The Sunnah: Law, society and politics under reformist doctrine (19th - 20th Centuries)

From the moment we accept that many decades passed between the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the collecting of the many different texts interpreting the Sunna, we must also accept that the gap between the two entities (the words and the acts of the Prophet and their reflection in the Scriptures) is not merely of a formai nature. However, the classical theological institutions have managed not only to minimize the consequences of this division and make this established corpus into the second source of jurisdiction in Islam, but also to build an impenetrable wall between the reader and everything that aliows him to raise legitimate and rational questions concerning the nature of the Sunna and its meaning, including its appearance and its collection.
Our work suggests a historical reconsideration of the works of reformist scholars in terms of the Sunna compared with the other sources of Islamic orthodoxy, that is the Koran, the Ijma' and the Ijtihad. Firstly, a reconsideration of the gap that we mentioned, in order to try to evaluate its importance and implications. In this way we have shown that the reformist scholars had, for the first lime in history, overcome the tensions, contradictions, stagnation, clashes and protagonisms with a new critical approach to ail the foundations (usul) of Islamic thought, including the Koran and the Sunna. Acritique open to scientific thought towards new ways of intelligibility and appropriation of the real, in order to surmount all the taboos sanctified without legal ground. Secondly, this work enabled us to perceive the swift and brutal interruption in the work of the reformist scholars, who were a peaceful force of the one real « criticism of the Islamic mind » to leave some space to two forms of destructive « terrorism » -that of the state and that of the marginalized individual.
Since then, can we still talk about the renaissance of another combat between the dogmatic theological mind and the supposed faithless and lawless « scientific » mind?