The Qur’an and the Sunnah/Hadith: definition, authenticity, status and authority

According to the Orthodox Sunni perspective, the Qur’an is God’s word that was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad during the 22 years of his messengership (from 610 to 632 CE). Based on internal and external pieces of evidence, Muslims believe that the exact wording of the Qur’an has been safeguarded since its revelation to the Prophet.

The developed Sunni legal theory broadly defines Sunnah as the sayings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad, all of which are considered normative and binding sources of theological, legal and other Islamic beliefs. In its narrow sense, however, the Sunnah refers to only the practice or the example of the Prophet. It is regarded as a normative and ideal embodiment of the teachings of Islam that was, as such, also safeguarded by God as a form of revelation extra to the Qur’an. According to this view, Muhammad, qua prophet and messenger of God, was protected from error, and when he did err, he was set right by divine grace. Furthermore, as the receiver of revelation, the Prophet was the main interpreter of God’s words, and his statements (hadiths) were declared authoritative by the Qur’an itself.

There is another important difference between the Qur’an and the Hadith as legal sources, which is that despite its status as a form of divine revelation, the Hadith, in the Sunni tradition, did not enjoy the same degree of divine protection as was the case with the Qur’an. Establishing and safeguarding the authenticity of the Hadith required arduous hu­man effort. In the decades following the Prophet’s death, both reports from and about him were transmitted orally. When political, religious and legal divisions among Muslims deep­ened, traditions were falsely put in the mouth of the Prophet to lend credence to conflicting theological, legal and political views. This situation alarmed a group of pious transmitters of Prophetic traditions, who, starting from as early as the second half of the first/seventh and well into the second/eighth centuries, began to do two things almost concurrently: collecting and writing down reports from and about the Prophet Muhammad, and devel­oping a methodology by which they assessed the reliability of other Hadith transmitters (henceforth ‘traditionists’) and the integrity of each chain of transmitters (isnad, literally meaning a prop) which they now insisted must precede, or support, any report from or about the Prophet. In other words, these scholars acted as Hadith collectors, transmitters and critics.

Hadith scholars needed to travel far and wide to ‘collect’ Hadith because after the Mus­lim conquests in the few decades following the Prophet’s death, his Companions (sahaba) dispersed in various provinces in the Muslim state, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt, where they transmitted the traditions that they had learned from the Prophet. Conse­quently, the traditions that existed in these provinces varied, which naturally resulted in legal disagreements among scholars, with each assuming that it followed the example of the Prophet. Seeking to standardize the law, traditionists began to collect traditions from various regions, a strenuous effort that culminated in the emergence in the third/ninth cen­tury of large and ‘universal’ canonical collections of ‘sound’ traditions, which collections became the standard and authoritative sources of the Hadith. But during this process of Hadith collection, these scholars needed to sift authentic from unauthentic traditions. This they did, according to the Sunni theory, by collecting information about traditionists in each chain of transmitters, a process that led to the compilation of even larger collections of biographies (tarajim) of all individuals featured in chains of Hadith transmission, both reliable and otherwise.

Later Sunni scholars believe that the methodology developed by the early Hadith critics was successful in sifting authentic from unauthentic traditions. However, because the vast majority of the Prophetic traditions were transmitted by individual transmitters (dhdd) from the Prophet and even for one or two more generations to come, and because of the presence of multiple versions of many traditions, even sound Hadith is not deemed to have the same epistemological status of the Quran that was transmitted, as has been mentioned previously, by a large number ofpeople in each of its chains of transmitters. Accordingly, whereas the au­thenticity of the Qur’an is certain, that of the Hadith is only probable, but is certain enough to be a basis of what is regarded as normative views and practice.

In the classical Sunni theory, then, both the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s Sun- nah/Hadith were accepted as the main sources of Islamic law right from the beginning of Islam. Both were regarded as two independent but also complementary (as will be seen) forms of revelation, even if the Qur’an is held in special esteem as God’s holy speech that is both immutable, unsurpassed and eternally divinely-protected from verbal corruption. Both the Qur’an and the Sunnah/Hadith, therefore, have contributed to the formation of Islamic law since the beginning of Islam, even if this classical theory acknowledges that the disparity among different Muslim provinces in early Islam in terms of the repository of Prophetic tra­ditions that were available to each of them led to legal disagreements among jurists in various regions but also within each region. Starting from the second/eighth century, however, Had­ith scholars and critics were able first to purge fabricated traditions and embark on a process of collecting and writing down traditions. This process led to some standardization, not necessarily of actual legal views (which remain diverse), but primarily of the sources of law. Disagreements among jurists after this point did not result mainly from possessing different pieces of evidence, but primarily from disagreements over the interpretation of these pieces of evidence.²

In contrast with this classical Sunni theory, modern Western and occasionally Muslim scholarship tends to question the authenticity of most Hadith (with a minority view ex­tending this scepticism to the Qur’an itself). According to this scepticism, rather than being a formative source of Islamic law, Prophetic traditions post-dated legal views and cannot therefore be used to understand the formation of Islamic law.

The next section will provide an overview ofthe hermeneutics ofthe Qur ’an and the Hadith as Muslim scholars have conceptualized the relationship between them as two textual sources of Islamic law. The discussion of this hermeneutics will be linguistic but also historical. The cases discussed below are old and have been largely settled within all schools of Islamic law. However, and in order to keep the chapter within a reasonable length, the following discussion will not delve deeply into the history of early legal disagreements and will avoid controversies in modern scholarship over the role of us.u~l al-fiqh in the actual synthesis of Islamic law. The following discussion relies, more or less, on the classical Sunni theory on the formation and development of Islamic law.

2