Da'wah Discourse Between Complete Conveyance and the Blight of Excerpting

By Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Ali Abouseif, President of the American Imams Academy.

Introduction

Praise be to God, who sent down the Book as a clarification of all things; and blessing and peace upon the one granted the most comprehensive of speech, and upon his family and Companions, who bore the word from him whole and delivered it exactly as they heard it. To proceed:

Among the gravest afflictions that beset the pulpit discourse today is a hidden blight to which many imams and preachers pay no heed: the neglect of connecting texts to one another and gathering the scholarly material in full before presenting it to the people. A preacher rises and cites a single narration of a hadith that has multiple narrations which complete one another and are indispensable to the full meaning; or he recites a verse severed from its context and its counterparts. So the discourse emerges excerpted and the meaning truncated in most cases, and perhaps the people understand from it the opposite of what the Wise Lawgiver intended. This blight is made all the more rampant by an affliction newly emerged in our lives: the culture of short, clipped video segments — what are called "reels" — which has accustomed people to receiving religion in truncated snippets, and has accustomed some preachers to fashioning their speech to that measure.

This subject is among the topics most firmly connected to the office of the imamate; for the imam is one who signs on behalf of God and His Messenger before the people, conveying from them both. God Almighty says: ﴿And We revealed to you the Reminder so that you may make clear to the people what was sent down to them﴾ [al-Naḥl: 44]. Clarification is not achieved except by joining the ends of the speech one to another; for a single word of a text is like a single limb of a body: the completeness of its form is not known except by returning it to its whole. Yet before we proceed with the grounding of principles, it is fitting that we pause to establish the name of this subject and its place on the map of the sciences — so that we neither claim for it what is not its own, nor deny it what belongs to it.

First: Establishing the Term — Is It an Independent Science, or an Art Among the Arts of Discernment?

The truth is that "connecting the texts" is not an independent science with a defined boundary and works composed under its name, like the science of grammar or of hadith terminology. Rather, it is an art among the arts of discernment (dirāya), a tool among the tools of understanding, and thereby a tool of conveyance and of fine clarification. Established, well-known sciences intersect within it: the gathering of a hadith's chains of transmission — a chapter of the science of hidden defects (ʿilal); the discipline of conflicting hadith (mukhtalif al-ḥadīth) and its difficult reports, which has its renowned works — *Ikhtilāf al-Ḥadīth* by Imam al-Shāfiʿī, who was the first to devote this subject to independent composition; *Taʾwīl Mukhtalif al-Ḥadīth* by Ibn Qutayba; and *Sharḥ Mushkil al-Āthār* by al-Ṭaḥāwī; the interpretation of the Qur'an by the Qur'an; the returning of the ambiguous (mutashābih) to the clear (muḥkam); and thematic exegesis in the terminology of the later scholars. Imams famed for their mastery of this craft — some of whom will be mentioned — include al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad, ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī, Ibn Khuzayma, and al-Ṭaḥāwī; and among the commentators, Ibn Ḥajar and al-Nawawī.

This art has controls that guard it from turning into its opposite, the most important of which are five: gathering before adjudicating — one does not resort to claiming abrogation or preponderance except after joining is found impossible; returning the ambiguous to the clear, not the reverse; giving weight to context and to the occasions of a hadith's utterance and a verse's revelation; guarding against fabricated composition (talfīq) — one does not assemble a narration from the wordings of disparate narrations and present it as a single text; rather, each wording is attributed to its narrator and its source — for the joining of texts is a reconciliation between their meanings, not a mixing of their wordings; and seeking illumination from the understanding of the imams and commentators, so that the preacher does not independently join texts by his own opinion in matters upon which the people of knowledge have spoken. Once the place of this art and its controls is settled, let us look at its root; for its root is drawn from the revelation itself.

Second: The Grounding of Principles — The Texts Interpret One Another

The people of knowledge have established that the soundest method of interpretation is that the Qur'an be interpreted by the Qur'an; for what is stated in summary in one place has been laid out in detail in another, and what is left absolute in one verse has been restricted in its sister. Then the Qur'an is interpreted by the Sunna, and the Sunna interprets itself, part by part. This method is no newly coined convention; rather, it is an authentic prophetic method that the Messenger of God (may God bless him and grant him peace) taught his Companions by direct instruction.

In the two Ṣaḥīḥs, it is reported from Ibn Masʿūd (may God be pleased with him) that he said: When ﴿those who believe and do not clothe their faith in wrongdoing﴾ [al-Anʿām: 82] was revealed, that weighed heavily upon the Companions of the Messenger of God (may God bless him and grant him peace), and they said: Which of us has not wronged himself? So the Messenger of God (may God bless him and grant him peace) said: "That is not it. It is only associating partners with God (shirk). Have you not heard what Luqmān said to his son: ﴿O my son, do not associate anything with God; indeed, associating partners is a grave wrong﴾ [Luqmān: 13]?"^[1] See how he (may God bless him and grant him peace) removed the enormous difficulty that nearly broke the backs of the Companions — not with fresh speech, but by connecting the ambiguous text to another text from the Book itself; thus he returned the ambiguous to the clear, and this is the very craft of which we speak.

By contrast, God made the pursuit of the ambiguous severed from its clear counterpart a mark of the people of deviation, saying, Glorified is He: ﴿As for those in whose hearts is deviation, they follow that which is ambiguous of it, seeking discord and seeking its interpretation﴾ [Āl ʿImrān: 7]. It does not befit the people of knowledge — and far be it from the people of knowledge and the masters of the pulpits — to fall into a form of error that God made a sign of those people; for there is a vast difference between one who deliberately seeks discord and one who interprets with good intent. Yet the effect of truncated speech upon the ears of the people may be similar, even if the intentions are far apart. The Companions saw the outcome of this path in the Khawārij; Ibn ʿUmar (may God be pleased with them both) said of them: "They took verses revealed concerning the disbelievers and applied them to the believers."^[2] That sect did not go astray through ignorance of the Qur'an's wordings, but by severing the verses from their context and their counterparts. And so, when the scholar of the Umma, Ibn ʿAbbās (may God be pleased with them both), debated them, he did not dispute with them by his own opinion, but argued against them by gathering the texts and joining some to others, until two thousand of them recanted.^[3] Thus the gathering of texts was the weapon of rightly guided leadership in confronting extremism — and how greatly we need it today.

Among the forms of Qur'anic excerpting is what occurs in the speech of some preachers: reciting God's saying ﴿So woe to those who pray﴾ [al-Māʿūn: 4] and stopping short of its completion: ﴿those who are heedless of their prayer﴾ [al-Māʿūn: 5]. The scholars have coined the famous illustration of one who recites ﴿Do not approach the prayer﴾ [al-Nisāʾ: 43] and holds back from His saying: ﴿while you are intoxicated﴾ — so the prohibition of praying in a state of intoxication turns into a prohibition of prayer itself! This is, on the face of it, an exaggerated example, yet it occurs in subtler forms in our sermons more than we suppose. This Qur'anic and prophetic principle is what the imams of hadith later formulated into explicit, refined rules.

Third: The Method of the Scholars, Past and Present — No Understanding Except by Gathering the Chains

What we point to today is no recent matter in the efforts to reform pulpit and homiletic discourse; rather, it is the discourse of the scholars of old and of late. The words of the imams of this field have converged upon the point that gathering the chains is a condition of understanding itself, not a technical luxury peculiar to the hadith masters.

Among what is reported from Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (may God have mercy on him) is his saying: "A hadith, if you do not gather its chains, you do not understand it; a hadith interprets itself, part by part." From ʿAlī ibn al-Madīnī, the teacher of al-Bukhārī: "A chapter, if its chains are not gathered, its error does not become clear." From Yaḥyā ibn Maʿīn: "Had we not written the hadith from thirty angles, we would not have grasped it." All of this al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī reported with his chains in *al-Jāmiʿ li-Akhlāq al-Rāwī wa-Ādāb al-Sāmiʿ*.^[4] Imam Muslim clarified in his book *al-Tamyīz* that the way to know the error of narrators is precisely the gathering of narrations and setting them against one another until the sound is distinguished from the flawed. And al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar and others among the imams of hadith terminology established that the reliance, in uncovering hidden defects and dispelling apparent contradiction, is upon gathering the chains and weighing them against one another.

This discourse did not cease with the early scholars; among the contemporaries, Shaykh Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (may God have mercy on him) stated in his book *How We Deal with the Prophetic Sunna: Landmarks and Controls* that among the controls of soundly understanding the Sunna are: understanding it in the light of the Noble Qur'an, and gathering the hadiths reported on a single subject until the vision of the jurist and the commentator is complete.^[5] Thus the word of the contemporaries met the word of the predecessors upon a single conclusion: understanding is a branch of gathering, and conveyance is a branch of understanding. If the imams of this craft did not trust their own understanding of a hadith until they gathered its chains, then how can a preacher trust his understanding — and then his conveying it to the people upon the pulpits — from a single narration that happened upon him by chance in a book or a post?

Fourth: Applied Examples — Hadiths Whose Meaning Is Truncated by Neglecting Their Remaining Narrations

So that the discussion does not remain mere abstract theorizing, here are six examples from the very heart of what preachers address every Friday. We present them one by one, showing the reader in each how the meaning bends when its narration is taken in isolation, and how it straightens and is completed when its narrations are gathered and joined one to another — while adhering to the etiquette of documentation we set forth: every wording attributed to its source, without fabricated composition of the wordings of the narrations.

1. Hadith: "Indeed, the deceased is punished for his family's weeping over him." This hadith is in the two Ṣaḥīḥs from the narration of ʿUmar and his son (may God be pleased with them both).^[6] Were the preacher to deliver it in isolation, it would suggest holding the deceased accountable for another's sin. The Mother of the Believers, ʿĀʾisha (may God be pleased with her), corrected its unqualified sense, saying: "May God have mercy on ʿUmar. By God, the Messenger of God (may God bless him and grant him peace) did not say that God punishes the believer for his family's weeping over him; rather he said: Indeed, God increases the disbeliever's punishment for his family's weeping over him." And she said: "The Qur'an suffices you: ﴿And no bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another﴾ [al-Anʿām: 164]."^[7] The scholars reconciled the narrations by holding that the threat concerns one who charged his family with wailing, or knew it to be their custom and did not forbid them. Here, then, is a jurist among the female Companions presenting the Sunna against the Qur'an and gathering the narrations, so that the meaning straightens and the difficulty is repelled — and this is precisely what the preacher ought to do before he ascends the pulpit.

2. Hadith: "I have been commanded to fight the people until they say: There is no god but God." This is among the most famous of texts excerpted from context, upon which the extremists feed on the one hand, and the assailants of Islam on the other. Its completion is in the two Ṣaḥīḥs, and the wording is al-Bukhārī's: "I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but God and that Muḥammad is the Messenger of God, and establish the prayer, and give the alms. If they do that, they have protected from me their blood and their wealth, except by the right of Islam, and their reckoning is with God."^[8] The understanding of the Companions themselves proceeded upon returning some of its wordings to others; for when ʿUmar contested with Abū Bakr (may God be pleased with them both) over fighting those who withheld the alms, citing the narration: "I have been commanded to fight the people until they say: There is no god but God… except by its right," al-Ṣiddīq answered him: "By God, I shall fight whoever separates the prayer from the alms; for the alms is the right due upon wealth."^[9] Thus Abū Bakr — the leader on whose behalf conveyance is made — built his majestic stance upon the complete hadith, not upon its excerpt. Moreover, the other texts on covenants, protected status, the jizya, and God's saying ﴿There is no compulsion in religion﴾ [al-Baqara: 256] make clear that the hadith is not upon its imagined generality, but concerns a specific group and a specific context. Whoever delivers it truncated has opened a door he cannot close.

3. The Hadiths of Contagion: "There is no contagion and no evil omen" alongside "Flee from the leper." In the two Ṣaḥīḥs: "There is no contagion, no evil omen, no owl-superstition, and no Ṣafar." Were the preacher to stop there, it would suggest the wholesale nullification of secondary causes. But in al-Bukhārī: "And flee from the leper as you flee from the lion." And in the two Ṣaḥīḥs: "Let no one with sick animals bring them upon one with healthy animals." And in both, concerning the plague: "If you hear of it in a land, do not enter it; and if it strikes a land while you are in it, do not leave fleeing from it."^[10] By gathering the texts, the integrated meaning becomes clear: the negation of what the pre-Islamic age believed about contagion having an effect by its own nature, independent of God's decree, together with the affirmation of secondary causes, taking them into account, and guarding against them. There will come, in the contemporary examples, how this very illustration became a practical test for the imams of the West.

4. The Prohibition of Drinking While Standing, alongside His Drinking While Standing (may God bless him and grant him peace). Muslim reported from Anas and Abū Hurayra (may God be pleased with them both) the prohibition of drinking while standing, and in some of its wordings there is severity. And in the two Ṣaḥīḥs, from Ibn ʿAbbās (may God be pleased with them both), he said: "I gave the Messenger of God (may God bless him and grant him peace) to drink from Zamzam, and he drank while standing." And in al-Bukhārī, that ʿAlī (may God be pleased with him) drank while standing, then said: "Some people dislike that one of them should drink while standing, and I have seen the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) do as you have seen me do."^[11] Whoever preaches on the etiquette of food and drink using the hadiths of prohibition alone casts the people into difficulty and into judging as wrong what is authentically established as the Prophet's own act (may God bless him and grant him peace); but whoever gathers the texts knows the scholars' paths in reconciliation, so his discourse emerges trustworthy and balanced.

5. The Hadith of Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj on the Prohibition of Renting Land. This is the very example the hadith masters cite as evidence for the rule "a hadith, if its chains are not gathered, you do not understand it." Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj (may God be pleased with him) reported the prohibition of renting farmland;^[12] were it taken upon its unqualified sense, sharecropping and leasing — which the Companions practiced — would be forbidden. When its chains were gathered, it became clear in some of its narrations that they used to rent out land in exchange for what grew along the water channels and the banks of the streams and a portion of the unknown crop; so this would be safe while that would perish. They were forbidden from that on account of uncertainty (gharar) and ignorance of what was contracted, not from the very principle of renting. Zayd ibn Thābit (may God be pleased with him) said: "May God forgive Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj. By God, I know the hadith better than he. Two men came to him who had quarreled, and he (may God bless him and grant him peace) said: If this is your affair, then do not rent out farmland."^[13] See how the legal ruling arrived at, after gathering the chains, was contrary to the apparent sense of the isolated narration — and how many a pulpit has a ruling built upon a single narration!

6. Hadith: "And do not say: 'Had I…'" In Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: "Be keen on what benefits you, seek help from God, and do not become incapable. If something befalls you, do not say: 'Had I done such-and-such, it would have been so-and-so,' but say: 'God decreed, and what He willed He did'; for 'had I' opens the work of Satan."^[14] Some preachers excerpt from it the prohibition of "had I," suggesting its absolute forbiddance — even though he (may God bless him and grant him peace) said: "Had I foreseen of my affair what I later came to see, I would not have driven the sacrificial animals."^[15] By gathering the texts — together with the context of the very hadith from which it was truncated — it becomes clear that what is prohibited is the "had I" coupled with discontent and objection to the decree, not the "had I" of wholesome wishing or of instruction. Here the truncation occurred not merely by neglecting another narration, but by severing the clause from the beginning of its own hadith — which is the mildest form of truncation and the most widespread. And if these examples are from the inherited legacy of knowledge, then our reality in the West brings us its fresh examples every Friday.

Fifth: Three Models from Our Reality in America and the West

The First Model: The Blight of "Reels" and Thirty-Second Clips. Among the afflictions newly emerged in our lives are what are called "reels" and short clips. A preacher in one of our American mosques delivers a balanced sermon; then half a minute is excerpted from it and published severed from its context. Hostile monitoring platforms seize upon it and present it as evidence of "hate speech," and the mosque finds itself facing a media confrontation. The lesson here is twofold: the imam who keeps in mind that his speech will be excerpted learns to present the text whole with its context every time; and then he realizes, from his own suffering with media excerpting, the odiousness of doing to the sacred texts what he complains of from his opponents.

The Second Model: The Pandemic and the Jurisprudence of Gathering the Texts. When the coronavirus pandemic swept America and the Friday and congregational prayers were suspended, the people divided: one party argued from half of the subject for the obligation of opening the mosques, and another party clung to secondary causes until it nearly forgot their Lord. None stood firm in that trial except the imams who applied the gathering we set forth in the third example above — between the texts of contagion, of secondary causes, and of reliance upon God — so they produced for their communities a balanced jurisprudence that convinced both the cautious and the trusting. That was a practical test that showed the gathering of texts to be no academic luxury, but the equipment of leadership in calamities.

The Third Model: An Audience That Reviews and Reads — So How Does the Imam Lead It? A university student attends the Friday prayer; when he departs, he reviews the hadith he heard on hadith websites and digital encyclopedias, and reads on the platforms of the skeptics in English doubts all of which are built upon truncated texts. This alertness in itself is neither hostility toward the imam nor ill manners with him — rather, it is said to him: listening attentively during the sermon is obligatory, and the door of review and questioning is open thereafter — indeed, it is an educational opportunity that the imam ought to lead, not to shy away from. If this young man finds his imam presenting the texts whole with their context, attributed to their sources, he learns from him the method of reception before the content of the sermon; and he leaves the mosque fortified against extremists and skeptics alike, because both hunt only with the severed text. But if he finds him excerpting as the adversaries of his religion excerpt, doubt seeps into everything he hears from him thereafter. And after this: what does the imam gain if he masters this art? Its fruits are three.

Sixth: Three Fruits of This Art in the Scale of the Imamate and Leadership

The First: Safeguarding the Pulpit against attributing to God and His Messenger what they did not say; for the truncated meaning may be another meaning than the one the Lawgiver intended, and the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) says: "Whoever lies against me deliberately, let him take his seat in the Fire."^[16] And though the excerpting preacher is not deliberately lying, laxity in verification while able to verify is no excuse for one who has appointed himself to conveyance.

The Second: The Moderation and Balance of the Discourse; for the texts of the Sacred Law came as paired counterparts embracing one another: hope and fear, dispensation and resolve, encouragement and warning. Whoever confines himself to the texts of warning produces despairing hearts; whoever confines himself to the texts of hope produces the negligent; and whoever gathers them, his discourse emerges upon the way of prophethood.

The Third: Preserving Credibility and Fortifying the Audience; for the listener today possesses the tools of instant review, as we saw in the third model, and if trust in the imam's precision falls once, doubt seeps into everything he says thereafter. Moreover, the imam who gathers the texts educates his audience by his practice — before his speech — that meaning is not taken from half a text; so the gathering of texts itself becomes a methodological education for the Umma. This is a leadership function that isolated exhortations cannot fulfill. And if one should say: I am convinced — so where do I begin? — then here are five tested steps.

Seventh: Five Practical Steps Before Ascending the Pulpit

1. Gather the hadith's narrations from their sources: the Six Books, the Musnad, and others, assisted by the works of aṭrāf such as *Tuḥfat al-Ashrāf* by al-Mizzī, and by precise modern research tools — provided they remain in your hand as trusted, not as automated masters: they open for you the path to the sources but do not spare you from examining them. There is no excuse today for one who sits back from acquiring knowledge from its sources, given such ease. And bind every wording to its source so that you are safe from fabricated composition.

2. Look into the occasion of utterance and the context: the occasion of the hadith's utterance, the occasion of the verse's revelation, and their circumstances; for how many a difficulty has been dispelled by knowing the story in which the text was uttered, as you saw in the hadith of Rāfiʿ ibn Khadīj.

3. Consult the reliable commentaries: such as *Fatḥ al-Bārī* by Ibn Ḥajar and *Sharḥ al-Nawawī ʿalā Muslim*; for the commentators present the narrations and dedicate chapters to reconciling conflicting hadith, so you find with them the distilled essence of what you seek, gathered in one place.

4. Present your speech to what opposes it, and take up a regular reading in the books of conflicting hadith: ask yourself: does this text have an opposing, restricting, or specifying counterpart? If you find one, do not ascend the pulpit until you know the manner of reconciliation, assisted by the works of this field that we have mentioned — those of al-Shāfiʿī, Ibn Qutayba, and al-Ṭaḥāwī; for they build in you the faculty of reconciliation and show you the craft of the imams first-hand.

5. Ask the specialists about what is unclear, and do not be ashamed: for half of knowledge is "I do not know," and for you to delay the material of a sermon by a week is better than to convey to the people a truncated meaning for an age.

Conclusion: The Trust of Complete Conveyance

The imamate is a trust of conveyance before it is an honor of precedence, and the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) says: "May God brighten a man who hears something from us and conveys it as he heard it; for perhaps one to whom it is conveyed retains it better than one who heard it directly."^[17] In his saying "as he heard it" there is an indication of delivering the material whole, undiminished; for whoever delivers half of the word has not delivered it. So let the imam make the gathering of the texts and connecting them a pillar of his craft, not a supererogatory addition to it; and let him remember that every sentence he delivers from the pulpit becomes a religion by which hundreds behind him worship — either he has conveyed from God a complete clarification, and his is the reward of that, or he has conveyed a truncated meaning, and upon him is the burden of what the people built upon it.

O God, grant us understanding of Your Book and the Sunna of Your Prophet, trustworthiness in conveying from You, and a gathering of the word of truth as You love and are pleased with; and may God bless, grant peace, and bestow blessing upon our Prophet Muḥammad and upon his family and all his Companions.