Greeting Non-Muslims in Hadith: A Contextual Reading for Social Harmony in Contemporary Indonesia

This article analyzes the hadiths about greetings to non-Muslims and their relevance to social harmony in contemporary Indonesia. The unit of analysis of this research includes hadiths related to salam to non-Muslims, along with their reception and interpretation in classical hadith lectures and in contemporary religious discourse in Indonesia. This study aims to explain the variety of understandings of these hadiths, identify the socio-historical context in which they appear, and demonstrate the significance of contextual readings for Muslim-non-Muslim relations in pluralistic societies. This research uses a thematic approach (maudhu'i) to collect and classify relevant hadiths, then analyzes them through contextual hermeneutics by considering the social situation at the time of the Prophet and the dynamics of religious life today. The contextual reading follows a three-stage hermeneutical procedure consisting of textual analysis, socio-historical reconstruction, and ethical contextualization. The study analyzes thirteen narrations collected from Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, Musnad Aḥmad, and Sunan Ibn Mājah, which were categorized through thematic analysis into restrictive, responsive, and expansive narrations. The study's findings show that hadiths about salam to non-Muslims can be classified into three main categories: hadiths born in the context of tension with non-Muslims, hadiths that show the Prophet's acceptance or response to non-Muslim greetings, and hadiths that encourage the spread of salam in wider social interactions. The novelty of this article lies in the integrative reading of the entire hadith as a corpus that is interrelated, not as a postulate that is understood separately. Thus, this article contributes to strengthening the study of contextual hadith while offering a more inclusive framework of understanding for the development of social harmony between religions in Indonesia.