Sorry for starting another thread, I could not post a reply for some reason.
I have to agree with a lot of what Achtung has said in his posts, it is also important to question and verify how the Islam we all know today has come about.
In the time of Mu’awiya’s rule (661-680) until the the 2nd century Hijrah (when the Hadith were officially compiled) the hadith had become a medium of stories and instrument for various political factions and theological sects to support their sectarian positions. In order to stop the continued fabrication of the hadith and contain futrther divisions of Muslim society at the time, there arose a movement to fix the sources of law in Islam and to standardise the hadith.
This is the main social determinant which gave rise to the major jurisprudential figure in Islam in the person of Shafi’i. He laid down the bases of Islamic classical jurisprudence with his theory that the sources of Islamic law were the Quran, the Hadith, Ijma’ or consensus of religious scholars, and Qiyas or analogy.
With the acceptance of Shafi’i’s jurisprudential theory where the hadith was given a position of almost equal importance with the Quran (the formula is “second primary source”), the use of creative thought
or ijtihad for all practical purposes was abolished. This came to be known later as ‘the closing of the door of ijtihad’ and the beginning of the regime of taqlid or blind imitation of the great masters.
Shafi’s idea of ‘Ijma’ was that of a formal and a total one: he demanded an agreement which left no room for disagreement. This very different to the idea of Ijma from the early schools, for them Ijma was not an imposed or manufactured static fact but anongoing democratic process; it was not a formal state but an informal natural growth which at each step tolerates and, indeed, demands fresh and new thought and therefore must live not only with but also upon a certain amount of disagreement. We must exercise Ijtihad, they contended, and progressively the area of agreement would widen; the remaining questions must be turned over to fresh Ijtihad or Qiyas so that a new Ijma could be arrived at. But it is precisely the living organic relationship between Ijtihad and Ijma that was severed in the successful formulation of al-Shafi’i. Al-Shafi’i’s genius provided a mechanism that gave stability to our medieval socio-religious fabric but at the cost, in the long run, of creativity and originality.
Shafi’i came to the view that all opinions existing at that time would be acceptable, but nothing more than that - no new thinking could be allowed. The status quo would be set in stone with no possibility of new participants. Thus the idea of ijma first and ijtihad later was crystallized and given an official authority. Conformity became the norm. This was followed by the passivity and blind obedience that had to be fostered to maintain this conformity. The conformity and the passivity soon fused together to breed the pessimism and the fatalism which is a natural result of dead intellect. This came to be the character of the majority of Muslims, this is a typical of the kind of people Achtung mentioned who would denounce you if you question anything on this matter.
The Quran is the Word of God and contains the Truth. It is a book of guidance for mankind designed to take them out from the realm of darkness into the realm of light, from falsehood into truth, from injustice into justice and from slavery into freedom (intelectual as well as physical). There is only one truth that all muslims are certain of and that is the Quran, we must question and verify everything else asscociated with Islam to discover the truth. This is not to reject all hadith or teachings but to judge them in a scientific and logical manner. Do we want to come out of the darkness or are we happy with the status quo?