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Rejection Of Incorrect Tawatur Actions To Islam
What bases and sources do we refer to in order to reject actiosn such as azan in infants ear and beard? Is it hadith? How do we know that some actions in our salah werent actually based on weak reports and then the reports were lost etc but the action remained. For example, if we did not have the hadith to analyse on beard and azan in the ear of an infant would we accept these practices as sunnah given from the prophet SAWS?
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20 Replies
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Rejection Of Incorrect Tawatur Actions To Islam
updated 4 years, 3 months ago
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20
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We trace the tawatur in the Muslim history and see where it is beginning from. It is only accepted or called ‘sunnah’ if it’s coming from the prophet(SAW).
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But the sunnah and Quran we have today are independent sources not reliant on any tracing back in history. The reason we know they are transmitted from generation to generation is because that is also the way they are transmitted today. The original question still stands
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Where do we find sunnah? It’s in fiqh books. The scholars note what is the common practise of the Muslims of that time/ijma.
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I think if you search on this forum principles of sunnah you will find that we have a different opinion. The common practise is the sunnah and the fiqh is just a record thereof. The difference is the fiqh is not always correlating to the sunnah as some Hadith take prevalence over the living tradition. The sunnah came the same way as the Quran- it was not by a record or written manuscript but part of the Muslim ummahs living tradition
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I understand what you are saying and I do believe sunnah to the common practice. However the written record of sunnah is in fiqh book(not fiqha itself) as explained by Ghamidi and not in Hadith. When there’s a dispute in what is sunnah or not, that is how we resolve the matter.
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And my question is about the time when a dispute arises. There can be a few possibilities:
Eg beard- the Hadith had a context and it is rejected
Eg number of rakah it is in the living tradition
But:
There could be an action that has the name of religion on it eg growing a beard which was based on a khabr wahid. But this khabr wahid has not reached us. So it is an erroneous attribution but we have no way to check if it is correct or not. If an adulteration can occur with Hadith why can’t it occur without?
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To further clarify the question:
Take any action for which we don’t find reasoning in Quran eg method of prostration.
How do we know this method is not actually based on some Hadith (try and view this in a vacuum as I know about the seven bones thing) and then this hadith has not been transmitted to us.
If the Hadith about beard was not here and the practice came to us from a perspective that it is the command of the prophet ﴾ﷺ﴿ the same way we don’t try to find logic for method of sajda or Ruku we would have to concede that beard is a part of the sunnah.
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The definition of Tawatur is that a large number of people pass on a thing. The number is so large that it is impossible to say all of them misunderstood something or made a mistake in transmission. In Hadith, one person is reporting something where as in tawatur thousands are transmitting.
With the example of beard, we need to see even if there is a tawatur, when did it begin and is it transmitted as a religious commandment.
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Well there is definitely a tawatur- most of the ummah is and probably has believed it was a fard.
We don’t check to see where the ahkaam for sajda started.
They believe it was a religious transmission.
I am asking if we didn’t have the Hadith which started it how could we criticise this practise as being out of context.
Why is it not possible that:
The ahkaam for sajda we’re actually based on khabr wahid and it was just not transmitted all the way to us- and the khabr wahid was also misunderstood
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The Hadith talk about sunnah just like they talk about the Quran. It is clear from the Hadith that beard is not explained as a sunnah.
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Yes perfect.
But why couldn’t there be any actions that were actually founded In a hadith- misinterpreted like the beard narrative and then transmitted to us? Without the actual Hadith coming but the practice has come
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I think you are confusing ijma and tawatur.
Ijma is the consensus of scholars on a particular issue.
If there’s an ijma of scholars on an interpretation of a Hadith or a Quran verse and we see that their interpretation is not correct, we don’t have to accept that because we have the actual source and we can understand for ourselves what it says.
Tawatur is transmission through generations the religious practises etc.
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Ok.
There has been an ijma that beard is fard. It has come through tawatur.
This is the same way as sajda.
Now if there was no Hadith that we could analyse and reject the status of this command and we only had the ijma and tawatur of this practise could we still reject it?
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No. There is no ijma on that. Some scholars say it is fard, some say it’s sunnah and some say it’s wajib.
I don’t think we can reject anything that has an ijma of Sahaba and has tawatur. Even a Hadith that goes against it cannot be accepted. We analyse that where the Tawatur starts from. If it’s coming from the Sahaba, it cannot be challenged because they are transmitting it from the prophet(SAW).
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How do we see where this transmission starts from? It’s a quite difficult task to see where something started from
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It indeed is. We trace it from our times to all the way back to the times of the sahaba. That’s what Ghamidi sab. has done.
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Like I said before, tracing it in the books of fiqh. The ullema write in their books what the practise of the general muslims is in their times. It’s called ‘ilm ul aama’
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I just wanted to still ask as I don’t really understand.
I don’t really want to get into an example because it might not be perfect.
Muslims have ijma on practise x and it is transmitted by tawatur.
In truth this practice was a misinterpretation of an inauthentic source. But it still managed to obtain ijma and tawatur status.
The inauthentic source has not
Doesn’t this mean that the sunnah is not Qatai in that sense because we have to pour ice history books to prove a certain practise’s authenticity or inauthenticity .
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We can surely find out when in history that ijma took place. It has no importance if it’s not coming from the Sahaba and the source of that ijma is unknown. According to Ghamidi sab every bidah could be traced in history and we can easily say when it started.
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Take Quran for example, it is transmitted through ijma and quoli tawatur, but when you’ve to look for Quran yourself, where do you find that ijma and tawatur? in the book named Quran where all of that ijma and tawatur has been incorporated but that doesn’t mean that ijma and tawatur doesn’t exist. Now take Sunnah, the same ijma and tawatur is present, but at the same time it is incorporated in fiqh books from generation after generation. Nothing in this negates the ijma and tawatur, but since fiqh has the ability to add or remove certain actions among followers of that particular fiqh, those actions sometimes can be misconstrued as an original Sunnah but we can always revert back to original ijma and tawatur through time line of fiqh and their books. Practically speaking, you can always verify current ijma that is within the current ilm of Ummah, but how are you going to verify at an academic level whether this current ijma has been passed on through previous generations or not, it is through these fiqh books only, otherwise from an academic standpoint, there is no other way to verify or trace it back to the point of initiation.
(I have used Quran’s analogy to help in the understanding of how Ijma and tawatur takes the form of hard book, otherwise there are still differences in the very nature of Quran (Words) & Sunnah (Actions) which makes the tracing back procedure very different for both of these).
Take Beard for example, when you trace back, you find ijma and tawatur on existence of beard but there has never been ijma on its status as a religion. All the fiqh claiming it to be religion has been doing so as an independent interpretation within domain of fiqh and not within domain of that ijma. Take eating with right hand for example, there has never been any disagreement among any jurists in its status as a religion through ijma and tawatur. Take azan in the newborn’s ear for example, it did appear that there was some kind of Ijma in the current ilm of Muslims but when it was traced back, it lacked that very ijma.
This is to the best of my understanding but keep following response to 23 questions series, Insh’Allah this topic will be discussed at length in the coming sessions.
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