Voices of Islam (29 page)

The three main groups of scholars that have used the term
Sunna
are Hadith scholars (sing.
muhaddith
), who collect and authenticate the sayings of the Prophet; jurists (sing.
qadi
), who apply the rules of the Shari‘a in daily life; and juridical theorists (sing.
faqih
or
mufti
), who derive legal opinions (sing.
fatwa
) from the systematic analysis of Qur’an and Hadith. Hadith scholars use the term
Sunna
to refer to anything attributed to the Prophet, including his words, deeds, and tacit approvals, as well as descriptions of his appearance and character—including, even, how he sat, slept, and ate. Some also include in this definition the actions of the Prophet’s Companions and their students. Jurists use the term
Sunna
to refer to behaviors that are rec- ommended as praiseworthy but are not mandated by law. Juridical theorists, who use the Sunna in formulating legal opinions, consider it as ‘‘anything attributed to the Prophet, either in explicit word, deed, or tacit approval.’’
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Certain scholars among this latter group added to the defi ition of Sunna personal qualities that the Prophet embodied. However, the most

The
Sunna
: The Way of the Prophet Muhammad
129

authoritative defi of the Sunna remained the actual words of the Prophet, his actions, and matters that he sanctioned.

The first category of the Sunna comprises the
statements
of the Prophet as recorded by his Companions in Hadith literature, such as, ‘‘Let there be no harm and no reciprocating harm,’’
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or ‘‘The water of the ocean is pure, and its carrion is permissible’’
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(unlike land animals, which must be slaughtered properly). The second category of the Sunna consists of the
actions
of the Prophet as recorded by his Companions. For example, the Prophet stated, ‘‘Pray as you see me pray.’’ Thus, the
Salat
prayer that Muslims perform five times a day is based on the Companions’ descriptions of the Prophet’s actions when he prayed.

Prophetic actions fall under three subcategories. The first subcategory con- sists of the Prophet Muhammad’s personal preferences and activities, such as his likes and dislikes. Sufis tend to emphasize these aspects of the Prophet’s behavior, but most juridical scholars argue that such matters are not part of the Sunna. Instead, they are regarded as mere cultural habits of the Arabian Peninsula or are seen to reflect personal preferences that have no legal value. The West African authority on the Sunna, ‘Abd Allah Ould Hajj Ibrahim (d. 1814
CE
) commented on this subject as follows: ‘‘The Prophet sometimes performed acts that he himself discouraged in order to clarify their permis- sibility. Also, any of his actions that resulted from his particular nature, such as what and how he ate or drank, or how he sat or stood up, do not fall under the rubric of Sunna.’’
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Despite such qualifications, many Muslims follow the Prophet’s personal practices out of love and devotion. Hence, some Muslims wear a ring on either the ring finger or small finger, sit on the floor when eat- ing, or eat with their hands because the Prophet did so. Some Muslims even avoid foods that the Prophet avoided and prefer foods that he preferred.

The second subcategory involves actions of the Prophet that were legis- lated by God specifically for him. For instance, God commanded the Prophet in the Qur’an to stand in prayer for at least a third of the night and obliged him to pray extra prayers every morning. Pious actions such as these are encouraged for ordinary believers but are not obligatory for anyone but the Prophet himself. Similarly, the Prophet was allowed to fast for days without food or water, but he prohibited such extreme fasts for his followers. The license to marry more than four women at one time also falls under this cat- egory. While this practice was permissible for the Prophet, it is prohibited for others. The Prophet exercised this dispensation by marrying older women, divorce´es, widowed single mothers, and women whose tribal ties strengthened the unity of the Muslim community. Although Islam allows Muslim men to marry up to four women at a time, no jurist considers this practice part of the Sunna. Rather, it is merely a permissible act and some- times it is even prohibited. Many jurists discourage this practice because of the near impossibility of treating wives equally, as the Qur’an demands. According to the Maliki school of law, a woman entering into a marriage

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has the right to stipulate that the man will not take another wife without divorcing her.

The third subcategory of the Prophet’s acts consists of actions that are neither part of his particular nature nor from his special obligations and dispensations. These consist of cultural habits that the Prophet picked up by virtue of his participation as a member of seventh-century Arab society.

The third category of the Sunna includes acts that are
sanctioned
by the Prophet. For the most part, the Prophet’s Companions performed these acts in his presence. Such acts were either approved by the Prophet directly or approved by his silence. According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet was not permitted by God to remain silent in the presence of a prohibited act. For in- stance, the Prophet once inquired about the condition of a young boy’s bird that he kept as a caged pet in his house. Because the Prophet did not prohibit the boy from keeping the bird in a cage, it is understood that keeping birds as pets is permissible. Thus, the Prophet’s Sunna is seen as sanctioning the keep- ing of pets. According to some scholars, over 300 rulings were derived from this one hadith, including the Sunna of inquiring about people’s pets and the permissibility of keeping a bird in a cage.

Some scholars consider
Sunna
a synonym for
Hadith,
while others con- sider
Hadith
to be a reference to the words of the Prophet and therefore more specific than the Sunna. In spite of this scholarly distinction, the words ‘‘Sunna’’ and ‘‘Hadith’’ are largely synonymous in the minds of most Mus- lims. The term
Sunna,
which is mentioned 16 times in the Qur’an to refer to ‘‘precedent’’ or ‘‘custom,’’ is used specifically in collections of Hadith to refer to the normative practice of the Prophet. In early Islam, ‘‘Sunna’’ con- noted the normative practice of the Muslim community that was either legis- lated or sanctioned by the Prophet. Under the influence of Imam Shafi‘i, the term
Sunna
came to refer specifically to the Prophet’s practice as embodied in sound Hadith. Today, Sunna refers to what Muslims consider the practice and behavior of the Prophet as recorded by his Companions and collected by the great Hadith scholars of Islamic history. Even the Maliki school of juris- prudence (followed mostly in North and West Africa), which in earlier times had favored a broader application of the term, has largely capitulated to the current usage of the term. The efforts of the Hadith scholars in collecting and systematizing Prophetic traditions enabled the jurists to glean from them the normative practice of the Prophet, based on the respective schools’ meth- odologies.
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One useful way to distinguish Hadith from Sunna is described as follows:

Hadith differs from Sunna in the sense that Hadith is a narration of the conduct of the Prophet whereas Sunna is the example or the law that is deduced from it. Hadith in this sense is the vehicle or the carrier of the Sunna, although Sunna is a wider concept and used to be so especially before its literal meaning gave way to its juristic usage.
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The
Sunna
: The Way of the Prophet Muhammad
131

According to Imam Shafi‘i, most scholars agreed that the concept of Sunna comprised the following three categories: (1) Qur’anic legislations that the Prophet specifi or elucidated, (2) the Prophet’s clarifi ations of ambigu- ities in the Qur’an, and (3) actions the Prophet performed that are not men- tioned in the Qur’an. According to Shafi scholars unanimously accepted the first two categories but disagreed about the third, since it lacked a sup- portive text from the Qur’an itself. In the
Risala,
Shafi‘i provides many examples of the fi two categories and establishes the soundness of the third. He concludes: ‘‘As for the Sunna, which [the Prophet] laid down on matters for which a text is not found in the Book of God, the obligation to accept them rests upon us by virtue of the duty imposed by God to obey the [Prophet’s] command.’’
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Today, all of the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence accept all three categories of the Sunna. For example, the times for prayer and how they are performed fall under the third category of the Sunna. Neither the prayer times nor how to pray is clearly elucidated in the Qur’an. An example of the Sunna allowing exceptions to Qur’anic injunctions is found in the requirement to make an ablution before praying: while the Qur’an requires washing the feet, the Sunna provides the dispensation of wiping over a covered foot with wet hands.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUNNA

Ahmad Zarruq (d. 1493
CE
), a prominent Maliki jurist and Sufi from North Africa, identifi three stages in the formation of Islamic theology and law. The first was the
prophetic stage,
during which the Prophet’s Com- panions and those who learned from them absorbed what the Prophet taught. The second was the
compilation stage,
the period in which the Qur’an and the Hadith were compiled into the form we have today. Last was the
codification stage,
in which the texts of the Qur’an and the Sunna were exam- ined and codified into devotional practice and Sacred Law. The scholars who codifi the sayings and actions of the Prophet fell under two categories: biographers (
‘ulama’ al-Sira
) and Hadith scholars (
muhaddithun
). The biographers of the Prophet were liberal in their narrations and did not authenticate the stories and sayings they related with great rigor. This caused the jurists to reject their narrations as a source of legislation.
Sira,
biographi- cal literature about the Prophet Muhammad, does not have legislative authority. It is primarily read as devotional literature, since knowing the Prophet’s biography draws one nearer to him. In a more systematic sense, it is also read as sacred history and serves to contextualize verses of the Qur’an that refer to events that occurred during the Prophet’s lifetime.

Unlike the biographers, Hadith scholars developed a rigorous science that enabled them to determine, with a high degree of accuracy, the veracity of

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the many traditions that circulated among common people and scholars alike. The most important element in the assessment of Hadith is the reliabil- ity of the chain of transmission (
sanad
or
isnad
). In order to be accepted, a hadith must be transmitted by a chain of reliable narrators who relate it as closely to the original as possible. Scholars allow hadith accounts to be trans- mitted in different words, as long as the same meaning is retained.

In addition, scholars classified hadith accounts into three broad categories: sound (
sahih
), good (
hasan
), and weak (
da‘if
). Sound hadith are subcatego- rized into narratives that are supported by multiple chains of transmission at every stage (
mutawatir
), narratives that are supported by multiple chains of transmission at most stages (
mashhur
), and solitary (
ahad
) narratives that are not supported by multiple chains of transmission.
Mutawatir
hadith are akin to verses in the Qur’an in terms of their authority; there are less than 500 such hadith. The hadith that are categorized as
mashhur
are those narra- tives that have many transmitters but do not reach a number that ensures infallibility. Finally, the solitary reports are hadith that have either one or at most a few transmitters in any given generation.

In the early stages of his mission, the Prophet initially prohibited people from writing down his sayings out of concern that the Qur’an would be con- fused with his own words. In the later part of his mission, however, once the Qur’an was fi rooted in the hearts of his followers, he did permit his Companions to record his words. While Hadith scholars have differed over the authenticity of numerous hadith and have agreed that many hadith accounts were fabricated for political or other purposes, Muslims do not question the authenticity of Hadith as a reliable source of Islamic knowledge in general. Recently, however, some Muslim scholars have raised the ques- tion of hadith’s authenticity. In the last hundred years, largely because of Orientalist critiques of Hadith literature, certain views have developed that challenge the validity of much of the Hadith literature that was formerly con- sidered beyond reproach. As a result, a minority of Muslims, especially in South Asia, rejected most hadith accounts altogether and demanded that the practice of Islam be based solely on the Qur’an. These ‘‘People of the Qur’an’’ (
Ahl al-Qur’an
) were countered by ‘‘People of the Hadith’’ (
Ahl al-Hadith
), who revered Hadith almost as much as they revered the Qur’an. A main responsibility of the juridical schools of Islam is to refute such extreme positions through a critical yet balanced approach to Hadith study.

THE HADITH COLLECTIONS

Hadith scholars spent over 300 years collecting, authenticating, and sys- tematizing the corpus of Hadith. A rigorous science developed from this painstaking endeavor and provided the heuristic tools for categorizing and further subcategorizing the Hadith. Many great scholars emerged from this

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Sunna
: The Way of the Prophet Muhammad
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discipline, and some achieved great prominence as their collections gained widespread acceptance among the majority of Muslims. Certain Hadith col- lections known as
sunan
constitute the injunctions and prohibitions of the Prophet and focus on the legal aspects of his sayings. Others include stories of his life, such as his childhood experiences, and the sayings of his Compan- ions and their students. Some collections include the opinions of the scholars who collected the Hadith.