Sunnites, the name commonly given to orthodox Muslims, because in their rule of faith and manners the Sunna (pron. Soonna), or traditional teaching of the Prophet, is added to the Koran. According to Islam the human mind is incapable of attaining light in law or religion but through the Prophet, and all expressions of God's will are equally important. Reason and conscience are here of no value; memory is all. Hell-fire is the award due alike to him that prays without being properly washed and to him that denies the word of the Prophet. Accordingly during the Prophet's life his counsel was eagerly and continually sought; and after his death his example and sayings were collected as of infinite value. After the death of the four rightly guided califs, Abu Bekr, Omar, Othman, and Ali, intimate friends of the Prophet, fearful uncertainty arose and gradually occasioned the four schools of the four orthodox Imāms. The first of these was Abu Hanifa, born in Basra of a noble Persian family. He taught in Kufa on the Euphrates. He logically deduced from the Koran all religion and law; for the Koran says (Sura 16 : 91) 'to thee we have sent down the book which clears up everything.' Consequently, when the Koran says (S. 2 : 20) 'for you have I created the whole earth,' it follows that to Muslims belongs all the property of unbelievers. Hence the propriety of piracy and aggressive war against them. In his school arose the famous legists of Irāq, and his system, the most widely spread of the four, is now professed by the Turkish empire. He would never hold any office under government, fearing the doom due according to prophetic tradition to every giver of a wrong decision, namely, to be plunged into hell from a height of forty days' journey. He died in 767 in prison, where the calif had confined him for refusing to be Cadi over the new capital Bagdad.
In 795 died Mālik ibn Anas in his eighty-fourth year at Medina, where he was born and had lived all his days. There, surrounded by traditions of the Prophet, he had taught after the custom of Medina. This had been impossible to Abu Hanifa, residing amid a partly foreign people and a very complex civilisation. Mālik gathered from the Koran and from local traditions of Mohammed his Muwāttaa, or Beaten Path, a complete body of law and religion. He never announced any such tradition without a previous ablution. On his death-bed he regretted with tears that he had ever used his own judgment in pronouncing an opinion on a point of law, and wished that he had been flogged and re-flogged every time. His system was established in North Africa by African students, who found Medina the most convenient school, and in Spain by his Berber pupil Yahya 'bn Yahya. The third orthodox imām was Ash-Shāfi'i of the Koraish tribe, and descended from the Prophet's grandfather, Abdul-Mūttalib. He was born, it is said, on the day of Abu Hanifa's death. He taught in Cairo, and there he died in 820. He was an eclectic, but leaned more to the traditional precedents of his teacher Mālik than to the deductive method of Abu Hanifa. His system prevailed in Egypt, and was not uncommon eastward. It still flourishes in the Asiatic islands.
The use of reason and Greek philosophy had by this time wrought such laxity in faith and in public and private conduct that rigid puritanism was a natural concomitant. Its exponent was Ibn Hanbal, the fourth orthodox imām, who died in 855 in his native city Bagdad, beyond which his system never had much power. He was a pupil of Ash-Shāfi'i, whose lectures, however, he would never allow his own pupils to attend. Tradition and Sunna had now immensely increased, and by these alone the Hanbalites were guided. They are now almost extinct, but were strenuous in their early days, when they would break into festive meetings in Bagdad, beat the singers, break the musical instruments, and pour the wine into the streets. The bulk of tradition had now made editing indispensable, and those huge masses of it began to appear under which the Muslim mind has been crushed to death. As Ibn Hanbal said, 'the punishment of the learned man in this world is blindness of heart.' Abu Hanifa had used only 18 traditions, Mālik 300. Ibn Hanbal used 30,000. These were mainly collected by his friends and pupils. One of these, the excellent Abu Daūd Suleimān, travelling in many Muslim lands, collected half a million, which he sifted down to 4800. Another, Yahya 'bn Main, spent a large fortune and wore out his last pair of shoes in collecting 600,000. Helpers copied as many more for him. 'I copied quantities of traditions to the dictation of liars,' he said, 'and heated my oven with them, whereby my bread was well baked.' But of the six accepted collections the standard one was made by Al Bukhārī, a friend and pupil of Ibn Main. He taught in Bagdad, and like the best Muslim theologians was a Persian. He died in 870. Of the 600,000 traditions heard by him he admitted only 7275, whereof the half are probably genuine. Till he had washed and performed two rekas of prayer he never inserted any tradition. An edition by Krehl appeared at Leyden in 1862-72, in 3 vols. The collection by his Muslim pupil is better arranged, and is more used. The sources of tradition were Ayesha, the first four califs, and the six companions of the Prophet, of whom Abu Horaira, a manifest liar, was more prolific than any other. Through one of these channels to Mohammed the isnād or pedigree of every tradition had to be traceable. Worth or internal evidence counted for nothing. The work of collecting was begun too late. The real origin of most traditions was the requirements of interested parties, conscious mendacity, or gossip, specially in the standing camps of Arabs required in every conquered land. The matter is called Hadīth, events, tradition, and is much more entertaining than the Koran. Besides the legal and religious utterances of Mohammed, which are generally in one or two sentences, it embodies endless nonsense about his life and miracles, although Mohammed disowned all miracles but his own inspiration, about spirits, the beginning of the world and its end. Whatever in the Hadīth can be imitated or obeyed is Sunna, method; compulsory for guidance if connected with religion, but redundant or collateral, though praiseworthy, if giving mere details of such things as the Prophet's mode of standing and sitting. Its object is to make needless all appeals to reason and conscience. In legislation it is much less used than formerly; but, like the Koran, it is infallible and unalterable, and its only independent expounders are the four orthodox imâms. Legislation merely means a declaration by the Sheikh-ul-Islâm and his council of ulemâ or doctors that this or that agrees with the Koran or tradition. Reformation of law or religion from within is impossible.