It is well-known that the traditions (hadith) going back to - or ascribed to - the Prophet Muhammad were not only of paramount importance for the development of Islamic law but also for the unfolding of Muslim piety in many fields. Islam as a world religion is not conceivable without the normative role model of its founding figure, and a large number of controversies in the Muslim world and beyond in recent years bear witness that this statement is valid until this very day. Nevertheless, Muslim attitude towards the hadith has always been far from unanimous, both within Sunnism and with regard to the clashes between Sunnites and Shiites. The present paper will focus on some recent controversies in the Sunnite (mostly Egyptian) public sphere which reveal two main features. On the one hand, there is the continuation, often with sectarian undertones, of more or less traditional conflicts over the status of certain figures of early Islam. This was the case in a heated confrontation in the Egyptian press in 2006/07 which was only ended after the then rector of al-Azhar University, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, issued a fatwa to the effect that the veneration of all companions of the Prophet constituted the sixth pillar of Islamic faith. On the other hand, there are the activities of a number of religious intellectuals directed against the scholarly establishment of the 'ulama' and their power to interpret the legacy of the Prophet and to make it obligatory for the believers. Some radical protagonists - such as the so-called Quranists centered around the former Azhar scholar Ahmad Subhi Mansur, or the Lebanese author Zakariya Uzun - go so far as to completely do away with the authority of the hadith and to concentrate on the Quran instead as the sole guideline for Muslim individual and social life. Others, like the Egyptian Jamal al-Banna or the Syrian Muhammad Shahrur, call for a far-reaching revision of the traditions and their restriction to matters of ritual and piety. By doing so, they primarily aim at driving back the 'ulama's influence over contemporary society, but also at promoting an understanding of religion that puts more emphasis on the individual responsibility of the believer. As such, these controversies are an integral part of the larger conflict between traditional scholarship and modernist intellectualism which has been a hallmark of Islamic reformism throughout the 20th century.

Islamic reformism in the eighteenth century has received increased scholarly attention in recent years. Much of this attention has focused on the role of ijtihad in eighteenth-century reformist thought and concurrent debates about taqlid. A predominant trend in this scholarship is the search for connections—in particular student-teacher connections—linking scholars in a common reformist chain. Such a view has been criticized for over-emphasizing student-teacher relationships as well as focusing too narrowly on scholars tied to the network of ulama in the Hijaz. These criticisms, however, do not address many similarities shared between reformist scholars who are otherwise unconnected. I propose in my paper to analyze closely the views on ijtihad of three eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reformist scholars from three separate cultural and scholarly environments: the Indian Hanafi Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi (1703-1762), the Inner Asian Hanafi Abu Nasr Qursawi (1776-1812), and the Yemeni Zaydi Muhammad b. ‘Ali Shawkani (1759-1834). Each of these scholars took a critical stance towards the conventional construction of madhhab authority and promoted original legal interpretation of scripture. The details of the each scholar’s stance, however, differ significantly, as does how they conceived of ijtihad and how it should be carried out. I will analyze and compare the three views in light of their respective socio-historical contexts and current debates on eighteenth-century reformism and legal reasoning. It is my hypothesis that while the differences between their respective stances can be attributed to different particular legal traditions—for instance, differing views towards uses of hadith among Indian Hanafis versus Central Asia Hanafis or Yemen Zaydis—the similarities can be traced to broader trends within the history of the Islamic scholarly tradition. In particular, I would argue that the understanding of madhhab authority and its construction that was predominant in the late post-classical period led to the articulation of a certain a reformist inclination that focused on the renewed exercise of ijtihad as a religious necessity. The reliance on established legal doctrines within the madhhabs—including Zaydism—contributed to a backlash against the strictures of madhhab authority by reform-minded scholars. Though the precise formulation of this critique varied in different contexts and from reformer to reformer, its impetus was the established methods of legal reasoning in the late post-classical madhhab.

The late 19th century was a moment of unprecedented polemical activity in Muslim South Asia. Marked by immense political and moral uncertainty, the colonial period in South Asian Islam generated an unprecedented degree of intellectual fermentation on the part of Muslim scholars ('ulama). In responding to the political catastrophe of the demise of the Mughal Empire and the ensuing new conditions of colonialism, Indian Muslim scholars mobilized the canonical tradition of Islamic law in novel ways. But the fundamental question of how one should engage the historical legacy of norms and values in Islamic law with the new conditions of colonialism remained a subject of tremendous controversy. Rival factions of the Muslim learned elite participated in a fury of contestation, often leading to pronouncements of blasphemy and unbelief against one another. These ideological battles were animated by a fundamental ethical question that has captured the imagination of Muslim thinkers for several centuries: what are the limits of innovation (bid‘a) to the normative model of the Prophet? Bid‘a (heretical innovation) refers to new practices that oppose the prophetic norm. But what are those practices, how should that be decided, and who has the authority to make that decision are unsettled questions that continue to haunt South Asian Muslims even today. In this paper, I examine a polemical moment that centered on precisely these questions, a polemic that began in colonial India but one that continues to inspire bitter debates and disputes among South Asian Muslims even today. The players who participated in this polemic were the pioneers of two major Sunni reform movements/ideological orientations in South Asia; the Deobandis and the Barelvis. The Deobandis and Barelvis were among the most prominent Sunni Hanafi scholars in colonial India. At the heart of their polemic was the following question: how should a community honor the Prophet’s memory and normative example in modernity? More specifically, they mobilized competing interpretations of Hanafi law to debate the legitimacy of popular practices such as the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid), the transmission of blessings to the deceased by distributing food (isal-i sawab) to the community, and others. Conceptually, this paper interrogates the relationship between law, theology, and everyday practice as presented in rival Muslim legal discourses in colonial India. I argue that the Barelvi-Deobandi polemic was animated by competing theological imaginaries each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.

This paper examines how the 19th-century Damascene jurist Ibn 'Abidin is a key figure for studying the development of the Hanafi school from the medieval to early modern periods, not only because he revised persistent doctrines within the Hanafi school, but also because he brought the concept of ‘urf (customary practice) to the core of legal reasoning. Western scholarship on Ibn 'Abidin tends to view his contribution as lying outside of the juristic hierarchy and authority of the Hanafi school, if not as a rejection of the school’s authoritative structures. I demonstrate that Ibn 'Abidin never rejected the authoritative hierarchy of the school, but rather he acted in the name of its authority to justify departure from established opinions or admission of new rulings within its realm. I argue that to understand Ibn 'Abidin’s contribution is to acknowledge that the process of change within a legal school is intrinsic to its existence and a constitutive feature of its structure. I explore the doctrinal changes induced by internal mechanisms of the Hanafi legal school by focusing on two issues in the work of Ibn 'Abidin: (1) duress in contracts and (2) abstraction (ghasb) of property. Based on the legal devices of necessity (darura) and change in time and situation (ikhtilaf 'asr wa zaman), Ibn 'Abidin argues for a fundamental change in key Hanafi doctrines on duress and abstraction, transforming the medieval opinion of the school by calling on its eponym and founders. He contends – invoking the authority of Abu Hanifa who, “were [he] here, [he] would say the same [on this issue]” (Ibn 'Abidin, Majmu'at Rasa'il, 44) – that anyone, and not just a sultan, is capable of exercising coercion, and he shifts the opinion of the Hanafi school to accept the legal concept of abstraction of immovable property. Most importantly, Ibn 'Abidin negotiates the system of authoritative opinions of the school by introducing exceptions and invoking the general need of the public. This revision of key doctrines through the invocation of the very authorities Ibn 'Abidin seeks to protect has ramifications for the codification of Hanafi school in the 19th century that, I assert, extend to the codification of the Hanafi jurisprudence in the Mecelle, and is evident in his son’s participation on the Mecelle supervising committee.