Re: Mutawatir Ahadith superceding Holy Quran’s Ayats
It is purely a Fiqhee (jurisprudence) issue. It is predominantly followed by the Hanafi school.
Abrogation by Qur’an and/or Sunnah
According to the Shafii school, the sunnah cannot technically abrogate the Qur'an. According to the Hanafi school, sunnah can abrogate Qur'an if it is mutawatir (mass-narrated) or mustafid (abundant, even if not quite mutawatir). In practice, however, there is no instance of a Qur'anic verse being rendered totally inapplicable by the sunnah. The Hanafi principle mentioned is rather applied to cases of specification, e.g. the permissibility of somtimes wiping wet hands over leather socks during ablution, rather than inevitably washing the feet. This practice is mass-narrated in the sunnah and from the practice of the Companions, but is not explicitly found in the Qur'an, which refers only to washing/wiping the feet. Similar is the case with the stoning of married adulterers. It is not total abrogation, because it is not calling for a total cancellation of the whipping mentioned in the Qur'an. Rather, it indicates the stoning of a subset of adulterers (and some jurists are actually of the view that whipping and stoning are both applied in this case), and as such is a case of specification (takhsis). The ahadith of stoning are mustafid. Also, there is the hadith from Umar on this issue, which suggests that even if it was not part of the Qur’an, it was a very strong sunnah, to the extent that Umar thought it equivalent to the Qur'an. The Kharijites rejected the ruling of stoning, due to their perception that it contradicts the Qur'an, and in the process rejected (knowingly or unwittingly) a large quantity of hadith. A more recent scholar (20th century CE) purportedly did not espouse stoning, on the basis that it was abrogated by the verse of the Qur'an legislating whipping as the punishment for zina. This is hypothetically a possibility, although it leaves the question as to how the Companions and following generations apparently remained unaware of this abrogation, only to await him discovering it centuries later. According to Imam al-Shafii also, the Qur’an cannot abrogate the sunnah, his rationale being that if a verse of the Qur’an abrogated the verdict of a practised sunnah, the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) would then act on the abrogation, and so it would be his new sunnah which is actually abrogating the earlier sunnah; otherwise the door is opened for deviants to reject sunnahs by claiming they were abrogated by the Qur’an.
Your right that it varies from school to school however it is said that Imam Shaafi did admit to the same principle that hanafi’s follow in his Risalah. I have not read the Risalah myself to confirm this though. Have you confirmed this?
