Expressions in the Qur’an and Sunnah

Expressions in the Qur’an and Sunnah

by: Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford
Expressions in the Qur’an and in the sayings of the Prophet should not be isolated from their whole context. Doing that means that their general purpose is obscured. In the later period of Islam, jurists, as well as theologians and Sufis, did this in order to extract what they wanted to extract from the texts so as to meet their need to authorize a ruling or a doctrine or a form of devotion.

Here is a simple example: there is a well-known hadith in which a Bedouin came to the Prophet and said he had doomed himself and another Muslim. The Prophet asked what he had done. The man said he had willfully had intercourse with his wife while they were fasting in Ramadan. The Prophet said: “Free a slave.” Now you can extract from this the ruling that the expiation for willfully ruining your fast is to free a slave. But if you reflect on the whole hadith, you will notice that the Prophet did not become angry with the man or lecture him – there was no need as the man knew his fault. Rather, the Prophet cared for him in his trouble and told him directly how to make amends for his fault. So as well as the ruling, one can learn about the value of compassion, about the urgent need for forgiveness, about the wisdom of not obsessing about sin, but admitting it and making amends for it. These general lessons are not learnt if we focus narrowly on the legal point.

In our time, narrow readings of Qur’an and hadith continue, with the same result that the education of our hearts and minds generally — so that we understand the seriousness of our lives and take responsibility for them – is neglected. If we learn to utter nicely worded theological doctrines, or to engage in special forms of worship, or to know the legal ruling for a certain situation, these gains (and sometimes these are gains) are disconnected from our general disposition and have little effect on how we live our lives as a whole.

Everything has a method and measure appropriate to it. The methods and measures that serve us well in the study of the phenomena of the natural world, do not serve us well in the study of the human world. The Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet do contain some particular instructions, but for the most part they are concerned with alerting us to the reality of our responsibility to God, of our connection to Him. We should, when studying the hadith, never lose sight of the fact that the teaching in them can train and prepare our consciences so that we understand the spirit and temperament of the Sunna and then embody the Sunna in our lives as a whole, in both the inside and the outside of our intentions, speech, actions and relationships.

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