الاختلاف علی الامام سفیان الثوری بانقطاع السند واثرہ علی المسائل الفقہیہ

Abstract

The Almighty Allah has blessed Muslim ummah by preservation of the religion of Islam through protection of its sacred book, the Holy Quran, and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) known as “Hadith”. The Muslim scholars burnt the midnight oil in the scrutiny and criticism of these traditions and a new branch of knowledge was emerged in the field of Hadith sciences known as “Elal ul Hadith” in which these traditions were criticized by various aspects. On the other hand, this branch has close link with the field of Islamic Jurisprudence as the latter one is totally dependent upon the former one. It is also a fact that there are several diversities in the “Hadith” from different angles like chain of narrators, text of Hadith and qualities of narrators etc. This diversity played a significant role in the formation of Islamic jurisprudence and variety of opinions within it. Consequently, this diversity among the jurists incited me to collect miscellany in a narration of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) from a single narrator or dependency upon chain of narrators and preferring a specific mode of narration in the modern issues explaining its effects on jurisprudential issues. For the said purpose, I collected those narrations of Imam Sufian Thauri (d. 161 H) in which chain of narrations had been interrupted and I specified a particular book of “Elal” in chain of narrators “Al-Elal ul Warida fil Ahadith Al-Nabawiyyah” by Imam Dar Qatni (d. 385 H) which is considered a masterpiece in the said field. The present study is concerned with those narrations of Imam Sufian Thauri who have direct relation with the issues of Islamic Jurisprudence. I shall explain various modes of a specific narration from Imam Thauri and his fellows, preferring a particular mode among them, then finally, I shall elaborate its consequences over jurisprudential diversities.