here is the conversation we had last time you posted one of his papers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/sw7k0/hijab_question/c4j9oti

my first response here:

I have not read jon brown's paper but I will now. I will tell you though that I have papers of its kind in the past. I have read for example, the book on islamic theology and law by ignaz goldziher that viciously attacks the entire institution of hadiths and makes assertions about their acceptance for political expediency and other reasons, but let's not kid ourselves, goldziher attacks anything Islamic whether true or not. It doesn't bode well for the credibility of the paper that Jonathan Brown's name is attached to it since he as a similar reputation as an orientalist scholar.

I will read his paper, but I don't take my Islam from people who have made a career out of attacking Islam. If you could go back in time to the time of Rasulallah, saw, would you go and ask Abu Lahab about Tawhid?

Also, have you read kamali's book on hadith studies? it'll give you another perspective on critical accuracy within hadith collections and is one of the best books in English from an Islamic perspective:

http://www.amazon.com/Textbook-Hadith-Studies-Authenticity-Classification/dp/0860374351

not to mention, modern scholars continously sift through hadiths to this day looking for errors in authenticity. As Muslims, we have nothing to hide and if a hadith is found to be weak, which still happens even today, Muslims are the first one to throw it out. When you study fiqh, you find opinions of jurists that say things like, I'm basing this opinion on this hadith which I'm not sure of - if it's found to be sahih, then that is my opinion, but if it is found to be weak, then I'll change my opinion to say xyz. My point is that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, we study the hadiths carefully scrutinizing them for accuracy. We don't make overt generalizations about whether they are all strong or all weak or all suffer from a lack of critical accuracy. No, we look carefully. Clearly the Prophet, saw, said something besides Quran in his life and it behooves us to figure out what that is. brb, reading jon brown.

edit: first couple of pages are incredibly biased. He uses biased language unbefitting of serious scholarship like "these varied and often competing connections to the Prophet’s legacy had inundated legal discourse with a cacophony of authoritative statements from the Prophet"

edit2: omg, page 3 he's actually referencing golziher and schact!! my instinct was correct on brown. so far, this paper is simply a rehashing of orientalist opinions. You know these are the guys indirectly tasked with giving the brutal murder and subjugation of the Muslim world an academic basis, right? It's like people quoting a smarter version of jihadwatch today. still reading. edit3: this is his attempt to explain from a schachtian framework, the evolution of a backgrown isnad:

A report in the Muwata may be attributed to a Companion, while a generation later al-shafi attributes the same report to the Prophet through a defective mursal isnad (in which there exists a gap in the isnad between the Prophet and the person quoting him). Two generations later, in the Sahih of al-Bukhari (d.256/870), we find the same hadith with a complete isnad to the Prophet. Schacht contended that the Prophetic versions of these reports had clearly been forged after the compilation of works such as the Muwata, since if they had existed earlier, then scholars like Malik no doubt would have included them in their writings to trump their adversaries in legal debates.

So for example:

First, Imam Malik says, a sahaba says "XYZ."

Second, Imam Malik's student (Shafi) says, btw, a Companion's student (mursal hadith) said "The Prophet said XYZ." Lastly, Imam Malik's student's student's student (Bukhari) says, Ok I pieced it together. here: student -> companion's student -> companion said "Prophet said XYZ."

According to schacht, Malik might be right, but bukhari almost certainly invented the whole thing since, get this, if Bukhari was right, Malik would have certainly known about the different narrators!!. Seriously, what kind of reasoning is this on the part of Schacht? Imam Malik lived in one city his entire life and learned what he could from the people he was exposed to. He was an ocean of knowledge. But even at the time of Imam Malik, companions were living all over the world. Imam Bukhari traveled everywhere tracking down the knowledge of these companions to put together a clearer picture. He had access to information that Imam Malik did not. How can Schacht conclude that if Bukhari was right, Malik would have known about it to use in a debate?? Seriously, that is weak reasoning.

Muslims scholars will tell you that 1, 2, and 3 are saying the same thing based on new and more verifiable information, thus achieving in fact greater "critical accuracy" and therefore "the Prophet said XYZ" is a reliable hadith. And they will give you actual examples instead of fictional and hypothetical scenarios. At least he could provide an example.

edit4: Okay, so motzki and donner (both completely unreliable people who have made careers of attacking islam) disagree with schacht that Muslims would not have been able to completely fabricate these isnads overnight without some kind of communal alarm. John Brown contends there was alarm, just not to the extent that schatch asserts there is error in hadith collections. remember when I said that Muslims are the first to acknowledge a bad hadith? Schatch and Brown, who seems at this point to be a huge schatch fanboy, is basically saying well that's not good enough, there have simply got to be more weak hadiths than what Muslims say. What is he basing that on? read for yourself:

This is not to suggest that Muslim ÈadÊth critics acknowledged the backgrowth of isn§ds on the scale that Schacht, Juynboll and others have described. Muslim scholars maintained much more charitable presuppositions towards transmitted material. The ÈadÊth corpus is so vast that our attitudes towards its authenticity are necessarily based more on the axioms of our critical worldview than on empirical fact. 22 Out of thousands of extant ÈadÊths, Schacht based his conclusion about the backgrowth of legal isn§ds on only forty-seven traditions, which he believed undermined the prima facie historical reliability of the entire ÈadÊth corpus. 23 Conversely, the Muslim critics examined here identify a total of seventy-six instances of the backgrowth of isn§ds. But for them, those reports that do not exhibit this flaw are prima facie words of the Prophet.

wait, Seriously? Schacht is making massive generalizations about the hadith studies based on his study of a mere 47 hadiths?! That is completely ridiculous. I mean, I kind of knew that orientalist scholars did not study the texts in much detail - most of them cannot distinguish between a verse of the Quran and a hadith, but 47? That is shameful. Do you really think these are the kinds of intellectually dishonest people that we should be learning perspectives on our own texts? I can understand his point that if he finds errors that Muslim scholars did not find, then the scholars are not reliable, but my answer to him is that the person who does not master the field does not have any business claiming there is even one error, much less a mere 47. Do you have any idea how many hadiths bukhari says are not reliable? Tens of Thousands. That is the diligent work of a real scholar.

edit5: wow, major confusion by Brown over marfu and mawquf hadiths on page 8-9. He does not understand how a mawquf tradition is elevated and instead considers it to be fictional backgrowth of the isnad. He is assuming that an original narration attributed to a companion could not possibly have actually been a hadith in the first place, thus the later elevation of that mawquf tradition in his eyes is post-hoc injection of false information in the isnad. This is completely incorrect! This is what happens when orientalist scholars learn from other orientalists instead of studying these texts in from the tradition of the people that actually wrote them. His entire premise, the difference between what he is calling prophetic and "non-prophetic" hadiths is based on faulty assumptions about the nature of a what a mawquf, or what he calls "non-prophetic" tradition actually is.