The Neglected Sunnah

Abstract

The present article is a contribution to the continuing discussion ofsunnah. I hope to show the scholar who deals with texts referring tosunnah that he or she is not, when interpreting a text containing the word,confined to a choice between the sunnah of the Prophet, local sunnah,and the sunnah of the Companions and the early community. It is quitepossible that the sunnah referred to is the sunnah mentioned in theQur'an, namely, the sunnah of God.We must remember certain characteristics of Sunnah. a) it is setintentionally by one having the authority to do so-the imam; b) it ismeant to be imitated and not changed, and c) the imam who sets thesunnah shares responsibility for the deeds of thcse who imitate him.What seems to be missing from most discussions of sunnah is the factthat it is a Qur'anic notion as well. Joseph Schacht, for example, quotesno Qur'anic occurrences, not even in his 1963 article that asserts that thesunnah of the Prophet was precisely to follow the Qur'an. Bravmann'scitation of Q 8:38 at the end of his discussion of the phrase madat sunnatal awwalin is the only Qur7anic instance of the word that he cites in hisown voice; the othem are in quotations from al Shafi'i, Ibn Hisham, andal Baydawi. Apparently neither Mustafa al Siba'i nor Muhammad alKhatib’ refer to the sunnah of God.The sunnah that God sets for Himself is certainly authoritative, unchanging,and meant to be imitated. But it is more important to note thatGod’s sunnah is also what God Himself does, what He has prescribed forHimself. Human beings know that God will inevitably do a certain thingbecause He has always done the same thing in the past. These are universaland unchanging rules and, as such, can form the basis for logicalarguments. The branch of modem legal logic called rule-based reasoningholds that such reasoning is prior to all other forms, since no communicationusing the word in the concrete and not the metaphoricalsense can even take place until the interlocutors agree on certain rules,such as the rules of language ...