Sunna means traditional usage, or custom hallowed by ancestral use, by practice transmitted through past generations. He who violates this custom trespasses against the Holy of holies, against something far above any article of a legal code drawn up with all the mature consideration and cool deliberation of the judicial mind; he had sinned against the pious reverence due to the days of old. This is the view which underlies the sanctity of the sunna. Translated into legal phraseology sunna might accordingly be denominated right by custom, but a better idea of its meaning may be gained by comparing it with the mores majorum or usus longævus of the Romans. For the determining factor in it is not its established character but the high esteem in which it has been held from remote antiquity.
All this (to return to the proposition from which we started) is little in accord with a system which originated with a prophet of revolution who could not say, as Jesus said of himself, that he was “not come to destroy but to fulfil”—at least, not as far as the traditional institutions of the Arabs were concerned. Mohammed does, indeed, represent himself as restoring what has been lost, as bringing back the golden age of religion to man, the rule of the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) which had been lost by corruption and wickedness, and obscured by gross heathenism on its own native soil (for according to Mohammed the Kaaba at Mecca is the temple of Abraham and Ishmael). But it is not this pretension which will enable us to grasp the significance of the idea of the sunna in Islam.
Amazing as it may sound, and accustomed as we are to associate the idea of the sunna with the sheikhs who keep jealous watch over the holy places of Islam, sunna is not primarily an Islamite word, nor is the idea it expresses peculiar to Islam. It is deeply rooted in the ethical sentiment of the very heathenism which the prophet arose to overthrow. Sunna is an idea which Islam adopted from Arab heathenism, and which, in the change of meaning it underwent in this new sphere, became one of the main pillars of the new system.
The conception involved in the sunna, as defined at the beginning of this essay, represents the heathen Arab’s ideal of life and the primitive idea of laws and morals in tribal life. In this respect there was no difference between the two classes which went to make up the sum total of the Arab world, between the Bedouins and the dwellers in towns. The mores majorum were their law and their religion. The customs of their forefathers were their dogmas; the practices that had come down to them from the remote past were their sacraments. To infringe these was criminal sacrilege. If the cult of tribal fellowship and regard for the duties arising out of this association constitute the sum total of morality, how much more imperatively did the principle apply to the maintenance of a supersensual fellowship with the generations of the past.
Hence, in the persecution with which the world of Arab heathenism received his preaching, Mohammed was not confronted by opponents who defended the old state of things by arguments based on religion, or wielded the weapons of serious controversy to refute his doctrines. The heathen Arabs had but one argument against the message proclaimed to them by the visionary of Mecca—it was an innovation. He represents his heathen fellow-countrymen as putting forward this argument against himself in exactly the same manner as he represents the heathen nations of old as hurling it at their prophets. “If one saith to them, ‘Obey the laws which Allah sends you,’ then they say, ‘We follow the customs of our fathers.’ If one saith to them, ‘Come and adopt the religion which Allah hath revealed to his ambassador,’ they answer, ‘We are satisfied with the religion of our fathers.’ When the evil-doers commit an evil deed they say, ‘Thus we saw it done by our fathers, it is Allah who commands such things.’ But they say, ‘We found that our fathers were on this road and we tread in their steps.’ Speak and say—do I not proclaim to you a better thing than that whereat ye found your fathers?”
This plea, which constitutes, so to speak, the methodology of the struggle of the heathen against the prophet, is, as it were, a constant element that pervades all the laments of the Koran over the stubbornness of the heathen. They hate the prophet because he insults their forefathers, who were likewise his own. He is lacking in filial piety. And the touchstone of his error is his antagonistic attitude towards the remote past. To the heathen his idols are dear as “heritages from the worthies who have bequeathed this inheritance.”
Only a few decades elapsed before Islam had its own sunna. The element of antiquity in this case was, of course, a figment; it anticipated for its justification the generations yet to be born, who should look up to this new standard as to something hallowed by tradition. It had no warrant in the actual experience of successive generations which had already regarded it as inviolable.
The Koran, the oldest and most authoritative document of the Islamite movement, is not a book which offers to the believer a comprehensive body of religious instruction sufficient to satisfy all inquiries. What it pre-eminently does is to predispose religious sentiment to the acceptance of the religion which arose on this foundation. Nor is it more complete if regarded as a statutory guide in questions of law, since it takes note of only a small and very limited department of juridical needs. What it does is to predispose ethical sentiment in favour of the new aspects in which social life and the legal relations it involves are to be considered.
While these sentiments gave precision to the form of these new standards, investing them with the character of divinely instituted laws, their substance drew its nourishment from alien sources, from new views, which were a consequence of the great career in history upon which the new Islamite community entered soon after it came into existence. Much fresh territory was conquered. It was impossible that contact with foreign elements should fail to implant fresh ideas in the Semitic mind, singularly receptive as it is—ideas which were destined to give its final shape to the faith of Islam with which its adherents had embarked on their conquering career.
Without the effect produced on the religious sentiment of Mohammedans by questions that arose under the influence of Greek philosophy, there would have been no formulated system of Mohammedan dogmatics, and in like manner the first impulse towards the creation of a Mohammedan system of law was given by contact with two great spheres of civilisation—the Romaic and the Persian, the former in Syria and the latter in Mesopotamia. It has already been remarked that the influence of Roman law on the sources of a legal system in Islam is attested by the very name given to jurisprudence in Islam from the beginning. It is called al Fikh, reasonableness; and those who pursue the study of it are designated Fukaha (singular Fakih). These terms, which, as we cannot fail to see, are Arabic translations of the Roman (juris) prudentia, and prudentes, would be a clear indication of one of the chief sources of Islamite jurisprudence, even if we had no positive data to prove that this influence extended both to questions of the principle of legal deduction and to particular legal provisions.
The positive laws of the Koran, and the few legal decisions made in particular cases by the first caliphs and other companions of the prophet at Medina in the early days of Islam, together with all the legal customs retained from heathen days, were inadequate to serve for the state of things brought about by the great conquests and immense expansion of the Moslem empire. Even if all elements which had previously and all which had come into being to meet the primary requirements of the new Mohammedan society had sufficed for an Arab commonwealth on an Islamite basis, the sum total of it all would nevertheless have been inadequate to the needs of the new political fabric of Islam in countries subject to entirely different economic and social conditions, and amidst conquered peoples whose lives were ordered on a systematic legal basis. When Islam subdued such ancient civilised peoples with the edge of the sword, it could not impose upon them the primitive conditions of life under which it had come forth into the wide world from the steppes and oases of Arabia. It could mould the results of the historic past into harmony with its own religious sentiment; but it could not destroy it, if for no other reason than that it had nothing to put in its place. Hence it had to leave many institutions in the conquered countries substantially as it found them. The problem first presented itself in Syria, the first halting-place of the victorious advance of Islam. The Koran and its earliest applications in practice made provision for family and matrimonial rights and rights of succession, but proved worse than meagre when applied to the privileges attaching to landed property in a great agricultural state, or to the laws of contract and obligation which, in the countries conquered by Islam, were ordered by the fixed standards of Roman law. In this department the heads of the new government had to take over very many ordinances of Roman law.