Ideal Sunnah vs the Living Sunnah
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Guys please go through this at least once
What Fazlur Rahman?s assessment in the 1960s has in common with his later thinking is a willingness to re-assert the primacy of the Qur?an over all the other sources by showing how it has been over-ruled by secondary sources. There is not sufficient time to analyse critically the veracity of all his historical analyses; the main focus in this section is to look at the general direction of his re-assessment, and its implications for his Qur?anic hermeneutics.
The Sunna is defined as a behavioural concept, yet it is not just a law of behaviour but also a normative moral law. He rebuts the assertion of Western scholars, in the case of the Sunna, that practice precedes the normative status it acquires. Instead he defends it by appeal to logic surely these practices would not been initiated, if the element of normativeness had not been prior to their inception. Sunna, translated as ?exemplary conduct?, originally implied the setting up of a model; but it neither implied the necessity of following it, nor did its moral normativeness follow automatically (for there is the idea of a bad Sunna in tradition). The idea of correct conduct is closely related, however, to the setting of an example. He accepts the conclusion of Western researches on the Sunna, that in content it is composed of continued tribal customs and the free- thinking activity of early jurists on the incorporation of new elements from other Late Antique cultures; and in later centuries there was much fabrication of Hadith. However, it is wrong to conclude that the concept of Sunna did not start from the very beginning; and that it covered not only the Sunna of the Prophet himself, but the interpretations of the Prophetic Sunna. Whatever original Prophetic content there was in the Sunna, it was neither large, nor specific. In later centuries, Sunna became co-extensive with the ijma? of the community and the success of the mass-scale Hadith movement destroyed the flexible early relations between Sunna, ijtihad and ijma?. It is argued (196510-11) that the Sira reveals the Prophet not to have been a pan-legalist at all. Firstly, he was mainly a moral reformer, and very rarely resorted to general legislation (as the paucity of specifically legislative verses in the Qur?an suggests). Secondly, when he intervened in a legal manner, it was generally in an ad hoc rather than in any systematic fashion, in a way that was entirely situational. So with this analysis, Fazlur Rahman concludes that the Prophet did not lay down rules for the minutiae of life, and so it follows that he intervened in events in a way which can only be seen as normative in a general sense. So the Sunna here becomes ancillary to the Qur?an, and is characterised as a loose umbrella-concept which informs particular interpretations in future settings.
The early generations of Muslims developed an elaborated and specific code of human behaviour through a process, ra?y (personal considered opinion), that wins Fazlur Rahman?s whole-hearted approval for its intellectual creativity. This very creativity produced much regional divergence in what was accepted as the Sunna of different regions. Intellectual and religious ?lites became concerned with this increasing divergence in Sunna, and promoted a more controlled form of systematic reasoning (qiyas). In contrast, the jurists of the early schools of law like Imam Malik, writing in the eight century, used Sunna and ijma? almost interchangeably to mean both his opinions and the views/practices of the people of Medina. Thus for Imam Malik, Sunna is simply what came to be accepted by the consent of the Muslim community. This gains Fazlur Rahman?s approval because ?he actual content of the Sunna of the early generations of Muslims was largely the product of Ijtihad when this Ijtihad, through an incessant interaction of opinion, developed the character of general acceptance or consensus of the Community, i.e. ijma?.? (19651 The eighth-century aphorism, ?the Sunna decides upon the Qur?an, the Qur?an does not decide upon the Sunna?, thus gains real force for Fazlur Rahman. He interprets this in a way that gives primacy to continuing rational reflection upon the Qur?an.
The Community, under the direction of the spirit (not the absolute letter) in which the Prophet acted in a given historical situation, shall authoritatively interpret and assign meaning to the Revelation. (196520)
Fazlur Rahman condemns the post-Shafi?i consensus that the Sunna is not a living practice of interpretation, that instead it goes back to the ideal Sunna of the Prophet which has then been progressively interpreted by ra?y and qiyas. He sees it as disastrous that al-Shafi?i's arguments concerning ijma? came to be widely accepted; namely that consensus had to be so total that it left no room for disagreement. Positively contrasted with this definition of ijma? is the earlier one of the ancient legal schools ijma? is a continuous process (not a state) which requires informality and the continued existence of disagreement. In other words, ijma? is naturally linked with the continuous effort of ijtihad, so that the area of agreement can be widened. In place of a living and organic movement (Sunna>>ijtihad>> ijma?), the Sunna became ideal, literal and specific; which could only be transmitted through Hadith. Thus instead of seeing ijma? as a natural outcome of ijtihad, al-Shafi?i reversed the order into ijma?>>ijtihad. Ijma? became ?static and backward-looking?. (196525) The acceptance of this form of static consensus established great stability, but only ?at the cost of creativity and originality.? (loc.cit.)
It is important to defend a misapprehension about Fazlur Rahman here. He does not deny that the Hadith do not go back to the Prophet?s time. However, he does say that the idea of Hadith that we have inherited is a latter one. The lawyers of the ancient schools of law like Abu Yusuf, Awza?i and Malik based their legal work on the ?living Sunnah? and through personal judgement interpreted their materials freely to elaborate the law. The emerging Hadith-movement, however, saw their task as reporting, with the purpose of promoting legal fixity and permanence. In the extant works of the second century, most of the legal and moral traditions are not from the Prophet but are traced back to the Companions; however as the decades passed these traditions came to be ascribed to the Prophet himself, perhaps inwardly propelled by their definition of authenticity. The early lawyers resisted this trend. They maintained different criteria. For instance, Awza?i regarded Hadith of the Prophet and the living Sunnah as having the same fundamental obligatoriness.The nature of the emerging Hadith-movement can be proven by one well-known fact, undisputed even by the most orthodox of Muslims. The classical traditionalists themselves argued that ?moral maxims and edifying statements and aphorisms may be attributed to the Prophet irrespective of whether this attribution is strictly historical or not.? (196544) Most of the Hadith corpus is, in fact, the Sunnah-Ijtihad of the first generations which after a serious struggle received the sanction of ijma?, or the adherence of the majority of the Community. In addition to the necessary chains of narrators growing backwards, the nature of the corpus changed also the living Sunnah had been primarily geared towards behavorial norms, but the Hadith came to incorporate legal norms, religious beliefs and principles as well.
I am only able to offer a precis tonight, often without many of the corroborating examples that Fazlur Rahman gave. Those who are interested should look further into his work.
Fazlur Rahman Malik (Urdu ک (September 21, 1919 ? July 26, 198 was a well-known scholar of Islam; M. Yahya Birt of the Association of Islam Researchers described him as "probably the most learned of the major Muslim thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century, in terms of both classical Islam and Western philosophical and theological discourse."
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The problem i see with "living sunnah" is how can it be traced back to the original or close to.
The early schools like imam malik based it on the living sunnah or the practices of the community but who is to say their practices weren't/didn't become distorted in some way.
it's interesting that in the early days ijma too priority over hadiths. hadith tracing back only to companions isnt the only problem, sects had a big influence in hadith
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The need of creating some kind of theoretical justification for what so far had been an instinctive reliance on the opinions of the majority, led, from the first decades of the second/eighth century onwards, to the living tradition being retrojected, and to its being ascribed to some of the great figures of the past. This process, too, began in Kufa, where the stage of doctrine achieved in the time of Hammad b. Abi Sulayman (d. I20/73 was attributed to Ibrahim al-Nakha'i (d. 95-6/7I3-I5). The Medinese followed suit and retrojected their own teaching to a number of ancient authorities who had died about the turn of the century, some of whom later became known as the 'seven jurists of Medina'. At the same time as the doctrine of the school of Kufa was retrospectively attributed to Ibrahim al-Nakha'i, a similar body of doctrine was directly connected with the very beginnings of Islam in Kufa by being attributed to Ibn Mas'ud, a Companion of the Prophet who had come to live in that city, and Ibrahim al-Nakha'i became the main transmitter of that body of doctrine, too. In the same way, other Companions of the Prophet became the eponyms of the schools of Medina and of Mecca. One further step in the search for a solid theoretical foundation of the doctrine of the ancient schools was taken in 'Iraq, very early in the second/eighth century, when the term ' Sunna of the Prophet ' was transferred from its political and theological into a legal context, and identified with the sunna, the ideal practice of the local community and the corresponding doctrine of its scholars. This term, which was taken over by the school of Syria, expressed the axiom that the practice of the Muslims derived from the practice of the Prophet, but it did not as yet imply the existence of positive information in the form of ' Traditions ' (Hadith), that the Prophet by his words or acts had in fact originated or approved any particular practice. It was not long before these Traditions, too, came into existence, and the persons who put them into circulation were the Traditionists.
The ancient schools of law themselves represented, in one aspect, an Islamic opposition to popular and administrative practice under the later Umayyads, and the opposition group which developed into the Traditionist movement emphasized this tendency. As long as a Companion of the Prophet had been the final authority for the doctrine of a school on a particular point, it was sufficient for a divergent doctrine to be put under the aegis of another Companion of equal or even higher authority, as happened in Kufa where all kinds of minority opinions were attributed to the Caliph 'Ali, who had made Kufa his capital. But after the general authority of the Prophet himself had been invoked by identifying the established doctrine with his sunna, a more specific reference to him was needed, and there appeared detailed statements or 'Traditions' which claimed to be the reports of ear- or eye-witnesses on the words or acts of the Prophet, handed down orally by an uninterrupted chain of trustworthy persons. Very soon the emphasis shifted from proposing certain opinions in opposition to the ancient schools to disseminating Traditions from the Prophet as such, and the movement of the Traditionists, which was to develop into a separate branch of Islamic religious learning, came into being. It was the main thesis of the Traditionists that formal Traditions from the Prophet superseded the living tradition of the school. The Traditionists existed in all great centres of Islam, where they formed groups in opposition to, but nevertheless in contact with, the local schools of law. Initially the ancient schools offered strong resistance to the disturbing element represented by the Traditions, but they had no real defence against their rising tide; they had to express their own doctrines in Traditions which allegedly went back to the Prophet, and to take increasing notice of the Traditions produced by their opponents. Finally the outlines and many details of Islamic law were cast into the form of Traditions from the Prophet. In this way, one of the greatest and most successful literary fictions came into being.
Chapter 4 LAW AND JUSTICE
J. Schacht. "Law and Justice"
from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. II, pt. VIII/chpt. 4, beginning with pg. 539. -
Fazlur Rahman's 'living sunnah' concept is just a sophisticated way of spinning the same old argument That the prophet left a series of practices out the Quran. Did he? Sure - if the Quran LIED to us.
The Quran is very clear that if the Prophet forged any other teachings after Quran (ba3dahu), he's be done for (69/40-47)
These living sunnah practices are nothing more than Pre-Quranic practices which are relabelled in order to make it seem that Quran approves of them. They say their kaabah is the quranic kaabah for example. How do we verify these claims? Context. Read Quran how it's arranged and we can see for ourselves, none of these practices are based on it.
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Maybe but I think Fazlur was focused on what the prophet did, how he implemented the Quran not about leaving a set of practices nor forging teachings. so my understanding of his view is that the the living sunnah is practices muslims did, thing is how do you prove it?
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Fazlur Rahman's 'living sunnah' concept is just a sophisticated way of spinning the same old argument That the prophet left a series of practices out the Quran. Did he? Sure - if the Quran LIED to us.
The Quran is very clear that if the Prophet forged any other teachings after Quran (ba3dahu), he's be done for (69/40-47)
These living sunnah practices are nothing more than Pre-Quranic practices which are relabelled in order to make it seem that Quran approves of them. They say their kaabah is the quranic kaabah for example. How do we verify these claims? Context. Read Quran how it's arranged and we can see for ourselves, none of these practices are based on it.
Maybe the Ka'ba was pre Islam paganism. But the goal of the Quran is not to change those rituals as much as its to reform them into monotheism. There are many rituals of that kind in mankind history. To whom is the worship is the question.
Maybe Querish wanted to standardize these rituals as Islamic and binding, hence the need to attach either the prophet Muhammad or Abraham into them. But from a Quranic view, rituals are just rituals. they don't tell us anything. there are pagan rituals, and there are monotheist rituals. On the outside they may look the same, but to whom the ritual is dedicated to and to which deity its for, is the difference.
The Quran makes that clear when it always brings back the focus to faith and deeds. Rituals like pilgrimage and sacrificial rites are human functions very common throughout mankind history.
22.34. To every people did We appoint rites (of sacrifice), that they might celebrate the name of Allah over the sustenance He gave them from animals (fit for food). But your Allah is One Allah. submit then your wills to Him (in Islam) and give thou the good news to those who humble themselves,-
22.36-37 The sacrificial camels we have made for you as among the symbols from Allah. in them is (much) good for you then pronounce the name of Allah over them as they line up (for sacrifice) when they are down on their sides (after slaughter), eat ye thereof, and feed such as (beg not but) live in contentment, and such as beg with due humility thus have We made animals subject to you, that ye may be grateful. It is not their meat nor their blood, that reaches Allah. it is your piety that reaches Him He has thus made them subject to you, that ye may glorify Allah for His Guidance to you and proclaim the good news to all who do right.
So these rites are throughout mankind history and we see that in ancient religions. We see temples and ceremonies and sacrifices and rites. Usually to honor gods and to show thanks. But the Quran says these must be directed to God and not other gods. I see THAT as the goal of the Quran. So I am not sure that the Quran intended to come up with something new. But it did come up with monotheism and justice. Faith and deeds.