Editing Sunnah (section)

==="Living sunnah"===
In the 1960s, [[Fazlur Rahman Malik]], an [[Islamic modernist]] and former head of Pakistan's Central Institute for Islamic Research, advanced another idea for how the (prophetic) sunnah—the normative example of Muhammad—should be understood: as "a general umbrella concept"<ref name="FR-IMiH-11-2">{{cite book |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Islamic Methodology in History |date=1965 |publisher=Karachi |pages=11–12}}</ref> but not one "filled with absolutely specific content",<ref name="FR-IMiH-11-2" /> or that was static<ref>Brown 103</ref> over the centuries. He argued that Muhammad had come as a "moral reformer" and not a "pan-legit", and that the specifics of the sunnah would be agreed upon community of his followers, evolving with changing times as a "living and on-going process".<ref>{{cite book |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Islamic Methodology in History |date=1965 |publisher=Karachi |page=75}}</ref> He accepted the criticism of Western and Muslim scholars that the content of many hadith and isnad (chain of transmitters) had been tampered with by Muslims trying to prove the Muhammad had made a specific statement—but this did not make them fraudulent or forgeries, because if "Hadith verbally speaking does not go back to the Prophet, its spirit certainly does".<ref name="FR-IMiH-80">{{cite book |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Islamic Methodology in History |date=1965 |publisher=Karachi |page=80}}</ref> Instead these collections of ahadith of al-Bukhari and al-Muslim's were ''[[ijma]]'' (consensus or agreement of the Muslim scholars—which is another classical source of Islamic law).<ref name="FR-IMiH-80" /> Doing so, they follow the spirit of Muhammad's mission,<ref>{{cite book |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Islamic Methodology in History |date=1965 |publisher=Karachi |pages=6, 8}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |jstor=20832617 |journal=Islamic Studies |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Concepts Sunnah, Ijtihād and Ijmā' in the Early Period |date=1 January 1962 |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=5–21}}</ref> and "resurrect" the legal methodology of the pre-Shafi'i "Ancient schools". But just as second and third century Muslims could re-formulate hadith and law around a prophetic spirit, so can modern Muslims—redefining ''[[riba]]'' and replacing medieval laws against bank interest with measures that help the poor without harming economic productivity.<ref>{{cite book |last=Rahman |first=Fazlur |title=Islamic Methodology in History |date=1965 |publisher=Karachi |page=77}}</ref><ref>Brown, 1996, p.106</ref>