Farahi school

[1] After finishing his studies, he taught in many religious schools, including, Sindh Madressatul Islam University, Karachi, (from 1897 to 1906),[2] Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO) and Darul Uloom, Hyderabad.

He subsequently travelled to 'Sara-e-Mir', a town in Azamgarh, where he took charge of the Madrasatul Islah, an institution which was based on the educational ideas of Shibli Nomani and Farahi, The Islamic scholar Amin Ahsan Islahi (who later immigrated to Pakistan), was one of them.

Thus, by making the Qurʾān its sole yardstick, this school has been able to engage with modern-day scholarship on a variety of issues relating to Islamic history.

The founder of what is now the largest school within Sunni Islam, Abu Hanifa, “turned to the Qur'an, those Hadiths he knew for sure to be reliable, the teachings of the Companions who had settled in Kufa and then his own reason.

Unlike the flurry of spurious Hadiths.”[6] This approach soon led to condemnation and charges of heresy from the post-Shafi'i partisans of Ḥadīth, who were dismayed with Abu Hanifa's preference of legal reasoning over Hadith.

[10] If this report is contextualised in light of the Qurʾān and historical circumstances of the prophetic era, the attentive reader will conclude that this particular prohibition was aimed at pictures that were utilised for worship by idolaters.

It must be accepted that the authority of the Qurʾān reigns over Abu Hanifa or Shafi’i, Bukhari or Muslim, Ashari or Maturidi and Juaniad or Shibli alike.

Daniel W. Brown writes that “to many early Muslims, by contrast, the Sunna and ḥadīth remained conceptually independent, and the two concepts did not fully coalesce until after al-Shafiʿi.

He has been followed on this by a variety of scholars, such as Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Cuypers, Irfan Shahid, Pierre Crapon de Caprona, Raymond Farrin, Neal Robinson, and others.