Islam's other holy books.(Book Review)

Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam By Ram Swarup Prometheus Books, 258 pages, $22

Nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan wrote that, unlike the founders of other world religions, Mohammed "was born in full light of history." If so, history's illumination is not always flattering to the warlord-prophet: How many people know that Mohammed claimed he "stood at the gates of Hell and saw that the majority of those who entered were women"? Or that he believed "filling the belly of man with pus is better than stuffing his mind with poetry"? Or that he flushed his nasal passages with water three times each morning because "the devil spends the night in the interior of the nose"?

You won't find these anecdotes in the Koran. Rather, these and thousands of other stories are found in the hadiths--accounts of the Prophet recorded by his earliest companions and passed down through succeeding generations. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Muslim scholars collected these stories, weeded out the obviously forged, and organized the rest into six massive texts. With the Koran, these volumes form two mutually illuminating pillars of Islamic devotion: If the Koran deals with the commandments of God revealed through His Prophet, the hadiths (or hadis) depict, through Mohammed, the ideal ways to perform those commands. Fascinating, absurd, sometimes comical and horrific, the hadiths are essential to understanding Islam--and why the religion so easily lends itself to superstition, despotism, and eschatological violence.

Recently reissued, Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam, is an attempt by Indian scholar Ram Swarup, who died in 1998, to present a streamlined version of one particular hadith collection: the Sahib Muslim, compiled by the Sunni scholar Muslim ibnu'l-Hajjaj (819-875 A.D.) and translated into English in the 1970s. Reviewing each of the Sahih Muslim's 42 books, Swarup selects several hundred of its traditions and places them in a historical context, adding his own comments supplemented by the Koran and Western sources. We learn that, according to Mohammed, the three gravest sins are to"associate a partner with Allah" (i.e., deny His unitarian nature), murder one's children, and commit adultery with a neighbor's wife, in that order. The Prophet also decreed that the person most deserving of "good treatment" is "your mother, again your mother, and again your mother"--though he consigned his own polytheistic mere to Hell. As for Mohammed's mission on earth: "None of you is a believer until I am dearer to him ...