by Iftikhar uz Zaman

In April 1991, a debate in soc.religion.islam — begun over Islamic dress codes — had produced a criticism of the Saudi scholar Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani. One poster cited his reportedly geocentric cosmology as evidence that he should not be followed. Iftikhar uz Zaman, a graduate student at the University of Chicago whose own dissertation drew on Albani's hadith scholarship, responded. His reply quickly moved past the debate and became something else: a careful argument about how to evaluate specialized religious expertise.

Al-Albani (1914–1999) was one of the twentieth century's most prolific hadith scholars — a Syrian-Albanian who became the most influential Salafi hadith specialist of his era. He wrote hundreds of volumes classifying and authenticating hadith, and his assessments shaped how Salafi and many Sunni communities worldwide understood the prophetic tradition. He was also, by various accounts, wrong about cosmology, and his venture into jurisprudence (fiqh) was contested even among those who admired his hadith work.

Iftikhar's argument: treat the hadith scholar the way you treat a doctor. Go to him for what he knows. Do not go to him for what he does not know. And do not use his errors in one domain to dismiss his mastery in another. He closes with a wider concern — that the easy dismissal of the "mulla" as backward risks a kind of cultural suicide, discarding centuries of careful scholarship because the scholars were sometimes wrong about things outside their fields.

I hope everyone will excuse me for this tangent: but it seems that the name of this scholar who believes that the earth is the center of the universe keeps being brought up again and again, and every time this happens I am tempted to clarify — so I am giving in to this temptation.

The scholar in question is Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani. This man is a formidable scholar of hadith. His knowledge of hadith is absolutely phenomenal: and I think my dissertation would have taken me twice as long to write if it had not been for the work he has done.

On the other hand he does believe that the earth is at the center of the universe. So what are we to make of this?

Well, as far as I am concerned, in this age of specialization this phenomenon should not be too hard to understand. When I go to a doctor I go to ask him how to treat a disease — if he has opinions on the carburettor on my car being clogged or clean, well, I take it with a grain of salt; then I go to a mechanic. If the mechanic tells me that the doctor is out of his mind, I take that sentence precisely as it is stated — the doctor is wrong about my car. But I do not take this to be evidence of the doctor being incompetent in his field.

Now, Albani does not, to the best of my knowledge, pronounce the earth's being the center of the universe as something which is established by the Quran and the sunna. So his being wrong on this issue does not invalidate his opinion on hadith. I have no intention of studying astronomy from him, so it doesn't bother me when I am using his works for hadith study.

There is an additional problem with Albani, though. He does consider himself a faqih — an expert in jurisprudence, in understanding and interpreting the meanings of the corpus of hadith material which he actually has mastered. Here I, and a lot of the people whose knowledge of these matters I respect, think he is overstepping his bounds. Again, this is a matter of opinion and can be argued.

The point of this post, though, is to suggest that we try to break down some of these monolithic characterizations of people as "backwards" and "forwards." The mulla is a much maligned individual. However, fortunately or unfortunately, he has read the sources a lot more extensively than a lot of us have. Thus, until we do the reading ourselves, one cannot simply "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and think we can dispense with all types of mullas — from Malik, Shafi'i, Ahmad, to Ibn Hajar, al-'Ayni, to the modern ones like Albani. What we can do is put large question marks where we have questions and learn from them what we can — then, later, perhaps try to investigate the questionable points. Eventually, the investigation may lead us to throw out everything these mullas have told us. But it seems like cultural suicide — taking Islam as a culture here — to completely disavow the work of centuries which has gone into the texts of Islam, which these people, many of them sincere along with being knowledgeable, have invested in.

We do this kind of selective listening with any "expert" in everyday life. Why can we not give our religious scholars the same treatment? Is there perhaps a visceral reaction here? A hatred?

These are just questions: not accusations.

Colophon

Written by Iftikhar uz Zaman, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and posted to soc.religion.islam on 19 April 1991. The thread began as a discussion of dress codes in Islam and widened through an exchange about the Saudi scholar Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani. The poster was working on a dissertation in Islamic studies and had used Albani's hadith scholarship directly in his research.

Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (1914–1999) was born in Shkodër, Albania, and emigrated to Syria as a child. A self-taught scholar who spent years studying manuscripts in the Zahiriyya library in Damascus, he became one of the most prolific and influential hadith scholars of the twentieth century. His multivolume classifications of hadith — distinguishing authentic (sahih) from weak (da'if) traditions — shaped Salafi communities worldwide. He taught briefly at the Islamic University of Madinah and was expelled from both Syria and Saudi Arabia at different points for his views. He died in Jordan in 1999.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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