The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in Early Islam

Abstract

AbstrakKarya Cook yang berjudul The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in Early Islam lebih memfokuskan pada penentangan terhadap penulisan hadis yang terjadi pada masa awal Islam dalam proses penggeseran tradisi oral dalam periwayatan hadis menjadi tradisi tertulis, dan tidak memaparkan kronologi bagi penulisan hadis itu sendiri. Cook mengklasifikan oposisi penulisan hadis pada masa awal Islam ke dalam dua fase, yaitu fase Basrah dan fase umum yang meliputi Kufah, Madinah, Makkah, Yaman, dan Syria, beserta argumen yang dibangun masing-masing fase, juga pola kompromi yang ditempuh untuk menghubungkan dua pendapat yang berseberangan tersebut. AbstractCook's work entitled The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition in Early Islam focuses more on opposition to writing traditions (hadith) that occurred in the early days of Islam in the process of shifting the oral tradition in Hadith narration into a written tradition, and did not expose the chronology for writing tradition itself. Cook classified the opposition in writing hadith in the early days of Islam into two phases, namely Basra phase and common phase which includes Kufa, Medina, Mecca, Yemen, and Syria, and their arguments which are built by each Umma Farida 20 RIWAYAH, Vol. 1, No. 1, Maret 2015 phase, as well as patterns of compromise adopted to connect the two opposite opinions.

Sacred Voice, Profane Sight: The Senses, Cosmology, and Epistemology in Early Islamic History

“…Th e disparagement of writing was not due to Jewish infl uence as Josef Horovitz (2004Horovitz ( [1918) and Cook (1997) claim but rather to commonality of cultural knowledge and contingent solutions to shared practical problems (Schoeler 2004). I want to illustrate this idea of commonality by a linguistic example that questions the argument from infl uence.…”

“…In addition to these three points I also assume following Michael Cook (Cook 1997) that writing of hadith was resisted and disparaged in early Islam but contrary to him I take that as a sign of some cultural logic operative behind the whole methodology. Th e disparagement of writing was not due to Jewish infl uence as Josef Horovitz (2004Horovitz ( [1918) and Cook (1997) claim but rather to commonality of cultural knowledge and contingent solutions to shared practical problems (Schoeler 2004).…”

“…As discussed above, recent studies have confi rmed the existence of writing from the very beginning of Islam. Th e problem is why audiocentric transmission of knowledge existed besides writing as the culturally privileged methodology and why writing was disparaged (Horovitz 2004(Horovitz [1918; Cook 1997). I want to argue that the alternative suggested in the last question above was an "impossible probability," or less decisively, "improbable possibility."…”

The Oral and the Written in Early Islam. By Gregor Schoeler. Translated by Uwe Vagelpohl, edited and introduced by James E. Montgomery. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 248+viii. £80.00.

“…It is worth mentioning at this juncture the extended article by Michael Cook on the subject of hostility to the writing of tradition in early Islam. 40 Schoeler acknowledges in the addenda to his own article that they are in agreement on many points but that Cook himself speaks of there being 'substantial disagreements'. Cook argued that a Jewish origin lay at the heart of the Muslim tradition of orality (scripturalism) and opposition to writing, observing that both Islam and Judaism shared the same epistemological conception of an oral tradition which existed alongside written scripture.…”

Major Topics of the Hadith

“…Some of the most exciting work in this field is being done by Harald Motzki (2002) and several additional European scholars whose work can be sampled in Herbert Berg (2003). Apocalyptic hadith is one genre of hadiths that has elicited a modest degree of attention by Western scholars; see the publications by David Cook (2003), Michael Cook (1992, 1997), and Wilferd Madelung (1986).…”