Abstract
Muslims commonly refer to the beginning of Islam as the golden era of their religion, both in terms of piety and preeminence. This period comprised the career of the Prophet Muhammad and the subsequent first four leaders of the Islamic community, known as the “rightly guided caliphs.” According to Islamic Tradition, the Qur’ān was put into writing during this period, which is also the nascent stage in the transmission of the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his companions, transmitted by generations of Muslims and still considered authoritative today. To many Muslims, the period of the Prophet and the first four caliphs is normative and, therefore, the most important part of their history. The primary source of information for Muslims is the Qur’ān, immediately followed by the sunna of the Prophet, that includes his deeds, sayings, and tacit approval, preserved by consecutive generations of Muslims. How did the concept of sunna develop within the formative period of Islam? Was it derived from the exemplary behavior of the Prophet or is it a mixture of different manifestations of sunna, for example, the living tradition of the Muslim community, the exemplary behavior of the companions of the Prophet, or caliphs with the pre-Islamic concept of sunna?
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I would like to thank Adam Walker for his careful revision of the English text and for his valuable suggestions to improve this chapter. Any inaccuracy or mistake is, of course, my fault.
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Notes
Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58.
Yasin Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law: The Qur’ān, the Muwatta’ and Madinan ‘Amal (Richmond: Curzon, 1999), 164–165.
David S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of Mohammedanism: Lectures delivered in the University of London May and June 1913 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1914).
Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1979), 58.
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Meïr M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam: Studies in Ancient Arab Concepts (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), 155, 160, 164, and 165–166.
See Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, “The Kitāb al-Maghāzī of Abd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-San’ānī: Searching for Earlier Source-Material,” in Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki, eds. Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Kees Versteegh, and Joas Wagemakers (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 29–30.
See particularly Maher Jarrar, Die Prophetenbiographie im islamischen Spanien: Ein Beitrag zur Überlieferungs- und Redaktionsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 28–29.
Rizwi Faizer and Andrew Rippin, Introduction to The Life of Muhammad: Al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī, ed. Rizwi Faizer (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), xv;
Alfred Guillaume, Introduction to The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), xvii.
Franz Rosenthal, General introduction to The History of al-Tabarī: Volume I: General Introduction and From the Creation to the Flood (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 132–133;
Elsaid M. Badawi and Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur’anic Usage (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), 460;
The translation of the terms al-atīra and al-rajabi-yya are based on the information found in W Montgomery Watt and M. V McDonald, trans., The History of al-Tabarī: Volume VI: Muhammad at Mecca (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 40 footnote 53.
See my discussion of these traditions in Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, “The Raid of the Hudhayl: Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri’s Version of the Event,” in Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghazi Hadith, eds. Harald Motzki with Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, and Sean Anthony (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2010).
The translation is from G. Rex Smith, trans., The History of al-Tabarī: Volume XIV: The Conquest of Iran (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 51.
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© 2015 Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort
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der Voort, N.Bv. (2015). The Concept of sunna Based on the Analysis of sīra and Historical Works from the First Three Centuries of Islam. In: Duderija, A. (eds) The Sunna and its Status in Islamic Law. Palgrave Series in Islamic Theology, Law, and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369925_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369925_2
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