السنة ومكانتها في التشريع الإسلامي

السنة ومكانتها في التشريع الإسلامي

One of the most important aspects in the study of Hadith is defending the authority of the corpus of Ahadith itself.

The mid-19th century saw a swarm of attacks on the authority of Hadith. For the first time ever in the history of Islam, not only was the preservation and transmission of the corpus of Hadith questioned, but the actual authority of the Prophet as a representative of Shari’ah was called into question in what became known as the Qur’an-Only movement. The movement seemingly originated in India through the thought of Sayyid Ahmed Khan and his student, Abdullah Chakralwi. In Egypt, this movement gained particular momentum through the works of an Egyptian physician called Tawfique Sidqi, who was influenced by the modernist movement of Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Having been given the prominent platform of writing in the popular Al-Manar magazine, Sidqi’s ideas gained particular momentum.

An individual influenced by Sidqi’s articles was a man named Mahmud Abu Rayyan who wrote a book titled Adwa’ Ala al-Sunnah al-Nabawiyyah. In this book, Abu Rayyan attacked the veracity and authority of the Hadith corpus using the ideologies of Goldziher and Schacht, in what became known as one of the most academic attacks on the corpus of Hadith.

Scholars began to refute Abu Rayyah’s book and one of the most authoritative books written as a refutation was Al-Sunnah wa Makanatuha fi’l-Tashri’ al-Islami by Mustafa al-Siba’i.

Written by an erudite scholar, the book covers a range of issues raised by Abu Rayyah. The author systematically covers the issues of how the Sunnah was preserved, the veracity of Muhammad inn Shihab al-Zuhri as a prolific narrator of Hadith, the veracity of Abu Hurayrah radiyAllahu anhu as a reliable companion and the venerable positions of the authors of the six famous books of Hadith and the eponyms of the four schools of thought. Relying upon over 50 sources, the author sifts through the major issues pertaining to the preservation and codification of the corpus of Hadith.

The book also shows how Abu Rayyah has relied upon some very strange sources to make his arguments.

The author was a well-travelled scholar having visited many orientalists in the University of Edinburgh, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Manchester University, Leiden and other key universities in Europe, including Paris, Finland, Germany, Norway, Belgium and Denmark. He ensured to meet the orientalists teaching in all of these universities and exchanged views with them, proceeding to give an overview of their thoughts in this book.

The author also met one of the founding fathers of modern-day orientalism, Joseph Schacht, in Leiden and debated him on the issue of Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri’s association with The Banu Umayyah, convincing him of the mistakes of Goldziher. He records this debate in the book and how he left Schacht speechless.

Further to this, the author also spent a considerable amount of time in the company of the reformist Rashid Rida during the latter period of Rida’s life.

The book begins with an interesting introduction to all of the key players in this saga of the authority and preservation of the corpus of Hadith.

This book is an absolute must-read for all students of Hadith.

ismaeel Books