The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

sunna

“Sunna” is a term of pre-Islamic origin for established custom, the approved practice handed down from the past. In Islam, sunna came to mean the practice of the Prophet, whose example all Muslims should follow: in effect, Islamic law. Initially, the Prophet’s sunna was not sharply distinguished from that of his Companions and other righteous figures of the past, who were assumed to have acted as he did or in his spirit when they had innovated. The righteous figures in question seem to have included the caliphs, regarded as sources of sunna by virtue of their office, but their role had been rejected by 750, when the Umayyads were replaced by the Abbasids. Initially, the sunna was inferred from Qur’anic rulings (on the assumption that the Prophet and other moral exemplars had followed them); from the behavior of upright people; and from short reports, known as hadiths, recording their words or acts on a particular occasion. Such reports began to proliferate in the course of the first Islamic (hijrī) century, with reports from the Companions predominating. Their validity as sources for Islamic law was disputed. Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafi‘i (d. 820) is usually held to have been the first major proponent of the belief that “sunna” meant the sunna of the Prophet as documented in the hadith alone, with reports about the Companions as a subsidiary source. This eventually came to be generally accepted. In the course of the century after Shafi‘i’s death, the reports from which the Prophet’s sunna was known, by then circulating in very large numbers, were sifted and tested for authenticity on the basis of the chain of transmitters attached to them, and several collections of those deemed authentic were made from the mid-ninth century onward. Six of these became canonical. In principle, Islamic law is based on both the Qur’an and hadith, but in practice the hadith was by far the more important source. Though the word “sunna” came invariably to conjure up that of the Prophet, it also continued to be used in its old sense of established practice without reference to any particular authority, as when a particular practice was deemed to have “become sunna.”

The concept of sunna as the practice of the Prophet documented in the hadith is fundamental to Sunnism. It concentrated all religious authority in one man in the past and effectively ruled out that supreme religious authority could ever be acquired by anyone in the present. Muhammad did have such authority, but only because his knowledge was of divine origin, and as the seal of the Prophet he was the last recipient of revelation. After his death, his message was preserved in the Qur’an and hadith, which were, and are, accessible to everyone. Religious authority rested on mastery of these two sources and associated disciplines, achieved in varying degrees by the scholars, who were in principle just learned laymen and who often disagreed. In practice, the scholars did come to be institutionally separate from the laity in the course of time, and something in the nature of a religious hierarchy also emerged. But though some scholars were more authoritative than others, no one person or body was empowered to sit in final judgment of what was or was not Islamic law and doctrine. Determining and interpreting the will of God was a cumulative endeavor fraught with uncertainty, and the only final arbiter was consensus (ijmā‘), an entirely informal and retrospective mechanism consisting in the observation that the community had in practice acted in accordance with a particular rule for so long that the rule in question must count as vindicated. The Prophet is on record as having said that “my community will not agree on an error,” and the ultimate arbiter of what did or did not count as Islamic was in fact the community. There could be no equivalent of papal authority in Sunni Islam and also no “Caesaropapism.” This is still the case. Accordingly, Sunni Islam cannot quickly be made to turn around or change direction, nor does it have the vulnerability of communities dependent on a leadership defined by special descent, status, or office.

It is above all in its concept of religious authority that Sunni Islam differs from Shi‘ism. Like all Muslims, Shi‘is accept the sunna of the Prophet as authoritative, but they see their imams as continuing it as authorities in their own right, not just as mere transmitters of the hadith documenting the sunna. To Shi‘is, the divine guidance mediated through a human being (prophet or imam) could never be cut off. The Imamis eventually ruled that the Twelfth Imam had gone into occultation in 874, so that to them as to the Sunnis, religious authority came to rest on fallible scholarly learning, but by then they had developed a different corpus of the hadith and a different law. Both the Zaydis and the Isma‘ilis continued to concentrate religious authority in imams in the here and now, with the proviso that there might be periods without such imams (or without such imams in the open) in between.

Even within Sunnism the classical concept of sunna was never unchallenged. Sufis claimed religious authority as saints endowed with supernatural powers rather than book learning, the value of which they sometimes rejected altogether. Scholars, too, might claim to be saints or, more drastically, to be the messiah (Mahdi), thereby endowing themselves with supreme authority that was not normally available. In modern times the very concept of the Prophet’s sunna has become an object of debate, with much discussion of the authenticity of the hadith and even outright rejection of it in favor of exclusive reliance on the Qur’an. Some of the most influential thinkers in modern times have been laymen without scholarly training. But the classical distribution of religious authority still prevails.