Where Do We Get Sunnah From?
In the living tradition (Amal) of Muslims we see ikhtilaaf on issues like. a) Multiple Umrah at Hajj b) Rafa Yaddain or not c) Application of Zakaat rates (2.5, 5 and 10%) not consistent w/ Ghamidi sb’s understanding d) Hijab or no-Hijab e) f) g) We then narrow-down this list of ikhtilafaats to the bare minimum and say only this is Sunnah becuase there is no ikhtilaaf on these issues and everything else (with multiple opinions) we exclude from the list. Is this narrowing-down (academic exercise) done to fit our definition of Sunnah? Because in living tradition of Muslims we see Ikhtilaaf So, then is Sunnah 100% unchanged or it is the definition we like to give to Sunnah (and everything else – the Sunnah list – is just a result of our made up definition of Sunnah – i.e. unchanged ). Also, living tradition has ikhtilaaf, so this necessarily then needs books by jurists or hadith to determine what all has been passed down (the subset) without any ikhtilaaf from generations to generations. So, what is then the source of Sunnah today ? a) Living tradition w/ Ikhtilaaf b) Books by Jurists and Hadith corpus w/ ikhtilaaf We don’t have a visual historical record of what has not been changed.
Ahmad Brother! It’s not like that. There have been many differences in interpretation of Quranic verses on the basis of linguistics. Ghamidi sb. has presented his principles of understanding the Quran, in which understanding of language from Quran itself is one source among many others.
Our traditional literature of Bible, Hadith, Fiqh etc.