Choreographing Movement:
A Look at Hadith

October 24, 2007

The above video is a lesson for Muslims in performing the daily prayers. Each of the steps is clearly illustrated. Most helpful in the video is the way it anchors each of its instructions in an actual hadith (a tradition about the prophet Muhammad). These traditions were collected and arranged into collections in the 9th century AD.. so they are quite old. As you watch this video you can see the hold these Hadith continue to have on Muslim practice: the postures and motions they describe are exactly followed by millions of Muslims.

From the collection of Hadith arranged by al-Bukhari, here are some examples describing the way prayer is to look:

I saw Allah's Apostle opening the prayer with the Takbir and raising his hands to the level of his shoulders at the time of saying the Takbir, and on saying the Takbir for bowing he did the same; and when he said, "Sami a-l-lahu Liman hamida ", he did the same and then said, "Rabbana wa laka-l-hamd." But he did not do the same on prostrating and on lifting the head from it." [vol. 1, bk. 12, #705]

I offered prayer beside my father and approximated both my hands and placed them in between the knees. My father told me not to do so and said, "We used to do the same but we were forbidden (by the Prophet) to do it and were ordered to place the hands on the knees." [vol. 1, bk. 12, #756]

The Hadith are thus a fantastic example of the way written descriptions of actions make their way into our actual world. The hadith as a totality (there are also chapters on "sales and trade" and "gifts" and "wills and testaments") can be viewed as a written arrangement of life. The actual social system in places where Sunni Islam is practiced will reflect this text in a rather direct way.

Now, it cannot be said that al-Bukhari is willing this social world into existence out of nothing. The hadith are a work of the imagination in the sense that they re-create the world of early Medina on the page. But I doubt that these descriptions would have surprised many of his contemporaries. Al-Bukhari is mostly describing what was currently practiced in his own time. So the progression would have been: consensus about lived Islam, then textualization of that consensus in the form of Hadith. All those minute actions and valuations which had grown up around the practice of Islam get set down in words.

That is not the end of the story. Once a social system is textualized to this degree, it gains a new life. The text becomes the canon by which religious and daily practices are judged and amended. The text comes to not just reflect life, but to arrange it. And surely in our own time, more than a thousand years after the settling of Hadith into accepted collections, the movement is overwhelmingly from text to life. Early Medina as presented by Hadith is thus akin to the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Borges. That is, we witness the crossover from an imagined world into the actual world. Words and concepts step off the page and become embodied.

[see also my earlier post on Edward William Lane's exact description of the movements of observed people in Cairo.]