Islamic-Sunnism and Islamic Law Research Proposal

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Islamic-Sunnism and Islamic Law
Research Proposal
In the Islamic context, Sunnism regards the Prophet Muhammad’s example. It entails what the Prophet said and did ranging from rudimentary issues and day to day matters to key issues such as the Prophet’s conduct in wars, financial matters, and social life. This present essay seeks to shed light on Sunnism. It examines different scholarly thoughts as discursive developments within Sunnism. It entails an epistemological assessment of the legalities surrounding Sunnism and its development. This will be done by assessing the works of different scholars and the intellectual developments in Sunnism and other juristic thoughts. This paper simply aims to offer insight into a weighty topic in Islam and its study by explicating the development of Sunnism from the early beginning to contemporary Sunnism. To aid this, three articles will be reviewed independently. The first article "Shiʿi Jurisprudence, Sunnism, and the Traditionist Thought (Akhbārī) of Muhammad Amin Astarabadi” offers the needed epistemological backbone for the proposed research as it explicates the traditionalists’ movement and its association to Sunnism. The second article gives a legal perspective and delineates the establishment of Sunni legal theory. This article, "The development of logical structure in Sunni legal theory," is crucial as it explains the complex legal theory from which Sunni scholars aimed to justify and rationalize positive law. The third article, “ The Four Eponyms of Sunni Islamic Jurisprudence: An Examination of the Historical Development of the Dominant Madhȃhib and the Polemic of Ijtihȃd versus Taqlȋd,” further offers deeper insight into how Islamic law stabilized and the role of Sunni Madhȃhib in this development. These three articles provide useful information that will help form the background of my research.
Annotated Bibliography
Abisaab, Rula Jurdi. "Shiʿi Jurisprudence, Sunnism, and the Traditionist Thought (Akhbārī) of Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1626–27)." International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.1 (2015): 5-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743814001421. Retrieved from /core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/shii-jurisprudence-sunnism-and-the-traditionist-thought-akhbr-of-muhammad-amin-astarabadi-d-162627/D0A716E30C18EF7FFB042669784E1F56
According to this scholar, research on Astarabadi’s akhbarı (traditionist) movement perceive it as a response to the influence of Sunnism on the mujtahids or their extreme borrowings from it and emphasize the traditionists’ revulsion of integrating any aspect of Sunnism. This poses a limitation which the scholar seeks to rectify by offering Astarabadi’s thought as an expansive expansion within the Shii juristic tradition, which is part of the grand Islamic tradition. Notably, the author delineates that there is a need for sufficient knowledge on the rise and formation of this movement in order to address elementary queries into the Shi’i juristic tradition during Astarabadi’s time and its connection to its Sunni counterpart.
The article begins by explaining ...