The life style of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) or the way he lived in accordance to God’s revelation, the Quran, can in general be called the sunnah. It might also be said that this sunnah of the Prophet, who was the last of the prophets and best example for all humanity, is both a practical application of the Quran in a particular historical setting and a universal and meta-historical interpretation of it. For his sunnah is rich enough to contain general principles and examples for human beings in all times and places, in spite of historical, geographical, human, cultural, economic and social differences. Therefore, since the early years of Islam to this day, Muslims in every corner of the world have seen the sirah (biography) and sunnah of Prophet Muhammad as a paradigm to apply in all matters that concern them and have tried to comply with his orders and suggestions without objection.

However, some very marginal views, which first emerged as early as shortly after his death, try to disregard the sunnah of the Prophet as an essential source of Islam by casting some doubts. In the classical period, some marginal groups, the zandaqa (heretics) and a group within the Rafidis (an extremist Shia group) presented these anti-sunnah views. Today, these views are voiced by some modernist intellectuals greatly influenced by Western mentality who live in the West, some Muslim countries, or in the Indian sub-continent first emerging as groups called Ahl al-Quran.  They then gained supporters in some other Muslim regions and took as their essential assumption that the Quran is enough for everything. The emergence and activities of such groups and intellectuals has led to the spread of these still marginal views in Islam.

One of the basic claims that these groups put forward in order to support these views is the following: Until now, the personality of Prophet Muhammad has not been analyzed and discussed adequately by Islamic scholars. The reason for this is Muslims have accepted him as the Messenger of Allah in every aspect seeing everything he did as a product of his being a prophet. For them, the Prophet could not do anything without the guidance of the divine revelation, so his every behavior and attitude had to be approved of by Angel Gabriel. In other words, Prophet Muhammad in every aspect had a prophetic personality with no room for a ‘human identity’.

Another idea that underlies the modernist approach to the prophetic sunnah is the claim that the sunnah was essentially historically bound. According to this view, Prophet Muhammad always considered the needs and conditions of his own time when making his decisions, ruling over a case, or presenting a solution to social problems. If we had lived in his time, his rulings and the sunnah would be binding on us too. However, we live under very different conditions; therefore they say following the sunnah of the Prophet is not (or should not be) obligatory for Muslims today.

On the other hand, taking an opposite stance to the above-mentioned view, some of the scholars of Islam today tend to take the sunnah almost in its entirety as solely the product of Quranic revelation. According to this view, which is also marginal, the sunnah of the Prophet should be considered at the same level as the Quran in terms of both its form and content.

It is important to note that one of the factors leading to the emergence of the first of these two extreme (and marginal) views was the fact that Prophet Muhammad made some decisions based solely on his own judgment (ijtihad), and some of these decisions were soon corrected through the later revealed verses of the Quran. To the modernist, this factor plays a very important role in this issue of being “historically bound”.

However, despite this fact, it is not warranted to argue that Muslims have ignored the human side of Prophet Muhammad seeing him purely as a messenger with no will, isolated from his human features and acting only through directives from Quranic revelation. The fact that Muslim scholars, particularly the scholars of the Usul al-Fiqh (the Methodology of Islamic Jurisprudence), have extensively discussed the question of the Prophet’s ijtihad (making a legal decision by independent interpretation) and within this framework, classified the decisions he made on the basis of his own judgment and then evaluated these decisions in terms of their binding effects or their juridical value.  All this clearly shows that Islamic scholars have not seen him as a prophet whose entire actions are determined strictly by divine revelation completely isolated from human features, but rather, they have tended to believe Prophet Muhammad had some practices that were rooted solely in his human nature, and these practices and decisions can be a matter of discussion.

One of the principal aims of this essay on “The Question of Prophet Muhammad’s Ijtihad” is to discuss the issue of the “value” of the sunnah in terms of its universality and historicity and to analyze the authenticity of the claims that have been put forward by different groups about the way Muslims view the personality of the Prophet.

Briefly stated, we are of the opinion that Prophet Muhammad was a human being who acted in adherence to Allah’s revelation.

The human aspect of the Prophet becomes most apparent in his decisions and practices based on his own judgment. Prophet Muhammad himself often remarked that in matters not involved in the realm of purely religious convictions and about which there was no divine revelation he was like any other human being; therefore, he could (and did) make mistakes like everyone else among his companions.