FROM LIVING TRADITION TO TRANSMITTED AUTHORITY: AL-SUNNAH BEFORE AND AFTER AL-SHAFIʿĪ

Abstract

The authority of hadith occupies a central position in Islamic intellectual history, yet its historical formation remains a subject of scholarly debate. Much of the existing literature tends to portray al-Shāfiʿī as the pivotal figure who established the epistemological foundation of hadith as an authoritative source of Islamic law. Such a perspective, however, risks obscuring the long historical process through which mechanisms of transmission, verification, documentation, and legal application of hadith had already developed prior to al-Shāfiʿī. This article addresses that gap by examining the transformation of hadith authority from the generation of the Companions to the emergence of al-Shāfiʿī’s legal theory. Employing an intellectual-historical approach, the study reconstructs the continuity and transformation of hadith authority through an analysis of early transmission practices, the development of scholarly networks among the tābiʿūn, the codification movement of the second century Hijrī, and the epistemological reformulation advanced by al-Shāfiʿī. The study argues that the authority of hadith was neither suddenly created nor exclusively dependent upon al-Shāfiʿī’s intervention. Rather, it emerged through a cumulative process involving verification practices (al-tathabbut), transmission networks, scholarly learning circles, and systematic documentation that had evolved since the earliest Muslim generations. Nevertheless, before al-Shāfiʿī, hadith functioned alongside other normative authorities, including communal practice, companion precedents, and juristic reasoning. The article demonstrates that al-Shāfiʿī’s principal contribution was not the creation of hadith authority, but the systematization and canonization of a new epistemological framework that identified authentic prophetic reports as the primary representation of the Sunnah and the principal criterion of legal legitimacy. Consequently, the transformation associated with al-Shāfiʿī is best understood as a shift from a model of living sunnah grounded in communal practice toward a model of transmitted sunnah grounded in authenticated transmission.