deep-rooted predisposition that does not change,
LA Times, 14 Jan. 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/14/local/la-me-
pedophiles-20130115 (accessed 28 Jun. 2017).
12. For studies that highlight problems with the current understandings of consent,
see Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University
Press, 2013), and for the argument that free consent requires ending the marriage
contract, see Anne Phillips, Free to Decide for Oneself, in D. ONeill et al.
(ed.), Illusion of Consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman (Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2008). For recent coverage of the legal issues, see Campus
Rape: The Problem With Yes Means Yes, Time, 29 Aug. 2014, http://
time.com/3222176/campus-rape-the-problem-with-yes-means-yes/; No doesnt
really mean no: North Carolina law means women cant revoke consent for sex,
The Guardian, 24 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/
jun/24/north-carolina-rape-legal-loophole-consent-state-v-way (accessed 28 Jun.
2017).
13. Consider, for instance, Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Mak-
ing of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2010), which shows
how subjugating the self to the global corporation, the single most destructive
force for the planet, the poor, and democracy, draws on a deeper set of ideals
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page xxii
xxii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
about the supremacy of family, the morality of self-reliance, and the evangelical
justification of free enterprise.
14. The seminal work of Mary Macintosh (1968), the British feminist sociologist
and founder of the modern lesbian and gay movement in the United Kingdom,
comes to mind.
15. A homosexual author (Jesi Egan) grapples with the problem that Foucaults social
constructivism argument, so ardently supported by feminists, cuts against the
LGBT claim that their identity is biologically determined and hence not a choice
that can be influenced. www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/03/04/sexuality_as_
social_construct_foucault_is_misunderstood_by_conservatives.html.
16. The questioning of the traditional norms against homosexual behavior need not
come from a postmodernist or genealogical perspective, of course; liberal reli-
gious activists often couch their claims in terms that draw, often unwittingly, on
some kind of moral positivism and human rights discourse that may be theoret-
ically nave but is often rhetorically powerful.
17. Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500
1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
18. Ahmad al-Rumi al-Aqhisari, Against Smoking: An Ottoman Manifesto, ed.and
trans. Yahya Michot (Markfield, UK: Kube Publishing, 2011), 21.
19. Ibid., 124.
20. Junaid Jahangir, Queer Muslims Deserve More Than Scriptural Zealotry, Huf-
fungton Post, 12 July 2013, www.huffingtonpost.ca/junaid-jahangir/queer-mus-
lims_b_3581159.html (accessed 26 June 2017).
21. E. J. Graff, Whats Wrong with Choosing to Be Gay? Many gay activists insist
that they were born this way, hey. But what about those who choose otherwise?
The Nation, 3 February 2014, www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-choos-
ing-be-gay/; Brandon Ambrosino, I Wasnt Born This Way. I Choose to Be Gay,
28 January 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116378/macklemores-
same-love-sends-wrong-message-about-being-gay.
22. Hillel Gamoran, Jewish Law in Transition (Hebrew Union College Press, 2008).
As a rabbi for Beth Tikvah, I assume that the author belongs to reformed Judaism.
Ovamir Anjum, Editor, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

Imam Khattab Chair of Islamic Studies
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Department of History
University of Toledo, Toledo, OH
ajiss34-3-final_ajiss 8/16/2017 1:01 PM Page 1
A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on

Sodomy: An Annotated Translation and
Analysis of al-Suyutis Attaining the
Jonathan Brown
Abstract
This article provides an annotated translation of a treatise written

by the famous scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) in de-
fense of the hadiths condemning sodomy (liw). The article sit-
uates such a defense within the current discourse on Islam and
homosexuality, summarizing the main arguments for and against
the prohibition of liw as well as how the traditionalist and
Progressive camps have constructed their arguments.
Introduction
The act of the people of Lot (liw or lyah) has long stood out among sins
in Islamic thought,1 partly due to the Qurans singular condemnation for these
people and their iniquities, what it calls a gross indecency such as none in the
world committed before you: Indeed you come with desire unto men instead
of women (Q. 8:80-81 and Q. 27:55), and to this fiercely condemned practices
persistence in Muslim societies. The knot of issues making up the question of
Islam and Homosexuality is complex indeed. This study focuses on the spe-
cific thread of sodomy (liw).2
Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, the School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University; director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian
Understanding; and author of The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim (2007), Hadith:
Muhammads Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (2009), Muhammad: A Very Short In-
troduction (2011), and Misquoting Muhammad (2014); and editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia
of Islam and Law.
2 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3
While Muslim scholars compiled impressive lists of the different sins and
obscenities indulged by Lots people, their juridical discourse on liw, which
they classified as an action as opposed to an inclination or a desire, remained
distinctly focused3: inserting the penis (dhakar, sometimes ashfah [glans])
into a mans anus. The Shafiis, Hanbalis, and Hanafis included anal sex with
women other than wives and concubines in this definition as well (anal sex
with wives or concubines was impermissible, but it was not treated as seriously
as liw).4 The discourse on liw thus differs significantly from most discus-
sions surrounding LGBTQ issues, which focus far more on identity, relation-
ships, and inclinations than on physical acts.
Like zin (fornication or adultery), liw was a penetrative act of the penis.
As with zin, any act that did not involve this penetration fell into a lower cat-
egory of offense. Sex acts between women (e.g., siq) thus were lesser of-
fenses. As in the case of heterosexual activity, other same-sex contact was
condemned and could even be punished by a judges discretion. But nothing
matched liw, the greatest indecency (al-fishah al-kubr), either in moral
condemnation or in the severity of punishment.5
The main Sunni opinions on the punishment are as follows, listed from
the most to the least severe6:
1) Both the active and passive partners are killed (on the basis of the Hadith
of Killing the Active/Passive Partner, see below). This was an early posi-
tion of al-Shafii (d. 204/820) and Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), and is the main
Maliki position (death by stoning).7
2) Liw is punished exactly like zin: The married person (muan) is stoned
to death; the never-married person is lashed 100 times and exiled for a
year. This is the main opinion of the late Hanbali school and an opinion of
the Shafii and Hanafi schools (held by al-Shaybani [d. 189/804], Abu
Yusuf [d. 182/798], al-Tahawi [d. 321/932], and others).8
3) Liw is punished similarly to zin, but not exactly. The active partner is
executed by a sword; the passive partner is punished with 100 lashes and
exiled for one year. This is the dominant opinion in the later Shafii school.9
4) Liw is punished by the judges discretionary punishment (tazr). The
judicial authority has the discretion (siysah)10 to execute a repeat offender
to protect public order. This is the main historical Hanafi opinion, rooted
in Abu Hanifahs (d. 150/767) own opinion.11
The evidence for the Shariahs positions on liw and its punishment come
from (1) the Qurans clear condemnation of going to men out of desire in-
stead of women; (2) numerous hadiths condemning and prescribing severe
Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 3
punishments for it; (3) legal analogy on the basis of zin; and (4) a variety of
legal opinions from the Companions and Successors, presumably based on
their understanding of the Quran, the Sunnah, and the proper deployment of
legal reasoning. Their rulings range from treating liw like zin to considering
it distinct, and their prescribed punishments range from execution by stoning,
burning, or throwing the perpetrator from tall buildings to corporal punishment
(e.g., lashing).12
According to the leading Hanafi scholars, such as Ibn Humam (d. 861/
1457), the tremendous disagreement among the Companions and Successors
over this acts punishment is evidence that the offense is not one of the udd
crimes (offenses that infringe upon the rights of God and have set punish-
ments in the Quran or Hadith). According to this perspective, those hadiths
specifying the death penalty for liw must either be unreliable or they must
not be interpreted as a general rule. If the Prophet had truly identified it as a
udd crime and set a punishment for it, such variation in opinions would not
have existed. So reasoned many Hanafis.
Doubt over the proper punishment was enhanced by the flaws that Muslim
Hadith critics identified in the main hadiths on the topic. Even some non-
Hanafis, such as the Shafii hadith scholar Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852/
1449), admitted that the principal hadiths used as evidence to classify liw as
a udd offense were not sufficiently reliable for that task. But only the Hanafis
rejected analogy as a means to include crimes under the rubric of udd of-
fenses. Shafiis had no problem with doing this, so Ibn Hajar and others still
insisted that both liw and bestiality were udd crimes on the basis of their
analogy with zin.13
The criticism of the hadiths surrounding these practices took place against
the backdrop of this debate, which was and remains in essence, an intra-
Sunni one over the nature of liw and its proper punishment. There has been
no debate, to my knowledge, over the prohibited nature of anal sex between
men. The Shafii scholars Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1210), al-Nawawi (d.
676/1277), and al-Haytami (d. 974/1566) all list Liw being arm as one
of Islamis axiomatic tenets (malm min al-dn bi al-arrah), as do the Hanafi
Badr al-Rashid (d. 767/1366), the Hanbali al-Buhuti (d. 1051/1641) and the
Zahiri Ibn Hazm (d. 456/1064). Al-Bayhaqi (d. 458/1066), al-Qurtubi (d.
671/1272), al-Sanani (d. 1768), and others have stated that there is consensus
on its prohibition.14
Attempts by Progressive15 scholars to reconceptualize how the Islamic
tradition should view the knot of issues surrounding homosexuality (or, in-
verted, the problem of heteronormativity) have rested on four main pillars:
(1) attempts to reinterpret the Quranic story of Lots people as a condemna-
tion of male rape instead of as a condemnation of sodomy; (2) illustrating how

Sunni hadith scholars had dismissed the hadiths condemning liw as unreli-
able; (3) the claim that Muslim jurists built their whole structure of law re-
garding liw on a limited, patriarchal understanding of the Quranic story;
and (4) that Muslim scholars were prisoners of a patriarchal and heteronor-
mative narrative. Mobeen Vaid has already addressed the argument that this
story should be reread (see his article in this volume).16 The present study ex-
amines the hadiths on liw primarily through a treatise devoted to defending
them by the famous Cairean scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505).
On one hand, the Hadith/Sunnah pillar of what can be termed the Pro-
gressive argument on homosexuality is redundant, for Muslim scholars have
long held that scriptural texts must be interpreted according to their evident
meaning unless some compelling external or internal evidence suggests oth-
erwise.17 The plain language meaning of the Qurans condemnation of men
who go unto men out of desire instead of women does not readily afford
any interpretations other than the obvious one, and the Quran provides no
signs that would compel a reader to consider an alternative interpretation.
Provided that the Hadith/Sunnah corpus or the first principles of reason do
not provide such evidence, the evident reading of the Quran stands as is: a
condemnation of men going unto men out of desire instead of women. Fur-
thermore, while one might challenge the authenticity of the cited hadiths,
there is certainly no hadith evidence that liw is anything but sodomy.
From another perspective, the Hadith/Sunnah pillar of the Progressive ar-
gument is crucial. Since the Islamic tradition has consistently rejected impor-
tant elements of LGBTQ identities and lifestyles, many advocates of a
Progressive revision have jettisoned that tradition and tried to elaborate a new
interpretation based solely on a radical rereading of the Quran. More influ-
ential figures, however, have attempted to engage the tradition and show how
it can be recast to support their argument.18 Scholars who have pursued this
strategy have had to accept the traditional Muslim conception of the Sunnah
as the authoritative lens through which the Quran is read. Since hadiths seem
to make it clear that this unprecedented gross indecency condemned in the
Quran is conventionally termed sodomy (see below), it is very difficult to
promote a rereading that breaks with this understanding. For Progressive pur-
poses, the hadiths thus either have to be shown to be unreliable according to
Sunni hadith criticism, or their meaning must be recast. Otherwise, not only
do these hadiths clearly condemn liw and prescribe punishments for it, but
they also lock the traditional Muslim understanding of the whole Sodom and
Gomorrah narrative in place. As early Muslim scholars recognized: The
Sunnah rules over the Book of God.19
Ratings of Ibn Abbas Hadith of Killing the

Active/Passive Partner
The most famous hadith on liw, narrated from the Prophet by Ibn Abbas,
reads: Whoever you have found committing the act of the people of Lot, kill
the active and passive partner. And whoever you have found to have had sex
with an animal, kill him and kill the animal. (The italicized portion will be re-
ferred to as the Bestiality Clause.)
This hadith was declared a by Ibn al-Jarud (d. 307/919-20), al-Tabari
(d. 310/923), al-Hakim al-Naysaburi (d. 405/1014), Ibn al-Talla (d. 497/ 1104),
Diya al-Din al-Maqdisi (d. 643/1245), Zayn al-Din al-Iraqi (d. 806/1404) and
al-Suyuti, all of whom are listed in the text of al-Suyutis treatise below. It was
also judged a or reliable by al-Ajurri (d. 360/970; in fact, it is one of the
hadiths he presents as suitable for use as proof), Ibn Abd al-Hadi of Dam-
ascus (d. 744/1343), al-Zarkashi al-Hanbali (d. 772/1370; the various narrations
on the topic all compensate for each others weaknesses, he says), Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyyah (d. 751/1350; it meets al-Bukharis standard, and Ibn Hanbal used
it as proof, he says), Ibn Hajar al-Haytami (it has a a sanad), Ibn al-Amir
al-Sanani (d. 1768), and Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (d. 1999).20 Even
the early Hanafi hadith scholar Abu Jafar al-Tahawi (d. 321/932), who held
that liw should be punished like a udd crime, uses this particular hadith as
the last nail in the coffin of those who disagree with him.21
Other Reliable Hadiths Condemning Liw

From the perspective of Sunni hadith criticism, the most reliable condemnation
actually comes from another hadith narrated from the Prophet by Ibn Abbas:
God has cursed those who slaughter to other than God, and God has cursed
those who alter the signposts (or boundary markers) in the land,22 and God
has cursed those who lead the blind off the path, and God has cursed those
who curse their parents, and God has cursed those who take as patrons those
who are not their patrons (tawall ghayr mawlhi), and God has cursed those
who commit the act of the people of Lot, and God has cursed those who com-
mit the act of the people of Lot, and God has cursed those who commit the
act of the people of Lot. (Some versions contain a clause cursing those who
commit bestiality as well).23
Another version contains almost the same content but is phrased as

Cursed are those who commit the act of the people of Lot24 Versions of
this hadith are found in the Muannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani (d.
211/827),25 the Musnad of Abd b. umayd (d. 249/863),26 the Musnad of Ibn
Hanbal,27 the Musnad of al-Harith b. Abi Usamah (d. 282/895-6),28 the Dhamm
al-Malh of Ibn Abi al-Dunya (d. 281/894),29 the Sunan al-Kubr of al-Nasai
(d. 303/915),30 the Musnad of Abu Yala al-Mawsili (d. 307/919-20),31 the a
of Ibn Hibban (d. 354/965),32 the Maswi al-Akhlq of al-Kharaiti (d.
327/939),33 the Mujam al-Awsa and the Mujam al-Kabr of al-Tabarani (d.
360/ 971),34 the Mustadrak of al-Hakim,35 the Sunan al-Kubr of his student
al-Bayhaqi,36 the ilyat al-Awliy of their contemporary Abu Nuaym al-
Isbahabi (d. 430/1038),37 the Trkh Baghdd of his student al-Khatib al-
Baghdadi (d. 463/1071),38 and the Mukhtrah of Diya al-Din al-Maqdisi (d.
643/1245).
This hadith has been judged a by Ibn Hibban, al-Hakim, and Diya al-
Din al-Maqdisi (by its inclusion in his Mukhtrah), Nur al-Din al-Haythami
(d. 807/1405) (its transmitters are used in the a), as well as by al-Albani
and Ahmad al-Ghumari (d. 1960).39
Summary of the Muslim Critiques of Ibn Abbas Hadith

Pre-modern criticism40 of this hadith centers on the person of Amr b. Abi
Amr (d. 144/761-62), a client of al-Muttalib b. Abdallah and member of the
Quraysh tribe from the Successors generation. A junior Successor, Amr nar-
rated hadiths mainly from the long-lived Companion Anas b. Malik and other
Successors like Said b. Abi Said al-Maqburi (his occasional narrations from
the Companion Jabir b. Abdallah come through an intermediary, al-Muttalib,
as he sometimes specifies). His narrations from Ikrimah are rare. Although
criticized by some, he was generally held in high regard by critics. Al-Bukhari
(d. 256/870) used him for ten narrations in the a, and Muslim (d. 260/875)
used him for five in his collection. But neither used his narrations from
Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet (s), nor did al-Nasai in his Mujtab.
Among the Six Books, Amrs narrations from Ikrimah appear in the three
Sunans of al-Tirmidhi (d. 279/892), Abu Dawud (d. 275/889), and Ibn Majah
(d. 273/886).
Abu Dawud uses the chain for a hadith on the obligation to perform the
greater ablution (ghusl) on Fridays, for a hadith on reading the Quran during
prayer, and for an unusual hadith about how to ask permission to enter homes
(which Abu Dawud notes is contradicted by a better report from Ibn Abbas)41
Ibn Majah uses the chain for a hadith on a debt issue.42 Along with al-Tirmidhi,
their only other use of the Amr Ikrimah chain is for the Hadith of Killing
the Active/Passive Partner. Amr b. Abi Amr was thus a hadith transmitter in
fairly good standing among early Sunni hadith critics. Ibn Hanbal and Abu
Hatim al-Razi (d. 277/890) said: There is nothing wrong with him (laysa bihi
bas), and Abu Zura al-Razi (d. 264/878) said he was reliable (thiqah).
But Amr was criticized, in particular, for his narrations from Ikrimah.
Ibn Hanbals close colleague Ibn Main (d. 233/848) said that Amrs hadiths
were not strong, and al-Nasai agreed. Al-Ijli (d. 261/875) said he was reli-
able but that scholars considered his narration of the Bestiality Clause to be
unsubstantiated. Ibn Main also noted that this hadith was considered unac-
ceptable from him, including the reports main liw clause. Al-Bukhari
doubted whether he had heard the Bestiality Clause from Ikrimah. In fact, he
was not convinced that Amr had heard any hadiths directly from Ikrimah.
Al-Juzajani (d. 259/873) declared him to be highly inconsistent in his narrations
(muarib al-adth). Later scholars like al-Dhahabi (d. 748/1348) considered
Amr adq (honest), and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani noted that his hadiths were
included in the aayn.43 Ibn Dihya (d. 633/1235) used Amr as the textbook
example of a narrator of asan adths.44
The vast majority of criticism surrounding Amr b. Abi Amr and his nar-
ration of this particular hadith only concerns the Bestiality Clause. The main
objection stems from the fact that reliable narrators reported that Ibn Abbas
advocated a contradictory ruling, namely, that bestiality was not a udd crime.
This is the main criticism raised by al-Bukhari, al-Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, and
the Hanafi al-Tahawi which they note when they bring up the opinion attributed
to Ibn Abbs, via the narration of Asim b. Bahdalah Abu Razin Ibn
Abbas, that the person who commits bestiality is not subject to the udd pun-
ishment.45 Beyond general questions of Amrs reliability or his having heard
directly from Ikrimah, the only other criticism of the liw portion is al-
Tirmidhis remark on conflicting evidence over the proper punishment for
liwt; that the hadith in which the Prophet names those who commit the act of
Lots people as a group cursed by God does not ordain their execution.
Aside from these criticisms, the main focus of al-Suyutis treatise is to crit-
icize Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, the leading hadith critic of the Mamluk period.
Like al-Suyuti, he adhered to the Shafii school and thus, in theory, supported
categorizing liw as a udd crime. Al-Suyuti focuses on Ibn Hajars criticism
that the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner is disagreed upon in terms
of its attestation, and al-Suyutis defense of the hadith is premised entirely on
the shape and form of this critical comment. But Ibn Hajars criticisms were
more extensive. Certainly, at one point in his voluminous writings he seems to
downplay the hadiths flaws, noting that its transmitters are deemed reliable
(mawthq) but that there is disagreement on it.46 But he states in his Fat al-
Br that this hadith, as well as the one from Ali that specifies stoning (see
below), are both weak (af). It is impossible to see how al-Suyutis attempt
to clarify Ibn Hajars first comment, detailed in the treatise presented here,
could apply to such an unambiguous criticism. This does not mean that Ibn
Hajar was conceding to the Hanafis on liw not being a udd crime, for he
writes that the main evidence in this regard is not any hadiths, but rather that
the act is analogous to adultery/fornication (zin).47 At another point in the Fat
he states that both the liw and bestiality clauses are not sound (lam yai),
but that both acts fall under zin.48
More recent criticism of this hadith has moved beyond the person of Amr
to that of Ikrimah himself. This is a major component of the most compre-
hensive critique of the hadiths on liw, namely, that offered by Scott Siraj al-
Haqq Kugle in his Homosexuality in Islam.49 Ikrimah (d. 105/723-24), the
freeman (mawl) of Ibn Abbas, was probably a North African Berber. He was
given as a slave to Ibn Abbas in Basra, but his owner quickly freed him.
Ikrimah traveled widely in the entourage of leading early Muslims, including
to Marv and Yemen, and was sought out as an authority on matters of religion.
Criticism of Ikrimah is not novel. Since the first centuries of Islam, his
reliability as a scholar and hadith transmitter has been questioned due to his
alleged espousal of Kharijite beliefs, accepting gifts from rulers, and transmit-
ting false material (kadhib). Yet he had many, many advocates. Al-Tabari, Ibn
Mandah (d. 395/1004-05), Ibn Hibban, and Ibn Abd al-Barr (d. 473/1070),
and others all defended him. The best summary of this discussion, as well as
the best defense, can be found in Ibn Hajars Huda al-Sr.50 A recent revival
of the anti-Ikrimah line has come from the United Kingdom-based Hanafi
scholar Atabek Shukurov,51 to which another United Kingdom Hanafi scholar,
Mufti Zameel, has provided a comprehensive rebuttal.52
The Progressive argument has generally reproduced the intra-Sunni
polemics over the hadiths prescribing harsh punishments for liw. Kugle sum-
marizes them well when he observes that those hadiths that directly affect
legal rulings on homosexuality are not forged reports that should be dis-
missed, but rather reports with solitary chains of transmission, the application
of which should be assessed.53 They are not forgeries, but they also are not
reliable enough to convince many Sunni scholars that liw should be treated
as a udd crime. The Hanafi scholar al-Jassas (d. 370/981) made this same
argument.54
Progressive Contributions to Criticism

of the Hadiths on Liw
Kugle introduces several novel criticisms as well. The first builds on existing
accusations that Ikrimah was a Kharijite, contending that his Kharijism led
him to treat sexual offenses with particular severity. But his only evidence is
the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner and the overall uncompromis-
ing nature of Kharijite beliefs. Although he explains that this group believed
that Muslims who committed grave sins like zin ceased to be believers,55
Kugle does not investigate Ikrimahs stance on this question. In a famous ha-
dith of incredible relevance to Kugles argument, Ikrimah narrates from Ibn
Abbas, from the Prophet, that one who commits zin, theft, drinks alcohol, or
commits murder is not a believer when committing those acts.56 But this hadith
can hardly be dismissed as a Kharijite invention, for the majority of its narra-
tions come not through Ikrimah, but from the Prophet by Abu Hurayrah, who
was not accused of Kharijism (they are included in all the Six Books).57 More
importantly, Ikrimahs version features striking tones of leniency. Unlike those
who transmitted it from Abu Hurayrah, Ikrimah asks Ibn Abbas to explain
how committing such sins can erase a Muslims faith and, crucially, how re-
penting restores it.58 For from being a ruthless puritan on sexual sins, Ikrimah
is our source for the teaching that any apostasy involved in committing these
sins can be remedied by repentance.
The most significant objection to Kugles enhanced criticisms of
Ikrimah is that it contradicts his overall strategy of constructing an accept-
ance of homosexuality within the Sunni legal tradition. Rejecting all evidence
narrated by Ikrimah would contradict the agreed upon tenets of Sunni hadith
criticism (since al-Bukhari considered him reliable and used him in his a)
and Sunni law (he is relied upon as a transmitter of evidence in all Sunni
schools). An argument based on excluding Ikrimah would thus hardly be
Sunni.
A second element of Kugles criticism of hadiths on liw does not affect
the hadiths examined in this study; however, it does merit examination. He
claims that one of the features of a hadiths text (matn) that revealed it as a for-
gery according to Muslim scholars was the Prophets supposed uses of the
proper names of groups, sects, or schools of thought that emerged decades after
his death. This would apply to hadiths that use sodomite (l) or sodomy
(lyah, liw). While Kugle admits that this does not apply to the wording
the act of the people of Lot, which is used in the main hadiths examined in
this study.59 Moreover, Kugle provides no reference for this alleged rule of
matn criticism. In fact, although Sunni hadith critics did at times cite anachro-
nisms in a hadiths wording as a factor for declaring them forged, many hadiths
that Sunnis have long considered reliable contain what some might consider
anachronistic references, such as the Prophet gesturing to Iraq (where the Khar-
ijites first emerged) and fortelling that a group interpreted as being the Khari-
jites will come out (yakhruju) from there.60 This is in great part due to the
fact that Muslims have believed that, as a prophet, Muhammad (s) was granted
access to the unseen by God.61
Aside from this, anachronism does not always entail forgery. Often, as in
the case of the hadiths on liw, narrations with non-anachronistic wordings
(e.g., the act of the people of Lot) are transmitted alongside counterparts with
anachronistic wording (e.g., lyah). It may simply be that as the proper nouns
for sects or certain acts became common, less fastidious narrators substituted
them for their non-anachronistic counterparts. This would have been permitted
by hadith scholars, who generally allowed narrating a hadith by its general
meaning (al-riwyah bi al-man) and not necessarily word for word, provided
that the transmitter understood its meaning and kept it intact.62
The example mentioned by Kugle, namely, hadiths in which the Prophet
condemns the Qadariyyah (those who believe in human free will), perfectly
demonstrates this.63 For every hadith in the main Sunni collections (and Ibn
Hanbals Musnad) in which the Prophet condemns them by their proper name,
there is a corresponding narration in which he refers to them as the people of
qadar or those who disbelieve in qadar. In fact, Muslim scholars consider
these latter narrations to be the most reliable ones.64
One of Kugles main lines of argument is that there is nothing intrinsic
in the cited hadiths to encourage us to see the deed of Lots Tribe as involving
sex.65 In the case of the hadith that lists those whom God has cursed, he sug-
gests that the common thread is that those deeds either infringe on Gods rights
or injure others. He argues that, in the context of this hadith, same-sex rape
makes more sense as the meaning of the act of the people of Lot than mere
anal sex between men66 and that introducing the Bestiality Clause into these
hadiths was intended to deflect the interpretation of this act of Lots people
toward anal intercourse.67
There are three flaws in this argument. First, the hadiths he discusses pro-
vide absolutely no evidence that this Quranic story should be read in any way
other than the plain language meaning of general male-male sexual contact.
Kugles decision to read the hadiths mention of this particular act in another
light (i.e., that it was rape) simply imports a baseless interpretive choice from
one text into another. The argument thus circles back to its anchorless point of
departure: Muslim scholars misconstrued and misapplied hadiths mentioning
the act of the people of Lot because they misread the Qurans Lot pericope.68
But the only way to establish the Progressive reading of the Lot pericope in
the first place is to provide some internal evidence from the Quran (lacking,
as shown by Vaid) or external evidence from the Sunnah. But as laid out by
Kugle, any mention of this act in the external hadith evidence can only be read
to support the Progressive argument if one already assumes the Quran has
been misread.
Second, the claim that male-male anal sex is out of place in a list of
cursed deeds due to the insult they cause to the Divine or injuries they cause
to others ignores the historical place that sodomy has occupied in human
norm making. As Kugle suggests, such a list has a common theme of dis-
rupting or inverting the proper order of human relations with each other and
with God. For him, this act could not constitute such a transgression, while
male rape could. But this betrays a parochial rootedness in the modern liberal
conviction that only the transgression of personal autonomy renders a sex
act morally wrong.
In fact, Kugles mistake is not following through on his insight. Ancient
law codes condemned sodomy precisely because it was understood as violating
the gender and property order established when humans settled into agricultural
communities. Far from being an addition intended to shift the narrative on the
act of Lots people, the Bestiality Clause might actually predate it. From the
world historical perspective, it is even more suited for this list because that par-
ticular taboo is one of humanitys oldest, originating with the beginning of set-
tled agriculture.69 It is not surprising to find sodomy and bestiality paired
together, as in Leviticus 18:22-23. These two rules draw primal boundaries for
newly settled human communities with nascent societal gender divisions: A
taboo on same-sex acts emphasizes the primary distinction among humans,
whereas the taboo on bestiality reinforces the distinction between humans and
the animals surrounding them.
Finally, Kugles assertion that only the patriarchal interpretation of this
story leads us to read references to the act of the people of Lot in the Hadith
as primarily sexual70 ignores a manifest reality: If this reading was wrong, it
was wrong as far back as anyone can reliably date the intellectual artifacts of
the Islamic tradition (other than the Quran itself). Kugle admits that by the
time Hadith collection and compilation had begun and hadiths were being
used in making legal decisions, this act was clearly understood as male-male
sexual penetration.71 But the most recent, historical critical (i.e., non-Muslim)
scholarship on the hadith tradition and early Islamic law has shown that the
era referred to here by Kugle was none other than that of the late 600s, when
the junior Companions were still alive. Not only does this leave very little time
for Muslims to have totally misunderstood the story, but it also begs the ques-
tion of precisely what more authentic understanding of the Quran we could
hope to have than that of junior Companions and Successors.
According to the methods developed by the German Orientalist Joseph
Schacht (d. 1969), which Kugle tentatively embraces, the most historically re-
liable reports are those attributed to the Muslims living during the mid-eighth
century (atb al-tbin), like Ibn Jurayj (d. 150/767) and Malik b. Anas (179/
795). According to Schacht, their legal opinions were later pushed back to var-
ious Companions, attributions to whom are thus less historically reliable. Fi-
nally, these opinions had been pushed back into the Prophets mouth by the
early- and mid-ninth century.72
Although the main hadiths dealing with the subject refer to it as the act
of the people of Lot or sodomy without providing any description of what
that meant, some do offer details. One quotes the Prophet as saying: Whoever
has sex with (waqaa) a man, kill him. Another has: Concerning the person
who commits the act of the people of Lot, and concerning the man who is had
sex with (yut f nafsihi), [the Prophet] said: He is killed.73 Another hadith
reads: A woman does not engage directly with (tubshiru) another woman
except that they are committing fornication (zniyatn), nor does a man engage
directly with another man except that they are committing fornication.74 A
Companions ruling that, all things being equal, Schacht would consider as
more historically reliable than a hadith, describes Caliph Abu Bakr and other
Companions discussing how to punish a man who is screwed like a woman
(yunkau kam tunkau al-marah).75
These hadiths appear in later sources during the tenth and eleventh centuries,
so they could well have been forged after the early period of Hadith collection.
Turning away from Schachts outdated methodology to the most recent Western
scholarship on dating reports, we find that reports circulating as early as the
late 600s and early 700s clearly understood the act of the people of Lot as
male-male anal sex. Reports appearing in the earliest surviving sources, such
as the Muannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani (d. 211/ 827), offer no graphic
details, but they all address it as a direct analog to zin. Abd al-Razzaq quotes
his teacher Ibn Jurayj as describing how its punishment is exactly that as spec-
ified for zin in the Quran and well-known hadiths (i.e., a married partner is
stoned; a never-married partner is lashed 100 times and exiled for a year).76 In
the Muannaf of Ibn Abi Shaybah (d. 235/849), Ibn Jurayj reports from his
teacher, Ata b. Abi Rabah of Makkah (d. 114/732): Concerning a man who
comes sexually (yat) to a man, his proper treatment (sunnatuhu) is that of a
woman.77 These reports offer no hint that the act was understood as anything
other than the male-male counterpart of heterosexual fornication.
As the German scholar Harald Motzki has demonstrated using his com-
bined isnd/matn analysis, there is little reason to presume that reports narrated
by Abd al-Razzaq Ibn Jurayj Ata were forged by anyone in that chain.
As a result, states Motzki, this material can be seen as authentic representations
of Muslim legal scholarship in Makkah during the late seventh and early eighth
centuries.78 For our purposes, this means that even during the lifetime of the
longest living Companions, this act was understood as sodomy.
Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti: Author of Bulgh al-Maml

Jalal al-Din Abd al-Rahman b. Abi Bakr al-Suyuti was born in 849/1445 in
Cairo.79 His father, the first one in his family to pursue the life of scholar,
was from Asyut (Upper Egypt) and served as a judge there; his mother was
a Circassian slave. Al-Suyuti eventually voyaged down the Nile to settle in
Cairo. Although his father died when he was only five, the boy received an
excellent education under the supervision of prominent scholars close to the
family and, at the age of seventeen, received permission to issue fatwas from
the Shafii school by the noted scholar Alam al-Din Salih al-Bulqini (d.
868/1464), chief judge of Egypt. He studied with other leading scholars in
Cairo as well, including the Shafii jurist Sharaf al-Din Yahya al-Munawi (d.
871/1467) (whose great-grandson Abd al-Rauf would write a commentary
on al-Suyutis Jmi al-aghr) and the famous Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli (d.
864/1459) (whose Tafsr al-Suy would complete, thereby producing the
well-known Tafsr al-Jallayn). Although al-Suyuti was a Shafii in law, he
also studied Hanafi law. As part of the regular curriculum, he studied Ashari/
Maturidi theology and logic with Shams al-Din Muhammad al-Marzubani
(d. 867/1463) and others.
At the age of eighteen, al-Suyuti inherited his fathers position of teaching
law at the Shaykhuniyyah Mosque. Later on, he taught Hadith there as well;
was appointed administrator of the Baybarsiyyah and the Barquq Nasiri Sufi
lodges; and was initiated, at least symbolically, into the Shadhili, Qadiri, and
Suhrawardi Sufi orders. He also spent a great deal of time teaching Hadith in
the Great Mosque of Ibn Tulun.
Other than travelling to Makkah in 1464 and again in 1468-69 for hajj and
some internal travel in Egypt, there is no evidence that al-Suyuti voyaged else-
where. There is also no evidence that he married, although he did write a pan-
egyric poem for one Ghusun, who seems to have been a concubine who died
while pregnant. The fact that upon his death his books were left as a trust under
his mothers supervision suggests that he had no surviving children.80
In terms of his scholarly and ideological inclinations, al-Suyuti felt con-
tempt for the science of speculative theology (kalm) and advocated fideistic
submission (tafw) to scriptural references to Gods nature and the unseen.
Famously, he opposed the use of logic in the Islamic sciences. Al-Suyutis early
career was marked by involvement in numerous scholarly disputes, such as the
permissibility of reading the books of Ibn Arabi and other controversial mys-
tics (they were pious saints, but their books should not be allowed to laymen),
the permissibility of studying logic, the possibility of unrestricted ijtihd (see
below), as well as social conflicts among Cairos elite.
Al-Suyuti was heavily criticized for allegedly claiming that he had attained
the rank of unrestricted mujtahid (mujtahid mulaq), which was widely under-
stood as meaning a scholar capable of deriving law and theology directly from
Islams sources without adherence to any existing tradition or school. As he
explained to his student al-Sharani (d. 973/1565) as well as in his writings,
this description was actually that of an independent mujtahid (mujtahid mus-
taqill). He agreed with most scholars that this latter rank had not been possible
since around 1000 CE. Al-Suyuti acknowledged that he had claimed to have
reached this rare level of mujtahid mulaq, but he insisted that this rank, the
highest possible one in his latter days, consisted of deriving rulings independ-
ently but within an affiliation to a certain school of law (mujtahid muntasib).
In this, he argued, he was like such earlier leading Shafii jurists as al-Muzani
(d. 264/878), al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085), and Taqi al-Din al-Subki (d. 756/1356).
Al-Sharani reports that his teacher never gave a fatwa outside the Shafii
school of law.81
Al-Suyuti redefines the adjective prolific. Scholars have come up with var-
ious final tallies of his books and treatises, but the median count of his works
is over 600, 392 of which have been published.82 The fields of Quranic sci-
ences, Arabic grammar and rhetoric, as well as history were certainly some of
his more pronounced passions. But the collection and discussion of hadiths
dominated his oeuvre perhaps more than any other subject. His student al-
Dawudi says that he was the most knowledgeable of his time in Hadith and its
sciences, and al-Suyuti himself claimed to have memorized 200,000 hadiths,
adding that there might not be more than that in the world.
His effort to compile all of the extant hadiths in one massive compendium,
the Jmi al-Kabr, was cut short by his death. What survived is published in
thirty large volumes, covering around nine-tenths of an alphabetized ordering
of Prophetic sayings (he never began the section on Prophetic actions).83 While
working on this massive project, al-Suyuti seemingly extracted all of the ha-
diths that quoted the Prophets speech, as opposed to his actions, and compiled
them in a smaller work entitled Jmi al-aghr (10,031 hadiths in the published
version). He himself wrote an addendum with hadiths that he had missed (Al-
Ziydah), but did not incorporate them into the original.84
In the late 1480s, by then in his forties, al-Suyuti began withdrawing from
public life. When he argued with the Sufis of the Baybarsiyyah lodge (he dis-
puted their claim to be Sufis because they were not adopting the saints manners
and ethics), he was dismissed. Reports exist that the Mamluk sultan then sought
to have him killed. Al-Suyuti went into hiding for several months until the sul-
tan died, whereupon he retired permanently to his house on Rawa Island in
the Nile (today part of Cairo) to write in seclusion, perhaps leaving home only
to access books. He stayed there until his death in 911/1505, aged sixty-one.
In addition to the controversy over his claims of ijtihd, al-Suyuti was
heavily criticized (and is still scoffed at) for claiming to be the renewer (mu-
jaddid) of the tenth Islamic century. Yet his claim was not as arrogant as is
often portrayed, for he writes in his autobiography: This poor soul in need of
Gods bounty hopes that God would bestow upon him the blessing of being
the mujaddid at the start of the century.85 This could be seen as a sign of ego-
tism, but few contemporaneous scholars could hope for this mantle with a more
reasonable expectation of receiving it. His admirers wrote that al-Suyutis writ-
ings had spread as far is India during his own lifetime. His learning and, even
more, his astoundingly prolific output were quickly seen by many as miracu-
lous signs from God of his worthiness. But al-Suyuti was an abrasive man who
was confident of his abilities and quick to point out others shortcomings. As
Saleh writes: His arrogance and combative personality made it virtually im-
possible for other scholars to appreciate his undeniable accomplishments.86
We know little of where the treatise presented here, Bulgh al-Maml,
stood in al-Suyutis career. The text includes no hints as to when or exactly
why it was composed, other than as part of the longrunning Hanafis v. Other
Schools debate over the criminal rating of liw. At one point in his life, al-
Suyuti became very exercised over the continued operation of a certain house
of ill repute in Cairo, where all sorts of corruption occurred, like fornication,
sodomy, drinking, and playing music.87 But there is nothing remarkable
here, for few Muslim scholars would have reacted differently.
The Structure of Attaining the Hoped-for in
Service of the Messenger
The outline of al-Suyutis treatise is as follows:
1. Presentation of the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner and related

hadiths via Ibn Abbas, Abu Hurayrah, and Jabir, along with critical ap-
proval of their reliability.
2. Discussion of the criticisms of Amr b. Abi Amrs narration and responses
mitigating them, adding that other narrations compensate for his flaws.
Thus Amrs hadith should be considered a.
3. Presentation of other hadiths attesting to the content of Amr b. Abi Amrs
narration of the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner.
4. Presentation of supporting Companion reports.

5. Contextualization of criticisms of Amr b. Abi Amr and the argument that
he is reliable.
6. Response to Ibn Hajars comment that the hadith is disagreed on in terms
of its attestation.
7. Conclusion: People should be wary of speaking about hadiths without
knowledge of the Hadith sciences.
The Text of Bulgh al-Maml Relied on

for this Translation
There are two published editions of Al-w li al-Fatw, a collection of al-
Suyutis fatwas that he compiled himself. The Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah edi-
tion (henceforth, DKI), edited by a team of scholars, relied on a selection of
manuscripts and includes a limited critical apparatus. The Dar al-Kitab al-
Arabi edition (henceforth, DKA), which lacks any mention of the sources re-
lied on, seems to have relied on only one manuscript. Unfortunately, that
manuscript also seems to be an outlier. As such, this translation is based on the
DKI edition of the w.88
Endnotes
1. Books devoted to the topic include Dhamm al-Liw by Abu Bakr al-Ajurri of
Baghdad (d. 360/970), Al-ukm al-Mab f Tarm Amal Qawm L by Shams
al-Din Muhammad b. Umar al-Ghamri of Cairo (d. 849/1445); he also wrote a
book on gender mixing: Al-Unwn f Tarm Musharat al-Shabbn wa al-
Niswn and a Rislah f al-Lyah wa Tarmih by Ibrahim b. Bakhshi Dada
Khalifah (d. 973/1565); Shams al-Din al-Sakhawi, Al-aw al-Lmi (Beirut:
Dar al-Jil, 1992), 4:239; Hajji Khalifah Mustafa Katib Chelebi, Kashf al-unn
an Asm al-Kutub wa al-Funn, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Ata (Beirut:
Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1429/2008), 2:204.
2. For a study on the etymology and lexicography around the word liw, see Pierre
Larcher, Liw: agir comme le peuple de Loth Formation et interprtation
lexicales en arabe classique, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 14 (2014):
213-27.
3. See Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Al-Zawjir an Iqtirf al-
Kabir, ed. Imad Zaki al-Barudi (Cairo: al-Maktabah al-Tawfiqiyyah, 2003),
2:296-97.
4. Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-
1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 124, 136-39. The definition
of liw in the late Shafii school included the clause in the anus, whether of
a man or a woman. A hadith in Ibn Hanbals Musnad refers to anal sex with
ones wife as the lesser liw (al-lyah al-ughr), and this wording is attested
even earlier in the Kitb al-Tarsh of Dirar b. Amr (d. 200/815). In the Hanafi,
Shafii, and Maliki schools, anal sex with ones wife or slavegirl is only punished
by discretionary punishment (tazr) (in the Shafii school, one opinion is that
this is only done if the man repeats the act after a warning). Al-Sharani (d.
973/1565) states that some scholars allowed anal sex with male slaves, but he
provides no name or reference. The Hanafi scholar al-Kawakibi (d. 1096/1685)
also reported that there are those who consider anal sex with male slaves to be
permissible on the basis of the Qurans permission of sex with slaves (normally
read as slave women), but again with no mention of who these scholars were.
These may be references to the early Shafii scholar Abu Sahl Ahmad al-Abiwardi
(d. 385/995), who held that a man who commits liw with his male slave should
only receive a discretionary punishment, since the slave was his property, and
this introduced an ambiguity (shubhah), which drops the offense from the realm
of the udd. Ibn Hajar al-Haytami states that the ulama had come to consensus
that liw with ones male slave was the same as with a free man; Muhammad
Nawawi b. Umar al-Jawi, Qt al-abb al-Gharb (Cairo: Matbaat Mustafa al-
Babi al-Halabi, 1938), 246; Musnad of Ibn Hanbal (Maymaniyyah print), 2:182;
Dirar b. A mr, Kitb al-Tarsh, ed. Hseyin Hansu and Mehmet Keskin (Istanbul:
Sharikat Dar al-Irshad; Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 2014), 132; Muhammad Anwar
Shah Kashmiri and Ahmad Ali al-Saharanpuri, Jmi al-Tirmidh al-Muashsh
(Karachi: Qadimi Kutubkhane, n.d.), 338; Salih Abd al-Salam al-Abi, Al-
Thamar al-Dn f Taqrb al-Man shiyat Rislat Ibn Ab Zayd al-
Qayrawn, 2d ed. (Cairo: Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, 1944), 438; al-Suyuti,
Al-Ashbh wa al-Nair, ed. Muhammad al-Mutasim al-Baghdadi (Beirut: Dar
al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1414/1993), 746; Taj al-Din al-Subki, abaqt al-Shfiyah
al-Kubr, ed. Abd al-Fattah Muhammad al-Huluw and Mahmud Muhammad
al-Tanahi, 2d ed. (Cairo: Hujr, 1413/1992), 4:45-46; al-Haytami, Al-Zawjir,
2:299; Muhammad b. Hasan al-Kawakibi, Al-Fawid al-Samyah Shar al-
Fawid al-Sanyah, 2 vols. (Cairo: al-Mabaah al-Amiriyyah, 1322 AH), 2:355.
5. Ibn al-Hajj (d. 737/1336) of Cairo, who was famously conservative, divided
sodomy (lyah) into three levels: (1) pleasure from looking at other men/boys,
which was arm; 2) sexual contact short of anal sex, which was as bad as the
latter if repeated; and 3) anal sex (i.e., al-fishah al-kubr); Ibn al-Hajj al-Maliki,
Al-Madkhal, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, [1990]), 2:8. This tripartite division
might come from Abu Bakr Ibn Abi al-Dunya (d. 281/894), who cites one Abu
Sahl as describing how there will be three types of l folk: one that gazes, one
that clasps hands, and one that does that act. See Abu Bakr Ibn Abi al-Dunya,
Dhamm al-Malh, ed. Amr Abd al-Munim Salim (Cairo: Dar Ibn Taymiyyah,
1416/1996), 98. I thank Muntasir Zaman for this citation. See also Abu Bakr
Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Ajurri (d. 360/970), Dhamm al-Liw, ed. Majdi al-
Sayyid Ibrahim (Cairo: Maktabat al-Quran, n.d.), 72.
6. For a useful study, see Sara Omar, From Semantics to Normative Law: Percep-
tions of Liw (Sodomy) and Siq (Tribadism) in Islamic Jurisprudence (8-15th
Century CE), Islamic Law and Society 19 (2012): 222-56.
7. Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Mib al-Zujjah Shar Sunan Ibn Mjah (Karachi:
Qadim Kutubkhane, n.d.), 184; Abu Bakr Ahmad al-Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan al-Kubr,
ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Ata, 11 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah,
1999), 8:404-5; al-Abi, Al-Thamar al-Dn, 438.
8. Mansur b. Yunus al-Buhuti, Al-Raw al-Murbi, ed. Bashir Muhammad Uyun
(Damascus: Maktabat Dar al-Bayan, 1999), 463-4; Abu Jafar al-Tahawi, Shar
Mushkil al-thr, ed. Shuayb al-Arnaut, 16 vols. (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risalah,
1994), 9: 442-43.
9. Al-Jawi, Qt al-abb, 246.
10. See this excellent study on how Sharia rules on same-sex activity are linked pri-
marily to public order concerns: Mohammed Mezziane, Sodomie et masculinit
chez les juristes musalmans du IXe-XIe sicle, Arabica 55 (2008): 276-306.
11. Kashmiri et al., Jmi al-Tirmidh al-Muashsh, 338.
12. Al-Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan, 8:404-6; al-Haytami, Zawjir, 2:296.
13. Ibn Hajar, Fat al-Br, ed. Ayman Fuad Abd al-Baqi and Abd al-Aziz Bin
Baz, 14 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1997), 12:139, 251.
14. Badr al-Din Muhammad al-Zarkashi, Al-Bar al-Mu (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-
Ilmiyyah, 2007), 4:566; al-Haytami, Al-Fatw al-adthyah (Beirut: Dar Ihya
al-Turath al-Arabi, 1998), 267; Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Khamis, ed.,
Al-Jmi f Alf al-Kufr (Kuwait: Dar Ilaf al-Duwaliyyah, 1999/1420), 92;
Muhyi al-Din al-Nawawi, Rawat al-libn (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami,
1991/1412), 10:65; Mansur al-Buhuti, Kashshf al-Qin (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr,
1982/1402), 6:172; Ibn Hazm, Al-Muall (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, n.d.), 12:388; al-
Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan, 8:402; Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Qurtubi, Al-Jmi li Akm
al-Qurn, 10 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Hadith, 2002), 4:212; Muhammad b. Ismail
al-Amir al-Sanani, Subul al-Salm, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi,
2005), 4:18-19.
15. For a useful declaration of what Progressive means in the Muslim context, see
Omid Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 1-29.
16. http://muslimmatters.org/2016/07/11/can-islam-accommodate-homosexual-acts-
Quranic-revisionism-and-the-case-of-scott-kugle/.
17. Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari, Al-Ibna an Ul al-Diyna, ed. Fawqiyyah Husayn
Mahmud (Cairo: Dar al-Ansar, 1977), 138.
18. See Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld,
2010).
19. Abdallah b. Abd al-Rahman al-Darimi, Sunan al-Darim: introductory chapters,
bb al-sunnah qiya al kitb Allh.
20. Al-Ajurri, Dhamm al-Liw, 29; Ibn Abd al-Hadi Muhammad b. Ahmad, Al-
Muharrar f al-adth, ed. Adil al-Hudba and Muhammad Allush (Riyadh: Dar
al-Ata, 2001), 407; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Al-Jawb al-Kf li Man Saala
an al-Daw al-Shf, ed. Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib (Cairo: al-Maktabah al-
Salafiyyah, n.d.), 206; Muhammad b. Abdallah al-Zarkashi al-Hanbali, Shar
al-Zarkashi al Mukhtaar al-Khiraq, ed. Abdallah Abd al-Rahman al-Jibrin
(Riyadh: Maktabat al-Ubaykan, 1993), 6:287; Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Al-Zawjir,
2:293; al-Sanani, Subul al-Salm, 4:18; Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani,

a Sunan Ibn Mjah (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maarif, 1997), 2:324; idem, a
Sunan Ab Dwd (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maarif, 1998), 3:73.
21. Al-Tahawi, Shar Mushkil al-thr, 9:449-50. His criticism of other hadiths does
not involve Amr b. Abi Amr.
22. The Torah forbids shifting existing boundary markers, especially those of neigh-
bors. See Deuteronomy 19:14, 27:17; and Proverbs 22:28. In early Roman law,
destroying or moving boundary stones was punishable by being sacrificed to
Jupiter Capitolinus; O. F. Robinson, Criminal Law: The Roman Republic, OUP
Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:268.
23. The narrations through Abd al-Rahman b. Abi al-Zinad Amr b. Abi Amr are
highly inconsistent in their wording, as are the narrations through Sulayman b.
Bilal Amr b. Abi Amr, though they all contain mention of bestiality. By con-
trast, the narrations through Zuhayr b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr and
through Muhammad b. Ishaq Amr b. Abi Amr are extremely consistent in
their wording (those through Zuhayr never include bestiality; those through Ibn
Ishaq always do).
24. In the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal there is a similar hadith narrated from Ali in which
he reads from his afah that the Prophet said: God has cursed those who
slaughter to other than God, God has cursed those who steal signposts in the land,
and God has cursed those who curse their fathers, and God has cursed those who
give refuge to a murderer (laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh laana
Allh man saraqa manr al-ar wa laana Allh man laana wlidahu wa laana
Allh man aw mudithan); Musnad of Ibn Hanbal, 1:108, 118, 152.
25. Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani, Al-Muannaf, ed. Habib al-Rahman al-Azami, 11
vols. (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1403/1983), 7:365. The isnd is: Ibn Jurayj
Ata al-Khurasani (break) the Prophet: maln maln maln man amila
amal qawm l maln man sabba shayan min wlidayhi maln man ghayyara
shayan min tukhm al-ar maln man jamaa bayn imraa wa ibnatih maln
man tawall qawman bi ghayr idhnihim maln man waqaa al bahma maln
man dhabaa li ghayr Allh azza wa jall. And also via the isnd: Ibn Jurayj
(likely break) Ikrimah Ibn Abbas but without the mention of bestiality. It is
debated whether Ibn Jurayj met and heard hadiths from Ikrimah; see Ibn Hajar,
Tahdhb al-Tahdhb, ed. Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata, 12 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-
Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1994), 6:353.
26. Abd b. Humayd, Musnad Abd b. umayd, ed. Subhi Badri al-Samarrai and
Mahmud Muhammad Saidi (Cairo: Maktabat al-Sunnah, 1408/1988), 203. The
key part of the isnd is: Sulayman b. Bilal Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah
, with the wording: laana Allh man ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa laana Allh
man wl ghayr mawlhi wa laana Allh man kammaha am an al-sabl
laana Allh man laana wlidayhi wa laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh
wa laana Allh man waqaa al al-bahma wa laana Allh man amila amal
qawm l thumma laana Allh man amila amal qawm l thumma laana Allh
man amila amal qawm l.
27. Musnad of Ibn Hanbal in five locations. 1) Musnad 1:217. The isnd is Muham-
mad b. Salama (Maslama in some recensions of the Musnad, an error) Muham-
mad b. Ishaq (an) Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah the Prophet, with the
wording: maln man sabba abhu maln man sabba ummaha maln man
dhabaa li ghayr Allh maln man ghayyara tukhm al-ar maln man
kammaha am an arq maln man waqaa al bahma maln man amila
bi-amal (some recensions have amal) qawm l. 2) Musnad 1:317. The isnd
is Yaqub Ibrahim b. Sad Muhammad b. Ishaq (addathan) Amr b. Abi
Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet, with almost the identical wording:
maln man sabba abhu maln man sabba ummaha maln man dhabaa li
ghayr Allh maln man ghayyara tukhm al-ar maln man kammaha am
an al-arq maln man waqaa al bahma maln man amila amal qawm
l qlah rasl Allh (s) mirran thalthan f al-lyah. 3) Musnad 1:309. The
isnd is Abd al-Rahman Zuhayr - Amr b. Abi Amr - Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
the Prophet: laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh wa laana Allh man
ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa laana Allh man kammaha al-am an al-sabl
wa laana Allh man sabba wlidayhi wa laana Allh man tawall ghayr
mawlhi wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l laana Allh man amila
amal qawm l laana Allh man amila amal qawm l. 4) Musnad 1:317.
The isnd is Hajjaj Abd al-Rahman b. Abi al-Zinad Amr b. Abi Amr
Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet: laana Allh man man ghayyara tukhm
al-ar laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh laana Allh man laana
wlidayhi laana Allh man tawall ghayr mawlhi laana Allh man kammaha
al-am an al-sabl laana Allh man waqaa al bahma wa laana Allh
man amila amal qawm l laana Allh man amila amal qawm l laana
Allh man thalthan. 5) Musnad 1:317. The isnd is Abu Said Sulayman b.
Bilal Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah, etc., with the wording: laana Allh man
ghayyara tukhm al-ar laana Allh man tawall ghayr mawlhi laana Allh
man kammaha am an al-arq laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh
laana Allh man waqaa al bahma laana Allh man aqqa wlidayhi laana
Allh man amila amal qawm l qlah thalthan.
28. Nur al-Din Ali al-Haythami, Majma al-Zawid wa Manba al-Fawid, ed.
Husam al-Din al-Qudsi, 10 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, n.d.), 1:565.
The isnd is: al-Khalil b. Zakariyyah al-Muthanna b. al-Sabah Amr b.
Shuayb his father his grandfather the Prophet: maln maln maln man
amila amal qawm l.
29. Abu Bakr Ibn Abi al-Dunya, Dhamm al-Malh, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir
Ata (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1407/1987), 65. The key part of the isnd is Khalaf
b. Hisham Abd al-Rahman b. Abi al-Zinad Amr b. Abi Amr etc., with
the wording: laana Allh man amila amal qawm l thalthan laana Allh
man amila amal qawm l laana Allh man amila amal qawm l.
30. Ahmad b. Shuayb al-Nasai (d. 303/916), Sunan al-Nas al-Kubr, ed. Shuayb
al-Arnaut et al. (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risalah, 1421/2001), 6:485-86. Here al-
Nasai describes Amr as not strong (laysa bi qaw). The key part of the isnd
is: Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
the Prophet, with the wording: laana Allh man amila amal qawm l laana
Allh man amila amal qawm l laana Allh man amila amal qawm l. Al-
Nasai must have omitted the earlier part of the list of things God has cursed, as
the whole matn by this isnd is in al-Bayhaqi, Sunan, 8:403. Al-Ajurri includes
the narration by this isnd with only the wording: laana Allh man waqaa al
bahma wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l; as well as once with the
full list; al-Ajurri, Dhamm al-Liw, 46-47.
31. Abu Yala al-Mawsili, Al-Musnad, ed. Husayn Salim Asad, 13 vols. (Damascus:
Dar al-Mamun, 1404/1984), 4:414. The key part of the isnd is: Zuhayr
Abd al-Malik b. Amr Zuhayr b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr
Ikrimah, with the wording: laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh wa
laana Allh man ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa laana Allh man kammaha al-
am an al-sabl wa laana Allh man sabba wlidayhi wa laana Allh man
tawall ghayr mawlhi wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l qlah
thalthan yan qawm l.
32. Ibn Hibban al-Busti, a Ibn Hibban, ed. Shuayb al-Arnaut, 18 vols. (Beirut:
Muassasat al-Risalah, 1993), 10:265. The key part of the isnd is: Zuhayr b.
Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah, with the wording: laana Allh
man dhabaa li ghayr Allh wa laana Allh man ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa
laana Allh man kammaha al-am an al-sabl wa laana Allh man sabba
wlidayhi wa laana Allh man tawall ghayr mawlhi wa laana Allh man
amila amal qawm l qlah thalthan f amal qawm l.
33. Muammad b. Jafar al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq wa Madhmmuh, ed.
Mustafa al-Shalabi (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Sawadi, 1992), 203. The isnd is:
Ahmad b. Mansur al-Ramadi Abdallah b. Raja Said b. Salamah Amr b.
Abi Amr Ikrimah the Prophet, with the wording: laana Allh man waqaa
al bahma wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l qlah thaltha.
34. Abu al-Qasim Sulayman al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Awsa, ed. Tariq b. Awad
Allah al-Husayni, 10 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Haramayn, 1415/1995), 8:234. The
isnd is: Muadh Abu Musab al-Zuhri Muharrar b. Harun al-Qurashi al-
Araj Abu Hurayrah the Prophet (al-Tabarani notes that only Muharrar nar-
rates this from al-Araj), with the wording: laana Allh saba min khalqihi
min fawq sab samawtihi wa raddada al-lana al wid minhum thalthan
wa laana kull wid minhum lanatan takfhi fa-qla maln man amila amal
qawm l maln man amila amal qawm l maln man amila amal qawm
l maln man dhabaa li ghayr Allh maln man at shayan min al-bahim
maln man aqqa wlidayhi maln man jamaa bayn al-mara wa bayn
ibnatih maln man ghayyara udd al-ar maln man idda il ghayr
mawlihi; idem, Al-Mujam al-Kabr, ed. Hamdi Abd al-Majid al-Salafi, 25
vols. (Mosul: Maktabat al-Zahra, 1983/1404), 11:218. The isnd is Abu Yazid
al-Qaratisi and Yahya b. Ayyub al-Allaf Said b. Abi Maryam Abd al-
Rahman b. Abi al-Zinad and Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr
Ikrimah Ibn Abbas Prophet, with the wording: laana Allh man wl
ghayr mawlhi laana Allh man ghayyara tukhm al-ar laana Allh man
kammaha am an al-arq wa laana Allh man laana wlidayhi wa laana
Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh wa laana Allh man waqaa al bahma
wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l wa laana Allh man amila amal
qawm l wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l. See also, for almost
identical chains, al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq, 201.
35. Al-Hakim al-Naysaburi, Al-Mustadrak (Hyderabad: Dairat al-Maarif al-
Uthmaniyyah, n.d.), 4:356. The key part of the isnd is: Zuhayr Amr b. Abi
Amr Ikrimah, with the wording: laana Allh man dhabaa li ghayr Allh,
wa laana Allh man ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa laana Allh man kammaha
al-am an al-sabl wa laana Allh man sabba wlidayhi wa laana Allh man
tawall ghayr mawlhi wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm l. Another
narration comes via Abu Hurayrah. The key part of the isnd is: Muharrar b.
Harun al-Taymi (al-Qurashi) al-Araj Abu Hurayrah the Prophet: laana
Allh saba min khalqihi malun maln malun man amila amal qawm l.
Al-Dhahabi notes that critics considered Muharrar b. Harun weak.
36. Al-Bayhaqi, Sunan, 8:403. The key part of the isnd is: Ibrahim b. Hamzah al-
Zubayri Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah, with
the wording: laana Allh man tawall ghayr mawlhi wa laana Allh man
ghayyara tukhm al-ar wa laana Allh man kammaha al-am an al-sabl wa
laana Allh man laana wlidahu wa laana Allh dhabaa li ghayr Allh wa
laana Allh man waqaa al bahma wa laana Allh man amila amal qawm
l laana Allh man amila amal qawm l laana Allh man amila amal
qawm l.
37. Abu Nuaym al-Isbahani, ilyat al-Awliy wa abaqt al-Afiy, 10 vols.
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji and Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1416/1997), 9:232. The full
isnd is: Muhammad b. al-Hasan Abdallah b. Ahmad his father (a.k.a. Ibn
Hanbal) Muhammad b. Muslim (sic, probably a copyists error from the recen-
sions of Ibn Hanbals Musnad that have Maslamah instead of Salamah)
Muhammad Ishaq (sic) Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah the Prophet, with the
wording: maln man sabba abhu maln man sabba ummahu maln man
dhabaa li ghayr Allh maln man ghayyara tukhm al-ar maln man
kammaha am min arq maln man waqaa al bahma maln man amila
bi amal qawm l.
38. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Trkh Baghdd, ed. Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata, 14
vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1417/1997), 5:90. The key part of the
isnd is: al-Amash Abu Salih Abu Hurayrah the Prophet, with the wording:
maln maln man sabba abhu maln maln man sabba ummahu maln
maln man amila amal qawm l maln maln man aghr bayn bahmatayn
maln maln man ghayyara tukhm al-ar maln maln man kammaha am
an al-arq. Al-Khatib calls this munkar, notes that it is not reliably established
by this isnd (l yathbutu bi-hdh al-isnd), and places the blame on a later
narrator: Ahmad b. al-Abbas al-Khallal.
39. Al-Haythami, Majma al-Zawid, 1:103; al-Albani, a al-Jmi al-aghr,

ed. Zuhayr al-Shawish, 2 vols. (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1988), 2:1225;
Ahmad b. al-Siddiq al-Ghumari, Al-Mudw li-Ilal al-Jmi al-aghr wa
Sharay al-Munaw, 6 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1996), 6:13. The narration
championed by al-Ghumari, that via Ibn Ishaq, is found in Ibn Hanbals Musnad:
1:217, 317 and Abu Nuaym, ilyat, 9:232. Note: Kugle discusses this hadith
and presents a chart of some of its narrations. While he lists Ibn Ishaq as a trans-
mitter, he is absent in the actual diagram; Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 119.
40. For a useful summary of the criticism of this hadith, see Jamal al-Din Abdallah
b. Yusuf al-Zaylai, Nab al-Rya li-Adth al-Hidyah, ed. Muhammad
Awwamah, 5 vols. (Beirut: Muassasat al-Rayyan, 1997), 3:339-43.
41. Sunan Ab Dawud: kitb al-adab, bb m ja f al-istidhn f al-awrt al-
thalth.
42. Sunan al-Nas: kitb al-adaqt, bb al-kafla.
43. Al-Tirmidhi, Kitb al-Ilal al-Kabr, ed. Subhi al-Samarrai, et al. (Beirut: Alam
al-Kutub, 1989), 236; Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-udd, bb m ja f-man
waqaa al al-bahma; Sunan al-Nas: kitb mansik al-ajj, bb idh ashra
al-maram il al-ayd; Sunan Ab Dawud: kitb al-adab, bb al-istidhn f
al-awrt al-thalth; Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi, Mzn al-Itidl f Naqd al-Rijl,
ed. Ali Muhammad al-Bijawi, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Marifah, [n.d.], reprint of
1963-4 Cairo Isa al-Babi al-Halabi edition), 3:281-82; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhb al-
Tahdhb, 8:68-69.
44. Umar b. Hasan Ibn Dihya, Ad m Wajab min Bayn Wa al-Wan f Rajab
(Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1998), 136.
45. Sunan Ab Dawud: kitb al-udd, bb f-man amila amal qawm l, bb f-
man at al-bahma; Abu Sulayman amd al-Khattabi, Malim al-Sunan, 3d ed.,
4 vols. (Beirut: al-Maktabah al-Ilmiyyah, 1981), 3:333; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhb al-
Tahdhb, 8:68; al-Tirmidhi, Kitb al-Ilal al-Kabr, 236; al-Tahawi, Shar
Mushkil al-thr, 9:440-43. Al-Bayhaqi advanced a more doctrinaire Shafii po-
sition when he argued that this claim was not convincing, since Asim Razin
was not any more reliable a chain that of Amr b. Abi Amr; al-Bayhaqi, Al-
Sunan al-Kubr, 8:407.
46. Ibn Hajar, Bulgh al-Marm, ed. Tariq Awad Allah Muhammad (Beirut: Dar
Ibn Hazm, 2008), 420.
47. Ibn Hajar, Fat al-Br, 12:139.
48. Ibid., 12:251.
49. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 105-10.
50. Ibn Hajar, Huda li al-Sr Muqaddimat Fat al-Br, ed. Ayman Fuad Abd al-
Baqi and Abd al-Aziz Bin Baz (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1997), 596-
601.
51. See https://shaykhatabekshukurov.com/2016/06/13/ikrima-as-imam-of-modern-
hanafis/ and https://shaykhatabekshukurov.com/2016/07/09/ikrima-as-imam-of-
modern-hanafis-part-2/.
52. See http://ahlussunnah.boards.net/thread/499/response-atabek-ikrimah-mawl-ibn

53. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 88.
54. Abu Bakr al-Jassas, Akm al-Qurn (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, n.d.; fac-
simile reprint of Istanbul: Matbaat al-Awqaf al-Islamiyyah, 1335/1917), 3:263.
55. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 108-110.
56. See a al-Bukhr: kitb al-muribn min ahl al-kufr, bb ithm al-zin.
57. a al-Bukhr: kitb al-malim, bb al-nuhba bi ghayr idhn ibihi; a
Muslim: kitb al-mn, bb bayn nuqn al-mn; Sunan Ab Dwd: kitb
al-sunna, bb al-dall al ziydat al-mn; Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-mn,
bb m ja l yazn al-zn; Sunan al-Nas: kitb qa al-sriq, bb tam
al-sariqa; Sunan Ibn Mjah: kitb al-fitan, bb al-nahy an al-nuhba.
58. a al-Bukhari: kitb al-muribn min ahl al-kufr, bb ithm al-zin.
59. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 81, 116.
60. a al-Bukhr: kitb istitbat al-murtaddn, bb man taraka qitl al-
khawrij.
61. The Quran states that God only makes knowledge of the unseen (al-ghayb) avail-
able to those whom He chooses (Q. 72:26). In another verse the Prophet is made
to say: I do not know what will be done with me or with you all (Q. 46:9), and
in another: I do not tell you all that mine are the treasuries of the world, nor do
I known the unseen (Q. 6:50). Aishah is reported to have said that anyone who
claimed that the Prophet knew what would happen tomorrow was lying against
God; a al-Bukhr: kitb al-tawd, bb qawl Allh tal lim al-
ghayb). But numerous hadiths describe the Prophet knowing future events,
such as one in which God teaches him all that is in the heavens and the earth;
Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-tafsr, bb min srat d. Muslim scholars have thus
concluded that the Prophet either had qualified knowledge of the unseen or that
God granted him this knowledge at a particular time in his life, often thought to
be during his Ascension to Heaven from Jerusalem. See, for example, Ibn Asakir,
Trkh Madnat Dimashq, ed. Umar al-Amrawi, 80 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr,
1995-97), 11:5. Debate over the Prophets knowledge of the unseen has proven
tempestuous between the Deobandi and Barelwi schools of thought in South Asia.
See Usha Sanyal, Are Wahhabis Kafirs? Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His
Sword of the Haramayn, in Islamic Legal Interpretation, ed. Muhammad Khalid
Masud, Brinkley Messick and David S. Powers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 210-12.
62. Al-Khatb al-Baghdadi, Al-Jami li Ikhtilf al-Rw wa db al-Smi, ed.
Muhammad Rafat Said, 2 vols. (Mansoura: Egypt: Dar al-Wafa, 1422/2002),
2:81. The practice of transmitting the general meaning a hadith (al-riwyah bi
al-man) was widely accepted among hadith transmitters of the second/eighth
and third/ninth centuries. It was eventually accepted unanimously, as noted by
leading scholars like al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463/1071) and Ibn al-Salah (d.
643/1245). Some early Muslim scholars insisted on repeating hadiths exactly as
they had heard them. Ibn Sirin (d. 110/728) even reportedly repeated grammatical
errors in hadiths they had heard; al-Khatib, Al-Jmi, 2:71, 78-79; cf. Jmi al-
Tirmidh: kitb al-ilal. Interestingly, al-Qadi Iyad b. Musa (d. 544/ 1149) stated
that laxity in hadith transmission had led master scholars (muaq-qiqn) in the
fifth/eleventh century to close the door of riwyah bi al-man; al-Qadi Iyad,
Mashriq al-Anwr al i al-thr, ed. Balamshi Ahmad Yagan, 2 vols.
([Rabat]: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa al-Shuun al-Islamiyyah, 1402/1982), 1:23.
64. For the versions of these hadiths with the non-anachronistic wordings, see Sunan
Ibn Mjah: introduction, bb f al-qadar; Musnad Ibn anbal, 2:125.
65. Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam, 119, 123.
66. Ibid., 120.
67. Ibid., 122.
68. Ibid., 121.
69. Peter Stearns, Sexuality in World History (London: Routledge, 2009), 17.
71. Ibid.
72. See Jonathan AC Brown, Hadith (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 210-13.
73. Al-Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan, 8:403.
74. Al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Awsa, 4:266-67.
75. Al-Bayhaqi, Sunan, 8:405.
76. Abd al-Razzaq, Muannaf, 7:363.
77. Abu Bakr Ibn Abi Shaybah, Al-Muannaf, ed. Kamal Yusuf al-Hut, 7 vols.
(Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1409/1988), 5:497.
78. Harald Motzki, The Muannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani as a Source of Au-
thentic Adth of the First Century A.H., Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 50
(1991): 11-12.
79. For comprehensive studies on al-Suyuti, see Elizabeth Sartain, Jall al-Din al-
Suy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1975); Marlis J.
Saleh, Al-Suyuti and His Works: Their Place in Islamic Scholarship from Mam-
luk Times to the Present, Mamluk Studies Review 5 (2001): 73-89. Invaluable
Arabic works include Tahir Sulayman Hammuda, Jall al-Dn al-Suy: Aruhu
wa aytuhu wa thruhu wa Juhduhu f al-Dars al-Lughaw (Beirut: n.p.,
1989), Sadi Abu Jib, ayt Jall al-Dn al-Suy maa al-Ilm min al-Mahd il
al-Lad (Damascus: Dar al-Manahil, 1993). For his work in the science of Hadith,
see Badi al-Sayyid al-Lahham, Al-Imm al-fi Jall al-Dn al-Suy wa
Juhduhu f al-adth wa Ulmihi (Damascus: Dar Qutaybah, 1994).
80. Sartain, Jall al-Dn al-Suy, 1:23.
81. Ibid., 1:19-113; Najm al-Din al-Ghazz, Al-Kawkib al-Sirah bi Ayn al-Miah
al-shirah, ed. Jibrail Jabbur, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, 1979),
1:226-31; Abd al-Wahhab al-Sharani, Al-abaqt al-ughr, ed. Ahmad Abd
al-Rahman al-Sayih and Tawfiq Wahba (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafah al-
Diniyyah, 2005), 7, 13.
82. Saleh, Al-Suyuti and His Works, 83, 89.
83. Here al-Suyuti may have been following in the footsteps of his exemplar, Ibn
Hajar, who, according to al-Suyuti, wrote a book called Al-Jmi al-Kabr min
Sunan al-Bashr al-Nadhr. Many scholars have pointed out al-Suyutis failure
to exhaust all the extant hadiths in his Jmi al-Kabr. The Egyptian al-Munawi
(d. 1031/1622) estimated that al-Suyuti had captured no more than two thirds of
the extant Prophetic sayings in his Jmi al-Kabr, and he compiled his Jmi al-
Azhar min adth al-Nab al-Anwar to include additional material that al-Suyuti
had missed in the part of his work that he had completed. Al-Munawi then also
picked up where had al-Suyuti left off (around the hadith man taraka). The
Moroccan hadith scholar Abu al-Ala al-Fasi (d. 1769) wrote in over 5,000 ha-
diths in the margins of his copy of the Jmi al-Kabr. Meanwhile, the Indian
scholar Ali b. Abd al-Malik al-Muttaqi al-Hindi (d. 975/ 1567) built on al-
Suyutis Jmi al-aghr. He added more hadiths, including those describing the
Prophets actions, and then arranged all the material according to topic in his huge
Kanz al-Umml f Sunan al-Aqwl wa al-Afl; Muhammad b. Jafar al-Kattani,
Salwat al-Anfs wa Mudathat al-Akys mimman Uqbira min al-Ulam wa
al-ula bi Fs, ed. Abdallah al-Kamil al-Kattani et al., 4 vols. (Casablanca:
Dar al-Thaqafah, 2004), 1:150; al-Suyuti, Nam al-Iqyn f Ayn al-Ayn, ed.
Philip Hitti (Beirut: al-Maktabah al-Ilmiyyah, 1927), 49; Abd al-Rauf al-Mu-
nawi, Al-Jmi al-Azhar min adth al-Nab al-Anwar (Cairo: al-Markaz al-
Arabi li al-Bahth wa al-Nashr, 1980), 1:1-10.
84. This task was performed in the twentieth century by Yusuf al-Nabhani (d. 1932),
who titled the resulting work Al-Fat al-Kabr f amm al-Ziydah il al-Jmi
al-aghr.
85. Al-Suyuti, Al-Taadduth bi Nimat Allh, ed. Elizabeth Sartain (Cairo: al-
Matbaah al-Arabiyyah al-Hadithah, 1972), 227.
86. Saleh, Al-Suyuti and His Works, 78.
87. Al-Suyuti, Al-Taadduth bi Nimat Allh, 175.
88. Al-Suyuti, Al-w li al-Fatw (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1402/1982,
reprint of original published in 1352/1933), 2:110-115 and ; idem, Al-w li al-
Fatw, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arab, n.d.), 2:279-85.
Attaining the Hoped-for in Service of

the Messenger (may Gods peace
and blessings be upon him)
{In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. And praise be to
God, and peace be upon His elect servants.}1
Question: The hadith Whomever you all have found committing the ac-
tion of the people of Lot, kill the active and the passive partners2 appears
among the hadiths of Ibn Abbas, Abu Hurayrah, and Jabir.
The hadith of Ibn Abbas was included by Abu Dawud,3 al-Tirmidhi,4 al-
Nasai [in his Sunan al-Kubr],5 Ibn Majah,6 Ibn Abi al-Dunya in the Dhamm
al-Malh (The Condemnation of Distractions),7 Abu Yala [al-Mawsili]8 and
al-Adani9 in their two Musnads, by Abd b. Humayd10 and Ibn al-Jarud in the
Muntaq,11 by al-Daraqutni in his Sunan,12 by al-Tabarani13 and al-Hakim in
the Mustadrak and he rated it a14 as well as by al-Bayhaqi in his Sunan15
and al-Diya al-Maqdisi in his Mukhtrah.16
A group of the leading hadith scholars (aimmat al-uff) have declared
the hadith a, [among them] al-Hakim, as we have already mentioned; Ibn
al-Jarud, since he included it in his Muntaq and restricted himself in that book
to what is a; and al-Diya, since he included it in his Mukhtrah and re-
stricted himself in that book to what is a but did not appear in the
aayn.17 And it has been said that what is a in that book is stronger than
what is [declared] a in the Mustadrak. Ibn al-Talla also declared it a
in his Akm,18 as quoted from him by the hadith master Ibn Hajar19 in his work
documenting the hadiths used by al-Rafii20 [in his Muharrar in Shafii law].
And when the hadith master Abu al-Fadl al-Iraqi21 reported in his commentary
on al-Tirmidhi that al-Hakim ranked it as a, he affirmed that ruling and
provided as well numerous transmissions bolstering its isnd.
The hadith of Abu Hurayrah22 was included by Ibn Majah,23 al-Bazzar,24
Ibn Jarir [al-Tabari] and al-Hakim,25 who rated it as a as well, and also by
Ibn al-Talla (NB: It is also included in al-Tirmidhis Jmi).26 But the hadith
master Ibn Hajar added a corrective comment to Ibn al-Tallas rating of a
for the hadith: The hadith of Abu Hurayrah is not reliable (lam yaia). I
say, however, that Ibn Jarir [al-Tabari] rated as a both the hadith of Abu
Hurayrah and that of Ibn Abbas in his Tahdhb al-thr,27 and perhaps this is
what led al-Hakim to rate the hadith of Abu Hurayrah as a. But Ibn Abbas
hadith has been established [as sufficiently reliable] (thabata), and al-Dhahabi
noted, regarding al-Hakims a rating for Abu Hurayrahs hadith: In its
chain is Asim b. Umar al-Umari, and he is weak (af). And the hadith
master al-Iraqi apologized on behalf of [al-Hakim] by saying that he included
it only as an attestation (shhid)28 for the hadith of Ibn Abbas.
As for the hadith of Jabir, al-Tirmidhi29 alluded to it when he said, after
[presenting] the hadith of Ibn Abbas: And on this subject there are also [ha-
diths] from Jabir and Abu Hurayrah. And al-Iraqi said in his commentary [on
al-Tirmidhis Jmi]: Ibn Hazm transmitted it from a path via Muhammad b.
al-Qasim, from Yahya b. Ayyub, from Abbad b. Kathir, from [Abdallah b.
Muhammad b. Aqil, from Jabir, that the Messenger of God, may Gods peace
and blessings be upon him, said: Whoever has committed the action of the
people of Lot, kill him].30 Ibn Wahb transmitted it from Yahya b. Ayyub, from
a man, from Ibn Aqil.
Al-Harith b. Abi Usamah also included the hadith of Jabir in his Musnad,31
as did Ibn Jarir [al-Tabari] in his Tahdhb al-thr, from the path of Abbad b.
Kathir, from Abdallah b. Muhammad b. Aqil, from Jabir, that: I heard the
Messenger of God (s) say, while on the pulpit: Whoever has committed the
act of the people of Lot, kill him. And I saw another path for that hadith from
the hadiths of Ali, which escaped both the masters al-Iraqi and Ibn Hajar. Ibn
Jarir [al-Tabari] said, in his Tahdhb al-thr: Muhammad b. Mamar al-
Bahrani narrated to me, saying: Yahya b. Abdallah b. Bakr narrated to us, say-
ing: Husayn b. Zayd narrated to us, from Jafar b. Muhammad, from his father,
from his grandfather, from Ali, who said: The Messenger of God (s) said: The
person who has committed the act of the people of Lot is stoned, whether he is
muan32 or not (yurjamu man amila amal qawm L uina aw lam yuan).
NOTE: Al-Hakim only needed to resort to an attesting text for his a
rating of this hadith because of its transmitter from Ikrimah, from Ibn Abbas,
[namely] Amr b. Abi Amr, the freeman (mawl) of al-Muttalib. The majority
(jumhr) has deemed him reliable (thiqah), including Malik, al-Bukhari, and
Muslim, who included his hadiths in the main hadiths of the aayn (i.e., as
opposed to corroborating narrations). Abu Dawud and al-Nasai considered
him weak (aafahu), and because of that al-Nasai rejected this hadith.
Yahya33 said: He was weakened. Al-Dhahabi said in his Mzn, after report-
ing all of this, that he was not at all weakened, nor was he weak. Yes, he is not
as reliable as al-Zuhri and the like. He continued: And Ahmad b. Abi Maryam
transmitted from Ibn Main that he said: Amr b. Abi Amr is reliable, but he
is criticized for the hadith of Ikrimah, from Ibn Abbas that the Prophet (s)
said: Kill the active and passive partner. Al-Dhahabi commented on that:
His hadith is li asan,34 falling short of the highest levels of a.35
What is established in the hadith sciences is that [a transmitter] of that de-
scription, if a parallel36 or attesting [transmission] if found for him, his hadith
is rated as sound. For this reason, al-Hakim needed to provide the hadith of
Abu Hurayrah so that it could serve as an attestation for the hadith of Ibn
Abbas. Although Abu Hurayrahs hadith did not meet the condition of a,
he only cited it as an attestation and not as a primary hadith (al) to complete
the rating of Ibn Abbass hadith as a. The hadith master Abu al-Fadl al-
Iraqi produced numerous paths for Ibn Abbas hadith to bolster al-Hakims
a rating of it. He said:
It has also appeared via the transmission of Dawud b. al-Husayn,37 Abbad
b. Mansur and Husayn b. Abdallah, [all] from Ikrimah.38 So these three cor-
roborate Amr b. Abi Amr. Ahmad [Ibn Hanbal] included Dawuds narration
in his Musnad 39 with the aforementioned wording, and it was included by
Ibn Jarir [al-Tabari]40 and al-Bayhaqi in his Sunan,41 with the wording: Who-
ever has sex with (waqaa) a man, kill him. And the narration of Abbad
was included by al-Bayhaqi with the wording: Concerning the person who
commits the act of the people of Lot, and concerning the man who is had sex
with (yut f nafsihi), [the Prophet] said: He is killed.42 And Ibn Jarir [al-
Tabari] included it in his Tahdhb al-thr43 with the wording: The Prophet
(s) said, Kill the active and the passive partner in the act of Lot (al-lyah).
Al-Tabarani included Husayns narration in the Mujam al-Kabr44 with the
previous wording.
Al-Iraqi also produced two other paths for Abu Hurayrahs hadith, one of
them in the Mustadrak [of al-Hakim]45 and the Mujam al-Awsa 46 of al-
Tabarani, and the second in al-Tabaranis Mujam al-Awsa. But these two have
wordings that differ with the previous wording. He then produced the hadith
of Jabir, as discussed earlier, and then said: And on this topic, [there are ha-
diths] from Abu Musa al-Ashari in al-Bayhaqis [books]47 and from Ayyub in
al-Tabaranis Mujam al-Kabr.48 This is the sum of the attesting texts that al-
Iraqi presented to authenticate the hadith of Ibn Abbas.
I have said: I have found another attestation in addition to those. Abu
Nuaym said in his ilyat:
Abu Muhammad Talhah and Abu Ishaq Sad narrated to us: Muhammad b.
Ishaq al-Naqid reported to us, both (sic) saying: Muhammad b. Uthman b.
Abi Shaybah narrated to us: My father narrated to us: Waki narrated to us:
Muhammad b. Qays narrated to us, from Abu Hasin (Uthman b. Asim al-
Asadi), from Abu Abd al-Rahman, that Uthman looked out over the people
(ashrafa al) on the day he was attacked in his house (yawm al-dr) and
said: Have you all not come to know that killing is not due except for four
cases: A man who has apostatized after having entered Islam, who has com-
mitted adultery after having married, who took a life without right, or who
has committed the act of the people of Lot?49
[Abu Bakr] Ibn Abi Shaybah said in his Muannaf,50 Waki narrated to
us: Muhammad b. Qays narrated to us, from Abu Hasin, from Abu Abd al-
Rahman that Uthman looked out over the people on the day he was attacked
in his house and said: Have you all not come to know that the blood of a Mus-
lim person does not become licit except for four things: a man who has com-
mitted the act of the people of Lot (sic)? This isnd is a, and Uthmans,
may God be pleased with him, statement to the people Have you all not come
to know is evidence for that [fact] being well known among them, just as the
first three reasons mentioned with it. And Ibn Abi Shaybah said: Ghassan b.
Mudar narrated to us, from Said b. Yazid, from Abu Nadra: Ibn Abbas was
asked what the punishment (add) of the sodomite (l), and he said: The
highest building in the town is sought out, and he is thrown from it backwards,
and then this is followed by stoning. And Abd al-Razzaq said in his
Muannaf 51 : from Ibn Jurayj (tawl)52 ; and Ibn Abi Shaybah53 said: Muham-
mad b. Bakr narrated to us, from Ibn Jurayj, who said: Abdallah b. Uthman
b. Khuthaym reported to me that he heard Mujahid and Said b. Jubayr narrate
from Ibn Abbas that he said, concerning the virgin who is found committing
sodomy (lyah), that he is stoned. And Ibn Abi Shaybah said:
Waki narrated to us from Ibn Abi Layla, from al-Qasim Abu al-Walid,
from Yazid b. Qays, that Ali stoned a sodomite. He also said: Waki nar-
rated to us, from Sufyan, from Jabir, from Mujahid, concerning the
sodomite: He is stoned whether he was married (uana) or not. He said:
Yazid narrated to us: Hammad b. Salama reported to us, from Hammad b.
Abi Sulayman, from Ibrahim [al-Nakhai], concerning the sodomite: If any-
one were to be stoned twice, it would be this person. And [Ibn Abi Shaybah]
said: Abd al-Ala narrated to us, from Said, from Qatadah, from Ubayd
Allah b. Abdallah b. Mamar concerning the sodomite: Stoning is the re-
quirement for him, the death of the people of Lot. And he said: Abd al-
Ala narrated to us, from Said, from Qatadah, from Jabir b. Zayd, who
said: The prohibition/inviolability (urma) of the buttocks (al-dubur) is
greater than the prohibition/inviolability of the vagina (farj). And Qatadah
said: We understand it as [requiring] stoning.
[Al-Suyuti concludes], all of these reports (thr) are attestations for bol-
stering the Hadith of Ibn Abbas.
And how could Yahya,54 Abu Dawud, and al-Nasai be relied upon regard-
ing the weakness of the hadiths narrator (i.e., Amr b. Abi Amr), assuming
he alone had narrated it, when the leading imams had declared him reliable,
among them Malik, al-Bukhari, and Muslim, all of whom are considered su-
perior to every hadith master in their own age and the ages after? And they in-
cluded hadiths through him in the primary (ul) hadiths [in their books].
Al-Dhahabi said in his Mqiah:
Those who were used for hadiths by the two Shaykhs (i.e., al-Bukhari and
Muslim) or by one of them fall into two groups: (1) those that the two of
them used as proof in their primary hadiths and (2) those they used for parallel
narrations or for attestation texts to be taken into consideration. As for a trans-
mitter used as proof by both [imams] or only by one of them, but who was
neither deemed reliable [by other critics] nor found fault with,55 he is reliable
and his hadiths [are] strong. As for a transmitter who was used by both as
proof or only by one and who had been criticized, sometimes that criticism
[is characterized by bad-faith or bias (taannut), while the majority agrees on
him being reliable. In this case, that transmitters hadiths are strong as well.
And sometimes the criticism]56 of that transmitters laxity or inaccurate re-
tention (ifihi) merits consideration. This transmitters hadiths do not fall
below the level of asan, which can be called among the lower levels of
a. And there is not in the two books, by Gods praise, a man who was
used as proof by al-Bukhari or Muslim in their primary hadiths whose trans-
missions were weak. Rather, they are either asan or ai. And among those
whom al-Bukhari or Muslim used for their attesting or parallel [corroborating]
narrations are some with some problem [in] their retention (if) and some
hesitation in declaring them reliable. So everyone whose hadiths were used
in the aayn has passed the test (qafaza al-qanarah, literally jumped
over the viaduct), so there is no turning away from him except with clear
proof (burhn). Yes, [the category of] a consists of levels, and reliable
transmitters fall into classes.
Thus ends al-Dhahabis discussion in the Mqiah. He also mentioned in

his Mzn that Amr b. Abi Amrs hadiths were included in the aayn
among the primary hadiths.57 So how can his hadiths be ruled weak, as you
see in al-Dhahabis discussion here, when he was not even alone in narrating
the hadith? Indeed, there are corroborating narrations from Ikrimah, and his
hadith also has attesting texts from the transmission of a number of Compan-
ions. So it was for this reason that those hadith masters who declared it a
did so, and they did not pay heed to the weak rating of those who declared its
narrator weak. Al-Hakim needed to produce an attesting text for the hadith be-
cause, [taken] at their lowest level, Amrs hadiths are asan, so they require
attestation to raise them up to the level of a. And God knows best.
ANOTHER NOTE: The hadith master Ibn Hajar mentioned in his indexing
(takhrj) of the hadiths of al-Rafii[s Muarrar]58 that the above-mentioned
hadith of Ibn Abbas is disagreed on in terms of its attestation (mukhtalaf f
thubtihi), and in this he draws attention to an important point of knowledge
in the field of the technical terms of Hadith study (iil al-adth). I wanted
to clarify this point, since those with no awareness of the science of Hadith
will not understand Ibn Hajars intention in that, and one might misunderstand
it as impugning the Hadith, as those with no knowledge of the science con-
cluded from al-Tirmidhis statement regarding the Hadith I am the abode of
wisdom and Ali is its gate, in some of the recensions (nusakh) [of his Jmi]
that This hadith is munkar.59
Such people thought, based on that, that al-Tirmidhi meant that the hadith
is false (bil) or forged, [this being due to] their lack of knowledge regarding
the technical terms of Hadith and their ignorance that munkar is one of the
types of weak hadiths that appear. It is not from among the categories of false
or forged hadiths.60 Rather, scholars adopted that phrase as a technical term,
making it a label for a defined type of weak hadith, just as grammarians made
mawl (relative pronoun) a technical label for one type of definite nouns
(al-marifah). And it occurred in the case of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi61 in his His-

tory [of Baghdad] that he transmitted a false hadith and said after it, This ha-
dith is munkar. So al-Dhahabi took issue with him in the Mzn: What a
shock from al-Khatib, how he used the phrase munkar on this false report.62
Rather, munkar is used for [hadiths like] the Hadith of the Two Great Buckets
(qullatayn).63 And in his Mzn, he described as munkar a number of hadiths
from the Musnad of Ahmad [Ibn Hanbal], the Sunan of Abu Dawud and other
relied-upon books, indeed, even from the aayn as well.64
But this only means what is understood by the hadith masters, namely, that
the property of munkar (nakra) stems from being an isolated transmission
(fardyah). And being an isolated transmission does not entail that the hadiths
matn is weak, let alone false. One school of thought, such as [that of] Ibn al-
Salah, views the terms munkar and anomalous (shdhdh)65 as synonyms [in
describing reports]. How many hadiths are there in the aayn that have been
described as anomalous, such as Muslims hadith denying the reading of the
basmalah [aloud] in prayer? For indeed Imam al-Shafii, may God be pleased
with him, ruled that it was anomalous.66 And it is not for you to say that they
(i.e., al-Bukhari and Muslim) required as a condition for the a rating that
the hadith not be anomalous, for how would that be correct if it is included in
the a while it is ruled anomalous?
This is also due to your lack of knowledge regarding weakness [in hadiths].
For, indeed, Ibn al-Salah, when he mentioned the definition (bi) of the a
category and set as a condition that it not be shdhdh, said at the end of his
discussion: This is the [condition] for the hadith that is judged to be a
without any disagreement among the people of Hadith.67 So he alluded to this
being the definition for the level of a by agreement (al-a al-muttafaq
alayhi). But another type of a does fit into that definition, namely, the
disagreed-upon a (al-a al-mukhtalaf fhi). For this reason al-Zarkashi68
said in his commentary on the Mukhtaar of Ibn al-Salah: [The category
of] disagreed-upon a falls outside this definition. Then Ibn al-Salah
mentioned other important points of knowledge, among them that the [category
of] a subdivides into agreed upon and disagreed upon and as well as well-
known (mashhr) and rare (gharb), and he clarified all that.69
Al-Zarkashi said in his commentary and the hadith master Ibn Hajar said
in his Remarks [on Ibn al-Salah]70 at that point that al-Hakim mentioned in his
Introduction (Madkhal)71 that a hadiths are divided into ten categories, five
agreed upon and five disagreed upon. The first type of the first [category] is
what both al-Bukhari and Muslim chose, and that is the first level of the a,
which is narrated by a well-known Companion who has two transmitters [nar-
rating] from him. And the hadiths transmitted by this criterion do not number
ten thousand. The second: the a hadith narrated by an upstanding, accurate

(bi) transmitter from the upstanding, accurate (bi) transmitter, back to
the Companion, but who only has one transmitter [who narrates] from him.
Third: reports from a group among the Successors that only have one trans-
mitter [narrating] from each of them. Fourth: those solitary narrations of limited
attestation that are transmitted by reliable, upstanding narrators and narrated
by one of the reliable transmitters alone without other paths recorded in the
books [of Hadith].72 Fifth: hadiths from a group of the imams, from their fathers
and from their grandfathers, but the transmission of these hadiths only became
widespread from their fathers, from their grandfathers through them.73
As for the five categories whose soundness is disagreed on, the first is the
cast (mursal)74 hadith, which is considered a by the scholars of Kufa. Sec-
ond: the transmission of obfuscators (mudallisn)75 when they do not specify
hearing transmissions directly. In other words, they do not specify their direct
audition (sam). This type is a according to a number of scholars. Third:
a report narrated by a reliable transmitter from an imam of the Muslims, who
then provides an isnd [back to the Prophet] for that report, and then a group
of reliable transmitters narrate it from him but via casting (irsl). Fourth: the
transmission by a hadith scholar (muaddith) with sound audition and sound
writing, whose upstanding character seems evident, except that he neither un-
derstands what he narrates nor retains it exactly (l yafauhu). Indeed, this
category is a according to most scholars of Hadith, although some of them
do not see that is proof (ujjah). Fifth: transmissions from heretics (mubtadiah)
and people with various agendas, for their transmissions are accepted according
to the people of knowledge if they are truthful (diqn). Al-Hakim said: I
mentioned these categories so that no one would mistake that only what al-
Bukhari and Muslim included [in their books] is a.
Once you have understood this, [you will see that, concerning] the state-
ment of the hadith master Ibn Hajar that the hadith of Ibn Abbas is disagreed
on in terms of its attestation, he wanted to show that it fell into the category
of disagreed upon a and not agreed upon a. His intention was to com-
plete the point of knowledge, since his method in that book is that, if a hadith
fell into the first category, he noted it as being well attested, and if it was from
the second category, he drew attention to that. And there are in that noble book
precious gems from the craft of Hadith that only one with in-depth knowledge
of that science, like its author, would recognize.
So let the person be wary of daring to speak about the hadiths of the Mes-
senger of God (s) without knowledge, and let him apply himself assiduously
to attain that science until he becomes competent, his feet become firm, and
he delves deeply into it so that he not fall under the hadith: Whoever speaks
without knowledge, he is cursed by the angels of the heavens and Earth.76

And let him not be deluded just because no one repudiated him in this earthly
life, for after death the message will come to him either in the grave or on the
Bridge, where the Prophet (s) will dispute with him, saying:
How do you speculate about my hadiths and speak about that which you have
no knowledge? For either you reject something that I said or you attribute to
me what I have not said. Have you not read what was revealed to me: And
pursue not that of which you have no knowledge; hearing, sight and the heart,
all of these shall be questioned. (Q. 17:36)
O what an embarrassment for him on that day! O what a scandal for him,
this, if he dies a Muslim, and otherwise he will be punished! And refuge be
sought with God from a vile finale (s al-khtimah) [to the affairs of this
world]. As the preachers say in the pulpits in some of their sermons: And sins,
how many sins a servant [of God] is punished for because of a vile end. As
Shaykh Muhyi al-Din al-Qurashi al-Hanafi quoted in his Tadhkirah, from
Imam Abu Hanifah, may God be pleased with him: What strips people most
of faith upon death, or the greatest cause of this, is injustice (ulm), and what
injustice is greater than the insolence of delving into the hadiths of the Mes-
senger of God (s) without knowledge?
We ask God for safety and well-being.

Endnotes
1. { } not in the ms. relied upon by the Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi (DKA) edition. The
Dar al-Kitab al-Ilmiyyah (DKI) edition says it is missing from some mss.
2. Arabic: man wajadtumhu yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-
mafl bihi.
3. Abu Dawud Sulayman b. al-Ashath al-Sijistani (d. 275/889), Sunan Ab Dwd:
kitb al-udd, bb f man amila amal qawm l. The key portion of the isnd
the Prophet: man wajadtumhu yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa
al-mafl bihi. See also al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq, 202. Abu Dawud also
notes the parallel isnds of Sulayman b. Bilal Amr b. Abi Amr, and
Abbad b. Mansur Ikrimah, and Dawud b. Husayn Ikrimah.
4. Muhammad b. Isa al-Tirmidhi (d. 279/892), Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-udd,
bb f-man amila amal qawm l. The key portion of the isnd is: Abd al-
Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet:
man wajadtumhu yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi.
5. This particular matn is not found in either of al-Nasais Sunans. What the Sunan
al-Kubr actually contains is the hadith laana Allh man amila amal qawm
l, laana Allh man amila amal qawm l, laana Allh man amila amal
qawm l via the same isnd as the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner,
i.e., Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
the Prophet); Ahmad b. Shuayb al-Nasai (d. 303/916), Sunan al-Nas al-
Kubr, ed. Shuayb al-Arnaut et al. (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risalah, 1421/2001),
6:485-86. Here al-Nasai describes Amr as not strong (laysa bi qaw). The
Sunan al-Kubr is a much larger collection than al-Nasais more famous
Mujtab, often referred to simply as Sunan al-Nas. Unlike the Mujtab, it in-
cludes many unreliable hadiths and relies on transmitters whom al-Nasai himself
considered deeply flawed. For the most recent study on al-Nasai and his Hadith
collection, see Christopher Melchert, The Life and Works of al-Nasai, Journal
of Semitic Studies 54, no. 1 (2014): 377-406.
6. Muhammad b. Yazid Ibn Majah (d. 273/886), Sunan Ibn Mjah: kitb al-udd,
bb f man amila amal qawm l. The key portion of the isnd is: Abd al-
Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet:
man wajadtumhu yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi.
7. Abu Bakr Ibn Abi al-Dunya (d. 281/894), Dhamm al-Malh, ed. Muhammad
Abd al-Qadir Ata (Cairo: Dar al-Itisam, 1407/1987), 65. The key portion of
the isnd is: Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn
Abbas the Prophet, but the matn varies from the others: f-man amila amal
qawm l yuqtalu al-fil wa al-mafl bihi.
8. Abu Yala al-Mawsili (d. 307/919-20), Musnad, ed. Husayn Salim Asad, 13 vols.
(Damascus: Dar al-Mamun, 1404/1984), 4:346-8. The key portion of the isnd
al-mafl bihi. The hadith also appears with the clause on bestiality (see ibid.,
5:128) via the isnd: Abd al-Malik b. Amr Zuhayr b. Muhammad Amr
b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet.
9. Abu Abdallah Muhammad b. Yahya al-Adani (d. 243/858) was a hadith scholar
who lived for a long time in Makkah. He was a teacher of al-Tirmidhi, Muslim,
and Ibn Majah and was one of al-Nasais sources. His Sunan appears not to have
survived. I have found no record of the isnd.
10. Abd b. Humayd (d. 249/863), Musnad Abd b. umayd, ed. Subhi Badri al-
Samarrai and Mahmud Muhammad Saidi (Cairo: Maktabat al-Sunnah, 1408/
1988), 200. The key portion of the isnd is: Abdallah b. Jafar Amr b. Abi
Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet: man wajadtumhu yamalu amal
qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi, with the addition of the Bestiality
Clause. See also al-Tabari, Tahdhb al-thr: Musnad Ibn Abbas, ed. Mahmud
Muhammad Shakir, 2 vols. (Cairo: Matbaat al-Madan, n.d.), 2:554.
11. Abdallah b. Ali Ibn al-Jarud al-Naysaburi (d. 307/919-20), Al-Muntaq, ed.
Abdallah Umar al-Barudi (Beirut: Muassasat al-Kitab al-Thaqafiyyah, 1408/
1988), 208. The key portion of the isnd is: Sulayman b. Bilal Amr b. Abi
Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet: man wajadtumhu yamalu amal
qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi.
12. Ali b. Umar al-Daraqutni (d. 385/995), Sunan, ed. Abdallah Hashim Yamani,
4 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Marifah, 1966), 3:124. The key portion of the isnd is:
Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
the Prophet: man wajadtumhu yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-
mafl bihi.
13. Abu al-Qasim Sulayman al-Tabarani (d. 360/971), Al-Mujam al-Kabr, ed.
Hamdi Abd al-Majid al-Salafi, 25 vols. (Mosul: Maktabat al-Zahra, 1983/1404),
11:212. The key portion of the isnd is: Sulayman b. Bilal Husayn b.
Abdallah Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet: man wajadtumhu yamalu
amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi. Note: That isnd does not
include Amr b. Abi Amr. The hadith also appears at ibid., 11:226 with the clause
on bestiality inverted via the isnd of Dawud b. al-Husayn Ikrimah Ibn
Abbas the Prophet. This is also found in the Muannaf of Abd al-Razzaq al-
Sanani, 3:364. In my opinion, the narrations of this hadith via Dawud b. al-
Husayn are inconsistent (muarib) due to major and erratic variations in the
matns. See also note 39 below.
14. Hakim al-Naysaburi (d. 415/1014), Al-Mustadrak (Hyderabad: Dairat al-
Maarif al-Uthmaniyyah, n.d.), 4:355-56. The key portion of the isnd is:
Ibn Wahb Sulayman b. Bilal Amr b. Abi Amr Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
al-mafl bihi. It also appears via the isnd: Abdallah b. Jafar al-Makhrami
Amr b. Abi Amr etc., with the addition of the Bestiality Clause, as well as
via the isnd: Dawud b. al-Husayn Ikrimah, etc., with the wording man
waqaa al rajul fa aqtulhu, along with the clause man waqaa al dht
maram fa aqtulhu, whose a rating by al-Hakim is disputed by al-Dhahabi.
(this last matn also appears in al-Kharaiti via the isnd: Ali b. Dawud al-Qantari
Abdallah b. Salih Yahya b. Ayyub Abdallah b. Abd al-Aziz Ibn Jurayj
Ikrimah, etc.; al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq, 202.) Later scholars were very
critical of al-Hakims ta, with al-Dhahabi stating that, at most, about one
third of the material in the Mustadrak was actually a, one quarter asan,
and the remainder weak or extremely weak, with around 100 hadiths totally
false. As Ibn al-Amir al-Sanani states, the notion that the largest part of the
Mustadrak is a is wrong. Rather, the a is the lesser part (bal al-a
fhi maghlb). Al-Zaylai identified the flaws in al-Hakims methodology: The
fact that al-Bukhari and/or Muslim used a narrator does not ensure that any ha-
dith they narrate is reliable. See al-Dhahabi, Siyar Alm al-Nubal, ed. Shuayb
al-Arnaut et al. (Beirut: Muassasat al-Risalah, 1998), 17:175; al-Zaylai, Nab
al-Ryah, 1:342; Muhammad b. Ismail al-Amir al-Sanani, Al-Irshd il Taysr
al-Ijtihd, ed. Muhammad Subhi Hallaq (Beirut: Muassasat al-Rayyn, 1992),
52.
15. Abu Bakr Ahmad al-Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan al-Kubr, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir
Ata, 11 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1420/1999), 8:403-4. The main
part of the isnd is: Abd al-Aziz b. Muhammad Amr b. Abi Amr
Ikrimah Ibn Abbas the Prophet, with the wording: man wajadtumhu
yamalu amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi. Al-Bayhaqi also

gives the isnd: Dawud b. al-Husayn Ikrimah, etc., with the wording man
waqaa al rajul fa aqtulhu.
16. Diya al-Din Muhammad b. Abd al-Wajid al-Maqdisi, Al-Adth al-Mukhtrah,
ed. Abd al-Malik Duhaysh, 13 vols. (Makkah: Dar Khadir, 1421/2001), 12:
204-05.
17. This is not stated explicitly by al-Maqdisi in his short introduction, but it can be
safely inferred. See ibid., 1:69-70.
18. Ibn al-Talla (d. 497/1104) states that the Hadith of Ibn Abbas has been estab-
lished (thabata); Muhammad b. Faraj al-Qurtubi Ibn al-Talla, Aqiyat Rasl
Allh (often known as Al-Akm), ed. Faris Fathi Ibrahim (Cairo: Dar Ibn al-
Haytham, 1426/2006), 24.
19. This fi is Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852/1449) of Cairo.
20. Abd al-Karim b. Muhammad al-Rafii (d. 623/1226) of Qazvin is a leading
Shafii figure. His Muarrar is a major source for Shafii law.
21. Zayn al-Din Abd al-Rahim b. al-Husayn al-Iraqi (d. 806/1404), the great hadith
scholar of Cairo and an important teacher of Ibn Hajar. His commentary on Jmi
al-Tirmidh has survived at least in part and has been edited (but not published)
by students at the Islamic University of Madinah. See www.ahlalhdeeth.com/vb/
showthread.php?t=34839.
22. There are several variations, but the main text is: The Prophet (s) said, concern-
ing the one who commits the act of the people of Lot, Stone both the top and the
bottom partner (f alladh yamalu amal qawm l qla urjum al-al wa al-
asfal urjumhum jaman).
23. Sunan Ibn Mjah: kitb al-udd, man amila amal qawm l. The key part of
the isnd is: Asim b. Umar al-Umari Suhayl his father Abu Hurayrah
the Prophet: f alladh yamalu amal qawm l qla urjum al-al wa al-asfal
urjumhum jaman.
24. Amad b. Amr al-Bazzar (d. 292/904-5), Al-Bar al-Zakhkhr a.k.a. Musnad
al-Bazzr, ed. Adil Sad (Medina: Maktabat al-Ulum wa al-Hikam, 2009),
16:43. The isnd is: Ali b. Sahl al-Madaini Abdallah b. Nafi al-Sayigh
Asim b. Umar Suhayl his father Abu Hurayrah the Prophet: man amila
amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wal-mafl bihi.
25. Al-Hakim, Al-Mustadrak, 4:355. The key part of the isnd is: Abd al-Rahman
b. Abdallah b. Umar al-Umari Sahl [sic] his father Abu Hurayrah the
Prophet: man amila amal qawm l fa aqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi. This
narration is inconsistent (muarib), in my opinion, for it clashes in both isnd
and matn wording with the other narrations through Suhayl his father Abu
Hurayrah. Cf. al-Ajurri, Dhamm al-Liw, 59. For further confusion regarding
the wording, see also al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq, 202.
26. Al-Tirmidhi, Jmi al-Tirmidh. The isnd is the same as Ibn Majahs above, but
with the wording: uqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi. Al-Tirmidhi notes that only
Asim b. Umar narrates it from Suhayl and that Asim is considered weak due
to his retention (if).
27. Al-Tabari states that the narration from Ikrimah Ibn Abbas has a a
sanad in our opinion, but that others find flaws (ilal) in it, namely, the con-
troversy surrounding Ikrimah. Al-Tabari, Tahdhb al-thr: Musnad Ibn
Abbs, 1:550-51.
28. A shhid (lit. witness) report provides attestation for a hadiths meaning. Unlike
parallel transmissions (mutbaah), which corroborate a particular narration
from a source, attestations/attesting reports are often separate hadiths but share
a similar meaning. Thus, Muslim scholars often said that Mutbaah strenghens
a narration, while a shhid strengthens a Hadith. See Jonathan Brown, Hadith:
Muhammads Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld,
2009), 92-93.
29. Al-Tirmidhi, Jmi al-Tirmidh.
30. Ibn Hazm, Al-Muall, 11 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, n.d.), 11:383. A
hadith with the isnd in braces { } appears in Musnad Ibn anbal and Sunan Ibn
Mjah, but its wording is inna akhwaf m akhfu al ummat amal qawm l;
Musnad Ibn anbal, 3:382; Sunan Ibn Mjah, ibid.; al-Hakim, Al-Mustadrak,
ibid., Abu Yala al-Mawsili, Musnad, 4:97; al-Ajurri, Dhamm al-Liw, 45.
31. Al-Harith b. Abi Usama (d. 282/895-6) wrote a Musnad that has not survived. It
has been reconstructed by relying on the work of a scholar who had access to the
book, Nur al-Din al-Haythamis (d. 807/1405) Bughyat al-Bith an Zawid
Musnad al-rith. See al-Haythami, Bughyat al-Bith an Zawid Musnad al-
Harith, ed. Husayn Ahmad al-Bakiri, 2 vols. (Madinah: al-Jamiah al-Islamiyyah,
1992), 1:565-66 (via the same isnd as above Hadith of Jabir, with the same
wording: man amila amal qawm l fa aqtulhu). This hadith is also found via
the same isnd cited by Ibn Hazm in al-Kharaiti, Maswi al-Akhlq, 301.
32. Muan is a legal term that denotes a Muslim who has at some point consum-
mated a marriage.
33. Identifying the speaker as Yahya here might be an error on al-Suyutis part. Al-
Dhahabi introduces this comment as coming from Ibn al-Qattan, which al-
Suyuti understands as the famous Basran hadith transmitter and critic Yahya b.
Said al-Qattan (d. 198/813). It is most likely Ali b. Muhammad Ibn al-Qattan
al-Fasi of Marrakesh (d. 628/1230); Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi, Mzn al-Itidl
f Naqd al-Rijl, ed. Ali Muhammad al-Bijawi, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Marifah,
[n.d.], reprint of 1963-64 Cairo Isa al-Babi al-Halabi edition), 3:282. This exact
wording appears in Ibn al-Qattan al-Fasi, Bayn al-Wahm wa al-hm al-
Wqiayn f Kitb al-Akm, ed. al-Husayn Ayat Said, 5 vols. (Riyadh: Dar al-
ayba, 1418/1997), 4:184.
34. li (suitable) is generally used to mean that the hadith is fit either for consid-
eration or for direct use as evidence in matters of law. See Abd al-Fattah Abu
Ghuddahs comments on Abu Dawuds letter to Makkah in Abu Ghuddah, ed.,
Thalth Rasil f Ilm Muala al-adth (Beirut: Dar al-Bashair al-Islamiyyah,
1997), 38. Though the term asan was used to describe hadiths occasionally by
earlier critics like Ali b. al-Madini (d. 234/849), it did not become a defined tech-
nical term until the work of al-Tirmidhi. He defines asan as a hadith that does
not have in its isnd someone who is accused of lying or forgery, is not anomalous
(shdhdh), and is narrated via more than one chain of transmission. In other
words, its isnd was not seriously flawed, and it enjoyed corroboration through
other narrations, which mitigated the chances of a serious error creeping into the
text of the report. Later, the Shafii jurist and hadith scholar al-Khattabi (d.
388/998) described asan hadiths as those with an established basis and whose
transmitters were well-known; Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-ilal; Abu Sulayman
Hamd al-Khattabi, Malim al-Sunan, 3d ed., 4 vols. (Beirut: al-Maktabah al-
Ilmiyyah, 1981), 1:6.
35. Al-Dhahabi, Mzn, 3:282.
36. Mutbaah: A mutbaah narration is one that corroborates a transmitters nar-
ration from a source. As such, it has been translated as parellelism by Eerik Dick-
inson in his translation of Ibn al-Salahs Muqaddimah. See Ibn al-Salah, An
Introduction to the Science of the adth, trans. Eerik Dickinson (Reading, UK:
Garnet, 2005), 61; Brown, Hadith, 92-93.
37. Interestingly, al-Dhahabi says Dawud b. al-Husayns narrations from Ikrimah
are not accepted; al-Dhahabi, Mzn, 2:5.
38. See above notes on the Sunan Ab Dwd, ibid., as well as Abd b. Humayd,
ibid., al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Kabr, ibid; al-Bayhaqi, Sunan, ibid., and al-
Hakim, Mustadrak, ibid.
39. Dawuds narration is inconsistent (muarib), in my opinion, due to erratic dif-
ferences in the matns; see the following note as well. Ibn Hanbal, Musnad Ibn
anbal (Maymaniyyah printing), 1:300. The key part of the isnd is: Ibn Abi
Habibah Ibrahim b. Ismail Dawud b. al-Husayn Ikrimah Ibn Abbas
Prophet: uqtul al-fil wa al-mafl bihi f qawm l wa al-bahma wa al-wqi
al al-bahma wa man waqaa al maram fa aqtulhu.
40. Al-Tabari, Tahdhb al-thr Musnad Ibn Abbas, ed Mahmud Muhammad
Shakir, 2 vols. (Cairo: Matbaat al-Madan, n.d.), 1:554-55. The key part of the
isnd is: Ibrahim b. Ismail Dawud b. al-Husayn with the wording: man
waqaa al rajul fa aqtulhu yan amal qawm l and also: Ibrahim b.
Mujamma Dawud b. Husayn Ikrimah, with the wording: uqtul al-fil
wa al-mafl bihi f al-lyah wa man waqaa al dht maram fa aqtulhu.
This is also found in the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal, 1:300 (with the inclusion of the
Bestiality Clause as well).
41. Al-Bayhaqi, Al-Sunan, 8:403.
42. In his discussion of this narration, al-Dhahabi notes that Abbad is weak; al-
Dhahabi, Al-Muhadhdhab f Ikhtir al-Sunan al-Kabr li al-Bayhaq, ed. Yasir
Ibrahim et al., 9 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Watan, 1422/2001), 7:3367. Abbads nar-
ration also appears in the Mustadrak of al-Bayhaqis teacher, but only the clause
on bestiality; al-Hakim, Al-Mustadrak, ibid.
43. Al-Tabari, Tahdhb al-thr, 1:550-51. The isnd is: Muhammad b. Sinan al-
Fazzaz Awn b. Umarah Abbad b. Mansur Ikrimah, with the wording:
uqtul mawqi al-bahma wa al-bahma wa al-fil wa al-mafl f al-ltiyyah
wa aqtul kull mawqi dht maram.
44. Al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Kabr, 11:226.

45. Al-Hakim, Al-Mustadrak, 4:356. The isnd comes via Abu Hurayrah the
Prophet, with the wording: laana Allh saba min khalqihi malun maln
malun man amila amal qawm l.
46. Al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Awsa, ed. Tariq b. Awad Allah al-Husayni, 10 vols.
(Cairo: Dar al-Haramayn, 1415/1995), 8:234. The isnd comes via Abu Hurayrah
the Prophet, with the wording: laana Allh saba min khalqihi malun
maln malun man amila amal qawm l, with al-Tabaranis remark that
only Muharrar b. Harun narrated this hadith from al-Araj Abu Hurayrah.
47. This is probably Abu Musa al-Asharis hadith from the Prophet, with the word-
ing: idh at al-rajul al-rajul fa-hum zniyn, which al-Bayhaqi calls
munkar by that isnd; al-Bayhaqi, Sunan al-Kubr, 8:406. See also al-Ajurri,
Dhamm al-Liw, 51.
48. This might be a reference to a hadith in al-Tabaranis Al-Mujam al-Awsa (from
Abu Musa al-Ashari the Prophet, with the wording: l tubshiru al-mara al-
mara ill wa hum zniyatn wa l yubshiru al-rajul al-rajul ill wa hum
zniyn); al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Awsa, 4:266-67. Or it may be a reference
to a hadith in the Mujam al-Kabr concerning a man who had committed an in-
decency with a noble Quraysh youth; al-Tabarani, Al-Mujam al-Kabr, 4:132.
49. Abu Nuaym al-Isbahani, ilyat al-Awliy wa abaqt al-Afiy, 10 vols.
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji and Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1416/1997), 8:379. Abu
Nuaym notes, a rare [narration] (gharb), which Waki alone transmitted from
Muhammad b. Qays, namely al-Asadi al-Kufi. His hadiths are collected. And
Abu Abd al-Rahman is al-Sulam.
50. Abu Bakr Abdallah Ibn Abi Shaybahs (d. 235/849) (not his nephew, Muham-
mad b. Uthman, mentioned just above) work contains the same text cited by
Abu Nuaym; Abu Bakr Ibn Abi Shaybah, Al-Muannaf, ed. Kamal Yusuf al-
Hut, 7 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 1409/1988), 5:453.
51. Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanani (d. 211/826), Al-Muannaf, ed. Habib al-Rahman al-
Azami, 11 vols. (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1403/1983), 7:363.
52. Pausing the narration here, al-Suyuti adds another source for the narration from
Ibn Jurayj.
53. For the next series of opinions recorded by Ibn Abi Shaybah, see his Muannaf,
5:497.
54. The ms. used in the DKA edition has mawl Yay. The editors of the DKI edition
noted that they only saw this in one ms.
55. The one ms. of al-Suyutis text relied on for the DKA edition has wa l -m-r.
The editors of the DKI edition say this appears in some copies. Abu Ghuddahs
edition of the Mqiah, by contrast, has wa l ghumiza, which makes far more
sense in this context. See Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi, Al-Mqiah f Ilm Muala
al-adth, ed. Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah, 4th ed. (Cairo: Dar al-Salam, 1421/
2000), 79.
56. What appears between the braces { } is not found in al-Suyutis quotation from
al-Dhahabi; however, it does appear in Abu Ghuddahs edition of the Mqiah.
See ibid., 80. This was probably a haplographic error due to the repeated word
tratan; al-Suyuti skipped to the second instance of tratan, omitting the text in
between.
57. Al-Dhahabi, Mzn al-Itidl, 3:281.
58. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Talkh al-abr Takhrj Adth al-Rafii al-Kabr, ed.
Hasan Abbas Qutb, 4 vols. (Cairo: Muassasat Qurtubah, 1416/1995), 4:103.
Cf. Ibn Hajar, Al-Diryah f Takhrj Adth al-Hidyah, ed. Abdallah Hashim
al-Yamani, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Marifah, n.d.), 2:103.
59 Early critics like al-Bukhari, al-Tirmidhi, Abu Zurah al-Razi, Ibn Main, Ibn
Adi, al-Daraqutni, and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi all considered this hadith to be
weak or baseless. Later critics, however, like al-Alai, Ibn Hajar, and al-Suyuti,
considered its various transmissions together to raise it to the level of asan. See
Ismail b. Ahmad al-Ajluni, Kashf al-Khaf, ed. Ahmad al-Qalash, 2 vols.
(Cairo: Dar al-Turath, n.d.), 1:236237; and Ahmad al-Ghumaris book on this
hadith: Fat al-Malik al-Al bi iat adth Bb Madnat al-Ilm Ali, ed. Imad
Surur (n.p.: n.p., 1426/2005).
60. The term munkar (unknown or unfamiliar) was etymologically the converse of
marf (accepted or known) See Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-iym, bb m ja
f man nazala bi qawm fa l yamu ill bi idhnihim and Zayn al-Din Abd al-
Rahman Ibn Rajab, Shar Ilal al-Tirmidh, ed. Nur al-Din Itr (n.p.: n.p., 1398/
1978), 1:409. One of the earliest definitions of munkar comes from Abu Bakr
Ahmad al-Bardiji (d. 301/914), who defined it as a hadith known through only
one narration; Ibn al-Salah, Muqaddimat Ibn al-al wa Masin al-Iil, ed.
Aishah Abd al-Rahman (Cairo: Dar al-Maarif, 1989), 244. After Ibn al-Salah
(d. 643/1245), the term generally denoted a hadith narrated through only one
chain of transmission, but one of whose narrators was not reliable enough (i.e.,
termed adq or less) to establish it as reliable. See al-Dhahabi, Mzn al-Itidl,
3:140-1. Transmitters who were prolific and respected for their accuracy could
transmit uncorroborated material, but with limits. Their reputation was originally
earned, in great part, by being corroborated by other leading transmitters. Thus
al-Bardiji says that al-Hasan b. Ali b. Shabib can narrate solitary (munfarid) ha-
diths because he is so prolific. Centuries later, Ibn al-Qattan al-Fasi says a reliable
(thiqah) narrator can transmit such material as long as he does not do so too much;
al-Dhahabi, Mzn, 1:365, 504. Ibn Adi reveals the flexibility of munkar during
the early period when he describes the material narrated by Jafar b. Umar al-
Ibli as all munkar in either their isnd or their matn; al-Dhahabi, Mzn, 1:561.
Particularly in the first four centuries of Islam, munkar was often used to indicate
that a particular transmission of a hadith was unacceptable, with no necessary
bearing on the overall authenticity of the tradition in question. For example, Abu
Hatim al-Razi (d. 277/890) calls one narration of the famous hadith Deeds are
[judged] only by intentions (innam al-aml bi al-niyyt) munkar even though
that Prophetic tradition is considered a; Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi, Ilal al-
adth, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Marifah, 1405/1985), 1:131. In other circum-
stances, munkar seems to indicate forged or baseless. Some reports that
al-Bukhari describes as munkar, Ibn Hibban and al-Hakim call mawt; al-
Dhahabi, Mzn, 2:160. As shown in note 63 below, munkar could also be used
to show that one was clearly objecting to the hadiths meaning.
61. One of the most influential hadith scholars of the late-early period, Abu Bakr
Ahmad b. Ali al-Khatib (d. 463/1071) of Baghdad.
62. The hadith in question is Ali is the best of mankind, and whoever denies this
has disbelieved (Ali khayr al-bashar fa man ab fa qad kafara), which al-
Dhahabi considers an extremist Shiite (rfi) report. See al-Khatib al-Baghdadi,
Trkh Baghdd, ed. Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata, 14 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub
al-Ilmiyyah, 1417/1997), 7:433 (in the text of the Trkh Baghdd, the hadith is
Ali khayr al-bashar fa man imtar fa qad kafara. Al-Dhahabi goes on to say
that hadith scholars use munkar for hadiths that suffer from relatively minor flaws
in their transmission, such as the hadith If water reaches two large pitchers full
(qullatayn) it does not bear ritual filth (idh kna al-m qullatayn), which
appears in the Sunans of Abu Dawud, al-Nasai, and al-Tirmidhi. It lacked a
isnds, but was widely considered reliable. He says the term should not be used
for the likes of this plainly false hadith, meaning the pro-Ali hadith of al-
Khatib; al-Dhahabi, Mzn al-Itidl, 1:521. As with earlier scholars, al-Dhahabi
often uses munkar to denote that a particular transmission of a hadith might be
uncorroborated or anomalous. For example, he notes the munkar aspect of one
scholars transmissions but affirms that the texts (mutn) of those hadiths are fine;
al-Dhahabi, Mzn, 2:358. But examining the hadiths from the Six Books and
the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal that al-Dhahabi criticizes as munkar (or gharb, i.e.,
rare) in his Mzn, we find that sometimes munkar is used to object to unaccept-
able meanings in the matn of the hadith as well. This is affirmed by Abd al-
Fattah Abu Ghuddah, who says that munkar is often used to mean forged,
referring to the unknown or unacceptable matn of a hadith as well as its isnd.
See Abu Ghuddahs edition of Mulla Ali al-Qari, Al-Man f Marifat al-
adth al-Maw (Beirut: Dar al-Bashair al-Islamiyyah, 1984), 20. The fol-
lowing is a list of hadiths that al-Dhahabi rated as munkar from the Six Books
and Ibn Hanbals Musnad:
1. Mzn, 3:93: munkar as an objection to meaning. From a Muslim. Here

al-Dhahabi says that the hadith of the Prophet marrying Umm Habibah after
the conversion of her father Abu Sufyan is unacceptable in its meaning (al
munkar), since it was reliably established that the Prophet had married her
years earlier (see a Muslim: kitb fail al-abah, bb min fail
Ab Sufyn b. arb).
2. Mzn, 2:18: munkar as an objection to meaning. From Sunan Ab Dwd:
al-Dhahabi calls a hadith munkar, probably because it contradicts the other
narrations in which the Prophet instructs Muslims not to eat any part of the
game from which a hunting dog has already eaten (see Sunan Ab Dwd:
kitb al-ayd, bb f al-ayd). Other scholars, such as al-Khattabi (d. 386/996),
sought to reconcile this hadith with the conflicting material; al-Khattabi,

Malim al-Sunan, 4:298-94.
3. Mzn, 2:213: munkar as an objection to meaning. From Jmi al-Tirmidh:
al-Dhahabi says that he feels in his heart that a hadith in which the Prophet
tells his Companion to pray four rakahs on Friday, reading certain chapters
of the Quran, in order to remember the Quran, is very munkar, even
though he admits that its isnd seems fine (see Jmi al-Tirmidh: kitb al-
dawt, bb f du al-if).
4. Mzn, 1:641-2: munkar as an objection to meaning. From a al-Bukhr:
al-Dhahabi says the hadith describing how the Prophet experienced the Night
Journey as a child, rather than after his prophethood had begun, was so gharb
that if it were not in a al-Bukhr he would call it munkar. Al-Dhahabi
also calls this narration one of the gharb hadiths of the a; idem, Mzn,
2:270.
5. Mzn, 1:278 and 4:498: munkar possibly an objection to meaning. From
Musnad Ibn anbal: al-Dhahabi calls one hadith on the virtues of Marv
munkar (see Musnad, 5:357), and another one on the virtues of Homs (see
Musnad, 1:19).
6. Mzn, 2:312: gharb as an objection to meaning. From a Muslim: al-
Dhahabi calls the hadith of the Prophets telling the Companions to fast
Ashura like the Jews of Khaybar one of the gharb hadiths of Muslims
book (see a Muslim: kitb al-iym, bb awm yawm shr).
63. This hadith appears in the Sunans of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, and Ibn Majah.
As described by al-Khattabi, its isnds have been criticized for a variety of minor
flaws. However, It is testimony enough for its soundness that the stars of the
world from amongst the scholars of Hadith have declared it a and acted on
it. And they are the example to be followed, and upon them should we rely on
this matter; al-Khattabi, Malim al-Sunan, 1:36. The great Syrian Shafii
scholar and hadith master Salah al-Din al-Alai (d. 761/1359) wrote a small
book arguing that the hadith was a; al-Alai, Juz f Ta adth al-
Qullatayn wa al-Kalm al Asndihi, ed. Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni (Cairo: Mak-
tabat al-Tarbiyah al-Islamiyyah, 1992).
64. See note 63 above.
65. The definition used by al-Shafii, and implied strongly by al-Tirmidhi, became
the established definition for shdhdh by the fourteenth century: a transmission
that disagrees with something more reliable than it (yukhlifu m huwa awthaq
minhu). See al-Dhahabi, Mqiah, 42. Al-Khalili (d. 446/1054) and his teacher
al-Hakim, however, defined shdhdh as merely that which has only one isnd
(laysa lahu ill isnd wid); al-Hakim, Marifat Ulm al-adth, ed. Muaz-
zim al-Husayn (Hyderabad: Dairat al-Maarif al-Uthmaniyyah, 1966), 148; al-
Khalil b. Abdallah al-Khalili, Al-Irshd f Marifat Ulam al-adth, ed. Amir
Ahmad Haydar (Makkah: Dar al-Fikr, 1993), 13. For more on this debate, see
Ibn Rajab, Shar Ilal al-Tirmidh, 1:450-62; Jonathan AC Brown, The Canon-
ization of al-Bukhari and Muslim (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 249.
66. See Brown, Canonization, 257-58.
67. Ibn al-Salah, Muqaddimah, 152.
68. Badr al-Din Muhammad b. Bahadur al-Zarkashi (d. 794/1392) of Cairo, a famous
hadith scholar and Shafii jurist. See al-Zarkashi, Al-Nukat al Muqaddimat Ibn
al-al, ed. Zayn al-Abidn Muhammad Bila Furayj, 4 vols. (Riyadh: Adwa
al-Salaf, 1419/1998), 1:101, 125.
69. Ibn al-Salah, Muqaddimah, 152.
70. Ibn Hajar, Al-Nukat al Kitb Ibn al-al, ed. Masud Abd al-Hamid al-Adani
and Muhammad Faris (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1414/1994), 109-10.
71. Al-Hakim, Kitb al-Madkhal il Marifat Kitb al-Ikll, ed. Ahmad Faris Sallum
(Dar Ibn Hazm: 1423/2003), 73-107. Al-Suyuti abridges this section, but does
not introduce any material.
72. In other words, the isnd is a single chain for the first two links.
73. The example that al-Hakim gives for this type is the afah of Amr b. Shuayb,
from his father, from his grandfather, from the Prophet, which contains crucial
rulings on compensation for injuries and manslaughter/homicide; al-Hakim, Mad-
khal, 101. For the hadith, see Sunan Ab Dwd: kitb al-diyt, bb al-diya kam
hiya and Sunan Ibn Majah: kitb al-fari, bb mrth al-qtil.
74. Through the eleventh century, mursal was used to mean a hadith in which a trans-
mitter cited the Prophet without actually having met him. By the thirteenth cen-
tury, it had come to mean a hadith in which a Successor quoted the Prophet,
omitting the Companion from the chain of transmission. Until the mid-ninth cen-
tury, many jurists, particularly the Hanafis, did not consider mursal hadiths to be
flawed in any way, and thus they served as a major source of evidence. Although
he used mursal hadiths selectively, al-Shafiis incorporation of hadith transmitter
criticism into his evaluation of evidence meant that mursal hadiths would be seen
as suspect due to the break in their chain.
75. Transmitters who engage in tadls (obfuscation in transmission) phrase a trans-
mission or many transmissions in such a way that it seems they heard it directly
from a source when they actually heard it via some intermediary.
76. Al-Suyuti errs in citing this hadith as man takallama bi ghayr ilm laanathu
malikat al-samwt wa al-ar. The existing hadith is actually man aft bi
ghayr ilm, as cited by al-Suyuti in his Al-abik f Akhbr al-Malik, ed.
Muhammad Said Zaghlul (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1408/1988), 187.
See al-Khatib, Al-Faqh wa al-Mutafaqqih, ed. Adil Yusuf al-Azazi, 2 vols.
(Dammam: Dar Ibn al-Jawzi, 1417/1996), 2:327; Ibn Asakir, Trkh Madnat
Dimashq, ed. Umar al-Amrawi, 80 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1997), 52:20;
Musnad Al Ri, in Musnad al-Imm Zayd (Beirut: Dar Maktabat al-Hayat,
1966), 444.
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Editor-in-Chief E AbdulHamid A. AbuSulayman Zakyi Ibrahim
in-Chief EditorZAbdulHamid A. AbuSulayman Ovamir Anjum
Ali Mazrui TH AMERICAN ASSOCIATION NORTHINTERNATIONAL
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE
li Mazrui Zakyi Ib Managing Editor
INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL
F ISLAMIC AND MUSLIMS OF ISLAMIC AND MUSLIMS
International Institute of Islamic Thought University of Toledo
OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT
Managing
INSTITUTE OF INSTITUTE OF
STUDIES (NAAIMS) STUDIESTHOUGHT
(NAAIMS) ISLAMIC THOUGHTISLAMIC THOUGHT
INSTITUTE OF
Managing Editor
ISLAMIC
Aliaa Dakroury
Aliaa Dakr
Copy Editor
Assistant Editor
sociation of Muslim Social Scientists of The International Institute of Islamic
Aliaa Dakroury
The The International Institute of Islamic
Copy Ed merica (AMSS) has formally changed Nor The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) is an intellectual and
Basit Kareem Iqbal
Copy Jay
Editor e to the North American Association of its n cultural foundation. It was established and registered in the United States
Jay Willoughby
Willou
University of California, Berkeley
Jay Willoughby Book

CopyReview
Editor Editor and Muslim Studies (NAAIMS). It re- Isla of America at the beginning of the fifteenth hijr century (1401/1981) with
Book Revie s status as an independent non-profit tain the following objectives:
Book Review Edito tax-exempt membership-based organ- 501.
Mahdi Tourage
Mahdi Tou
Jay Willoughby
Mahdi Tourage run by a board of directors that is izati To provide a comprehensive Islamic outlook through elucidating the
Associate Editors every two years. NAAIMS encom- elec principles of Islam and relating them to relevant issues of contempo-
Associate E
Editorial Board
the United States and Canada, and is pass rary thought.
Associate Edi ors Imad-ad-Dean AhmadAndrew
Haifaa
F.Jawad
all scholars dedicated to promoting the ope
-ad-Dean Ahmad H
Hussein A. Agrama March
f Islam and Muslim societies. It was es- stud To regain the intellectual, cultural, and civilizational identity of the
UniversityMehmet
of Chicago
AsutayYaleMarcia
University
Hermansen
anMehmet
Ahmad Asutay
Haifaa J
d in 1972 by North American Muslim tabli ummah by conducting research in the humanities and the social sci-
met Asutay Ahmad
MarciaY
Mehmet AsutayAhmad YousifNaguib
Shuruq
s for the sole purpose of establishing an scho ences.
Durham University Lancaster University
Ahmad Yousif
International Advisory Board ic forum where scholars could meet an- aca
Jonathan A. C. Brown Ahmed El Shamsy
International A to debate social issues from an Islamic nual
Georgetown University University of Chicago
To rectify the methodology of contemporary Islamic thought in order
ernational Advisor tive. pers
to enable it to resume its contribution to the progress of human civi-
Marcia Hermansen Ousmane Kane
Khurshid Ahmad M. Kamal Hassan
Khurshid Ahmad Loyola Akbar
University
AhmedHarvard DivinityH.School
lization and give it meaning and direction in line with the values and
Mohammad Kamali
id Ahmad M. Kam
Akbar Ahmed S produces and disseminates aca- NA
objectives of Islam.
ShermanManzoor
A. Jackson
AlamErmin Sinanovi
Enes Karic
ar Manzoor
Ahmed Alam MohamUniversity of Southern
KhaledCalifornia
BlankinshipInternational Institute
Seyyed Hossein of Islamic Thought
Nasr esearch on Islam and the diverse lived dem
zoor
TahaAlam Enes KaE
J. al-Alwani nce of Muslims. Its conferences, lec- exp
The institute seeks to achieve its objectives by:
Katherine Bullock James P. Piscatori
al-Alwani Clovis C
afar Ishaq Ansari Charles Butterworth Anne Sofie Roald ward programs, research activities, and ture
haq
haledAnsari SeyyedS
Blankinship International
DavutogluAdvisory
TamaraBoard tions promote reflective and analytical publ
Holding specialized academic conferences and seminars.
Ahmad Sonn
ankinshipBullock
Katherine James P.J John L. EspositoMehdi
Antony Sullivan through the disciplines of the social sci- stud
e Bullock
arles Anne So
Butterworth
Khurshid Ahmad Golshani
nd humanities. enc
Supporting and selectively publishing works of scholars and re-
MehdiAhmed
GolshaniM. Sayyid M. Syeed
utterworth
Ahmad TamaraT
Davutoglu
Akbar Kamal Hassan
Davutoglu Antony
John L. Esposito searchers in universities and academic research centers in the Muslim
Manzoor Alam Mohammad H. Kamali
est Graduate Paper Awards competi- The
. Esposito Sayyid
Sayyid world and the West.
Khalid Blankinship Enes Karic
M. tablished by AMSS in 2001, encourages tion,
Golshani
Katherine Bullock Seyyed Hossein Nasr
ship among emerging Muslim scholars sch
Directing higher university studies toward furthering work on issues
Charles Butterworth James P. Piscatori
ating in its annual conferences. In ad- parti
of Islamic thought.
Ahmet Davutoglu Anne Sofie Roald
John L. Esposito Tamara Sonn NAAIMS sponsors regional confer- diti
North America. In 2008, a University ence
A joint public The institute has a number of overseas offices and affiliates, as well as ac-
A publication
M. Syeed of:
Series was established to increase the Lect
Sayyid
AMuslim
joint publication o ations campus profile and facilitate di- orga ademic advisors, for the purpose of coordinating and promoting its various
Social Scient with the academy. alog activities. It has also entered into joint academic agreements with several
m Social Scientists & of
The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
universities and research centers to implement its objectives.
A publication of
&
national Institute of Is
Mailing
The International Institute of Address:
Islamic Thought (IIIT) rship includes a free one-year subscrip- Me
l Institute of Islamic T the quarterly American Journal of Is- tion to the quarterly American Journal of Is- to implement its objectives.
Mailing Ad
All correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at:
Social Sciences (AJISS), a peer- lamic Social sciplinary
Sciences journal published
and (AJISS), a peer- several universities and research centers
AJISS
to implement its objectives.
Mailing should
Address:
AJISS, P.O. Box 669, Herndon,
Mailing Address:VA 20172-0669 USA several universities research centers
spondence be a ed interdisciplinary journal published reviewed interdi
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P.O.should be addresse P.O. Box 669, Herndon, VA 20170-0669 USA
Phone:
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All correspondence703-471-1133 Fax:
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to the Editor at:
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VOLUME 34 SUMMER
W 2017 NUMBER 3
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC SOCIAL SCIENCES

In this issue
AMERICAN JOURNAL
OF
ISLAMIC
ARTICLES
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Translation and Analysis of al-Suyutis Attaining the
Jonathan Brown
Can Islam Accommodate Homosexual Acts? SPECIAL ISSUE
Mobeen Vaid ISLAM AND HOMOSEXUALITY
REVIEW ESSAYS
BOOK REVIEWS
CONFERENCE, SYMPOSIUM, AND PANEL REPORTS
VOLUME 34 NUMBER 3 SUMMER

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VOLUME 34 SUMMER

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC SOCIAL SCIENCES

CONFERENCE, SYMPOSIUM, AND PANEL REPORTS

VOLUME 34 NUMBER 3 SUMMER

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT

International Advisory Board

Submissions must conform to the following guidelines:

AJISS is indexed in the following publications: a) U.M.I. (16 mm microfilm, 35 mm microfilm,

International Institute of Islamic Thought

VOLUME 34 SUMMER 2017 NUMBER 3

A double-blind and peer-reviewed

Islam and Homosexuality

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT

Conference, Symposium, and Panel Reports

Elements of a Prophetic Voice of

vi The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

viii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

x The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

The conditions of late-capitalist modernity, sometimes called postmoder-

The Limits of Consent and the Autonomy of the Self

xii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

This is the first element of consent an expression of the sovereign self

xiv The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

The Limits of Historicism and Social Construction

Same-sex relationships and desires certainly existed before but homosexuality

In this time, sodomy [Michot translates this as homosexuality] has spread

Such accounts, even when corrected for some reformist exaggeration,

xvi The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

xviii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

The Imperative to Draw Reasoned Boundaries

xx The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

normativity. In an overpopulated and over-stuffed late-capitalist world, pro-

1. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian

xxii The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Ovamir Anjum, Editor, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on

This article provides an annotated translation of a treatise written

2 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 3

4 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

tion of male rape instead of as a condemnation of sodomy; (2) illustrating how

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 5

Ratings of Ibn Abbas Hadith of Killing the

Other Reliable Hadiths Condemning Liw

Another version contains almost the same content but is phrased as

6 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Summary of the Muslim Critiques of Ibn Abbas Hadith

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 7

8 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Progressive Contributions to Criticism

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 9

10 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 11

12 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 13

Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti: Author of Bulgh al-Maml

14 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 15

1. Presentation of the Hadith of Killing the Active/Passive Partner and related

16 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3

4. Presentation of supporting Companion reports.

The Text of Bulgh al-Maml Relied on

Brown: A Pre-Modern Defense of the Hadiths on Sodomy 17

18 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:3