Question
Assalamualaykum akhi kareem,
I have been doing quite a bit of research with regards to the difference between Sunnah and hadith according to your understanding. I am very convinced by it due to the fact that you’ve proven both Quran and Sunnah to be Mutawatir with all the fundamentals and essential parts reaching us without the hadith. However my main issue is I have understood Sunnah to be a synonym for hadith and hadith being an independent source for a very long time and this is literally almost what the whole ummah believes including it’s scholars I believe. I just cannot seem to comprehend how almost the whole ummah view hadith in that view and the view you have presented is contrary to that but yet so much more convincing. How could the whole Ummah come to the wrong conclusion and I think there is even a hadith that mentions something along those lines of my Ummah will never agree upon an error.
Jazakallahukhair
Abu Sumayah
Answer
The discussion on the role of hadith is an old one and we know that classical scholars in the earliest centuries of Islam debated how fiqh / law should be derived i.e. what are the sources of law, how do we interpret the Qur’an, the place of textual reports such as hadith etc. I am only writing a brief summary of this for now but I am happy to discuss this further.
Allah tells us in the Qur’an that ‘Deen has been completed / perfected.’ This means that the Prophet (s.a.w.), as the main source of the Deen and its explanation, must have propagated all aspects of Deen fully. The Qur’an testifies to this. So whatever was ‘Deen’ must have been openly explained, preached, and practiced. Allah could not have left it to the personal choice of some scholars to decide almost 200 years after the Prophet to commit some of his words to writing.
If you study the history of the development of Islamic law and usul-al-fiqh (also called legal theory i.e. how should laws be extracted from revealed sources), you will find thatthe earliest Muslims simply relied on sunan or sunnah. The sunan included the practice of Prophet Muhammad as well as the practices of the Sahaba. This is why Imam Malik, the earliest of jurists, considered the practice of the people of Madina to be a source of law. He did not rely on hadith narrations even though some were around at the time, of which a few Imam Malik himself collected in his Muwatta. Imam Abu Hanifa was the same. He considered established practice as a source of law. For example, it was established and wellknown that salah is obligatory five times a day and the number of fard rakah were knows. There was no need to find a hadith to learn to pray salah.
It was in the second century after Hijrah (AH) that hadith started circulating among the people of knowledge and soon scholars realised that hadith could be used to add authority to their argument. How could an opponent argue with what was said to be the very words of the Prophet himself? And it was only in the late second century AH that Imam Shafi’ivery convincingly argued that religious law must be based on textual evidence. This meant that if something was difficult to understand from the Qur’an then the next source / text to refer to was Hadith. By that time the process of formally compiling hadith was gaining momentum.
This approach to deriving law was questioned and debated amongst scholars. The Ahl-al-ray’ used to say that human reason must engage with the Qur’an. The Ahl-ul-hadith (traditionists) used to argue, following Imam Shafi’is view, that human reason must be suspended the moment a reliable hadith was found. So it happened that classical law went on to write that a woman’s testimony was worth half of a man’s (based on hadith) or that Muslims had to live and dress according to 7th century Arabia norms etc. We see exactly the same approach to law amongst peaceful fundamentalists groups today. The reason why this approach was so loved, in olden times as in now, is that it offers certainty / absolute decisions and this appeals to our ulema. Thus, a hadith report that says all of a woman is awra can be used to dictate exactly what women should wear and if they don’t conform,then their emaan is suspect. Or that stoning to death is a ‘divinely ordained punishment’ even though the Qur’an says clearly that adulterers will receive 100 lashes. There are dozens of examples like this.
But the problem with this approach is that it makes Islam a 7th century religion, a fossil, where one must re-create the conditions of that time to practice Islam. A lot of militant groups have taken this idea to an extreme. This is because they give supremacy to hadith over the Qur’an, a grave error.
This tension around use (or misuse) of hadith is not new. It is here that I differ slightly from your view. Many scholars have questioned this approach, starting from Imam Malik and Imam Abu Hanifa who always gave priority to sunan. Similarly, Imam Shatibi questioned how we use different sources of law. Shah Wali Ullah in India asked similar questions. But the most systematic and well thought out criticism of this method has come from the work of the Farahi-Islahi school of thought, culminating in the work of Javed Ahmed Ghamidi who has actually given us the tools to identify what is Deen and what is Sunnah. He gives a list of practices in his book Al-Meezan and explains how our Deen has always transferred with tawatar of the vast majority of Muslims and will continue to do so. In fact, we can say that our Ummah has not congregated on error. Their congregation and consensus (ijma) has been around agreed Sunnah which include salah, fasting, hajj, zakah, ritual cleanliness, sacrifice of animals, the two Eids and nikah etc.
You are right in stating that for a long time our traditional scholars have made the case that Sunnah = hadith. This is because Imam Shafi’i argued that the record of Prophet’s Sunnah was the hadith. This is not correct.
All scholars and their work is to be respected. Their niyyah was certainly pure and noble but now, 1200 years down the line, we can look back at their work and criticise it and learn from it, but not ever disrespect their efforts. Their reasoning may have been fit for their times but it is not fit for our times. This tension has been very beautifully captured by Jonathan Brown in his book ‘Misquoting Muhammad.’ To gain a quick insight into development of legal theory and role of hadith, please see Wael Hallaq’s excellent book ‘The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law.’ Lastly, Amin AhsanIslahi’s lectures on hadith have been translated into English and are available in book form titled ‘Fundamentals of Hadith Interpretation.’
It is a shame that Muslims, especially traditional ulema, have reacted very emotionally to anyone who has questioned the misuse of hadith.Its a fact that some Some scholars have gone to the extreme of rejecting the entire body of hadith literature e.g. Ghulam Ahmad Pervaiz sb, and chanted the ‘Qur’an only’ slogan. Their approach has’nt helped the cause of Islam.
InshaAllah as Muslims continue with their learning of Islam and if they agree to adopt an academic approach, something we are trying to encourage through the work of our charity, the tide will turn against this method of deriving law and inshaAllah we will find more suitable methods of legal reasoning.
May Allah reward you and bless you in your search for religious knowledge. Ameen.
UIUK team
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