Islamic-Sunnism and Islamic Law Research Proposal

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Islamic-Sunnism and Islamic Law
Research Proposal
In the Islamic context, Sunnism regards the Prophet Muhammad’s example. It entails what the Prophet said and did ranging from rudimentary issues and day to day matters to key issues such as the Prophet’s conduct in wars, financial matters, and social life. This present essay seeks to shed light on Sunnism. It examines different scholarly thoughts as discursive developments within Sunnism. It entails an epistemological assessment of the legalities surrounding Sunnism and its development. This will be done by assessing the works of different scholars and the intellectual developments in Sunnism and other juristic thoughts. This paper simply aims to offer insight into a weighty topic in Islam and its study by explicating the development of Sunnism from the early beginning to contemporary Sunnism. To aid this, three articles will be reviewed independently. The first article "Shiʿi Jurisprudence, Sunnism, and the Traditionist Thought (Akhbārī) of Muhammad Amin Astarabadi” offers the needed epistemological backbone for the proposed research as it explicates the traditionalists’ movement and its association to Sunnism. The second article gives a legal perspective and delineates the establishment of Sunni legal theory. This article, "The development of logical structure in Sunni legal theory," is crucial as it explains the complex legal theory from which Sunni scholars aimed to justify and rationalize positive law. The third article, “ The Four Eponyms of Sunni Islamic Jurisprudence: An Examination of the Historical Development of the Dominant Madhȃhib and the Polemic of Ijtihȃd versus Taqlȋd,” further offers deeper insight into how Islamic law stabilized and the role of Sunni Madhȃhib in this development. These three articles provide useful information that will help form the background of my research.
Annotated Bibliography
Abisaab, Rula Jurdi. "Shiʿi Jurisprudence, Sunnism, and the Traditionist Thought (Akhbārī) of Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1626–27)." International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.1 (2015): 5-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743814001421. Retrieved from /core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/shii-jurisprudence-sunnism-and-the-traditionist-thought-akhbr-of-muhammad-amin-astarabadi-d-162627/D0A716E30C18EF7FFB042669784E1F56
According to this scholar, research on Astarabadi’s akhbarı (traditionist) movement perceive it as a response to the influence of Sunnism on the mujtahids or their extreme borrowings from it and emphasize the traditionists’ revulsion of integrating any aspect of Sunnism. This poses a limitation which the scholar seeks to rectify by offering Astarabadi’s thought as an expansive expansion within the Shii juristic tradition, which is part of the grand Islamic tradition. Notably, the author delineates that there is a need for sufficient knowledge on the rise and formation of this movement in order to address elementary queries into the Shi’i juristic tradition during Astarabadi’s time and its connection to its Sunni counterpart.
The article begins by explaining the primary features of a discursive tradition and then demonstrates how Astarabadi’s traditionist thought can be perceived as a discursive advancement within the Shi’i juristic tradition. According to the scholar, this advancement was a reaction majorly to issues internal to that tradition, which shares important elements with its Sunni counterpart. The Shi’i jurisdiction took form in the 11th Century and by the 13th Century; the jurisdiction had incorporated rational principles of ijtihad that served as another foundation for the origin of the law. Looking at Shii legal-juristic happenings as a discursive tradition permits one to reconsider traditions as the shared spaces of the Shii and Sunni traditions and in light of their limits.
The scholar deliberates over Astarabadi’s traditions and its vital consequences for the orthodoxy of the juristic tradition, the function of the state in legal power, and the believer’s -role in emulating the mujtahid. In conclusion, this author’s discussion revolved around Astarabadi’s philosophies on traditionism which was not just a sheer recommencement of past leanings in legal, hadith, and rijal scholarship, but was also concerned with disproving ijtihad which was not advanced before the 13th century. Keen to note, this author highlights that Asad’s comprehension of the discursive tradition aids people to see, the Safavid tradit...