Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/75

 68 began to assert itself among the spiritual leaders, so much foreign matter had already been incorporated into Islâm, that the theory of the sufficiency of Qorân and Sunnah could not have been maintained without the labelling operation which we have alluded to. So it was assumed that as surely as Mohammed must have surpassed his predecessors in perfection and in wonders, so surely must all the principles and precepts necessary for his community have been formulated by him. Thus, by a gigantic web of fiction, he became after his death the organ of opinions, ideas, and interests, whose lawfulness was recognized by every influential section of the Faithful. All that could not be identified as part of the Prophet's Sunnah, received no recognition; on the other hand, all that was accepted had, somehow, to be incorporated into the Sunnah.

It became a fundamental dogma of Islam, that the Sunnah was the indispensable completion of the Qorân, and that both together formed the source of Mohammedan law and doctrine; so much so that every party assumed the name of "People of the Sunnah" to express its pretension to orthodoxy. The contents of the Sunnah, however, was the subject of a great deal of controversy; so that it came to be considered necessary to make the Prophet pronounce his authoritative judgment on this difference of opinion. He was said to have called it a proof of God's special mercy, that within reasonable