FROM THE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

On certain occasions, it so happened that the relevant Hadith was available but the reporter himself could not understand its real meaning. Ibn Umar is reported to have narrated a Hadith from the Prophet that a deceased person is punished on account of the mourning of his relatives. When this tradition came to the attention of Aisha, she rejected it saying that Ibn Umar might have been mistaken, or might have forgotten some relevant part of the tradition. She also observed that the Hadith reported by Ibn Umar goes against the Quranic verse: ‘No soul bears the burden of another.’ The Companions, however, tried their best to establish their decisions on the Quran and Sunnah. They aspired to keep their decisions and personal judgements close to those of the Prophet. Despite their differences, they did not deviate from the spirit of the Quran and Hadith. The people who followed took their stand on the opinions expressed by the Companions. They retained in their memory the Hadith of the Prophet and the opinions of the Companions and made attempts to reconcile opposite opinions. They exercised independent reasoning (ijtihad) in two ways. First of all, they were not afraid to give preference to the opinions of one Companion over another, and sometimes, even to the opinions of a person who came after over those of a Companion. Secondly, they engaged in original thinking themselves. In fact, the real formation of Islamic law starts in a more or less professional manner with the people who came after the Companions (now known as Successors). With the Successors, Islamic law began to take its formal shape and develop into an independent subject of study. In this age, the principles that governed fiqh were the Quran, Sunnah and deductive reasoning. The Prophet himself introduced these principles. As mentioned above, the practice of Islamic jurisprudence came into existence with the advent of Islam, but it developed into a regular discipline in the second century AH. Abu Hanifa played the leading role in this gigantic task of compilation and systematization of Islamic law. By Abu Hanifa’s time, the accepted rules of fiqh had not been collected and had not yet been systematized into a regular discipline, if they were perpetuated, it was by being passed on verbally. There were no strict methods of reasoning, no rules for derivation of orders, no grading of In the early days of Islam, the law was neither inflexible nor very rigidly applied. Different and even contradictory laws relating to many problems could be found acceptable on the basis of argument.