Boekhoff-vd Voort, N., "The Concept of Sunna Based on the Analysis of sira and Historical Works from the First Three Centuries of Islam", in The Sunna and its Status in Islamic Law, Adis Duderija (ed.), New York: Palgrave, 2015, pp 13-38 (original) (raw)

Muslims commonly refer to the beginning of Islam as the archetype golden era of their religion both in terms of piety and pre-eminence. This period comprised the career of the Prophet Muḥammad and the subsequent first four leaders of the Islamic community, known as the "rightly guided caliphs". According to Islamic Tradition, the Qurʾān was put into writing during this period, which also the nascent stage in the transmission of the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his Companions, transmitted by generations of Muslims and still considered authoritative today. To many Muslims, the period of the Prophet and the first four caliphs is normative and, therefore, the most important part of their history. The primary source of information for Muslims is the Qurʾān, immediately followed by the sunna of the Prophet, that includes his deeds, saying and tacit approval, preserved by consecutive generations of Muslims. How did the concept of sunna develop within the formative period of Islam? Was it derived from the exemplary behaviour of the Prophet or is it a mixture of different manifestations of sunna, for example, the living tradition of the Muslim community, the exemplary behaviour of Companions of the Prophet or caliphs with the pre-Islamic concept of sunna? The present article will contribute to the discussion about the development of sunna by comparing the concept of sunna in historical and sīra works, i.e. works dealing with the biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, from the first three centuries of Islam. However, since these works cover differ periods of time, the analysis of the concept of sunna is limited to those traditions or their parts that deal with the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad and the reigns of the first four caliphs of the Islamic empire, Abū Bakr (r. 11-13/632-634), ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 13-23/634-644), ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (r. 23-35/644-656), and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (r. 35-40/656-661). The terms under scrutiny are the noun sunna, its plural sunan, and derivatives of the verb sanna. 1 I would like to thank Adam Walker for his careful revision of the English text and for his valuable suggestions to improve this article. Any inaccuracy or mistake is, of course, my fault. The first part of this article is dedicated to the discussion about the origin and the development of the concept of sunna from pre-Islam to the end of the second Islamic century, as well as the relationship between the sunna of the Prophet and the "living tradition", or the generally agreed practice, of the community. The second part consists of an analysis of the three above mentioned terms in the source material, followed by a discussion of the different types of sunna as represented by the terms sunna, sunan and sanna in the sīra and historical works of the first three centuries of Islam. The debate about the development of prophetic sunna The classical Islamic view on the development of prophetic sunna during the first three centuries of Islam is that already during the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad Muslims imitated the Prophet's conduct. The subsequent generations continued this custom and preserved the Prophet's sunna in oral or written tradition. While Islamic scholars certainly played an important role in the preservation of the sunna, the ordinary Islamic community was also instrumental in the preservation of practices. 2 Joseph Schacht was not the first to oppose the classical Islamic view on the origin and the development of the sunna of the Prophet, but his study of the concept of sunna in the work of the Islamic legal scholar al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/819) brought about many scholarly publications by Muslims as well as non-Muslims. 3 Schacht coins "living tradition" as a collective name for several concepts of sunna in the ancient school of laws, ranging from "generally agreed practice" to the original pre-Islamic meanings of "precedent" or "way of life". 4 He argues that sunna originally denoted the normative practice of the community and was from the time of al-Shāfiʿī onwards (i.e. from the end of the second Islamic century) formalised and eventually restricted to the normative behaviour of the Prophet Muḥammad. 5