Hadith and sunnah : ideals and realities / contributed by Zubayr Siddiqi, Muhammad Ali, Mustafa A'zami, S. M. Yusuf, Fazlur Rahman, Shah Shahidullah Faridi, Muhammad Asad, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, Annemarie Schimmel and Abd al-Qadir Al-Sufi

Includes indexes and bibliographical references

"And if all Hadith is given up, what remains but a yawning chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet? And in the vacuity of this chasm not only must the Qur'an slip from our fingers under our subjective whims, for the only thing that anchors it is the Prophetic activity itself - but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur'an and, indeed, the existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth."

The essays comprising this book were selected to serve a long felt need for a comprehensive collection of writings on various aspects of Hadith and Sunnah for the non-academic reader. These essays were written by eminent Muslim scholars over a period of four decades and published in various scholarly Islamic journals, many of them inaccessible now. By bringing them together in one volume, the book will serve the reader to get a holistic picture of the true role of Hadith and Sunnah as an integral part of Islam and the Islamic Sharī ah