7 scholars who shaped how Islam is studied

Abdullah ibn Abbas was a cousin of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and a boy when the Prophet died. The Companions called him tarjumān al-Qurʾān, “the interpreter of the Quran”. The Prophet is reported to have prayed, “O God, give him understanding in the religion.”^[1]

Much of the earliest commentary on the Quran is attributed to him. He spent the years after the Prophet’s death learning from senior Companions and later taught at Mecca, where students such as Mujahid and Ikrima carried his explanations forward. Their transmission is the base of the commentaries that al-Tabari collected two centuries on.

Scholars of hadith sort reports under his name by their chains. The objection comes from that very work: a commentary printed under his name in modern editions, Tanwīr al-Miqbās, was compiled long after his death and its attribution is doubted. The sorting is therefore not a formality. A saying is taken to be his only when its chain of transmitters holds.

Muhammad ibn Ishaq wrote the earliest comprehensive life of the Prophet. His work survives through the edition of Ibn Hisham (died around 833) and the quotations of al-Tabari. It is the base of almost every later biography, and an English reader can meet it in Alfred Guillaume’s translation.^[2]

Scholars praised him on the campaigns, and some, such as Malik, criticised him. Hadith critics were more cautious about his reports on matters of law than about his narrative of events. Ibn Hisham himself says that he left out some of what Ibn Ishaq wrote, and the early critic Ibn Sallam al-Jumahi judged part of the poetry in the book to be forged.

Later writers weigh his reports against the Quran and the hadith collections. That is how the book is used: as the framework of the life, with each report tested against stronger sources.

Sulayman Abu Dawud al-Sijistani compiled the Sunan, one of the six canonical hadith collections. It focuses on hadith used in law, and Abu Dawud noted weaknesses in the reports he included.

He is said to have chosen the roughly 4,800 hadith in the book from a far larger number he heard, reported as several hundred thousand. In a letter to the people of Mecca he described his method: where a report was very weak he pointed that out, and where he said nothing the report was at least acceptable.^[3]

The fair criticism is that his silence is a weak signal, since later scholars found weak reports he had left unremarked and graded them again. The answer is that the system of grading was built for this: each generation of hadith scholars rechecked the work of the last, and the Sunan is read with their notes beside it.

Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian of Iraq, was a physician and the best-known translator of the Baghdad of his age. He translated Galen and Hippocrates from Greek into Syriac and Arabic and set a standard for accuracy.

In a surviving letter on the translations of Galen he describes his method. He gathered several Greek manuscripts, compared them to establish a sound text, and then rendered the sense into Syriac and Arabic, aided by a team that included his son and his nephew.^[4] The practice of checking a text against its variants is the same discipline the hadith scholars applied to their own sources.

His work is one reason Greek medicine reached Arabic and, through it, Europe. His case shows the scholarly tradition was not solely Muslim in its makers. Muslim patrons paid for his work and Muslim physicians built on it.

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, “the philosopher of the Arabs”, worked in the House of Wisdom on mathematics, optics, music and philosophy. His essay On First Philosophy argued for the unity of God by reason.^[5]

In that essay he writes that one should not be ashamed to admire the truth and take it from wherever it comes, even from peoples remote from us and different from us. The remark explains why a Muslim philosopher of the ninth century felt free to read Greek authors, and why his patrons paid for translations.

He is the first major philosopher writing in Arabic and sits at the start of a tradition that includes al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The strongest objection from within Islam, voiced later by al-Ghazali, was that the Greek philosophers reached conclusions that contradict the Quran. Al-Kindi’s own aim was to support revelation by reason, and his essay on the One is an example.

Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari began as a Mu’tazili, left the school, and gave the theological position that became most common in Sunni Islam. Faruqi’s study of the divine attributes explains his move: the Mu’tazila avoided anthropomorphism by treating the Quran’s attributes as figures of speech, and al-Ash’ari held that they are true as stated, with the question of “how” set aside, bilā kayf.^[6]

The Mu’tazila were the rationalist school of the time, and he had been trained in it at Basra. He kept its method of argument and turned it against its conclusions, so that reason defended the text.

The school he began, joined by the Maturidi, is taught in most of the Muslim world today. Traditionalist scholars, above all the Hanbalis, held that kalam, the rational theology he used, was itself a risk, and the disagreement between the camps over how far reason may go in speaking about God continues.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali taught law in Baghdad, left his post in a crisis of doubt, and wrote Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Revival of the Religious Sciences), a guide to worship and character. His Incoherence of the Philosophers criticised parts of Greek philosophy as the Muslims received it.

His autobiography, Deliverance from Error, tells of the crisis in 1095, when he lost the power of speech in the lecture hall, gave up his chair and travelled for years before teaching again.^[7] In the Incoherence he named three philosophical positions as unbelief: that the world has always existed, that God knows only universals, and that there is no bodily resurrection. On the rest he engaged the philosophers on their own ground and accepted their logic.

He brought together law, theology and spirituality. His book is still read in mosques and seminaries. Ibn Rushd answered the Incoherence in his Incoherence of the Incoherence, and scholars still debate which of the two won the exchange.