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From Issue: 1014 [Read full issue]
Solitary Hadiths
Abu Hanifah was accused of violating the Sunnah, although he denied the charge. When Abbasid Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur wrote to him saying, "Word has it that you place a higher priority on analogical reasoning (qiyas) than you do on the hadiths!" Abu Hanifah replied:
"It is not as you have heard, O Commander of the Faithful. Rather, I work first on the basis of the Book of God. I then turn to the Sunnah of the Prophet and, after this, to the legal rulings issued by Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. Lastly, I look at the legal rulings issued by the other Companions of the Prophet. Only if there is disagreement among these do I resort to analogical reasoning. And God remains exalted above His creatures."
In the Hanafites' view, a hadith that has not gained wide circulation (and has thus not been classified as mashhur or mustafid) is of only tentative value. As such, it neither specifies what is stated generally in the Quran nor qualifies what the Quran has stated in absolute terms. Abu Hanifah would reject a solitary hadith (ahad) if: (1) its content was in conflict with the overall message or apparent meaning of the Quran; (2) it contradicted other, widely circulating hadiths; (3) the narrator of the hadith was not a jurist or scholar of Islamic jurisprudence; (4) the narrator, after passing on the hadith, acted in a manner contrary to the hadith's content; (5) it dealt with punishments or means of atoning for serious offenses, since such measures lose their validity if they are subject to the slightest doubt, and the narrator may have lied or been mistaken in what he said; (6) some of the pious early Muslims had challenged its reliability; and (7) it had ceased to be employed in argumentation due to disagreement over it among the Companions. (The last condition was sufficient basis for rejection of a solitary hadith by some early Hanifite scholars, and most later ones).
Compiled From:
"Reviving The Balance: The Authority of the Qur'an and the Status of the Sunnah " - Taha Jabir Alalwani, p. 147