Reappraisal

Abstract

Modern discussions about the place of hadith reopen many of the issues that were debated in the third-century uṣūl controversies, revisiting basic questions about how the authority of the Prophet is mediated. The nineteenth-century Ahl-i Ḥadīth approached the hadith as a powerful tool for critique and purification of Islam and for a radical challenge to the fiqh tradition, holding that Prophetic authority must be appropriated by direct application of hadith and laying the ground for modern Salafism. By the beginning of the twentieth century, modernists and Qurʾanists had begun to turn anti-taqlīd arguments against the hadith literature itself, arguing that the Qurʾan is the Prophet's sole legacy and a fully sufficient guide for Muslim practice. Thus for a small minority of modern Muslims engagement with hadith became entirely destructive, aimed only at demonstrating its unreliability and undermining its authority. Between these extremes, a variety of middle-ground strategies emerged seeking varying degrees of freedom to critique, reassess, and reinterpret the role of hadith. Many reformist approaches to hadith marginalize the hadith in practice, explicitly subordinating it to the Qurʾan. Consequently actual discussions of legal reform are often strikingly hadith free.