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Question about the interpretation of a Dominant Character Hadith

Q1:
Hadith:
Anas b. Malik reported that Umm Sulaim narrated it that she asked the
Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) about a woman who sees in a
dream what a man sees (sexual dream). The Messenger of Allah (may
peace be upon bi m) said: In case a woman sees that, she must take a
bath. Umm Sulaim said: I was bashful on account of that and said: Does
it happen? Upon this the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him)
said: Yes (it does happen), otherwise how can (a child) resemble 
her? Man's discharge (i. e. sperm) is thick and white and the discharge 
of woman is thin and yellow; so the resemblance comes from the one 
whose genes prevail or dominate."
[...see below Q2]

A:
A hadith is the gist of what a narrator, in effect, *understood to 
have seen and heard*. The scholars of hadith then shed the spotlight 
in holistic terms, like detectives reconstituting a scene, on the 
different aspects related to Arabic style, textual variants and 
precedence, internal consistency, the Prophetic idiom and so forth.

A non-mutawatir-lafzi hadith is by definition not a film of the 
events retelling every single verbal and actual detail into which we 
can read literal conclusions. And even the language of a mutawatir 
lafzi is not meant to be forcibly made compliant with the standards 
of contemporary scientific discourse.

As Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal pointed out in the latter chapters of his book 
_Science and Islam_, one of the mistakes of Muslim "scientistic" 
apologetics is to try to fish out from the early sources some kind of 
precise demonstrations and arguments for latter-day discussions. This 
is anachronistic and is not going to work. This failure of Sayyid 
Ahmad Khan's "Naytshuriyya" (naturalist materialism) and the Egyptian 
"Reformists" and their pseudo-scientific Tafsirs, in many respects 
lives on in Harun Yahya's vulgarization literature.

It is enough that our sources give every sound mind *a perception of 
coherence* in general terms, which faith then completes and 
categorizes as a mu`jiza. To chisel and hew the early sources into 
some kind of scientific-journal type of demonstration, however, is 
not only a mistake but a recipe for a wholesale dismissive backlash.

To go back to the Dominant Character Hadith, it is in line with the 
economy and concision of the Prophetic speech to assume there is a 
discursive switch from the "fluid discharge during sleep" mentioned 
in the question, to the "corpus luteum produced by the woman's ovum" 
that contributes genes and chromosomes to the fetus.

This switch is logical: the reply not only gives the first woman the 
fawta that ghusl is required just as it would be - as per her own 
simile - after a man's sperm discharge; it also adds information 
which puts to rest Umm Sulaym's follow-up implied denial of female 
and male procreative physiology being on a par. The Prophet, upon him 
blessings and peace, in essence replies: "They are on a par except 
for the detail of precedence of sperm and corpus luteum which results 
in unilateral resemblance."

And Allah Most High knows best.

GF Haddad
2009-01-04

Q2:
 The question was concerning the above-mentioned hadith:

 "...Orientalists claim that the hadith supports the idea that
 Muhammad (sallAllahu alayhi wasallam) said that the fluids emitted by females during sexual
 dreams contribute to the creation of a child. With the proposed
 interpretation in the above article (and various Islamic articles
 discussing this hadith), the meaning of discharge changes mid way
 through; the discharge that the woman asks about is the one that is
 emitted during sexual dreams, while the woman's discharge that the
 rasul is referring to in the last statement of the hadith refers to
 the fluid containing the ovum. Orientalists claim that there's no
 reason for the change in definition, and that the discharge being
 referred to in the last statement is the one being referred to in the 
 women's question (the discharge during sexual dreams), and the hadith
 implies this, hence Muhammad (sallAllahu alayhi wasallam) believed that females emitted
 something analogous to the sperm (in that it has the potential to
 fertilize) in males during sexual dreams. How would one answer this
 objection with regards to the meaning of discharge in the above 
 hadith?"

Q3:
 Would you say that one of the reasons we have different rules for
 treating narrations as compared to the rules that non-Muslims have
 treating their scriptures is because the basic structure of a "hadith"
 is much different from the basic structure of lets say... the text in
 the Bible? 
 If so, then there's a fundamental methodological difference between
 the way we interpret our texts and the way others do.

A:
The book I cited by Muzaffar Iqbal begins on this important point, 
which is that the Western science-religion divide has been 
erroneously exported from the Christian sphere to Islam whereas it 
does not properly apply to the latter.


GF Haddad
2009-01-05
.-.