This book gives a summary of the Muslim theory of the Prophet Muhammad’s authority, called Sunnah, as the second source of Islam. The book tries to incorporate the traditional Muslim understanding of the Prophetic Sunnah as laid down in the classical texts of usul al-fiqh and usul al-hadith, with a view to showing how the Muslims universalized his local, Medinan legacy. It argues that the classical Islamic thought overcame the authenticity challenge posed by the oral transmission of the Prophetic legacy through developing a rational theory of transmitted knowledge; this theory is based on the distinction between collective transmission and individual transmission, the latter being controlled by the general framework of the former. The book also attempts to develop an approach to how to read his Sunnah collected in the hadith compilations, with a special emphasis on his sayings regarding the contemporary ethical, political and social problems of our global village, such as woman, non-Muslims, ecology, democracy, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

İstanbul-Ankara: ISAM Publication & TDV Publications, 2006; (9th ed.) 2022

 

Click for generics page, contents and foreword.

 

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