From the Islam of the Qur’an to the Islam of Hadith

By employing the Khaldunian concept of renewed origin, meaning both rupture and continuity, this book sheds brilliant light on the process of reestablishing Qur’anic Islam into a Hadith Islam, paralleling the shift from the Islam of the message to the Islam of history, and from the Islam of “Umm al-Qura” to the Islam of conquests.
The danger lies not only in this shift in authority from the Qur’an to the Hadith, but also in the transformation of the person responsible for Islam into something resembling an automaton, acting only according to the texts that govern the affairs of his public and private life. With al-Shafi’i’s hypothesis that the Prophet only spoke from revelation, even when he did not utter the Qur’an, the Hadith attributed to the Prophet after his death were given the status of revelation. The scholars of Hadith and jurisprudence agreed that the Sunnah, like the Qur’an, was a divine, transcendent legislation. Like everything divine and transcendent, the Sunnah and its rulings were freed from the constraints of space and time. This condemned the Arab-Islamic mind to introspection and stagnancy in endless repetition. This also blocked his path to discovering the concept of evolution, the dialectic of progress, and the consequent changes in positive laws of human, not divine, origin. This ultimately established his opposition to modernity, which today threatens to turn into a regression toward a new Middle Ages.