With the Prophet's death, divine communication ceased. The people – among them ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb – imagined that he would remain in his ummah to manage its affairs and be the last man standing, and then bear witness to this ummah on the Day of Resurrection. When, after Abu Bakr's sermon, they ascertained the news of his death, they became – in the words of ʿAʾisha – “like sheep on a rainy winter night at the loss of their Prophet”.

The Muslims were at once deprived of both heavenly guidance and the presence of the Prophet. However, they still had God's book, which His messenger was given. The Qur’an alone was enough to govern and regulate the conditions of the first Muslim community and its religious, social and political affairs. However, it was not long after the Prophet's death that the Arabs expanded from their desert like a giant genie released from its bottle. Within a century, they controlled territories from the Oxus River in Central Asia to the far north of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, governing various nations with customs, morals and values, environments and civilisations very different from those of the people in the Arabian Peninsula. They founded new cities and inhabited existing cities already densely populated with their original indigenous inhabitants. All this resulted in a need for more complex and detailed laws than those that were sufficient for the simple desert community in Mecca and Medina. The rules governing the simple life of the first Muslims no longer met the needs of their grandsons, who were now living in new environments, mixing with followers of religions radically different from their own, and facing conditions that the Qur’an did not talk about, or addressed only in general terms, without elaborating on the details.

The Sunna as the Second Source of Law

Faced with this massive geographic expansion, the pressures of the new, historic and ever-changing conditions, as well as the changing times and places, the Muslims and their jurists sought guidance on how to deal with all these new circumstances.