Joseph Schacht Quotes

Even the classical corpus... contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by ‘historic intuition,’ as it has been called, have failed. ... the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam.

[t]he idea of religious law—the concept that law, as well as the other human relationships, must be ruled by religion—has become an essential part of the Islamic outlook. The same, incidentally, is true of politics, and even economics; it explains the recent attempt to hold an Islamic economic congress in Pakistan. Because they cannot face the problem, because they lack historical understanding of the formation of Mohammedan religious law, because they cannot make up their minds, any more than their predecessors could in the early Abbasid period [which began 750 CE], on what is legislation, the modernists cannot get away from a timid, halfhearted, and essentially self-contradictory position... The real problem poses itself at the religious and not at the technically legal level.

Schacht also states "The Hanafis on the other hand hold the view that the paternity of the child and the character of the slave as umm al-walad in this case depends entirerly on an acknowledgement by the master.'