Did Muhammad Really Say That?

"The scholars have done a tremendous job of recording and authenticating the hadith. After all that work, to say, 'OK, let's throw the hadith away because it doesn't fit with my intellect,' I should question my intellect, not the hadith," Abdullah said.

Other scholars caution against a rush to view ancient texts through modern eyes. "If people don't like something, the easiest thing to do is to say that the hadith must not be true," said Mohammad Fadel, an Islamic law professor at the University of Toronto.

"This is understandable to some extent, but it's an easy way out; it's not an intellectually sound approach," he said.

There is also no guarantee that new interpretations that try to reconcile certain texts with modern times will be accepted by all Muslims.

This year, for example, Afghan judges justified their death sentence for a Muslim convert to Christianity based on a death sentence handed down by Muhammad to an apostate. Yet most Muslim scholars condemned the Afghan judges, citing examples from Muhammad's life in which he urged tolerance for people of other faiths. They noted that the man ordered by Muhammad to die was not guilty of changing religions, but of treason.

"With this apostasy issue, the differences become so glaring, with one side saying, 'put to death,' and the other saying, 'no, free will.' People are coming from two worlds," said Amanullah of altmuslim.com. "The cultural differences in the Muslim world stem from the hadith."

Other scholars emphasize that the hadith and their interpretations should be viewed through the prism of time and culture. If Muslims are to successfully reinterpret the hadith for the 21st century, they must avoid literalism and be willing to apply the hadith to reflect today's cultural norms.

"In the prophet's time, there was a tacit understanding that things would change as circumstances changed," said Ebrahim Moosa, an Islamic studies professor at Duke University.

"We need to re-evaluate our canon of interpretation."