Did any of the Muslims deny the authenticity of the Sunnah?!
Dr.. Ahmed Qushti Abdel Rahim
Reference has already been made to the importance of distinguishing between the authenticity of the Sunnah itself, in that it is words issued by the infallible one, may God bless him and grant him peace, that must be followed, and the method of transmitting and narrating it, which is represented in news and narrations from one generation to another, transmitted frequently or unilaterally, while acknowledging the depth of the correlation and the closeness of the connection between Both things.
However, not realizing the aforementioned difference led to some confusion and confusion among some of those who spoke about this issue. The validity of the Sunnah in itself is something agreed upon among all Muslims, and none of their sects disputed it. As for the narrations insofar as they are a way of transmitting the Sunnah, that is what happened. A long dispute, and it even reached the point of denying its authenticity altogether among sects of exaggerated sects.
Imam Al-Shafi’i reported that the scholars of his time agreed on the obligation to act upon the Sunnah and follow it, with the exception of an anomalous group whose statement was not paid attention to, denying that he had heard “anyone - whom people attributed or attributed himself to knowledge - disagreeing that God Almighty made it obligatory to follow the command of the Messenger of God, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him.” May God bless him and grant him peace, and submission to His rule... and that God’s obligation upon us and upon those after us to accept the news from the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace - is one and the same” ( [1] ) .
Ibn Hazm conveyed the consensus of Muslims regarding the expiation of disbelief whoever restricts himself to acting according to the Qur’an and denies the authenticity of the Sunnah, or believes that it is not necessary to act on what is in it, attributing this denial to some of the extremists of the Shiites ( [2] ) . In the same vein, Al-Suyuti’s text is in his book, which he wrote specifically to defend the Sunnah. However, “whoever denies that the hadith of the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, whether in word or action, with the condition known in the principles - is an argument; He disbelieved and left the circle of Islam” ( [3] ) .
A number of fundamentalists have also concluded that the authority of the Sunnah is a religious necessity, and an axiom of Islam, which does not need much prolongation in determining it ( [4] ) , and therefore they do not concern themselves in their books with determining its authority, relying on it being one of the necessities, and the discussion becomes about the authority of the book. The Sunnah is one of the topics of theology, not the science of principles. Because the disagreement over it is with those who deny Islam and those outside its circle, and not among Muslims themselves ( [5] ) .
At the level of theological sects, we find Ibn Taymiyyah exonerating the Mu’tazilites and all other sects from the charge of denying the authenticity of the Sunnah: “There is no one among the Mu’tazilites or other Muslims who says: I do not acknowledge what the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, told him. Rather, every Muslim says: What the Messenger told me is true.” A truth that must be believed, and all Muslims of the Sunnah and heresy say: I believe in God and in what came from the Messenger of God according to what the Messenger of God intended, so if he does not acknowledge this then he is an apparent disbeliever” ( [6] ) , even if he - may God have mercy on him - indicated that This amount alone is not enough to distinguish the doctrine of the Sunnis from others, just as the dispute did not occur in the authenticity of the Sunnah itself, but rather in the proof of its transmission and the meaning of its words. “If an innovator disputes with a Sunni, he does not dispute with him whether the Messenger believed everything he reported, but he disputes whether he informed the Messenger of that.” Or not? Is it true or not?
The story of this aforementioned agreement does not erase what has been attributed to the Kharijites in terms of denying the validity of the Sunnah, their limiting the source of legislation for rulings to the Qur’an only, and their denial of the punishment of stoning, wiping the socks, and similar things that have been proven by the Sunnah alone ( [8] ) ; Because this attribution did not include all of them, but rather was attributed to some of them, and we do not have anything from their writings through which we can verify the validity of this statement about them, then we should not forget their abnormal position towards the Companions and Followers and the ruling regarding them as infidels, and thus there is no trust in all that they narrated, and their denial becomes The authority of the Sunnah - if it is authentic - focuses on casting doubt on the narrations, not on the Sunnah itself.
The same is true of what Al-Khayyat ( [9] ) , Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi ( [10] ) , Ibn Hazm ( [11] ) and al-Suyuti ( [12] ) attributed to the Shiites. From denying the Sunnah and denying its validity, if we put aside the opinions of the extremists of the Shiites, who departed from Islam, and claimed that prophecy was due to Ali, may God be pleased with him ( [13] ) , but Gabriel, peace be upon him, made a mistake in sending it down to the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, and therefore it does not exist. For the Sunnis, because prophecy is not proven at all, the Shiites in their entirety acknowledge the existence of the Sunnah, its validity, and the necessity of following it, even if there is a vast difference between its meaning for them, and what they consider to be Sunnah, and what is like that for the Sunnis and the community, and for this reason they have unique books, narrations, and rules of interpretation and modification of their own. Which led to them denying many of the narrations of the Sunnis and weakening them, and relying on narrations attributed to their imams, which have no share of validity in the scale of Sunni criticism [14] .
Thus, it can be said - as has been stated by a group of contemporary researchers ( [15] ) - that all Muslims agree on the validity of the Sunnah, with the exception of deviant and deviant sects, who, according to investigation, are outside the religion of Islam, and there is no truth to what some orientalists claimed that all ancient schools of jurisprudence, In addition to the people of theology, they opposed the Sunnah and resisted it as a new element and an intruder in the field of their jurisprudence, until Al-Shafi’i came and struggled to demolish that idea ( [16] ) ; In fact, the opposite is true, as everyone acknowledges its validity and relies on it, even though in many cases this acknowledgment does not go beyond the level of theoretical acceptance.
As for application and reasoning, how much did the Sunnis suffer from those who expanded its hadiths in response to and weakened the slightest opposition, and narrowed the scope of their use, to the point that there was no longer the slightest benefit in saying that they were authoritative while denying the authenticity of the narrations in general and in detail, or proving only the mutawatir and rejecting everything else, and then restricting the mutawatir to A few hadiths that do not exceed the fingers of one hand, and in the end the authority of the Sunnah becomes the authority of this small number, and anything else has no value, and it cannot be the only one to legislate doctrinally or jurisprudentially?!
There is no doubt that the consensus on the authority of the Sunnah applies to the Mu’tazilites and Ash’aris, as it applies to all other Muslims, but we will try to single out each of the two schools for a moment, clarifying the reality of their view of the Sunnah, and the position it enjoyed within the intellectual framework of both schools of thought.
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([1]) Al-Shafi’i, “Jamaa’ al-Ilm,” pp. 7-9, edited by: Muhammad Ahmed Abdel Aziz.
([2]) See: Ibn Hazm, “Al-Ahkam fi Usul Al-Ahkam” (2/8).
([3]) Al-Suyuti: “The key to Paradise is based on the Sunnah,” pp. 13, 14.
([4]) See: Al-Shawkani, “Irshad Al-Fahul,” p. 29, Ibn Amir Al-Hajj, “Al-Taqreeb wa Al-Tabir” (2/225), Saad Al-Din Al-Taftazani, “Al-Talwih Ala Al-Tashreeh” (1/138, 139), and Dr. Abdel-Ghani Abdel-Khaleq. “The Authenticity of the Sunnah,” pp. 248, 249.
([5]) See: Abd al-Ali al-Ansari, “Fawatih al-Rahmut Sharh Muslim al-Thabut,” printed in the margin of “Al-Mustasfa” (1/17), and al-Zarkashi, “Al-Bahr al-Muhit” (4/442).
([6]) Ibn Taymiyyah, “Explanation of the Isfahani Creed,” p. 106, Modern Library Edition, Beirut.
[7] - Previous source, p. 106.
([8]) See: Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi, “Usul al-Din,” p. 19.
([9]) See: Al-Khayyat, “Al-Intisar,” p. 148.
([10]) See: Abdel Qaher, “Usul al-Din,” p. 19.
([11]) See: Ibn Hazm “Al-Ahkam” (2/208).
([12]) See: Al-Suyuti, “The Key to Paradise in Protesting the Sunnah,” p. 13.
([13]) See: Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi, “The Difference Between the Factions,” p. 269, Abu al-Muzaffar al-Isfarayini, “Insight into Religion,” p. 74, 75, al-Shahrastani, “Al-Milal wal-Nihal” (1/175), and Ibn Hazm, “Al-Fasl” (5/ 42), and Ihsan Elahi Zaheer, “Shiites and Shiism... Sects and History,” p. 200.
[14] - See Ahmed Qushti: The conflict between the Akhbaris and the fundamentalists within the Twelver Shiite sect, its origins and dimensions, p. 76.
([15]) See: Dr. Muhammad Muhammad Abu Shahba, “Defending the Sunnah,” p. 13, Dr. Raouf Shalabi, “The Islamic Sunnah between proving the understanding and rejecting the ignorant,” p. 37, Salem al-Bahnasawy, “The Slandered Sunnah,” p. 25, and Abd al-Mu’tal al-Jabri. “The Authenticity of the Sunnah,” p. 34, and Dr. Abdul-Ghani Abdul Khaleq, “The Authenticity of the Sunnah,” pp. 245-272.
([16]) See:J.Schacht: The Origins Of Muhammadan Jurisprudence p.57. Oxford 1979.
See: Discussing his words and responding to them in detail by Dr. Sassi Salem Al-Hajj, “The Orientalist Phenomenon and Its Impact on Islamic Studies” (2/524), Center for Islamic World Studies (1991 AD), and Ahmed Qushti: The position of the modernist trend towards Imam Al-Shafi’i, presentation and criticism, p. 90.
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