Dr Aqib Javid Parry
During one of the most criticalphases of his life, Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988) was the Director ofthe Central Institute of Islamic Research in Pakistan (1962-1968). At this time, Pakistan was led by President Ayub Khan, who was appointed Chief Marshal Law Administrator in 1958 and later resigned as President in 1969. Ayub Khan personally invited Fazlur Rahman to return to Pakistan for this important work in 1961. One of the tasks that the then President gave to Ayub Khan in 1958 was to reform the institutions of the country in accordance with the teachings of Islam. Fazlur Rahman was prepared for this task by his training in the Deobandi school, supplemented by Arabic language and philosophical studies at the University of Punjab and his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He was linguistically gifted in both classical and modern languages and had faced the challenges of living, studying, and teaching in Britain and Canada for fifteen years. At Oxford, he studied with European scholars of Islam, such as S. van den Bergh and H.A.R. Gibb. At McGill University in Montreal, he had colleagues such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Syed Naquib al-Attas, Toshihiko Izutso, Charles Adams, and Ismail al-Faruqi. He knew the Greek philosophers and their Arabic successors.
During this time, Fazlur Rahman focused on the questions of living Sunnah and Hadith formation in his articles in Islamic Studies from 1962 to 1969. He also drew the core of these articles together with an additional chapter in his Islamic Methodology in History, first published in 1965. The critical question Rahman raises and tries to answer is about the meaning of the concept of Sunnah. What is the relation of Sunnah with Ijmaand Ijtihad? How did this relationship change with the historical and political unfolding of the Muslim world?
He begins by lending a new meaning to the concept of Sunnah. He argues that Sunnah is a very fluid term.First, there was the Sunna of the Prophet himself, which consisted of verbal and non-verbal teaching that could be traced back to Muhammad. Second, the Living Sunna, which was the way in which that prophetic model and the Qur’an were implemented in different geographical and cultural situations according to the interpretation and application of the community. This was developed through the use of rational struggling (ijtihad) leading to a consensus amongst the community (ijma). After the Prophet, the concept carries with it not only the Sunnah of the Prophet but gradually its interpretations by the community. These interpretations are also part of Sunnah. Rahmansignificantly argues that “Sunnah is … co-extensive with the Ijma ofthe community, which is essentially an ever-expanding process”(6). After giving thiscomprehensive definition of Sunnah and arguing for its organic relationship with the Ijtihad and Ijma of the community, Rahman crucially contends that after the mass scale of Hadith formation, this organic relationship was destroyed.This idea of Living Sunnah implies that it is ever expanding and the result of the assimilative-deductive thought process of the community,andthe Prophet is the normative moral exemplar and lays out general principles to be appropriated. “Prophet was primarily a moral reformer of mankind and that, apart from occasional decisions which had the character of ad-hoccases, he seldom resorted to general legislation as means of furthering the Islamic cause”(10).The idea of Living Sunnah also means that “The Prophetic Sunnah was a general umbrella concept rather than filled with an absolutely specific content flows directly, at a theoretical level, from the fact that the Sunnah is a behavioural term: since no two cases, in practice, are ever identical in their situational setting-moral, psychological and material-Sunnah must, of necessity, allow of interpretation and adaptation” (12). To reinforce his concept of ever-expanding Sunnah, he quotes a significant event when Hasan AlBasri was asked about the problem of free will and Determination. In his letter, Hasan Basritells ‘Abd al-Malik B. Marwan that although there is no Hadith from the Prophet in favour of the freedom of the will and human responsibility, nevertheless, this is the Sunnah of the Prophet. What this means is that the Prophet (and his Companions) have shown through their behaviour that the doctrine of predetermination contradicts the Prophet’s implicit teaching. This passage of Hasan Al Basri is highly revelatory of the Sunnah as the pointer in a direction rather than an exactly laid out series of rules.
Rahman furthercontends that the above organic relationship between Sunnah, Ijtihad, and Ijma was severed in the successful formulations of Imam AlShafi. Rahman writes,“The place ofthe Living Sunnah-Ijtihad-Ijma he gives to the Prophetic Sunnah which, for him, does not serve as a general directive but as something absolutely literal and specific and whose only vehicle is the transmission of the Hadith. The next place he assigns to the Sunnah of the Companions, especially of the first four Caliphs. In the third place,he puts Ijma,and, lastly, he accepts Ijtihad (23). Rahman does not seem to discredit the importance and contribution of Imam Al Shafibut acknowledges that Al Shafi’s genius provided a mechanism that gave stability to our medieval socio-religious fabric but at the cost, in the long run, of creativity and originality. There is no doubt that even in later times, Islam did assimilate new currents of spiritual and intellectual life, for a living society can never stand quite still, but this Islam did not do so much as an active force, master of itself, but rather as a passive entity with whom these currents of life played. An important instance is Sufism (24).
For Rahman, the task now is to re-cast the Hadith into the Living Sunna of that generation and then derive norms from it that can be applied in our society today. We can again quote Fazlur Rahman’s summary:
On some such line of re-treatment, we can reduce the Hadith to Sunnah ─ what it was in the beginning ─ and by situational interpretation can resurrect the norms, which we can then apply to our situation today. It will have been noticed that although we do not accept Hadith in general as strictly historical, we have not used the terms “forgery” or “concoction” concerning it but have employed the term “formulation.”This is because although Hadith, verbally speaking, does not go back to the Prophet, its spirit certainly does, and Hadith is largely the situational interpretation and formulation of this Prophetic model or spirit. This term “forgery” and its equivalents would, therefore, be false when used about the nature of Hadith and the term “formulation” would be true. We cannot call Hadith a forgery because it reflects the Living Sunnah and the Living Sunnah was not a forgery but a progressive interpretation and formulation of the Prophetic Sunnah. What we want now to do is to re-cast the Hadith into Living Sunnah terms by historical interpretation so that we may be able to derive norms from it for ourselves through an adequate ethical theory and its legal embodiment. (80)
Thus, Fazlur Rahman established that the Living Sunna is the way of life endorsed by the Ijma of the community, which is by nature ever-expanding. Originally there were divergent opinions derived by the use of reason (ra’y), which eventually coalesced into an Ijma in a local area; so, Malik uses the terms Sunna and Ijma with almost the same meaning. This means that the local Muslim community, working based on the Prophetic Sunna, using their Ijtihad, decides on the content of the Living Sunna and an interpretation of the Qur’an, essentially through a democratic process. Moreover, in the Hadith movement of the second and third centuries (AH), the organic relationship between the Sunna, Ijtihad and Ijma was destroyed. Fazlur Rahman held that Al Shafi’i brought in a new understanding of the concept of Ijma, from being an ongoing democratic process demanding fresh thought and agreement, therefore accommodating and needing a degree of disagreement, to a formal, total, solid, static agreement with no room for alternative views and therefore no Ijtihad. The pattern of working out the Muslim way of life now treated the Prophetic Sunna as absolutely literal and specific.This led to the Sunna of the Companions, which was established as an Ijma. This means that Ijtihad and Qiyas (analogous reasoning) were limited to working within these parameters if they were required to deal with a new matter. This makes Ijma a backwards-looking construct, static and epistemologically closed; it is a “given” from the past.
Works Cited
Rahman, Fazlur. Islamic Methodology in History. Karachi: Central Institute of Islamic Research, 1965.
The author can be reached at aqib007javeed@gmail.com