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From: goer@midway.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam
Subject: Re: A HADITH ABOUT WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST ?? (or my misunderstanding)
Message-ID: <1990Dec12.022307.20468@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 90 02:23:07 GMT
Sender: bes@nntp-server.caltech.edu (Behnam Sadeghi)
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
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Approved: bes@tybalt.caltech.edu

In article <1990Dec10.155648.8624@wpi.WPI.EDU>
zubairi@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Junaid Ahmed Zubairi) writes:
>
>==================================================
>In an Urdu selection from Sahih Muslim, I read a Hadith 
>which predicts events before the Dooms day (Qiamat)....
>It says that there will be a war among the nations of the 
>world in Middle East( near River Farat) in which 99% of the
>people will be killed. (Maybe it means 99% of the armies
>will be killed). The fight will be near river Farat and will be
>over gold.
>
>
>If you take GOLD = BLACK GOLD = OIL
>and consider RIVER FARAT (IS IN IRAQ)
>and the words (nations) then the conflict referred to can be the
>present Gulf crisis.

This raises an important interpretive issue that Christians and
Jews are also concerned about.  Is it legitimate to superimpose
meanings on words that were not known in the Prophet's day?
Certainly, "black gold" only originated in a period when oil was
of great industrial importance.  Before then it was mainly just
greasy black stuff, and wasn't even all that easy to find.  To
say that a hadith predicts a war over oil therefore superimposes
on the words something the Prophet could not have intended them
to mean.

Are such interpretations legitimate?  Like I said, Jews and Chris-
tians are divided on this issue.  The Rabbis regularly superimpose
meanings on the text that cannot have been intended.  So also many
Christians, especially Catholics before about 1900 (one of the
great Protestant-Catholic differences was on how strictly to ad-
here to the literal-historical sense).

I'm interested in what Muslims have to say about these issues.

-Richard (goer@sophist.uchicago.edu)