Routledge Handbook of Religious Laws

Abstract

While the classical jurisprudence (fiqh) of Islamic law speaks of 'four sources' to the Sharīʿa, there are actually only two that refer directly to divine revelation: the Qurʾān which was revealed to the prophet Muḥammad, and the Prophet's statements and acts, his sunna, collected and transmitted in a body of normative stories and anecdotes called the ḥadīth, or 'Prophetic traditions' (Kamali, 1991: 14-228; Vikør, 2005: 31-88). The Prophet had no supernatural attributes according to standard theology (the Sufī mystics would disagree), so there is an issue why his statements beyond those that transmit the Qurʾān also represent a divine revelation. One explanation is to claim that the Prophet, being the exemplary human, is infallible: he cannot say anything that is not correct. However, most views of the Prophet would restrict his attribute to being free of sin (maʿṣūm), which preserves him from a conscious lie but not from being honestly mistaken. Many ḥadīth stress his human side, providing statements of the type, 'when I speak as a Prophet, you must follow my example, but I have my own likes and dislikes as a man, and you need not follow me in that' (Muslim, 'Ṣaid', 7). Clearly, such stories are responses to claims that everything the Prophet said and did was indeed normative and represented divine will. A more pragmatic explanation is that divine revelation was continuous throughout the Prophet's life. So, if the Prophet had inadvertently made a mistake, God would correct him in a later revelation. In the absence of such a correction, the Prophet's statement must thus reflect God's will. However, neither the Qurʾān nor the ḥadīth are limpid sources but in contrasting ways. The text of the Qurʾān is not disputed by Muslims but is not always directly understandable, and only a small fraction of its verses refer to what may be