Methodological Fallacies in the Modernist Reading of the Prophetic Sunnah: A Critical Study

This research aims to defend the Sunnah, which is one of the greatest legal duties in the face of campaigns of skepticism, distortion, and slander from many parties that seek to exclude the Sunnah as a methodology and system of life, including those so-called modernists who raise the slogan of renewing thought and heritage, adding the mantle of “impartial” scientific research and calling for rereading the Islamic “heritage” and applying modern methods of criticism to it. The research question lies in how the modernist reading has contributed to presenting methodological fallacies in understanding and dealing with the Sunnah. The paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides the theoretical and conceptual framework of the research. The second section examines the statements of the methodological fallacies in the modernist reading of the Sunnah, including six fallacies, namely: imitation rather than innovation, selectivity, lack of accuracy and objectivity, dropping the value of the hadith, adopting abstract reason as a criterion for criticizing hadiths, the indiscipline of the criteria of criticism, and finally the fallacy of speaking in a non-specialized field. The third section balances the modernists’ approach with that of the Hadith Scholars in Hadith criticism, followed by the conclusion and the important findings and recommendations.