Reviving the Balance The Authority of the Qur’an and the Status of the Sunnah

Description

Reviving the Balance: The Authority of the Qur’an and the Status of the Sunnah studies the position of the Sunnah in Islam and its fun damental relationship to the Qur’an. Taking the praiseworthy intention and effort to emulate the Prophet into account the work examines the sensitive issue of the development of the oral and written traditions, the problems scholars faced despite painstaking work verifying the authen city of reports, the character of narrators, etc. and the ever growing complexity of a body of narratives that were making the simplicity and clarity of the Prophet’s life, words, and actions, a burgeoning maze of information. The author makes the case that once the Sunnah had been collected, the Muslim community began to neglect the Qur’an in favor of narrations of what the Prophet had done and said on the pretext that such narratives “contained the Qur’an, to eventually then abandon the Sunnah narratives in favor of Islamic jurisprudence on the pretext that Islamic juristic texts tacitly included both the Qur’an and the Sunnah.