Sunnah at the Time of Companions and Successors

With the death of the Prophet, Ḥadith attained a semi-formal status. The main purpose of Ḥadith, as mode of Sunnahic transmission, was, according to Rahman, for practical reasons “as something, which could be generated and be elaborated into the practice of the community”. Its random writing down marked the development of Ḥadith during this period of time in simple notebooks usually referred to as ṣaḥīfa/ṣuḥuf.71 Nonetheless, judging by their own involvement in making decisions based upon them, the importance given to Ḥadith at the time of the Caliphs was not great. Juynboll asserts that:

It is safe to say that Abu Bakr, the first caliph, cannot be identified with Ḥadith in any extensive way. This may show that during his reign examples set by the prophet or his followers did not play a decisive role in Abu Bakr’s decision making. With regards to second Caliph’s [Umar] use of word Sunnah ‘the term is usually use to mean: the normative behaviour of a good Muslim in the widest sense of the word’ [rather than a Ḥadith]. In case of the Uthman’s [third Caliph] view of Ḥadith in conducting of community’s affairs Uthman seems to have relied solely on his judgement.
From all the different sources74 on which the juristic decisions of Ibn Abbas’s (d. 68) disciples such as Ata b. Abi Rabah were based, only a small number of Prophetic Ḥadith were used.75 By the same token, the importance given to Ḥadith during the entire period of the Umayyad Caliphate (ending in 132 AH/750 CE) was ‘a  marginal phenomenon’.

The early religious epistles studied by Van Ess and Cook, suggest that the term Sunnah “has nothing to do with Ḥadith” and that in them Ḥadith are rarely, if at all, cited but that this “lack of Ḥadith did not betray any hostility towards the notion of Sunnah”. Again, these statements must be understood in the context that the understanding of the word Sunnah at that time, as we demonstrated earlier, was ethico-religious in nature, permitting a large scope for exercising of one’s own judgement so that Ḥadith was “interpreted by the rulers [of that time] and the judges freely according to the situation at hand.”

An indication that practice-based, non-written Sunnah was considered superior to that of Ḥadith is found in the chapter of Iyad’s book entitled On What Has Been Related from the First Community and the Men of Knowledge Regarding the obligation of Going Back to the Practice (ʿamal) of the People of Medina, and Its Being a Conclusive Proof (hujja) in Their Opinion, even if it is Contrary to Ḥadith (al-athar).” Elsewhere Iyad notes that Umar Ibn al-Khattab [second caliph] once said on the mimbar (pulpit), “By Allah, I will make things difficult for any man who relates a Ḥadith which is contrary to ʿamal.” Another factor which leads us to conclude that Ḥadith literature did not enjoy a great deal of importance in legal matters, and that it was quite restricted in scope in the first century, is the fact that the nature of legal literature from that period deals overwhelmingly with issues that the Qurʾān addresses directly such as inheritance, marriage and divorce, injury and compensation, rather than those aspects of the Prophet’s life that were not directly  alluded to by the Qurʾān. J. van Ess’ examination of first century Muslim literature led him to conclude that the use of Ḥadith and their importance in these works was practically non-existent.

The earliest indications that Ḥadith literature was spreading are the stories about the faḍ̣āʾil (merit) of the Companions which are likely to have originated during the caliphate of Abu Bakr, that is during the first two years after the Prophet’s death giving rise to what can be termed as politically motivated Sunnah. Another genre of early Ḥadith literature is the awāʾil/anecdotes of the quṣṣās (preachers) originating at about 40 AH. The subject matter of these Ḥadith/stories predominantly dealt with edification of the Prophet and the first generation Muslims termed tarhīb wa targhīb. Another early genre of written literature to emerge was that of rudimentary tafsīr which was, however, not recorded during the Prophet’s time. The ḥalāl–ḥarām genre of Ḥadith (i.e. those which have a legal value) “must have been extremely limited in scope and were mainly the products of individual judgement on the part of the first legal minds Islam produced.”

In terms of isnād development, the second element in the ‘authentic Ḥadith’ equation, is only towards the end of the period under examination (70 AH) that the first consistent usage of isnād was put into practice. Modes of transmission were both oral and written in nature and included reading from a Ḥadith book by a teacher to students (samāʿa), reading by students from books to teachers (ʿard/qirāʾa) and written correspondence (wasīyah). Towards the end of this period, coinciding with the establishment of regional schools of thought and regional Sunnah, most of the Ḥadith were regional in character, having regional isnāds based on the Companion’s interpretation of Prophetic Sunnah. The isnād of Ḥadith stopped at the level of the Companions (or Successors) supporting the broader principle of the schools’ general concept that Companions were in the best position to internalise and be living proponents of Prophetic Sunnah. This was reflected in their overall Sunnahic hermeneutic we referred to elsewhere as as-sunnah al-maʾrufa and/or regional Sunnah.

taken from this article (free PDF)

Constructing a Religiously Ideal “Believer” and “Woman” in Islam-Conclusion

The concern of this study has been to explore how on the basis of different manahij, and the assumptions that inform them, the two contemporary Islamic schools of thought, Neo-traditional Salafism (NTS) and progressive Muslims, conceptualise their respective versions of a religiously ideal  ‘Believer’ and ‘Muslim Woman’ concepts. A particular focus of the study was to highlight the crucial importance of the act of interpretation and its underlying methodological, epistemological and hermeneutical assumptions in the formulation of the NTS and progressive Muslims representation of these concepts. The broader context of the thesis was informed by the contemporary intra-Muslim debates on the issues of religious authenticity, legitimacy and the authority to speak for, and thus, define the very nature and future of Islam. In this context I pointed out that the existing scholarship suggested that, due to the forces of globalisation and modernisation which favour democratisation of religious knowledge and facilitate the fragmentation of religious authority, these debates have intensified with a number of actors who have emerged asserting their authority to authoritatively speak on behalf of Muslims and Islam. I also argued that this state of affairs left us with a perplexing phenomenon of ‘normative Islams’ which at times can be mutually exclusive on certain issues. The concepts of a ‘Believer’ and ‘Muslim Woman’, the focus of this study, are such two issues.

 In order to situate the intense and highly contested contemporary debates and discourses on the issue of the nature of the Islamic tradition and to show their essential continuity/discontinuity  with the experiences of the previous communities of interpretation, the first chapter  outlined the broad contours of the historical background behind the debates surrounding the status and the authenticity of the various sources of its legal authority with a particular emphasis on the madhhab and ahl-hadith based manahij. In particular I examined the various approaches to the question of the nature and the authenticity of Prophetic authority (Sunna) and its relationship with the hadith and Qur’an bodies of knowledge.

In the second chapter I situated the NTS community of interpretation  in relation to this historical context and argued that the NTS scholars can be considered as the contemporary incarnation of the pre-modern ahl-hadith school of thought in relation to how they conceptualise the concepts of ‘ilm, Salafism, Sunna and its the relative status in relation to the Qur’an and hadith bodies of knowledge as well as in relation to non-textual sources of knowledge such as ra’y and taqlid. Furthermore, the NTS school of thought was found to advocate a completely textual legal hermeneutic expressed best in their definition of ittibaa’ as an unflinching adherence to sahih hadith which in turn is conflated with following the true salafi Qur’an –Sunna manhaj . Secondly, I tried to show that the NTS manhaj as identified and characterised by themselves is often unspecific and vague, consisting of  amalgamations of qur’anic verse and sahih hadith and at times buttressed  with a commentary of classical scholars who themselves espouse the ahl-hadith manhaj. Moreover, I attempted to show that the NTS manhaj shows no evidence of being consciously grounded in any theory of interpretation. Thirdly, I maintained that the NTS manhaj is often disclosed by means of oppositional dialectics where it is contrasted in general terms with ‘new methodologies of modernist and intellectuals’ or that of the madhahib or Sufis. Lastly, I noted that one important part of the NTS manhaj is their subscription to the concept of al wala’ wa l bara’ which they consider as is part of the ‘aqidah.

Based on the delineating features of the NTS manhaj, a subject matter of the third chapter, the NTS was found to subscribe to very specific  concepts of a ‘Believer’ and “Muslim Woman’. Based upon their ahl-hadith salafi revivalist manhaj I demonstrated in the fifth chapter that, according to the NTS thought, the concept of a Believer was restricted only to the historical Muslim community who recognised the claim of Prophethood of Muhammad, thus forming the view  that religious salvation was permanently not to be extended to any other  non-Muslim community such as the Jews and the Christians. In the same chapter with respect to the NTS concept of a religiously ideal ‘Muslim Woman’, the study found that such a concept was constructed in relation to that of a secluded and completely veiled Muslim woman whose primary, if not exclusive, functions are considered to be that of a wife and a mother and whose religious duty is to obey her husband at the cost of her religious salvation.

Another community of interpretation within the Islamic tradition that this thesis focused on is that of progressive Muslims. In the fifth chapter I described important themes underpinning progressive Muslim worldview. In this context I maintained that progressive Muslim thought and ‘cosmovision’, is best characterized by a number of commitments, ideals and practices that the adherents of progressive Muslim thought advocate and adhere to. These included a strong commitment to social and gender justice, religious pluralism and a belief in the inherent dignity of every human being as a carrier of God’s spirit.  I also historically contextualized and placed progressive Muslim thought in relation to  their western predecessors of  the 18^th and 19^th century such as the European Romantic intellectuals and , in particular, with respect to the ideas and values of classical modernists of the early 20^th century Muslim reformers whose worldview and manhaj was most closely related to that of progressive Muslim thought .However, also a number of important differences between the latter  and progressive Muslims were noted such as the classical modernists inability to go beyond what was termed ‘the theological verticalism’ of the pre-modern embedded religious worldview.  I also maintained that progressive Muslims consider the nature of the concept of tradition to be dynamic, humanly constructed, a product of many past and present communities of interpretation. Furthermore, I found that the concept of culture-religious authenticity (asala) in progressive Muslims thought is not based upon a literal clinging to the turath, as in the case of NTS, but on a complex, creative, historical, critical and serious engagement with it. I argued that this progressive Muslims’ consciousness purports to be firmly rooted in usable traditions but is uncompromisingly universal in outlook with the ability to redefine the very meaning of Islam in light of modernity without abandoning the parameters of faith.  As such the often employed tradition-modernity dichotomy in the context of discourses pertaining to Islam and Muslims, to which NTS thought was found to subscribe to, is considered as artificial and false by the proponents of progressive Muslim thought. As far as epistemological boundaries and contours of progressive Muslim thought are concerned, it was asserted  that they are inclusive of both the pre-modern traditional Islamic as well as the modern episteme. It was also contended that progressive Muslims consider modernity a result of trans-cultural and trans-political inter-civilisational processes. As such I maintained that progressive Muslims, subscribe to the view of civilisationally distinct types of modernity. Lastly, I argued that progressive Muslims distance themselves from the meta-narratives and universalistic claims of the Enlightenment and that they can be considered as adherents of moderate form of postmodernism. Moreover, it was maintained that progressive Muslims strive for a synthesis between modernity and the inherited Islamic tradition and a cross-cultural dialogue based on equal partnership with the ultimate goal of a culturally polycentric world founded on economic socialism and gender equality.   

The delineating features of the progressive Muslim  manhaj which constituted the subject matter of the sixth chapter, were found to be  characterised as being  comprehensively contextualist/historical and holistic in nature , hermeneutically privileging ethico-religious values of the tradition such as justice and equality over the literalist (or at best semi-contextualist) hermeneutic embodied by the NTS manhaj and endorsing  the view present in the formative period of Muslim thought of not conceptually conflating Sunna and hadith bodies of knowledge. Based upon this manhaj I attempted to show, in the seventh chapter,  that the progressive Muslims  do not restrict the concept of a ‘Believer’ to the historical, reified community of Muslims and extend and recognise  salvific plurality as part of the Qur’an’s and Prophet’s normative teachings and with respect to their normative religiously ideal ‘Muslim Woman’ concept I asserted that progressive Muslims  do not consider the practices of veiling, seclusion of women, gender segregation and husband’s  religiously sanctioned dominion over his wife  to be the part of the religiously  normative ‘Muslim Woman’  concept. Instead, I contended that they promote and advocate a an alternative concept   that highlights women’s complete autonomy and their full metaphysical, ontological, ethical, religious, moral and socio-political agency vis-à-vis the men.

I would like to conclude my study with one last idea regarding the importance of the study.

In the second chapter I briefly pointed to the fact that the forces of modernisation and globalisation have ushered a new era in which fragmentation of religious authority and democratisation of religious knowledge have resulted in a proliferation of the debates on the very nature of Islam. Furthermore, I alluded to the literature which has detected the increased importance the competing versions of “normative Islams” based on variant conceptualisations and interpretations of the primary sources of the Islamic worldviews are playing in the battlefield for the heart and the minds of Muslims as espoused by a number of different Muslim groups and schools of thought. Although occurring at a much larger scale this contemporary situation in terms of its interpretational fluidity and vibrancy as well as its highly contested nature is somewhat reminiscent, of that of the time of the Prophet himself.[i] The continuing importance of studies examining this contested nature of the Islamic tradition dynamic and its historical roots is aptly summarised  with the following words of  Afsaruddin.

For the believing Muslim, this historical-hermeneutic project remains a worthwhile and even urgent today. Given the fact that Islam’s formative period remains contested among many, reclamation of this past in a responsible and historically defensible way must remain part and parcel of every contemporary reformist project that wishes to gain broad legitimacy and acceptance….this project of reclamation is being done more credibly today by those we have termed “modernist’ and/or “reformist” Muslims (called “liberal: or “moderate” by others) than by the hard-line Islamists. These modernists have imbibed more than a drop of their illustrious forbearers’ penchant for robust faith, creative thinking, and fidelity to core principles of their religion .In contrast, the illiberal and radical Islamists, for all their protestations to the contrary, have to a large degree undermined these core principles and betrayed the legacy of the earliest Muslims in their nihilistic quest for political power.[ii]

Similarly, El-Fadl argues that the future of Islam as far as Muslims go, for the next few generations will be defined by two  broadly defined approaches or schools of thought he refers to as modernists and puritans. He goes on to say that  question of interpretation will play an increasingly important part in terms of which one of these will set root among the contemporary and future generations of  Muslims.[iii]It is hoped that this study has shed some light on this problematic and has contributed to these debates in a constructive manner.

 FREE PDF OF THE BOOK HERE

---

[i] Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, op.cit; Mernisi, The Veil and the Male Elite,op.cit.

[ii] A. Afsaruddin, First Muslims-History and Memory, Oneworld, Oxford, 2007,199.

[iii] El-Fadl, Great Theft, 1-25.

The concept of Sunnah and at the Time of the Prophet

Professors Izutsuand Hallaq  claim that the emerging Qurʾānic Weltanschauung during the revelationary period was not completely divorced from its pre-Qurʾānic one. Although the Qurʾān is to be considered an
independent ethico-religious and linguistic entity with its own worldview, it did not claim a complete epistemological break with pre-Qurʾānic Arabia. Over the revelationary period of some two decades, the Qurʾān rejected, modified, condoned and accepted the socio-cultural values and moral of Arabian tribal communionism of pre-Qurʾānic Arabia in accordance with the budding Qurʾānic ontological and ethico-religious value system. The foundation of this emerging Qurʾānic view of “reality” was, quite naturally, the Qurʾān as embodied by the Prophet himself.

The notion of Sunnah was, as we argued earlier, a well-known concept in pre-revelational Arabia understood as a normative action-behavioural system set by an individual worthy of tribe’s emulation, in the post-revelational period logically ascribed to the bearer of Revelation himself.  With the Prophet amongst their midst, the early Muslim community had a direct access to the living commentary of the Revelation, and through him a living link to the Divine. The Prophet’s persona and character as a source of Revelation-based authority and normativeness for his contemporary adherents and believers in his Prophethood was a natural fact and a matter of common sense. With the Prophet alive in Makkah/Medina, the Muslim community was witnessing his activities daily and was subject to his instructions directly, that is without an intermediary. The community did not engage in systematically debating the questions of nature and the scope of the Prophetic authority. When the need arose they could seek advice and consult him in matters needing personal or communal clarification.

Indeed, in the Qurʾānic verses such as 59:7 and 4:64, the Qurʾān mentions the necessary intervention of and obedience to the Prophet in the affairs of the community. These, however, were not dogmatic in nature,
i.e., did not pertain to the realm of beliefs.

The Qurʾān, therefore, can be said to testify to that fact that the Prophet enjoyed extra-revelational authority based on “right and just practice”, but that this privilege was always exercised in conjunction with concepts of mutual consultation with the community in a most balanced and delicate way. Additionally, Dutton further substantiates this point. Based on his study of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭa he asserts that, “for Mālik the Prophet is clearly a source of extra-Qurʾānic judgment but this ‘extra- Qurʾānic’ element is considered to be within the general principals outlined by the Qurʾān rather than a separate one.” Elaborating on this point of organic, directly interwoven Sunnah- Qurʾān dynamic at the time of the Prophet in Mālik’s Muwaṭṭa, Dutton
also remarks that:

Many of the fundamental obligations of the Qurʾān, such as doing the prayer, paying
zakāt and going on hajj, could not have been put into practice unless there were some
practical demonstrations of how to do so, and the obvious model for this of course was
that of the one who first put thee obligations in practice, i.e. the Prophet. The Qurʾān
could not, therefore, be divorced from its initial context, i.e. the life of the Prophet,
and, although its supremacy of the text remained beyond question, it was always seen
in the light of its first practical expression, namely, the Sunnah of the Prophet.74


Thus, due to the nature of Qurʾānic content it was in need of Sunnah, that is, in need of both Deutungsbeduerftigkeit and of a practical manifestation in actu. This organic link between the Message and the Messenger is captured best by often-repeated Qurʾānic phrase exhorting the believers to “Obey God and the Prophet”. This unity of “prophetic-revelatory event”, to use Graham’s phrase, has from the very beginning and throughout the first 150 years of the formative Islamic thought reflected the early Muslim understanding of the function, nature the scope and the relationship between the Qurʾān and Sunnah. This interdependent, symbiotic relationship between the Qurʾān and Sunnah enjoyed wide-spread acceptable in early Islam. In this context Graham maintains that:

It appears [that] for the Companions and the early Followers of the Prophet, the
divine activity manifested in the mission of Muhammad was a unitary reality in which
the divine word, the prophetic guidance, and even the example and witness of all who
participated in the sacred history of the Prophet’s time, were all perceived as complementary,
integral aspects of a single phenomenon.

Similarly, this hermeneutically intimate relationship is also noted by Sachedina who avers the following:


Explication of the divine intention of the revelation was among the functions that the
Qurʾān assigned to the Prophet. The Prophet functioned as the projection of the divine
message embodied in the Qurʾān. He was the living commentary of the Qurʾān, inextricately
related to the revelatory text. Without the Prophet the Qurʾān was incomprehensible,
just as without the Qurʾān, the Prophet was no prophet at all.


Similarly, in his investigation of an early Ḥanafī jurist, ʿIsa b. Aban (d. 221/836), Bedir asserts that at this time the hierarchy of the Qurʾān and Sunnah was not yet clear. This unity of “prophetic-revelatory event”,
to use Graham’s phrase, has from the very beginning and throughout the first 150 years of the formative Islamic thought reflected the early Muslim understanding of the function, nature the scope and the relationship
between Qurʾān and Sunnah. This interdependent, symbiotic relationship between Qurʾān and Sunnah, therefore, enjoyed wide-spread acceptability in early Islam. It was expressed in a phrase kitāb (i.e. the Qurʾān) wa sunna. Thus, similar to the Qurʾān the concept of Sunnah (but not ṣaḥīḥ Ḥadīth as by product of ʿulūm al-ḥadīth sciences) can be seen as a type of wahy.

Apart from this symbiotic Qurʾāno-Sunnahic relationship stemming from the very nature of the Qurʾānic revelation, another aspect of the Qurʾānic revelation influenced the character of Sunnah as exemplified by
the Prophet. The predominantly ethico-religious character of the Qurʾān and the Qurʾānic legislative dimension, as well as its overriding concern for the moral conduct of humans, translated itself into Prophetic activity which emphasised a person’s moral responsibility and God-consciousness rather than law formulation. This nature and the character of the Qurʾānic revelation and its legislative element embodied and continued by the Prophet, was geared towards certain underlying legislative norms which were based on certain purposes and objectives. Schacht (rightly) observes this fact when describing the origins and development of Islamic Law by saying: “Had religious and ethical standards been comprehensively applied
to all aspects of human behaviour, and had they been consistently followed in practice, there would have been no room and no need for a legal system in the narrow meaning of the term. This was in fact the original ideal of Muhammad.”This claim will be investigated more closely in subsequent parts of this study.

As alluded to above, another phenomenon that needs to be taken into consideration in the context of evolution of the concept of Sunnah is that during the formative period of Islamic thought the oral nature of
transmission and authentification of knowledge as well as oral-based interpretative strategies of the primary sources were considered more authentic and were more prevalent then written-based ones. In this context Souaiaia avers that:

In the practices of scholars and jurists closest to the time of the Prophet , there seems
to be an overwhelming attraction to isnād-based oral reports and momentous lack of
interest in the published literature, a phenomenon that can be documented for at least
one-hundred years after the recording (tadwīn) era.


He also convincingly argues that the processes of formulation, preservation and transmission of religious and legal knowledge was “fully and exclusively oral”.88 The above distinctions are of fundamental importance to this study from the point of view of understanding the evolution of the concept of an authentic Sunnah in relation to that of an ‘authentic’ Ḥadīth.

An additional issue needing clarification is the evolution in the scope of and the function or the employment of the use of reason in the Qurʾān and Sunnah, especially in relation to the assumptions governing the nature of ethical value in the same. To date, the epistemologico-moral boundaries and character of the Qurʾān from the point of view of its own context, that is, divorced from its traditional scriptural interpretation itself, have not
been comprehensively studied”. Modern scholars of Muslim tradition such as Hourani, maintain that the Qurʾān cannot be said to completely disregard the value of ʿaql (inherent human reason) in forming ethical
judgments, while Reinhart asserts that “[T]he Qurʾānic message time and again appeals to impartial knowledge that confirms the Qurʾānic summons”. Moreover, Reinhart argues that ʿaql ’s explicit Qurʾānic endorsement in recognising God’s existence, Unity and Grandeur are considered to favour its implicit usage in the realms of ethics and morality.

In terms of epistemologico-methodological boundaries of the Sunnah at the time of the Prophet, Hourani states that in terms of ethical knowledge, the Qurʾān (and therefore Sunnah) considers revelation its major source but that “it is probable, but unproven, that natural reason is also capable of forming ethical judgments [independent of revelation]”. Furthermore, argues Hourani, in terms of ethical epistemology boundaries the
Qurʾānic nature of ethical value is generally objective, “the use of independent reason in ethical judgments is never ruled out explicitly in the Qurʾān, and there are some considerations that favour implicit assumptions
of its use”. It is further maintained that:

. . . Qurʾān and Muhammad both display a common sense attitude and that we should not expect either of them to claim that for every ethical judgement he makes a man must consult a book or a scholar, or work out an analogy when the book or scholar give no direct answer to the Problem.93

Draz, in his exhaustive investigation of the moral world of the Qurʾān, echoes this view by concluding that, according to the Qurʾānic moral world, the human consciousness in prior to Revelation and that is capable
of divorcing right from wrong without it. The essential common-sensical attitude of the Qurʾān and its message are evident in its discourse of “nature, ʿaql, the cosmos, and their patterns—all [are] appealed to say that the message of the Qurʾān is reasonable”. Thus, rationality and ethical objectivity certainly cannot be considered as alien to the overall spirit of Qurʾānico-Sunnahic teachings.

In summary, at the time of the Prophet then the concept of Sunnah was associated quite naturally with him, and, except from its ʿibadat component, seemed to have been understood primarily as a general, ethico-religious and, in Medina, politico-administrative, concept based upon righteous customary practice that partially reflected some of the pre-Qurʾānic customs and practices not contrary to Qurʾānic worldview. The legislative component of Sunnah, which in no doubt existed, was in consonance with the nature of the Qurʾān as the “most trustworthy mirror of the Prophet’s outlook and teaching”, also primarily conceived in religio-moral rather than positivistic terms. These religious and moral teachings, in fact, functioned as a reference
point for legal evaluation.

taken from the academic article  here