At the same time, other sayings that implied female inferiority and intolerance toward other religions troubled the 23-year-old student at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
"These issues have pushed me to seek more knowledge," said Abdul-Majid, who recently enrolled in an online course about the hadith, the collected stories of what Muhammad and his closest companions said and did.
Muslims hold the hadith second only to the Quran as a source of Shariah law and personal guidance. For centuries, Muslims have hotly debated the hadith, often coming to vastly different conclusions about what lessons to draw from Muhammad's life.
Now, with fundamentalists citing certain sayings to justify violence, intolerance and the oppression of women, moderate Muslim scholars and lay people like Abdul-Majid are revisiting the collected sayings and opening a debate about their meaning and role in Muslim life.
Because the hadith carry so much weight, any new interpretations could have dramatic effects on Muslim societies--influencing views on issues that include the rights of women and religious minorities and the compatibility of Islam with democracy.
Yet even those who advocate change acknowledge it won't come easily.
"There's resistance because it means changing the culture," said Pamela Taylor, co-chairperson of the Progressive Muslim Union. "It's a very threatening thing to look hard at your religion and say we've been doing it wrong for the last 1,100 years."
Muhammad commanded followers not to record what he said and did to guard against the possibility that they would confuse his words with God's. Instead, Muslims kept the sayings alive orally.
By the early ninth century, some 200 years after Muhammad's death, as many as 700,000 sayings were circulating throughout the Muslim world. Many were of questionable credibility and some were even fabricated to support political or economic policies.
Leading scholars decided the sayings should be collected and verified. Using a painstaking process, they traced the chain of narration and scrutinized the character and memory skills of the individual reporters.
The two pre-eminent hadith scholars, Muhammad Ibn Isma'il Bukhari and Muslim ibn Hajjaj, collected 2,602 and 9,200 hadith respectively, all of them considered sahih, or "sound," authentic and indisputable. Other collections exist, but they include sayings with weak links or other
defects.
Over the centuries, however, weak classifications have not stopped some Muslim clergy and politicians from invoking some sayings for political purposes. Others have interpreted sound hadith in ways that many Muslims find inconsistent with other Islamic teachings. Such practices continue today.
Consider the dispute around a hadith that says, "A woman may not lead a man in prayer, nor may a Bedouin lead Muhammad's followers or a corrupt person lead a committed Muslim in prayer."
Taylor, who supports women-led prayer, argued the hadith suffers from a weak chain of narrators and is a racist text out of step with Islam's racial egalitarianism. It was "hypocritical," she said, to use a hadith knowing it was weak.
Abdullah acknowledged that the hadith is "weak," but said he used it only to support other hadith to make his case. He also denied it was racist.
Sound narrations that some see as inconsistent with the Quran, or that don't fit Muhammad's image as fair and compassionate, can be even more problematic.
For example, in several hadiths collected by Bukhari, Muhammad orders adulterers to be stoned to death, although the Quran prescribes a punishment of up to 100 lashes. In recent years, Islamic courts in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria have handed down death sentences in some adultery cases, although it is unclear how many have been carried out.
"There are some that show him merciful and there are some that show him otherwise," said Shahed Amanullah, editor of the online magazine altMuslim.com. "People are asking, `How can you have these contradictions?' So something is wrong, and someone needs to resolve that."
Some scholars, however, warn against simply dismissing troubling sayings, and suggest a better response is to reinterpret the texts.
"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."
There is no guarantee, however, that new interpretations that try to reconcile certain texts with modern times will be accepted by all Muslims.
Earlier 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 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."
Indeed, Moosa and other scholars have compared the hadith debate within Islam with Christian debates about dogma.
And reforms are made. For example, Turkey's highest Islamic authority, the Diyanet, which controls more than 76,000 mosques, recently deleted several hadith, including "Women are imperfect in intellect and religion" and "The best of women are those who are like sheep."
The move, reported by The Washington Post, was coupled with an initiative to send more progressive imams to rural, conservative areas to preach against misogyny.
"The sahih concept has gained such strength that it's become impervious to change. People are so reluctant to nullify a sahih hadith because it has 1,200 years of scholarship behind it," said Amanullah. "People need to lose that fear."
