Hadith Polemic and the Muslim Psyche Abdul H.

Manraj Introduction The late Fazlur Rahman (1919 - 1988) was undoubtedly one of the greatest Muslim thinkers of the 20th century, yet he was only truly appreciated in academic circles. This may explain why he and intellectuals such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, Abdullahi Ahmed An Naim, and others with similar credentials are seldom mentioned or even heard of in mainstream Muslim discourses, which hardly ever rise above the level of mediocrity. Fazlur Rahman bemoaned the decadence of Muslims worldwide and his profound influence extended across academia and in scholarly publications. After teaching spells at Durham University (UK) and McGill University (Canada), he returned to his native Pakistan with high hopes. Rahman tried in vain to make some progressive changes especially with regards to how the Qur'an and Hadith are interpreted and applied. After threats against his life, he ended up fleeing to the United States where he was an accomplished professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago until his death. This article is a summation of one of his early works ( Islamic Methodology in History). Other contributions from this remarkable scholar include Islam, Islam and Modernity, Major Themes of the Quran, and Revival and Reform in Islam, his last book which was never quite finished due to his unexpected death in 1988. As Fazlur Rahman noted in his preface to "Islamic Methodology in History": The traditionalist-minded Muslims are not likely to accept the findings of this work easily. I can only plead with them that they should try to study this important problem with historical fair-mindedness and objectivity. I, for my part, am convinced, as a Muslim, that neither Islam nor the Muslim Community will suffer from facing the facts of history as they are; on the contrary, historical truth, like all truth, shall invigorate Islam for as the Qur'an tells us God is in intimate touch with history.1 With the exception of the Introduction and Conclusion, for the most part the applicable sections of Islamic Methodology in History were used verbatim in order to capture and synthesize the main themes for this article. Admittedly, a summary cannot do justice to any of FazlurRahmans books, so readers are encouraged to study Islamic Methodology in History in its entirety, since it includes the evidence and sources to substantiate his research. As far as this synopsis goes, the focus will be on the role of the Sunnah / Hadith in the formative years of Islam, how the early Muslims understood and applied the Sunnah / Hadith following the Prophet Muhammads death, and how the Hadith subsequently became inflexible leaving little or no room for analysis, reinterpretation, or any discussion. The result is that the majority of Muslims today believe that all of our thinking has been done for us centuries ago by the early generations of Muslims, and we should just unquestionably accept what has been passed down to us and nostalgically cling to the past, hoping that the glory days of Islam will somehow miraculously reappear. Methodology Essentially there are four basic principles of Islamic thinking which supply the framework for all Islamic thought, viz., the Qur'an, Sunnah / Hadith, ljitihad (independent reasoning), and Ijma (consensus). The fundamental importance of these four principles which, it must be reemphasized, are not just the principles of Islamic jurisprudence but of all Islamic thought

 can hardly be overestimated. Particularly important is the way these principles may be combined and applied; this difference can cause all the distance that exists between stagnation and movement, between progress and petrification.2 Sunnah is a behavioral concept whether applied to physical or mental acts and further denotes not merely a single act as such, but in so far as this act is actually repeated or potentially repeatable. In other words, a sunnah is a law of behavior whether demonstrated once or often.3In early Islamic history, two of the four principles (Ijtihad and Ijma) were intimately bound up not only with one another but also with the concept of Sunnah which, starting from the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, became an ongoing creative process of interpretation and elaboration and was given the sanction of ljma. This process of creativity stopped, however, grinding slowly to a standstill when this living Sunnah began to be cast in Hadith form and attributed to the Prophet.4 Western Islamic studies rejected the concept of the Prophetic Sunnah because they have found (i) that a part of the content of Sunnah is a direct continuation of the pre-Islamic customs and mores of the Arabs; (ii) that by far the greater part of the content of the Sunnah was the result of the freethinking activity of the early legists of Islam who, by their personal Ijtihad, had made deductions from the existing Sunnah or practice and most important of all had incorporated new elements from without, especially from the Jewish sources and Byzantine and Persian administrative practices; and, finally (iii) that later when the Hadith develops into an overwhelming movement and becomes a mass scale phenomenon in the late second and especially in the third centuries, this whole content of the early Sunnah comes to be verbally attributed to the Prophet himself under the aegis of the concept of the "Sunnah of the Prophet".5 Fazlur Rahman posits (1) that while the above story about the development of the Sunnah is essentially correct, it is correct about the content of the Sunnah only and not about the concept of the "Sunnah of the Prophet", i.e., the "Sunnah of the Prophet" was a valid and operative concept from the very beginning of Islam and remained so throughout (2) the Sunnah content left by the Prophet was not very large in quantity and that it was not something meant to be absolutely specific; (3) the concept Sunnah after the time of the Prophet covered validly not only the Sunnah of the Prophet himself but also the interpretations of the Prophetic Sunnah; (4) the "Sunnah" in this last sense is coextensive with the Ijma of the Community, which is essentially an ever-expanding process; and finally (5) after the mass scale Hadith movement the organic relationship between the Sunnah, ljtihad, and ljma was destroyed.6 It goes without saying that the Qur'an was taught as the nucleus of the new Islamic teaching. But the Qur'an is obviously not intelligible purely by itself strictly situational as its revelations are. It would be utterly irrational to suppose that the Qur'an was taught without involving in fact the activity of the Prophet as the central background activity which included policy, commands, decisions, etc. Nothing can give coherence to the Qur'anic teaching except the actual life of the Prophet and the milieu in which he moved, and it would be a great childishness of the twentieth century to suppose that people immediately around the Prophet distinguished so radically between the Qur'an and its exemplification in the Prophet that they retained the one but ignored the other, i.e., saw the one as divorced from the other. Completely nonsensical is the view of modern scholarship which makes the Prophet almost

like a record in relation to Divine Revelation. Quite a different picture emerges from the Qur'an itself which assigns a unique status to the Prophet whom it charges with a "heavy responsibility" and whom it invariably represents as being excessively conscious of this responsibility.7 The overall picture of the Prophet's biography if we look behind the coloring supplied by the medieval legal mass has certainly no tendency to suggest the impression of the Prophet as a pan-legist neatly regulating the fine details of human life from administration to those of ritual purity. The evidence, in fact, strongly suggests that the Prophet was primarily a moral reformer of mankind and that, apart from occasional decisions, which had the character of ad hoc cases, he seldom resorted to general legislation as a means of furthering the Islamic cause. In the Qur'an itself general legislation forms a very tiny part of the Islamic teaching. But even the legal or quasi-legal part of the Qur'an itself clearly displays a situational character. Quite situational, for example, are the Qur'anic pronouncements on war and peace between the Muslims and their opponents pronouncements which do express a certain general character about the ideal behavior of the community vis-a-vis an enemy in a grim struggle, but which are so situational that they can be regarded only as quasi-legal and not strictly and specifically legal. A prophet is a person who is centrally and vitally interested in swinging history and molding it on the Divine pattern. As such, neither the Prophetic Revelation nor the Prophetic behavior can neglect the actual historical situation; God speaks and the Prophet acts in, although certainly not merely for, a given historical context.8 As already noted, early Islamic literature strongly suggests that the Prophet was not a panlegist. For one thing, it can be concluded a priori that the Prophet, who was until his death, engaged in a dire moral and political struggle against the Meccans and the Arabs and in organizing his community-state, could hardly have found time to lay down rules for the minutiae of life. Indeed, the Muslim community went about its normal business and did its day-to-day transactions, settling their normal business disputes by themselves in the light of commonsense and on the basis of their customs which, after certain modifications, were left intact by the Prophet. It was only in cases that became especially acute that the Prophet was called upon to decide, and in certain cases the Qur'an had to intervene. Mostly such cases were of an ad hoc nature and were treated informally and in an ad hoc manner. Thus, these cases could be taken as normative prophetic examples and quasi-precedents, but not strictly and literally. Indeed, there is striking evidence that even in the case of the timing for ritual prayers and the detailed descriptions for such, the Prophet had not left a rigid model. For example, the following hadith seems to point to a campaign for fixing the standard times for prayers. For times of prayers, see the Muwatta' of Malik, Hadith no. 1: "...Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz one day delayed a prayer. 'Urwah ibn al-Zubayr entered upon him and informed him that alMughirah ibn Shu'bah, while in Kafah, once delayed a prayer, but Abu Mas'ud al-Ansari came to him and said: 'What is this, O Mughirah! Did you not know that Gabriel came down and prayed and the Prophet prayed (with him): then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the next prayer) and the Prophet prayed (with him); then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the third prayer) and the Prophet did likewise: then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the fourth prayer) and likewise did the Prophet: and then (again) Gabriel prayed (i.e., the fifth prayer) and so did the Prophet?' The Prophet then said, 'Have I been commanded this?' (On hearing this) Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz exclaimed, 'Mind what you are relating, O 'Urwah! Is it the case that

Gabriel it was who appointed the times of prayer for the Prophet?' 'Urwah replied, 'So was Bashir, son of Abu Mas'ud al-Ansari in the habit of relating from his father'." Henceforward, whenever prayers are emphasized in the Hadith, the word "Salah" is almost invariably accompanied by the phrase "'ala miqatiha [prayers] at their proper times." It was only on major policy decisions with regard to religion and state and on moral principles that the Prophet took formal action, but even then the advice of his major Companions was sought and given publicly or privately. In the behavior of the Prophet, religious authority and democracy were blended with a finesse that defies description. 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 behavioral term: since no two cases, in practice, are ever exactly identical in their situational setting moral, psychological, and material Sunnah must, of necessity, allow for interpretation and adaptation.9 It should be abundantly clear that the actual content of the Sunnah of the early generations of Muslims was largely the product of ljtihad when this Ijtihad, through an incessant interaction of opinion, developed the character of general acceptance or consensus of the Community, i.e.,ljma. This is why the term "Sunnah" in our sense, i.e., the actual practice, is used equivalently by Malik with the term "al-amr al-mujtama' 'alayhi", i.e., Ijma. Thus, we see that the Sunnah and the Ijma literally merge into one another and are, in actual fact, materially identical.10 The Sunnah of the Prophet was an ideal which the early generations of Muslims sought to approximate by interpreting his example in terms of the new materials at their disposal and the new needs, and this continuous and progressive interpretation was also called "Sunnah", even if it varied according to different regions. This is in stark contrast to the later rigidity that came with the full development of the Science of Hadith.11 That Hadith from the Prophet must have existed from the very beginning of Islam is a fact which may not reasonably be doubted. Indeed, during the lifetime of the Prophet, it was perfectly natural for Muslims to talk about what the Prophet did or said, especially in a public capacity. The Arabs, who memorized and handed down poetry of their poets, sayings of their soothsayers, and statements of their judges and tribal leaders, cannot be expected to fail to notice and narrate the deeds and sayings of one whom they acknowledged as the Prophet of God.12 The Hadith is nothing but a reflection in a verbal mode of the living Sunnah. The Prophet's Sunnah is, therefore, in the Hadith just as it existed in the living Sunnah. But the living Sunnah contained not only the general Prophetic Model but also regionally standardized interpretations of that Model thanks to the ceaseless activity of personal ljtihad and ljma. That is why innumerable differences existed in the living Sunnah. But this is exactly true of Hadith also. This is because Hadith reflects the living Sunnah. Indeed, a striking feature of Hadith is its diversity and the fact that almost on all points it reflects different points of view.13 But the Hadith in the Prophet's own time was largely an informal affair, since the only need for which it would be used was the guidance in the actual practice of the Muslims, and this need was fulfilled by the Prophet himself. After his death, the Hadith seems to have attained a semiformal status for it was natural for the emerging generation to enquire about the Prophet.

There is no evidence, however, that the Hadith was compiled in any form even at this stage. The reason, again, seems to be this, viz., that whatever Hadith existed as the carrier of the Prophetic Sunnah existed for practical purposes, i.e., as something which could generate and be elaborated into the practice of the Community. For this reason, it was interpreted by the rules and judged freely according to the situation at hand, and something was produced in the course of time which we have described as the "living Sunnah." But when, by the third and fourth quarters of the first century, the living Sunnah had expanded vastly in different regions of the Muslim Empire through this process of interpretation in the interests of actual practice, and as differences in law and legal practice widened, the Hadith began to develop into a formal discipline. It appears that the activity of the Hadith transmitters was largely independent of, and, in cases developed even in opposition to, the practice of the lawyers and judges. Whereas the lawyers based their legal work on the living Sunnah and interpreted their materials freely through their personal judgment in order to elaborate law, the Hadith transmitters saw their task as consisting of reporting, with the purpose of promoting legal fixity and permanence. Although the exact relationship between the lawyers and the transmitters of the Hadith in the earliest period is obscure for lack of sufficient materials, what seems certain is that these two approaches represented in general the two terms of a tension between legal growth and legal permanence: the one interested in creating legal materials, the other seeking a neat methodology or a framework that would endow the legal materials with stability and consistency. It is also quite certain that in the early stages, the majority of the Hadith did not go back to the Prophet, due to the natural paucity of the Prophetic Hadith, but to later generations. Certainly, in the extant works of the second century, most of the legal and even moral traditions are not from the Prophet but are traced back to the Companions, the "Successors," and to the third generation. But as time went on, the Hadith movement, as though through an inner necessity imposed by its very purpose, tended to project the Hadith backwards to its most natural anchoring point, the person of the Prophet. The early legal schools, whose basis was the living and expanding Sunnah rather than a body of fixed opinion attributed to the Prophet, naturally resisted this development.14 By the middle of the second century, the Hadith movement had become fairly advanced and although most Hadith was still attributed to persons other than the Prophet the Companions and especially the generations after the Companions nonetheless a part of legal opinion and dogmatic views of the early Muslims had begun to be projected back to the Prophet. But still, the Hadith was interpreted and treated with great freedom.15 The evidence clearly indicates the increasing power of the Hadith over and against the living Sunnah, whose very lifeblood was free and progressive interpretation. It was against this background that Imam al-Shafi'i, the "Champion of Hadith," carried out his successful campaign to substitute the Hadith for the living Sunnah.16 The Hadith movement, which represents the new change in the religious structure of Islam as a discipline and whose milestone is al-Shafi'i's activity in law and legal Hadith, demanded by its very nature that Hadith should expand and that ever new Hadith should continue to come into existence in new situations to solve novel problems social, moral, religious, etc. The majority of the contents of the Hadith corpus is, in fact, nothing but the Sunnah-Ijtihad of the

first generations of Muslims, an Ijtihad which had its source in individual opinion but which, in the course of time and after tremendous struggles and conflicts against heresies and extreme sectarian opinion, received the sanction of Ijma, i.e., the adherence of the majority of the Community. In other words, the earlier living Sunnah was reflected in the mirror of the Hadith with the necessary addition of chains of narrators. There is, however, one major difference: whereas Sunnah was largely and primarily a practical phenomenon, geared as it was to behavioral norms, Hadith became the vehicle not only of legal norms but of religious beliefs and principles as well.17 Findings It is clear that al-Shafi'i's notion of Ijma was radically different from that of the early schools. His idea of Ijma was that of a formal and a total one; he demanded an agreement which left no room for disagreement. But it is precisely the living and organic relationship between ljtihad andIjma that was severed in the successful formulation of al-Shafi'i. The place of the 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.18 Ijma, instead of being a process and something forward-looking coming at the end of free Ijtihad came to be something static and backward-looking. It is that which, instead of having to be accomplished, is already accomplished in the past. Al-Shafi'i'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 quite stand 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 case in point is Sufism.19 Without going into the details of the origins of Sufism, there is no denying that (as in every society) there must have been among the Companions those in whose temperament puritanical and devotional trends were stronger than purely activist traits, so it must be admitted that Sufism, as it developed from the second and, especially, third centuries, has little justification in the pristine practice of the Community. Its original impetuses came from politico-civil wars on the one hand and from the development of the law on the other. Its earliest manifestations are excessive individualist isolationism and ultra-puritanical asceticism. Furthermore, according to a Hadith in al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jihad, the Prophet is represented as recommending that one should go "into a mountain cavity (shi'b), and leave people alone." That this Hadith should occur in the Sahihof al-Bukhari in the very chapter devoted to Jihad is a remarkable evidence both of the growing power of the Sufi movement and the catholic spirit of the Ahl al-Sunnah. But there are also equally powerful and extremely interesting counter-Hadiths. These Hadiths strongly recommend the earning of livelihood (against the extreme interpretation of the Sufi concept of Tawakkul) and condemn uncompromising indulgence in devotional piety.20 While we are not concerned with analyzing the content of Sufism historically and tracing its elements to foreign sources, it need not be denied and, indeed, it is convincing that the Sufi movement came under certain fundamental influences from without, especially in its later stages of development.21 It is also a historical fact that Judeo-Christian religious lore (what came to be called "Isra'iliyat") had begun to find its way into Islam at a very early date

chiefly through the activity of popular preachers (qussas) who wanted to make their sermons as effective as possible.22 That there were already in the Middle East equivalent attitudes spread by other religions notably Christianity and Buddhism and that influences from these must have come into Islam at some stage, must be accepted. Out of the failure of political life to meet adequately the proper inner aspirations of the people, Messianism developed rapidly in Islam. In one form, these Messianic hopes simply took over the doctrine of the "Second Advent" of Jesus from Christianity. The orthodoxy in the course of time adopted it. In another form, which seems to have taken birth in Shi'i circles but came into Sunnism through the activity of early Sufis, these millennial aspirations are expressed in the doctrine of the Mahdi the figure who will finally effect the victory of justice and Islam over tyranny and injustice. That this doctrine came into Islam through the Sufisis made certain by the fact that the beginnings of Sufism are clearly connected with the early popular preachers known by various names who used Messianism in their sermons to satisfy the politically disillusioned and morally starved masses. In the beginning, the two doctrines that of the reappearance of Jesus and that of the Mahdi are quite distinct, since their historical sources are quite different, but later the two figures are brought together, although not entirely successfully.23 Since the twelfth century, the best and most creative minds of Islam have been drifting away from the orthodox system of education to Sufism. One has only to pick up any collection of Sufi biographies to see how many people "left formal, external education" and joined the Sufi ranks. The 'Ulama' (scholars) were left with little more than dry bones, the real currents of life having escaped their system and taken their own way.24 Now we have the Shaykh and his authority, an endless mythology of saints, miracles, and tombs, hypnotization and self-hypnotization and, indeed, crass charlatanism and sheer exploitation of the poor and the ignorant.25 The World of Islam and Islamic scholarship are by now familiar with the proposition that "the gate of ljtihad (fresh thinking) in Islam was closed". Nobody quite knows when the "gate of ljtihad" was closed or who exactly closed it. There is no statement to be found anywhere by anyone about the desirability or the necessity of such a closure, or of the fact of actually closing the gate, although one finds judgments by later writers that the "gate of Ijtihad has been closed." It may, therefore, be safely concluded that whereas the gate of ljtihad was never formally closed by anyone that is to say, by any great authority in Islam nevertheless a state of affairs had gradually but surely come to prevail in the Muslim World where thinking on the whole, and as a general rule, ceased.26 The denial of ljtihad in practice has been the result not of externally over-strenuous qualifications but because of a deep desire to give permanence to the legal structure, once it was formulated and elaborated, in order to bring about and ensure unity and cohesiveness of the MuslimUmmah. We have pointed out recurrently in the earlier part of this work that the Hadith movement launched by al-Shafi'i in the domain of law was itself a bid for uniformity amidst what threatened to be legal and dogmatic chaos. Subsequently, as Iqbal tells us, after the destruction of the Baghdad Caliphate and the breakup of the political unity of the Muslim World, the religious leadership concentrated all the more on ensuring the unity of the Ummah through law and other institutions. Such unity has, no doubt, reigned in the Muslim World but at the cost of inner growth, as the Muslim World

suddenly discovered under the impact of the foreign powers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But at the theoretical level the door of Ijtihad has always remained open and no jurist has ever closed it. To the causes enumerated by Iqbal must also be added the gradual deterioration of intellectual standards and the impoverishment of the intelligentsia of Islam over the years through a gradual narrowing down of the educational system.27 Although the "gate of Ijtihad" was never formally closed, 'Taqlid' (blind acceptance) of mere authority became so rampant that ljtihad became practically non-existent. 'Taqlid' was originally recommended for the common man although it was long conceded that even the common man has the power of discernment enough to decide between conflicting views. Later, however, 'Taqlid' enveloped almost all members of the Muslim society. Voices against this have been arising, particularly since the appearance of Ibn Taymiyah, and 'Taqlid' and closing of the door of Ijtihad have been imputed to the immediately earlier generations ever since. Proportionately, the emphasis on the necessity of ljtihad has increased particularly since the Islamic reform movements of the eighteenth century. The Muslim Modernist has espoused Ijtihad all the more and with all the greater sense of urgency since the impact on Islamic society of the new forces in all its forms.28 If the study of early Hadith materials is carried through with constructive purposiveness under the canons of historical criticism and in relation to the historico-sociological background, they take on quite a new meaning. A Hadith, say, in al-Muwatta, that Umar did so-and-so, when read as mere Hadith, i.e., as an isolated report, remains a blank and yields little; but when one fully comprehends the sociological forces that brought the action about, it becomes meaningful for us now and assumes an entirely new dimension. There is only one sense in which our early history is repeatable and, indeed, in that sense it must be repeated if we are to live as progressive Muslims at all, viz., just as those generations met their own situation adequately by freely interpreting the Qur'an and Sunnah of the Prophet by emphasizing the ideal and the principles and re-embodying them in a fresh texture of their own contemporary history we must perform the same feat for ourselves, with our own effort, for our own contemporary history.29 There are examples of Umar demonstrating this creativity with the Sunnah. When it came to dividing up conquered land among the Companions, what Umar and those who agreed with him and ultimately everyone had to agree felt most strongly was that the Prophet was acting within a restricted milieu of tribes; that, therefore, you cannot carry on the same practice where vast territories and whole peoples are involved; otherwise you violate the very principles of justice for which the Prophet had been fighting all his life. One thing is certain: that although Umar obviously departed formally from the Sunnah of the Prophet on a major point, he did so in the interest of implementing the essence of the Prophet's Sunnah. We know also that Umar suspended the punishment for theft when there was a scarcity of food. Indeed, there are few men in history who have carried on the mission of the Prophet so creatively, so effectively, and so well. But these are the choices and the decisions which every living society has to face almost incessantly but particularly at times when massive new factors enter into it.30 Umar also curtailed the "rights" of slave-owning men and even went against a Sunnah in order to keep the bases of the Sunnah alive, strong, and progressively prosperous.31 The evidence demonstrates beyond any shadow of doubt that our earliest generations looked upon

the teaching of the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet not as something static, but essentially as something that moves through different social forms and moves creatively. Islam is the name of certain norms and ideals which are to be progressively realized through different social phenomena and setups. Indeed Islam, understood properly, ever seeks new and fresh forms for self-realization and finds these forms. Social institutions are one of the most important sectors of the Islamic activity and expression. Social institutions, therefore, must become proper vehicles for the carriage and dispensation of Islamic values of social justice and creativity, etc. This is the clear lesson that we learn from the early development of the Sunnah. Umar changed the form of the Prophet's Sunnah of war in certain fundamental aspects and yet that very Prophet's Sunnah was all the more prosperous because of this change. The Muslims, indeed, changed the Qur'anic law of evidence and, instead of insisting on two witnesses, began deciding cases on the basis of one witness and an oath. They knew that what the Qur'an was after was to establish justice and not two witnesses. If we can now have a recorded selfconfession (provided its authenticity is established beyond doubt), may we not even dispense with conventional modes of evidence in a given case? But all these are problems that must be answered now, and they must be answered from the depths of the Islamic conscience, not from a mimicry of the past. If the right and successful answer emerges now from the Islamic conscience, therein shall live the Sunnah of the Prophet.32 Conclusion Something that cannot be emphasized enough and which must be made absolutely clear is that Fazlur Rahman is not advocating that Muslims completely discard the Hadith. As he points out, if all Hadith are given up, what remains is but a yawning chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet. And in the vacuity of this chasm not only must the Qur'an slip from our fingers under our subjective whims for the only thing that anchors it is the Prophetic activity itself but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur'an and, indeed, the existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth.33 Perhaps to the annoyance of some readers, Hadith, although it has as its ultimate basis the Prophetic Model, represents the workings of the early generations on that model. Hadith, in fact, is the sum total of aphorisms formulated and put out by Muslims themselves, ostensibly about the Prophet although not without an ultimate historical touch with the Prophet. The very aphoristic character of Hadith shows that it is not historical. It is rather a gigantic and monumental commentary on the Prophet by the early Community. Therefore, though based on the Prophet, it also constitutes an epitome of wisdom of classical Muslims.34 The genesis of some of the important political, theological, and moral doctrines showed how doctrines, which had originated in the "living Sunnah" as a product of Islamic history acting on the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah, were transformed, through the medium of the Hadith, into immutable articles of Faith.35 The religious history of Islam is that Islam has always been subjected to extremisms, not only political but theological and moral as well. The Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'ah (a group that claims to be adherents to the Sunnah) whose very genesis had been on an assumed plea of moderation, mediation, and synthesis which is an ongoing process and who, indeed, actually functioned as such a force in the early stages, themselves became, after the content of

their system had fully developed, authoritarian, rigid, and intolerant. Instead of continuing to be a synthesizing and absorbing force, they became transformed into a party-among-parties with all its rejecting and exclusivist attitudes.36 Sunnah for the early generations of Muslims was not just the Sunnah of the Prophet but included all the legal points, decisions, etc. deduced from it by rational thought.37 It is a sheer delusion to imagine that by stifling free, positive thought, one can save religion; for by doing so, religion itself gets starved and impoverished. The result was that after a few centuries, the real "Dark Ages" of Islam, the orthodoxy was left with little more than an empty shell; a threadbare formal structure with hardly any content.38 The purity of pristine Islam has been compromised with un-Islamic accretions both in doctrine and practice.39 What is needed is not just a simple "return" to the Qur'an and the Sunnah as they were acted upon in the past but a true understanding of them that would give us guidance today. A simple return to the past is, of course, a return to the graves. And when we go back to the early Muslim generations, this process of a living understanding of the Qur'an and the Sunnah is exactly what we find there.40 Should a society begin to live in the past however sweet its memories and fail to face the realities of the present squarely however unpleasant they may be it must become a fossil; and it is an unalterable law of God that fossils do not survive for long: "We did them no injustice; it is they who did injustice to themselves." (Q11:101; 16:33, etc.).41 This calls for a relentless process of hard, clear, systematic, and synthetic thinking, which is not yet visible in the Muslim World. By and large, and in effect, we are still suffering from intellectual indolence and consequently, for all practical purposes, are experiencing the two extreme attitudes born of this indolence, viz., (a) a laissez-faire attitude towards the new forces which makes us simply drift, and (b) an attitude of escape to the past which may seem emotionally more satisfying immediately but which is, in fact, the more obviously fatal of the two attitudes.42 The research and evidence can be summarized with the following salient points: 1) Sunnah for the early generations of Muslims was fluid, dynamic, and creative, and not just the Sunnah of the Prophet but included all the legal points, decisions, etc. that the Companions and successive generations deduced from it by rational thought based on interpretations of the Prophetic Sunnah. 2) The Prophet was not a pan-legist neatly regulating the fine details of human life from administration to those of ritual purity. He was engaged in a severe moral and political struggle against the Arabs and in organizing his community-state, and as such could hardly have found the time to lay down rules for the minutiae of life. Even the prayer times were not inflexible until after the proliferation of the Hadith. 3) Hadiths and counter-Hadiths were created by assorted groups as they vied for supremacy over each other in sectarian and political spheres. The majority of the Hadith did not go back to the Prophet due to the natural paucity of the Prophetic Hadith, but to later generations. However, in order to give provenance to the Hadith, they were projected backwards to the Prophet.

4) It is a historical fact that accretions from Arab culture along with pre-Islamic beliefs and practices including Buddhist, Persian, Byzantine, and Judeo-Christian found their way into Islam at a very early date and ultimately the Hadith collections (examples include the second coming of Jesus and the Mahdi, stoning to death for adultery, punishment in the grave, second class status and segregation of women, niqab, hijab, beard, etc.) 5) 'Taqlid' (blind acceptance and following) was initially recommended for the layman although it was long conceded that even the common man has the power of discernment enough to decide between conflicting views. The gate of Ijtihad was never formally closed but 'Taqlid' became so rampant that ljtihad became practically non-existent. A movement that gained momentum and a sizeable following as a result of Taqlid is Sufism, especially with the aid of Isra'iliyat. 6) Legislation from the Sunnah / Hadith (and even the Qur'an) is not meant to be immutable as rulings were largely situational, so they must be continuously revisited / reinterpreted with successive generations based on social and cultural considerations, as well as scientific and technological advances. It should be obvious that if rules are based on conditions that no longer exist, then the rules may no longer apply. For example, if a predator invades a woman's home and rapes her, and DNA evidence proves the presence of the man's sperm inside of the woman, then only a fool or an extremist would argue that based on the Qur'anic guidelines, four eyewitnesses must confirm that a crime was committed. This is not the kind of justice that the Qur'an advocates. 7) During the Prophets time, cultural practices were left intact unless they were in flagrant violation of the Quranic message, e.g., female infanticide, abuse of women and slaves, etc., Muslims today seldom draw a distinction between what is religious versus cultural, so for example, Muslims raised in the West must avoid western culture because being western somehow contravenes being Muslim. In other words, western Muslims must adopt an alien culture in order to be good Muslims. Just like the Quraysh who refused to accept the Prophets doctrine given that it threatened their establishment, and similar to Abrahams people who rejected his message of monotheism in favor of their idols because they found their forefathers worshipping them, likewise many Muslims today will discard the premise of this article as blasphemous. Their position will not be based on proof and logic, but on the fact that they have been conditioned via centuries of Taqlid to accept the majority (if not all) of the Hadith as infallible. This is because there is a Science of Hadith and all of the validation and categorization has already been done for us, so theres no need to give the Hadith any further scrutiny. Some even assert that the Hadith is revelation on par with the Quran since everything uttered by the Prophet is divinely inspired. What people fail to realize is that verification of a chain of narrators does not necessarily mean that the initial source of the data is authentic. For example, person A says that he heard something from the Prophet or saw him do something, which could be misinterpreted or fabricated; however, person A passes it on to persons B, C, and D. All four of these then each pass the report to future generations, and once the chain of narrators is verified back to the four sources even though the initial report actually came from one source, then the report is deemed genuine from multiple sources. There are many preposterous Hadith that deal with the belittling of women, quack medicine, or urban legends like the Prophets open heart surgery at a very early age (to name just a few

examples). These Hadith insult the human intelligence and are antithetical to the Quranic / Prophetic message. Naturally many of these reported pronouncements and stories appeal in large part to the nave and the ignorant. A good rule of thumb is that if a Hadith defies logic, and by extension is not in harmony with the Quranic message, then it has no place in Islam. SomeHadith have nothing to do with the Sunnah and in many cases are an affront to God and His noble Prophet. For example, there are Hadith that would have us believe that everything in our lives is predestined and we have no control over our decisions. The inference then is that God has chosen to deliberately lead people astray and then punish them for it, something that is unthinkable for any rational person.** Fazlur Rahman urged Muslims to indulge in critical thinking and not blindly accept what was passed down to us over the centuries, but to return to Ijtihad as practiced by the early generations of Muslims in order for us to continuously progress in all aspects of life, as exemplified by some of the early Muslims who built model civilizations. He believed that the Quran and authentic Sunnah provide a foundational framework from which fresh vision and creativity can materialize, given that knowledge is constantly developing and each new generation and its environment are not frozen in time. Moreover, Fazlur Rahman advocated that our best thinking is not behind us, but ahead of us and will only be realized through unremitting Quranic exegesis and judicious analysis of the Hadith. This is the methodology that will lead Muslims away from lethargy and towards a true understanding of the Quranic Weltanschauung and authentic Prophetic Sunnah. ________________________________________________________________________ ** Some examples of nonsensical Hadith that deal with the degradation of women, quack medicine, open heart surgery, and predestination, not to mention the sadistic retribution allegedly meted out by one who was sent as a mercy to mankind. Narrated Abu Bakra: During the battle of Al-Jamal, Allah benefited me with a Word (I heard from the Prophet). When the Prophet heard the news that the people of Persia had made the daughter of Khosrau their Queen (ruler), he said, "Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 9:219) The Prophet said, "I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 4:464, also 7.125, 7.126, and 8.456 have similar reports) We went out and Ghalib bin Abjar was accompanying us. He fell ill on the way and when we arrived at Medina he was still sick. Ibn Abi 'Atiq came to visit him and said to us, "Treat him with black cumin. Take five or seven seeds and crush them (mix the powder with oil) and drop the resulting mixture into both nostrils, for 'Aisha has narrated to me that she heard the Prophet saying, 'This black cumin is healing for all diseases except As-Sam.' 'Aisha said, 'What is As-Sam?' He said, 'Death.'" (Sahih Al-Bukhari 7:591) Narrated Abu Huraira: I heard Allah's Apostle saying, "There is healing in black cumin for all diseases except death." (Sahih Al-Bukhari 7:592) Some people from the tribe of 'Ukl came to the Prophet and embraced Islam. The climate of Medina did not suit them, so the Prophet ordered them to go to the (herd of milch) camels of charity and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). They did so, and after they had

recovered from their ailment (became healthy) they turned renegades (reverted from Islam) and killed the shepherd of the camels and took the camels away. The Prophet sent (some people) in their pursuit and so they were (caught and) brought, and the Prophet ordered that their hands and legs should be cut off and that their eyes should be branded with heated pieces of iron, and that their cut hands and legs should not be cauterized, till they die. (Sahih Al-Bukhari 8:794) Anas b. Malik reported that Gabriel came to the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) while he was playing with his playmates. He took hold of him and lay him prostrate on the ground and tore open his breast and took out the heart from it and then extracted a blood clot out of it and said: That was the part of Satan in thee. And then he washed it with the water of Zamzam in a golden basin and then it was joined together and restored to its place. The boys came running to his mother, i.e., his nurse, and said: Verily Muhammad has been murdered. They all rushed toward him (and found him all right). His color was changed, Anas said: I myself saw the marks of needle on his breast. (Sahih Muslim 311, also Sahih Al-Bukhari 4.429, 5.227, and 9.608 have similar reports) Allah's Apostle (peace be upon him) said: When the drop of (semen) remains in the womb for forty or fifty (days) or forty nights, the angel comes and says: My Lord, will he be good or evil? And both these things would be written. Then the angel says: My Lord, would he be male or female? And both these things are written. And his deeds and actions, his death, his livelihood; these are also recorded. Then his document of destiny is rolled and there is no addition to and subtraction from it. (Sahih Muslim 1216, also Sahih Al-Bukhari 4.430, 4.549, 8.593, and 9.546 have similar reports) Works Cited 1. Rahman, Fazlur. Islamic Methodology in History (Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1965). p. vi 2. Ibid. p. v 3. Ibid. p. 1 4. Ibid. p. 139 5. Ibid. p. 5 6. Ibid. p. 6 7. Ibid. p. 9 8. Ibid. p. 10 9. Ibid. p. 11-12 10. Ibid. p. 18 11. Ibid. p. 27 12. Ibid. p. 31 13. Ibid. p. 74-75

14. Ibid. p. 32-33 15. Ibid. p. 34 16. Ibid. p. 40 17. Ibid. p. 44-45 18. 10. Ibid. p. 23 19. Ibid. p. 24 20. Ibid. p. 65-66 21. Ibid. p. 106 22. Ibid. p. 49 23. Ibid. p. 109 24. Ibid. p. 136 25. Ibid. p. 117 26. Ibid. p. 149-150 27. Ibid. p. 172 28. Ibid. p. 173 29. Ibid. p. 178 30. Ibid. p. 181-182 31. Ibid. p. 183 32. Ibid. p. 189-190 33. Ibid. p. 70-71 34. Ibid. p. 76 35. Ibid. p. 87 36. Ibid. p. 91 37. Ibid. p. 130 38. Ibid. p. 132-13

39. Ibid. p. 142 40. Ibid. p. 143 41. Ibid. p. 176 42. Ibid. p. 177

Posted August 17, 2012

http://www.forpeoplewhothink.org/Topics/Hadith-Polemic.html FAZLUR RAHMANS UNDERSTANDING OF THE HADIST/SUNNAH Andi Purwanto & Arif Imam Zulfahmi * Fazlur Rahman was probably the most learned of the major Muslim thinkers in the secondhalf of the twentieth century, in terms of both classical Islam and Western philosophical and theological discourse. He came from a Punjabi family steeped in traditional Islamic learning; and then went on to familiarise himself with modern critical thinking at Oxford under H.A.R. Gibb and Van Der Bergh. In general, he was a committed teacher and research scholar (he was particularly innovative in Avicennian studies) with spells at Durham, McGill (Montreal) and California. From 1969 until hisdeath, he held the post of Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago, and so far has been the only Muslim to receive the prestigious Giorgio Levi Della Vida prize (1983). A disastrous spell in Pakistan during the 1960s, attempting to reform the teaching of Islam at tertiary level there, led to a systematic attempt, when Fazlur Rahman returned to North America, to re-evaluate his religious heritage. He is virtually unknown outside of intellectual circles, not having been a scholar-activist like his contemporary, Ismail al-Faruqi (d. 1986). It remains to be seen whether Muslims by pondering his works will be inspired to popularise his ideas. For all those Muslim Researchers out there, we would like to offer Fazlur Rahman as a paradigm of the modern committed Muslim intellectual. But to say this when Muslims have fallen into the deepest intellectual stagnation, which no amount of self-defeating rhetoric can hide, we must face the uncomfortable truth: within modern accumulations of knowledge lie some of the tools for our intellectual re- ignition and renewal. This is something that Fazlur Rahman recognised, and, in this sense, he is a torch-bearer. For insight, independence of thought, and crucially, unremitting courage, his work bears repeated examination. His bravery is borne out by the fact that he was criticised by all sides, as well as praised by many. If I might begin with a brief outline of his life. Special in this paper, we would like to write about one side of FazlurRahmans thoughts, that is Fazlur Rahmans Understanding of the Hadist or Sunnah. The study of Hadith based on Fazlur Rahman thought has a important meaning to the renewal of Islamic thought, especially its contribution in the field of methods and approaches. The historical approach of Fazlur Rahman offers a positive contribution to the study of traditions that had been occupied by the study sanad, -which based on his opinion- although giving a rich biographical information, but can not be positive argument that is final. Muslims today, according to Rahman, requires a methodological attempt to melt back the traditions that exist in the form of a living Sunnah (sunnah living) through historical approach. Fazlur Rahman has reviewed intellectual works associated with the study of hadith, among them are Ignaz Goldziher, Margoliouth, H. Lammens, and Joseph Schacht. Rahman begans of his study hadith which its study the concepts of Sunnah in the early history of Islam until the formalization of tradition, and offers a historical approach in the study. So, the keyword of

Rahmans thought is the sunnah living (living sunnah), the moral idea (ratio legislators), and specific legal. Hadith studies of Fazlur Rahman gives some contribution of new knowledge about the methods of criticism of the Hadith, gives an alternative way of methodological rigidity of Islamic thought, especially the Islamic legal thought that during this periode build methodological on flavorful methodological formalistic scholars, scripturalistic and atomistic, and contribute significantly to reconstruct the istinbath methods. So that more feasible to challenge the era. SUNNAH AND HADIST: Something More About the Sunnah SUNNAH is a behavioral conceptwhether applied to physical or mental actsand, further, denotes not merely a single act as such but in so far as this act is actually repeated or potentially repeatable. In other words, a sunnah is a law of behavior whether instanced once or often. And since, strictly speaking, the behavior in question is that of conscious agents who can own their acts, a sunnah is not just a law of behavior (as laws of natural objects) but a normative moral law: the element of moral ought is an inseparable part of the meaning of the concept Sunnah. According to the view dominant among more recent Western scholars, Sunnah denotes the actual practice which, through being long established over successive generations, gains the status of normativeness and becomes Sunnah.[[1]] This theory seems to make actual practiceover a periodnot only temporarily but also logically prior to the element of normativeness and to make the latter rest on the former. It is obvious that this view derives its plausibility from the fact that since Sunnah is a behavioral concept, what is actually practiced by a society over a long period, is considered not only its actual practice but also its normative practice. This is especially true of strongly cohesive societies like the tribal ones. But, surely, these practices could not have been established in the first place unless abinitio they were considered normative. Logically, therefore, the element of normativeness must be prior. And although it must be admitted that the fact of a customs being long established adds a further element of normativeness to itespecially in conservative societiesthis factor is quite different and must be radically disentangled from the initial normativeness. That Sunnah essentially means exemplary conduct as such and that actually being followed is not a part of its meaning (although the fulfillment of the Sunnah necessarily consists in being followed) can be demonstrated by numerous examples such as the following. Ibn Durayd, in his Jamharah (and he is followed in this by other lexicographers), gives the original meaning of the verb sannah as sawwara (al-shaya), i.e., to fashion a thing or produce it as a model. Next, it is applied to behavior which is considered a model. Here (and this is the sense relevant to us here) sannah would be best translated by he set an example. It is in this sense that Abu Yusuf admonishes Harun al-Rashid (see his Kitab al-Kharaj, the chapter on Sadaqai) asking the Caliph to introduce (as distinguished from to follow) some good sunnahs. In the same passage, Abu Yusuf quotes the Hadith, which may be very early, whoever introduces a good sunnah will be rewarded . . and whoever introduces a bad sunnah . . . , etc. If one asks how a sunnah could be bad if its essential meaning is not to be actually followed by others but to be morally normative, the answer (given by the author of Lisan alArab, s.v.) is that those who set bad examples wish, nevertheless, to be followed by others and in most cases (perhaps in all cases) they do not think they are setting bad examples.[[2]]

From the concept of normative or exemplary conduct there follows the concept of standard or correct conduct as a necessary complement. If I regard someones behavior as being exemplary for me then, in so far as I follow this example successfully, my behavior will be thus far up to the standard or correct. There enters, therefore, an element of straightness or correctness into this enlarged complemental sense of the word sunnah. It is in this sense that the expression sananal-tariq is used which means the path straight ahead or the path without deviation. The prevalent view that in its primary sense sunnah means the trodden path is not supported by any unique evidence, although, of course, a straight path without deviation implies that the path is already chalked out which it cannot be unless it has been already trodden. Further, the sense in which sunnah is a straight path without any deviation to the right or to the left also gives the meaning of a mean between extremes of the middle way. [[3]] EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF THE HADlTH That Hadith from the Prophet must have existed from the very beginning of Islam is a fact which may not reasonably be doubted. Indeed, during the life-time of the Prophet, it was perfectly natural for Muslims to talk about what the Prophet did or said, especially in a public capacity. The Arabs, who memorized and handed down poetry of their poets, sayings of their soothsayers and statements of their judges and tribal leaders, cannot be expected to fail to notice and narrate the deeds and sayings of one whom they acknowledged as the Prophet of God.[[4]] Rejection of this natural phenomenon is tantamount to a grave irrationality, a sin against history. Their new Sunnahthe Sunnah of the Prophetwas much too important (an importance so emphatically enshrined in the Quran itself) to be either ignored or neglected, as we sought to establish in the previous chapter. This fact juts out like a restive rock in the religious history of Islam, reducing any religious or historical attempt to deny it to a ridiculous frivolity: the Sunnah of the Community is based upon, and has its source in, the Sunnah of the Prophet. But the Hadith, in the Prophets own time, was largely an informal affair, for the only need for which it would be used was the guidance in the actual practice of the Muslims and this need was fulfilled by the Prophet himself. After his death, the Hadith seems to have attained a semi-formal status for it was natural for the emerging generation to enquire about the Prophet. There is no evidence, however, that the Hadith was compiled in any form even at this stage. The reason, again, seems to be this, viz., that whatever Hadith existedas the carrier of the Prophetic Sunnahexisted for practical purposes, i.e., as something which could generate and be elaborated into the practice of the Community. For this reason, it was interpreted by the rules and the judges freely according to the situation at hand and something was produced in course of time which we have described as the living Sunnah. But when, by the third and fourth quarters of the first century, the living Sunnah had expanded vastly in different regions of the Muslim Empire through this process of interpretation in the interests of actual practice, and difference in law and legal practice widened, the Hadith began to develop into a formal discipline.[[5]] It appears that the activity of the Hadith transmitters was largely independent of, and, in cases, developed even in opposition to, the practice of the lawyers and judges. Whereas the lawyers based their legal work on the living Sunnah and interpreted their materials freely through their

personal judgment in order to elaborate law, the Hadith transmitters saw their task as consisting of reporting, with the purpose of promoting legibility and permanence. Although the exact relationship between the lawyers and the transmitters of the Hadith in the earliest period is obscure for lack of sufficient materials this much seems certain that these two represented in general the two terms of a tension between legal growth and legal permanence: the one interested in creating legal materials, the other seeking a neat methodology or a framework that would endow the legal materials with stability and consistency. It is also quite certain that in the early stages the majority of the Hadith did not go back to the Prophet, due to the natural paucity of the Prophetic Hadith, but to later generations. Certainly, in the extant works of the second century, most of the legal and even moral traditions are not from the Prophet but are traced back to the Companions, the Successors and to the third generation. But as time went on, the Hadith movement, as though through an inner necessity imposed by its very purpose, tended to project the Hadith backwards to its most natural anchoring point, the person of the Prophet. The early legal schools, whose basis was the living and expanding Sunnah rather than a body of fixed opinion attributed to the Prophet, naturally resisted this development. We have briefly outlined the ro1e of al-Shafi in this process in the previous chapter. Al-Shafi constantly accuses the lawyers of not transmitting the Hadith and of not making use in law, of the little (Hadith} you transmit. Such criticisms are made by al-Shafi especially against the Hijazis but are equally turned against the Iranians. By the middle of the second century, the Hadith movement had become fairly advanced and although most Hadith was still attributed to persons other than the Prophetthe Companions and especially the generations after the Companionsnevertheless a part of legal opinion and dogmatic views of the early Muslims had begun to be projected back to the Prophet. We shall produce detailed evidence for this statement presently. But still, the Hadith was interpreted and treated with great freedom. In the last chapter we adduced evidence from Malik who often upholds the practice of al-Madinah against the Hadith and often bases his interpretations on his own opinion (ray).[[6]] Rahmans View about Sanad and Matan Hadist (wich literally means a story, a narration, a report) as we know it, being a unit of that disclipine wich bears the same name is a narrative, usually very short, purporting to give information about what the prophet said, did, or approved or disapproved or of similar information about his champanions, especially the senior champanions and more especially the four caliphs. Each hadist falls in two part : the text (matn) of the hadist itself and the transmissional chain or isnad, giving the name of narrators, wich support the text. Both the classical and the modern historians agree that at the first hadist existed without the supporting isnad wich probably appeared at the turn of the 1st/7 century. This is also roughly the date when the wholesale appearance of the hadist as a formalized written disclipine begins. There is, however, strong direct and indirect evidence that before becoming a formal disclipne in the 2nd/8th century, the phenomenon had existed at least since about 6080/680-700.[[7]] The first point to be made in this connection is that a higly developed system with to part, the text and the isnad, could not have appeared on the scene all of a sudden without a periode growth in wich it had only develop technically but expanded materially as well. An informal tradition is indeed naturally to be postulated during the lifetime of the prophet himself who

was the pivot of the muslim community. But after Muhammads death, the hadist passed from a purely informal condition into a semi-formal state. By this mean that whereas during the lifetime pf the prophet people talked about what he said or did as a matter of course, after his death this talk became a deliberate and conscious phenomenon since a new generation was growing up for whom it was natural to enquire about the prophets conduct.[[8]] Rahman criticism of the hadist from matan which in his opinion many dimensions that are not historical, isnad system is also not free from his criticism. He admit that the isnad containing rich of geographic information, and also minimize counterfeiting efforts traditions, but isnad cant be used as a final positive argument. According to Rahman, late developing isnad begins around the end of the first century hijriyah, so the traditions that are predictive of the political turmoil in the authentic Bukhari and Muslim despite having an awesome isnad, Rahman is not acceptable if we are really honest with history. Furthermore, Rahman gives two criteria for the assessment of hadist, they are history and the Quran. And these, hadist must be interpreted situationally appropriate historical perspective and according to their exact function in a clear historical context. With the principle of such interpretations, Rahman asserted that the traditions of law not understood as a law that is so to be applied directly, but must be understood as a problem that must be revisited (a problem to be retreated). Rahman and Modern Western Scholars Among the modern Western scholars, Ignaz Goldziher, the first great perceptive student of the evolution, of the Muslim Tradition (although occasionally uncritical of his own assumptions), had maintained that immediately after the advent of the Prophet his practice and conduct had come to constitute the Sunnah for the young Muslim community and the ideality of the preIslamic Arab sunnah had come to cease. After Goldziher, however, this picture imperceptibly changed. While the Dutch scholar, Snouck Hurgronje, held that the Muslims themselves . added to the Sunnah of the Prophet until almost all products of Muslim thought and practice came to be justified as the Sunnah of the Prophet, certain other notable authorities like Lammens and Margoliouth came to regard the sunnah as being entirely the work of the Arabs, pre-Islamic and post Islamicthe continuity between the two periods having been stressed. The concept of the Sunnah of the Prophet was both explicitly and implicitly rejected. Joseph Schacht has taken over this view from Margoliouth and Lammens in his Origins of Muhammedan Jurisprudence wherein he seeks to maintain that the concept Sunnah of the Prophet is a relatively late concept and that for the early generations of the Muslims sunnah meant the practice of the Muslims themselves. We (Rahman) have criticized, elsewhere, the grounds of this development in Western Islamic studies and have attempted to bring out the conceptual confusion with regard to sunnah. The reason why these scholars have rejected the concept of the Prophetic Sunnah is that they have found (i) that a part of the content of Sunnah is a direct continuation of the pre-Islamic customs and mores of the Arabs ; (ii) that by far the greater part of the content of the Sunnah was the result of the freethinking activity of the early legists of Islam who, by their personal Ijtihad, had made deductions from the existing Sunnah or practice and most important of allhad incorporated new elements from without, especially from the Jewish sources and Byzantine and Persian administrative practices ; and, finally (iii) that later when the Hadith develops into an overwhelming movement and becomes a mass-scale phenomenon in the later

second and, especially, in the third centuries, this whole content of the early Sunnah comes to be verbally attributed to the Prophet himself under the aegis of the concept of the Sunnah Of the Prophet. Now, we (Rahman) shall show (1) that while the above story about the development of the Sunnah is essentially correct, it is correct about the content of the Sunnah only and not about the concept of the Sunnah of the Prophet, i.e., that the Sunnah of the Prophet was a valid and operative concept from the very beginning of Islam and remained so throughout; (2) that the Sunnah-content left by the Prophet was not very large in quantity and that it was not something meant to be absolutely specific ; (3) that the concept Sunnah after the time of the Prophet covered validly not only the Sunnah of the Prophet himself but also the interpretations of the Prophetic Sunnah ; (4) that the Sunnah in this last sense is co extensive with the Ijma of the Community, which is essentially an ever-expanding process ; and, finally (5) that after the mass-scale Hadith movement the organic relationship between the Sunnah, Ijtihad and Ijma was destroyed. In the next chapter we shall show the real genius of the Hadith. and how the Sunnah may be validly inferred from the Hadith-material and how Ijtihad and Ijma may be made operative again. It may be gathered from the foregoing that the theory that the concept of the Prophetic Sunnah and even the content of the Prophetic Sunnah did not exist (outside the Quranic pronouncements on legal and moral issues) draws its force from two considerations, viz. (1) that in actual fact most of the content of the Sunnah during the early generations of Islam is either a continuation of the pre-Islamic Arab practices or the result of assimilative-deductive thought-activity of the early Muslims themselves, and (2) that the Sunnah, in any case, implies a tradition, as distinguished from the activity of one person. This latter statement itself both enforces and is enforced by the first. In Sections I and II above we have advanced evidence to refute this assumption and have shown that Sunnah really means the setting up of an example with a view that it would or should be followed. SUNNAH and HADIST It is absolutely imperative to be exactly clear about the real issues at stake particularly because there are strong trends in our society which in the name of what they call progressivism wish to brush aside the Hadith and the Prophetic Sunnah. In their anxiety to clear the way, they resort to methods much more questionable than Neros method of rebuilding Rome. Not only are the trends in question lacking in the foresight, they exhibit a singular lack of clarity of issues and a dismal ignorance of the evolution of Hadith itself. Without any grounding either in scholarship or in insight, they sometimes tell us that the Hadith is unhistorical and therefore unreliable as a guide to the Prophetic Sunnah. At other times we are naively told that Hadith may be history but it has no Shariah normativeness, i.e. even if Hadith is genuine, it contains no Sunnah for us. Progress we all want, not despite Islam, nor besides Islam but because of Islam for we all believe that Islam, as it was launched as a movement on earth in the seventh century Arabia, represented pure progressmoral and material. But we can neither share nor forgive confusionism and obscurantism. What shall we progress from and what shall we progress with, and, indeed, where to shall we progress? We (Rahman) shall now endeavour to show that technical Hadith, as distinguished from the historical and biographical Hadith, although it is by and large not historical, must nevertheless

be considered as normative in a basic sense and we shall try to indicate by illustration what this basic sense is. These are the points we wish to make in this connection: [[9]] (1) That the technical Hadith is by and large not historical in its actual formulations is shown by the various examples dealt with in the preceding pages. It may be said that we have, after all, given a few examples from a vast literature and that our conclusion is too sweeping. Now the first thing to be remembered in this connection is that the examples we have adduced are what we have called Fundamental Hadith, i-e. Hadith concerned with the Islamic Methodology itself. If the Hadith about the fundamental principles of Ijma and Hadith themselves proves unhistorical, the prima facie case for the Historicity of most other Hadith is demolished, It must be noticed that we are saying most other Hadith and not all other Hadith. But this difference between most and allwith the notable exception of Hadith (2) But the most fundamental objection to our thesis of non-historicity of Hadith will not be scientific but religious, viz., that Hadith will thus turn out to be a gigantic conspiracy. The question, however, is whether the Ahl al-Hadlth themselves regarded their activity as strictly historical. (3) But if the Hadith is not strictly historical, it is quite obvious that it is not divorced from the Prophets Sunnah, either. Indeed, there is an intimate and in eliminable connection between the Hadith and the Prophets Sunnah. We recall what we established in the first chapter, viz. that the earliest generations of Muslimsjudges, lawyers, theoreticians and politicianshad elaborated and interpreted the Prophetic Model (Sunnah) in the interests of the needs of the Muslims and the resultant product in each generation was the Sunnah in sense (ii), i.e. the living Sunnah. Now, the Hadith is nothing but a 1 reflection in a verbal mode of this living Sunnah. The Prophets Sunnah is, therefore, in the Hadith just as it existed in the living Sunnah. But the living Sunnah contained not only the general Prophetic Model but also regionally standardized interpretations of that Modelthanks to the ceaseless activity of personal Ijtihad and Ijma. That is why innumerable differences existed in the livi ng Sunnah. But this is exactly true of Hadith also. This is because Hadith reflects the living Sunnah. (4) We have said repeatedlyperhaps to the annoyance of some readersthat Hadith, although it has as its ultimate basis the Prophetic Model, represents the workings of the early generations on that model. Hadith, in fact, is the sum total of aphorisms formulated and put out by Muslims themselves, ostensibly about the Prophet although not without an ultimate historical touch with the Prophet. Its very aphoristic character shows that it is not historical. It is rather a gigantic and monumental commentary on the Prophet by the early Community. Therefore, though based on the Prophet, it also constitutes an epitome of wisdom of classical Muslims. It must, of course, be emphatically pointed out that a revaluation of different elements in Hadith and their thorough reinterpretation under the changed moral and social conditions of today must be carried out. This can be done only by a historical study of the Hadith by reducing it to the living Sunnah and by clearly distinguishing from the situational background the real value embodied in it. We shall find thereby that some of the major emphases of our traditional Orthodoxy will have to be modified and re-stated. Take, e.g. the case of determinism and free-will. At the time of the early Umayyad who advocated pure

determinism, free-will had to be emphasized and this is precisely what Hasan al-Basri and the early Mutazilah did. But when the Mutazilah humanism seemed to run riot and threatened the very bases of religion, Ahmad b. Hanbal and his colleagues accentuated the Will and Power of God over against the Mutazilah rationalism. But this doctrine of Divine Power and determinism subsequent became, and remains to this day, the hallmark of Orthodoxy. On the very same principle of situational interpretation, by resurrecting the real moral value from the situational background, must be handled the problem of legal Hadith. We must view the legal Hadith as a problem to be re-treated and not as a ready-made law to be directly applied. This is certainly a delicate question and must be handled wisely and cautiously, but handled it must be. Recall, e.g., the question of Interest. The Quran, as stated above, brings out the real reason behind the prohibition of Riba saying that it cannot come under the definition of a commercial transaction because it is a process whereby the capital is unjustly increased manifold. The historical Hadith confirms this by informing us that this was, in fact, the practice of the pre-Islamic Arabs. But we have seen the moral strictness by which legal opinion brought various activities under the definition of Riba by formulating a general principle that every loan which brings any advantage to the creditor is Riba. In the same breath we are told that Riba applies exclusively to the articles of food, gold and silver and beyond these it has no application. On some such line of re-treatment, we can reduce the Hadith to Sunnahwhat 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 with reference to it but have employed the term formulation. This is because although Hadith, verbally speaking, does not go hack 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 literally 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 recast 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 reembodiment. One anxiety will trouble many conscientious Muslims. It is that it is found impossible to locate and define the historically and specifically Prophetic content of the Sunnah, then the connection between the Prophet and the Community would become elusive and the concept Prophetic Sunnah would be irrevocably liquidated. But this worry is not real. To begin with, there are a number of things which are undeniable historical contents of the Prophetic Sunnah. Prayer, zakat, fasting, pilgrimage, etc. with their detailed manner of application, are so Prophetic that only a dishonest or an insane person would deny this. Indeed, the historical Hadith, i.e., the biography of the Prophet, is, in its main points, absolutely clear and would serve as the chief anchoring point of the technical Hadith itself when the latter is interpreted. Indeed, the overall character not only of the Prophet but of the early Community is indubitably fixed and, in its essential features, is not at all open to question even though there may be questions about the historical details. It is against this background of what is surely known of the Prophet and the early Community (besides the Quran) that we can

interpret Hadith. The purely prophetic elements in technical Hadith may be hard to trace, it may even be impossible to recover the entirety of them without a shadow of doubt, but a certain amount will undoubtedly be retrieved. But our argument does involve a reversal of the traditional picture on one salient point in that we are putting more reliance on pure history than Hadith and are seeking to judge the latter partly in the light of the former (partly because there is also the Quran) whereas the traditional picture is the other way round. But the traditional picture is already biased in favors of technical Hadith ; there is no intrinsic evidence for this claim and much intrinsic evidence that we have adduced is against it. Conclucion Based on the above, it can be concluded that Fazlur Rahman does not equate between understanding the Sunnah and Hadith. According to the Sunnah is non-verbal transmission, while the Hadith is the verbal transmission. Sunnah that has been agreed many people, expressed in the hadith. Hadith is Sunnah verbalization. This is what gave rise to the term from the Sunnah to the Hadith. Whereas, the term of Hadith to Sunnah means: that the behavior of the Prophet, during his life is constantly a concern amongst companions. Those with different levels trying to establish his behavior in accordance with the Prophet. Prophets companions repeatedly told to emulate. In terms of the prayer, the Prophet said:: pray you as you see me pray. In terms of Hajj, he said: Take from me your rituals. Prophet occasionally asserted, that behavior sunnah to be followed, Marriage is my sunnah. Anyone who turns away from it does not include my group. And to overcome the problems faced by the Muslims (in view of the second source of Islamic thought, namely the Quran and Sunnah through ahistorical approaches, literalist, and atomistic) Rahman offers a situational interpretation of the historical approach, then combine it with the method sociological approach. In addition, the critiques of the hadith, in fact Rahman criticism matan method and override the method sanad criticism. This is because of lating develope of Sanad, began around the end of the first century hijriyah, so the traditions that are predictive of the political turmoil in the authentic Bukhari and Muslim despite having an awesome isnad by Rahman is not acceptable if we are really honest with history. Furthermore Rahman gives two criteria for the assessment of history and tradition that the Quran, the hadith it is not valid if it contradicts the historical as well as the Quran. REFFERENCES: 1. Rahman, Fazlur, Islamic Methodology in History (Karachi: Central Institute of Islamic Research, 1994). 2. Fazlur, Rahman, Islam (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1979), second edition.

* Students of Ushuluddin Faculty for Spesial Program of Walisongo Semarang (Presented on Mei 31st, 2013, at Hadists Contextual lecture)

IAIN

[1] Fazlur Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History (Karachi: Central Institute of Islamic Research, 1994), page 1.

[2] Ibid., page 2-3. [3] Ibid., page 3. [4] Ibid., page 31. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid., page 34. [7] Fazlur Rahman, Islam (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1979), second edition, page 54. [8] Ibid. [9] OP.Cit., page 71-82.
http://andiuripurup.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/fazlur-rahmans-understanding-of-thehadistsunnah/

HADITH STUDIES IN FAZLUR RAHMAN PERSPECTIVE 03:31 ISLAMIC STUDIES NO COMMENTS

STUDY Hadith Fazlur

Rahman

(reviews of books Fazlur Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History, Karachi: Central Institute of IslamicResearch, 1965) 1. Preliminary At first, Fazlur Rahman, a neo-modernist intellectual, academic feel anxiety, which is also perceived by many Muslims, namely the closed-door meetings of ijtihad, so that there is a remarkable intellectual stagnation among Muslims. Closure of the door of ijtihad is, logically lead to the need for taqlid, a term that is generally interpreted as acceptance of the doctrine of bi la Kaifa terhjadap-madhhab and the madhhab-ororitas authority that has been established. Anxiety next Rahman phenomenon among Islamic reformer in doing reformer is generally the method used in dealing with legal issues still based on ad hoc approaches and-separated (fragmented) by exploiting the principle of takhayyur and talfiq. Application of this method certainly produces legal institutions are haphazard, arbriter and self-contra dictory. The study of Hadith Fazlur Rahman has a very important meaning to the renewal of Islamic thought, especially its contribution in the field of methods and approaches. The historical approach is that he offers a positive contribution to the study of traditions that had been occupied by the study sanad, which menutrut he, though giving a rich biographical information, but can not be positive that the final argument. Muslims today, according to Rahman, requires a methodological attempt to melt back the traditions that exist in the form of a living Sunnah (sunnah living) through historical study of it. Fazlur Rahman has reviewed sebelunya intellectual works associated with the study of hadith, among others, Ignaz Goldziher, Margoliouth, H. Lammens, and Joseph Schacht. Rahman is the scope of the study of hadith which began its study of the concepts of Sunnah in the early history of Islam until the formalization of tradition, and offers a historical approach in the

study. Then said the key is the sunnah of the living (living sunnah), the moral idea (ratio legislators), and specific legal. Hadith Fazlur Rahman's study provides some contribution of new knowledge about the methods of criticism of the Hadith, gives an alternative way of methodological rigidity of Islamic thought, especially the Islamic legal thought during this mensandarkan ourselves on building a flavorful methodological scholars madhhab formalistic, scripturalistic and atomistic, and contribute significantly to reconstruct istinbath methods so that more feasible to challenge the era. Fazlur Rahman started writing by describing briefly the intellectual anxiety about the real condition of Muslims is bound by the closed doors of ijtihad .. Furthermore, Rahman describes the historical evolution of the early development of hadith Hadith in the last Nabi.Pada Rahman offers a methodology in the study of hadith hadith to return back into the living Sunnah (sunnah living) through a historical approach that combined with the sociological approach. 2. Problem (Academic Anxiety) Starting from the most basic anxiety of a neo-modernist intellectual, Fazlur Rahman, who would also be felt by many Muslims, a condition in which the Muslims had sealed the door of ijtihad, so that there is a remarkable intellectual stagnation. Rahman feel this situation is not kondosif to present Islam as an alternative religion in the wake of an increasingly dynamic changing times. Closing of the door of ijtihad has been shut down that race of intellectual creativity in the early history of Muslims grew so extraordinary. Eventually Islam became a frozen set of doctrines and of course it is difficult to appear to give answers to problems keummatan in the wake of modernity. Closure of the door of ijtihad is, logically lead to the need for taqlid, a term that is generally interpreted as acceptance of the doctrine of bi la Kaifa terhjadapmadhhab and the madhhab-ororitas authority that has been established. In enacting the source of the teachings of Islam - the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the prophet - Muslims developed a rigid attitude by ahistorical approaches, literalistis and atomistic. Such a situation provoked immediate reaction from the Muslim reformers to take steps "rescue" of the teachings of Islam which is increasingly porous by history. However - as witnessed by Fazlur Rahman -, they are in doing renewal is generally the method used in dealing with legal issues still based on ad hoc approaches and-separated (fragmented) by exploiting the principle of takhayyur and talfiq. Application of this method certainly produces legal institutions are haphazard, arbriter and self-contra dictory. Picked up fragments of the past an isolated opinion - regardless of background kesejarahannya - then compile them into a kind of mosaic that is not arbitrary by smuggling under the surface as a structure of ideas borrowed from the West - without considering the contradictions or inconsistencies - is clearly a renewal of an artificialand unrealistic. That is why, a Josept Schacht asserts: "Yurispridensi and modernist Islamic legislation, in order to be logical and permanent, were in need of a theoretical base that is more rigid and consistent". [1] In a climate of sluggish reforms of this kind comes the Fazlur Rahman by offering a set of methodologies and comprehensive skewering, especially those associated with the excavation of the sources of Islamic teachings, namely the Qur'an and Sunnah. Bids Rahman in hadith studies with emphasis on the historical approach has given a fresh wind of renewal toward a more paradigmatic Islamic teachings. 3. Importance of Research Topics The study of Hadith Fazlur Rahman has a very important meaning to the renewal of Islamic

thought, especially its contribution in the field of methods and approaches. The historical approach is that he offers a positive contribution to the study of traditions that had been occupied by the study sanad, which menutrut he, though giving a rich biographical information, but can not be positive that the final argument. Muslims today, according to Rahman, requires a methodological attempt to melt back the traditions that exist in the form of a living Sunnah (sunnah living) through historical study of it. The effort was necessary, to differentiate the content of the hadith normativity sides of the sides of historicity, so the idea came the idea of moral tradition which can be used as a basis of ethics in developing a new formula that adaptatif Islamic teachings against changing times. Henceforth, not too much if what Fazlur Rahman to offer are principles that are not only useful for yurispridensi Islam, but also for the whole of Islamic thought.4. Past Research The study of Hadith Fazlur Rahman is a response to a prolonged controversy about the Sunnah and Hadith in Pakistan, and the situation of Western scholarship. Below is a brief overview of Western scholarship situation associated with the concept of Sunnah and Hadith. Ignaz Goldziher arguably the first Western scholar to conduct a critical study of hadith. In the work munomentalnya, Muhammadanische Studien (vol. 2, 1890), he argued that the phenomenon of Islamic tradition from the earliest times. However, because the content of tradition that continues to swell in the later period, and because dalamsetiap generation of Muslim hadith material running parallel to the doctrines of the flow of jurisprudence and theology that often collide with each other, then the judge Goldziher very difficult to find the original traditions from the Prophet [2]. Margoliouth in Early Development of Islam, argued that the Prophet Muhammad did not leave the Sunnah or Hadith, and that sunnnah practiced early Muslims did not constitute the Sunnah of the Prophet, but the habits of pre-Islamic Arabs that have been modified al-Qur ' an. Margoliuoth juka argues that in order to provide authority and normativity of these habits, the Muslims in the second century AH has developed kosep Sunnah and Hadith to create mechanisms to realize the concept. [3] H. Lammens, in his book Islam: Beliefs and Institutions, shows the same view with Margoliouth and stated briefly that the practice of Sunnah must have preceded the formulation in the hadith. [4] Joseph Schacht in his book The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, stated - as Margoliuth - that the concept of Sunnah Muslims are recent creations. According to the Sunnah reflects the traditional custom of the people who form the "living tradition" and "living tradition" that precedes the hadith (traditions of the Prophet), when tradition was first circulated - about ahead of the second Hijri century - he was not referred to the Prophet, but first to tabi'in, just at a later stage, referred to the Companions and the Prophet. [5] In her study of the Sunnah and Hadith, Rahman did confirm the findings or theories of Western scholars about it, but he did not agree with their theory that the concept is the creation of the Muslim Sunnah later. For Rahman, the concept of Sunnah is "the authentic concept and operative since the beginning of Islam and remained so throughout the period". [6] And from where Rahman's unique position among Western thinkers who have first conducted a study of hadith. Rahman is not a priori the existence hasanah tradition in Islamic thinking, but also do not blindly accept the official theory about the traditions and raw materials which are embodied in the hadith Ulumul version of the hadith scholars. And most importantly in Rahman's study of hadith is, how it offers pandekatan and new methods in understanding and operating the Muslim intellectual tradition in contemporary repertoire. 5. Theory Framework and Approach

Broadly speaking, according to Fazlur Rahman, the Sunnah of the Prophet is more appropriate if seen as a concept aegis (a general umbrella concept) rather than that he has a special content that is absolutely specific. The reason is that theoretically can be inferred directly from the fact that the sunnah is a terms of behavior (behavioral terms), because in practice no two cases are exactly the same background situasionalnya moral, psychological and material, then the Sunnah should be can be interpreted and adapted. Sunnah is so firmly Rahman, an indication of the direction (pointer in the direction) of the series of regulations that have been determined with certainty (an exactly laid-out series of rulers). [7] Based on that assumption, Rahman introduced his theory of situational interpretation of the hadith. He asserted that the needs of Muslims today are revalued on a variety of elements in the hadith and the reinterpretation of tradition perfectly in accordance with the conditions of moral-social that has changed in the present. This can only be done through a historical approach in the study of hadith, which returns the hadith to be "living sunnah," and to distinguish clearly the real values of the background contains situasionalnya. [8] Situational interpretation, according to Rahman, will explain that some religious doctrine should be modified and reaffirmed, as the problem of determinism and free-will (intentionfree) human being is reflected in the traditions. These traditions must be interpreted according to its historical perspective and functions according to the proper historical context. The same situational interpretation, according to Rahman, also be made to the legal traditions. These traditions, so should be viewed as a problem that must be revisited (a problem to be retreated) and not seen as a ready-made laws which can be directly used (a ready-made law). [9] Historical approach in the "interpretation of situational" style Fazlur Rahman suggested the existence of several strategic steps. First, understand the meaning of the text of the Prophet and then understand the background situasionalnya, namely the Prophet and the public regarding the situation in the period of the prophets in general (al-wurud asbab macro), including here also the causes of the emergence of Hadith (al-wurud asbab micro). In addition also understand the instructions of the Qur'an that are relevant. This is important, because Rahman's view that a reliable kreterium appraisers for the authenticity of the hadith is the meaning of two things, namely history and the Koran. From this step can be understood and differentiated values of real or legal target (ratio legislators) of specific legal provisions, and thus can be formulated the principle of the moral idea of the hadith. The next step is to re-growth law, namely the idea of moral principles derived are applied and adapted in today's sociological background. This is what Rahman meant by "melting" hadith to be "living sunnah".Thus, the interpretation of situational Rahman combines a historical approach to the sociological approach. Examples of methodological approach to historical operations in the study of Hadith Fazlur Rahman offered can be found in his account of usury in his book Islamic Methodology in History, as follows: Al-Quran ... to explain the real reason behind the prohibition of usury by saying that usury can not be defined as a commercial transaction because it is a process by which capital multiplied improperly. Historical Hadith confirm this by informing us behwa usury, in fact, is the practice of pre-Islamic Arabs. But we have seen the moral firmness with which the legal opinion has incorporated a variety of activities within the definition of usury by formulating a general principle that "every loan that gives keutungan to the lender is riba". In the same vein said that usury is exclusively applicable to foodstuffs, gold, and silver, and shall not apply to other things. This explicitly implies that, for example, a number of cotton may be loaned with the agreement that six months later he had returned in greater numbers in harmony with the

will of creditors.This sort of thing, of course, contrary to the general principle just quoted. Overall this development which would indicate that the rigidly formulated is a progressive interpretation of the moral prohibition against the Koran. Of course we can not accept the interpretation that the specific moral-legal in all circumstances and conditions. Further, the interest banks today are legally covered by the definition of trafficking is difficult to deny. Economists and monetary policies alone can determine whether an interest-free banks can function or not. If it works, thank goodness. But if not, then assert that the (system) commercial banking today - denagn a very controlled economy included in the ban on the Qur'an and Sunnah did not show honesty to history and religion but shows humans the acute crisis of confidence and cynicism uncompromising. [10] In the example above hadith interpretation, see Rahman looked legal traditions on usury as the formulation of the Muslims later, although he did not directly refer to these traditions. On the other hand, it appears that situational interpretation of the legal traditions - which of course is regarded by him as a creative interpretation of the early Muslims towards the Prophet's sunnah ideal - based on historical traditions and moral norms of the Koran, with careful attention to conditions kesejarahannya: "Only to understand the background that consists of the things that have been known for certain about the Prophet and the People of the initial (in addition to al-Qur'an), we can menafirkan legal traditions (technical) ". [11] 6. Scope and Research Key Terms Fazlur Rahman's study of this scope is a tradition that began its study of the concepts of Sunnah in the early history of Islam until the formalization of tradition, and offers a historical approach in the study. Then the keywords used by Fazlur Rahman, among others: the living Sunna (sunna living), the moral idea (ratio legislators), and specific legal. 7. Contributions in Islamic Sciences Hadith Fazlur Rahman's study provides some contribution to the development of Islamic thought, among other things: First, provide new knowledge about the methods of criticism of the tradition that had been dominated by the critical method manhaj sanad be most valid for assessing the authenticity of hadith.Second, provide an alternative way of methodological rigidity of Islamic thought, especially the Islamic legal thought during this mensandarkan ourselves on building a flavorful methodological scholars madhhab formalistic, scripturalistic and atomistic. Third, the whole edifice of thought Rahman, particularly associated with the thinking of the sources of Shari'ah, (al-Qur'an and Sunnah), is a significant contribution to reconstruct the methods istinbath making it more feasible to challenge the era. 8. Logic of Writing and Systematic Fazlur Rahman started writing his Hadith studies in the work of a very monumental, Islamic Methodology in History, by describing briefly the intellectual anxiety about the real condition of Muslims is bound by the closed doors of ijtihad. Similar exposure more adequately author Rahman get in other books, for example, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Furthermore, Rahman describes the historical evolution of tradition from the early development in the Prophet's hadith, then comes the 'sunnah who live' until the time of tadwin (Rahman Language: formasilisasi hadith). As tradition has not been formalized in the second century AH, treasures of Islamic thought has developed dynamically by applying the main pillars of Islamic thought, namely the Qur'an, sunnah, ijtihad, and ijma ', however, Rahman once wrote, when Muslims entered formalization era tradition (there was a shift from the Sunnah to the hadith), which happens is that the closed meetings of intellectual exercise to actualize the Sunnah of the Prophet in a fair and proportionate. In the end, Rahman offers a methodology in the study of hadith hadith to return back into the

living Sunnah (sunnah living) through a historical approach that combined with the sociological approach. In this discussion, Rahman also show some examples of traditions that later he analysis based on the method and approach that he had offered earlier. From this it can be seen consistency Rahman thinking about the tradition, both in the realm of ontology, epistemology, and axiology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fazlur Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History, Karachi: Central Institute of Islamic Research, 1965 ____________, Islam, trans. Ahsin Muhammad, New York; Library, 1984 ____________, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982 Ignaz Golziher, Muslim Studies, trans. C.R. Barber and S.M. Stern, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971 Josept Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, London: Oxfort at The Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 2-58, 80-189 Taufik Adnan Amal, Islam and the Challenges of Modernity: On the Study of Law thought Fazlur Rahman, Jakarta: Mizan, 1994

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Fazlur Rahman: A Chronological Picture MARCH 15, 2011

Fazlur Rahman, like Augustine and Anselm, began his quest for understanding from belief. Just as Augustine declared that faith seeks understanding and Anselm added to the formula with I believe in order to understand, so also in Fazlur Rahmans work one discerns an approach to thought that is based on prior conviction about first principles that are rooted in faith. More than faith in the usual sense of something believed, his commitment was a matter of will and moral vision. Frederick Denny, Fazlur Rahman: Muslim Intellectual. Muslim World (1989). FAZLUR RAHMAN: A CHRONOLOGICAL PICTURE 21 September 1919Born in the Hazara district of British India 1940B.A. Honors in Arabic, Punjab University, Lahore

1942M.A. in Arabic, Punjab University, Lahore 1943-46Research student, Punjab University, Lahore 1946-1949Oxford University 1949D. Phil. Oxford University 1950-1958Lecturer in Persian Studies and Islamic Philosophy, Durham University, England 1952Publication of Avicennas Psychology 1958Publication of Prophecy in Islam 1958-1961Associate Professor, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada 1959Publication of Avicennas De Anima 1961-1962Visiting Professor, Central Institute of Islamic Research, Karachi, Pakistan 1962-1968Director, Central Institute of Islamic Research 1965Publication of Islamic Methodology in History 1967Publication of Islam 1968Publication of Letters of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi; Italian translation of Islam 1969Visiting Professor, Spring Term, University of California, Los Angeles 1969-1988Professor of Islamic Thought, University of Chicago 1975Publication of Philosophy of Mulla Sadra 1979Publication of Major Themes of the Quran 1982Publication of Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition 1983Awarded the prestigious Giorgio Levi Della Vida prize 1987Publication of Health and Medicine in Islamic Tradition 1988: Died in Chicago 1998: The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman, edited by Frederick M. Denny 1999: Publication of Fazlur Rahmans manuscript, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism, edited by Professor Ebrahim Moosa. 2003: Donald L. Berry, Islam and Modernity through the Eyes of Islamic Modernist Fazlur Rahman 2009: Navin G. Haider Ali, Dr. Fazlur Rahman: An Islamic Modernist With a Difference (1919-1988)

In his writings on ethics and morals, Fazlur Rahman was acutely aware that changes in social values were informed by history, human experience, and altering human subjectivities. It is now up to those who value and appreciate his scholarship to sustain that critical intellectual arch of scholarship he advanced, an agenda that he immensely admired and favored. Ebrahim Moosa, Foreword, Major Themes of the Quran.

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