The Practice

Few realise that the other key element of Islam, its practice, is as well preserved and impregnable as is the Book of Allah. This has been confused in recent years by an understanding of hadith, the recorded oral transmissions from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, that has created a great lack of clarity and much confusion, both for Muslims and orientalist scholars.
It is important to realise that when the revelation reached the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, he conveyed it to others and put it into practice himself. He kept none of it back, and he did not transmit some of it secretly to a hidden elite, but he transmitted it and embodied it. His transmission is the Book of Allah, and his embodiment is called the Sunnah.
If it had stopped there, later generations would have said that “he, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was different, for he was a prophet and we are just ordinary people.” People would have come to believe that the deen of Islam is fundamentally unliveable. However, his contemporaries, his companions the men and women of Madinah, the Emigrants from Makkah and the Helpers of the people of Madinah, being a very representative cross-section of humanity, took on his practice and made it theirs. So later generations have no excuse: a city of perfectly ordinary people successfully took upon themselves the practice of the last of the Messengers, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.
They in their turn transmitted it. Although they did transmit it by teaching it, their great transmission was in their embodiment of it from which embodiment the next generation took their practice. Thus it has been from the very first day of Islam right down to our time, for, much as people learn a great deal from study with scholars and from reading books, the truth is that each generation learns the practice from the previous generation’s practice.
Thus, in spite of racial, linguistic, legal school and geographic differences, the practice of Islam is recognisably the same over vast areas of the earth and has been throughout the last fourteen centuries.
Naturally orientalist scholarship and indeed the scholarship of the legal schools will focus on differences of the texts and legal schools but the truth is that this basic sameness and consistency of practice is utterly stunning.