Roughly nine out of ten Muslims today identify as Sunni. The word comes from ahl al-sunna, “the people of the sunna,” meaning those who follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and its fuller form is ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamā’a, “the people of the sunna and the community.” In most popular accounts, and in a good number of scholarly ones, Sunnism is treated as the default: Islam as the Prophet taught it and the first believers lived it, from which the Shi’a, the Khawarij, the Mu’tazila, and other groups later broke away.
That picture creates a simple test. If Sunnism is the original religion, the Prophet and the earliest believers should have known themselves by that name, or by something close to it. They did not. The label is not in the Quran; it was not the self-description of the Prophet’s generation, and it did not become the name of a recognizable group until the ninth and tenth centuries, roughly two hundred years after the Prophet’s death. It then hardened into the identity we know in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the middle of fights with rival groups. This article traces that history and argues that Sunni identity is a later construction, produced largely by opposition to other parties, and not the name the first Muslims carried.
The sunna Umar knew and the sunna on the shelf
In the seventh century, the Prophet’s sunna was something people did. It was how to pray, how to fast, how to perform the pilgrimage, how to judge a case, handed down by practice in Medina and in the garrison cities. The only book was the Quran. Sayings attributed to the Prophet circulated by word of mouth, and whether they should be written down, or even repeated freely, was an open question. Compare that with what the word points to now. For a modern Sunni, the sunna is in practice a library: the six canonical collections, the older muṣannafs and musnads behind them, the grading manuals and commentaries, and an elaborate science for sorting sound reports from weak ones. That library is treated as a second source of law beside the Quran, and a person who rejects it is placed outside the community.
The Sunni tradition’s own sources say the first generation was not comfortable with anything like it. Start with the scene Bukhari places at the Prophet’s deathbed. The Prophet asks for writing materials so that he can set down something that will keep the people from going astray, and Umar answers that the Prophet is overcome by his illness and that the Book of God is sufficient for us (Bukhari 114). Commentators read the moment in several ways, most often as concern for a dying man, but the sentence Umar speaks is about what the community has to rely on, and his answer is the Quran.
The reports about Umar as caliph are more pointed. Ibn Sa’d records that Umar wanted to write down the sunan, prayed for guidance for a month, and then dropped the plan, saying he remembered a people who wrote a book, devoted themselves to it, and abandoned the Book of God. In ‘Abd al-Razzaq’s version of the story he swears that he will never mix the Book of God with anything. Also in Ibn Sa’d, al-Qasim, the grandson of Abu Bakr, tells a student who asks him to dictate hadith that the reports multiplied in Umar’s time, that Umar had people bring them to him and ordered them burned, and that he then called them a mathnā’a like the mathnā’a of the People of the Book, the Mishna, the Jewish oral law.
When Umar sent Companions to Kufa, he told them the people there recited the Quran with a hum like bees and that they should not distract them with narrations, and he gave the order jarridū al-Qur’ān wa aqillū al-riwāya ‘an rasūl Allāh, strip the Quran bare and ration the narration from the Messenger. Tabari has him telling his governors to devote themselves to the Quran and diminish the narrations of Muhammad, adding that he is their partner in it. Al-Dhahabi reports that Umar detained Ibn Mas’ud, Abu al-Darda’, and Abu Mas’ud al-Ansari in Medina for narrating too much, until Uthman released them, and Abu Hurayra is reported to have said that he would have been flogged for narrating in Umar’s time as freely as he did later. Ibn Qutayba, a defender of hadith, describes Umar as sharp with anyone who transmitted a great deal. These come from Ibn Sa’d, Tabari, al-Dhahabi, and Ibn Qutayba, and none of them is an opponent of the Sunni tradition.
A typical Sunni reply is that Umar feared people would conflate God’s speech with the Hadith. The irony of this claim is that this means that the Arabs of that time would not be able to distinguish God’s speech from a human narration, and thus diminish the claim of the linguistic excellence of the Quran. Another typical Sunni claim is that he wanted people to be focused on the Quran, yet if that is the case, why are later generations permitted to be focused on the Hadith? If the earliest generations spent all their energy focused on the Quran, why would that no longer apply to later generations?
According to the reports, Umar’s concern was Hadith becoming a rival to the Book of God, which is the situation that now exists. The reports are also uneven in strength, and the evidence should be put at the level it can bear. Sunni history demonstrates that the early communities remembered Umar as a man who restricted narration and opposed a second book. Bukhari also records ‘Ali being asked whether he had any divine revelation beyond what is in the Book, and answering that he had nothing except what is between these two bindings, the Quran (Bukhari 3047).
Now put a modern Sunni in front of Umar with hundreds of volumes of hadith, graded and cross-referenced and treated as a second source of law beside the Quran, and most certainly Umar would have had them burned, and the visitor would not be received as the man who finally honored the Prophet’s sunna. He would be told he had built the Mishna and followed the sunnah of the Jews.
What the Quran calls the believers
The Quran has a vocabulary for the people who accept its message, and none of it is sectarian. They are muslimūn (those who submit), mu’minūn (those who believe), and ‘ibād Allāh (servants of God). The Quran also insists that this name is older than Muhammad. In Sura 22:78, it says this title was attributed to Abraham, even though the action is primordial.
22:78 You shall strive for the cause of GOD as you should strive for His cause. He has chosen you and has placed no hardship on you in practicing your religion—the religion of your father Abraham. He is the one who named you “Submitters” originally. Thus, the messenger shall serve as a witness among you, and you shall serve as witnesses among the people. Therefore, you shall observe the Contact Prayers (Salat) and give the obligatory charity (Zakat), and hold fast to GOD; He is your Lord, the best Lord and the best Supporter.
The apostles in Sura 3:52 ask Jesus to bear witness that they are Muslims, and in Sura 41:33 the best speech is attributed to the one who calls to God and says innanī mina’l-muslimīn, “I am among the Muslims.” The identity the text offers is submission to God, shared with Abraham and the prophets before him, and it has no room for a subgroup name attached to a particular reading of Muhammad’s supposed example.
The text is not neutral on the habit of dividing into named parties. Sura 6:159 says that those who split their religion into sects, farraqū dīnahum wa kānū shiya’an, are nothing to the Prophet, lasta minhum fī shay’.
6:159 Those who divide themselves into sects do not belong with you. Their judgment rests with GOD, then He will inform them of everything they had done.
Sura 30:31-32 warns against those who divided their religion and became sects, each party rejoicing in what it has. Ironically, the word for sects is “shia.”
30:30 Therefore, you shall devote yourself to the religion of strict monotheism. Such is the natural instinct placed into the people by GOD. Such creation of GOD will never change. This is the perfect religion, but most people do not know.
30:31 You shall submit to Him, reverence Him, observe the Contact Prayers (Salat), and—whatever you do—do not ever fall into idol worship.
30:32 like those who divide their religion into sects; each party rejoicing with what they have.
Sura 3:103 commands believers to hold fast to the rope of God all together and not to divide.
3:103 You shall hold fast to the rope of GOD, all of you, and do not be divided. Recall GOD’s blessings upon you—you used to be enemies and He reconciled your hearts. By His grace, you became brethren. You were at the brink of a pit of fire, and He saved you therefrom. GOD thus explains His revelations for you, that you may be guided.
A believer reading these verses at the time they were revealed would have understood that the named faction, each celebrating its own possession of the truth, was the failure mode and not the goal.
The first split and the first meaning of “jamā’a”
The earliest believers were known by relationships and roles: the Companions, the Emigrants (muhājirūn) and the Helpers (anṣār), the people of Mecca and of Medina. There were disputes, but there was no named doctrinal camp that anyone would call Sunni.
The first named parties come out of politics. After the killing of ‘Uthman in 656 and the civil war that followed, a faction known as the shī’at ‘Alī, the party of ‘Ali, formed around his claim. At Siffin in 657, a group walked out of ‘Ali’s army over his acceptance of arbitration and became the Khawarij. These were names for political positions in a civil war, and over the following decades they gathered theological content.
The word jamā’a belongs to this story as a political term. The year 41 of the Hijra (661) is remembered as ‘ām al-jamā’a, the year of the community, because al-Hasan ceded the caliphate to Mu’awiya and the civil war ended. “The community” meant the united body of Muslims under a single ruler. Whatever else it came to mean later, its first career was as a word for political unity.
What “sunna” meant before it meant a sect
The word sunna means a path, a custom, an established way of doing things. It was already used in this sense before Islam, and it appears in the Quran in the phrase sunnat Allāh, God’s way of dealing with nations. In the first Islamic century, it kept this broad meaning. According to the standard accounts of the council that chose ‘Uthman in 644, ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Awf asked ‘Ali to rule by the Book of God, the sunna of the Prophet, and the practice of the two preceding commanders of the faithful, Abu Bakr and ‘Umar. ‘Ali declined the last condition, and ‘Uthman accepted it. Sunna here is precedent, a body of practice that the community and its rulers inherited, and it was something people argued over, not a badge.
Even among the scholars later claimed by Sunnism, the authority of the Prophet’s sunna as a body of transmitted reports was a fight and not a given. In Medina, the sunna was largely the living practice of the city. In Iraq, jurists leaned on their own reasoning and local custom. It was al-Shafi’i, who died in 820, who argued at length that the Prophet’s sunna, preserved in authenticated reports, must override local practice and personal opinion. That argument was made against fellow Muslims who did not accept it, which means a group defined by loyalty to the hadith-based sunna did not yet exist as the agreed identity of the community in the early ninth century. This is because if Shafi’i’s position was the dominant position, then he wouldn’t have needed to make a plea in his Risalah and Umma Kitab to justify the elevation of Hadith to divine revelation.
The Ibn Sirin report
The strongest-looking early evidence for the phrase is a statement attributed to the Basran scholar Muhammad ibn Sirin, who died in 728. As recorded in the introduction to Muslim’s collection of hadith, he is said to have remarked that people used not to ask about chains of transmission, but when the fitna broke out they said, name your men for us, so that the ahl al-sunna are looked to, and their reports are taken, and the ahl al-bid’a, the people of innovation, are looked to, and their reports are not taken.
This report proves less than it seems. Modern scholars disagree about which fitna is meant, with proposals ranging from the civil war of the 650s to the Second Fitna of the 680s and 690s to the revolution of the 740s, and some doubt the attribution to Ibn Sirin altogether. More importantly, even on the most generous reading, the phrase is functioning as a description of reliable transmitters, set against those with suspect beliefs. It is an adjective for people in good standing, and no one is yet naming a community. Studies of the term’s early history make the same point: ahl al-sunna started as a word of praise, and it took generations for the praise to become a proper name.
A label with multiple claimants
The best evidence that the term was not yet a stable identity is that its users did not agree on who was entitled to it. Abu Hanifa, who died in the middle of the eighth century and sympathized with the Murji’a, a group later condemned by many Sunnis, described the people he approved of as ahl al-‘adl wa-ahl al-sunna, the people of justice and the sunna. Among his followers, the phrase stayed interchangeable with other terms of approval for a long time. According to one recent scholarly study of the term’s career, as late as the ninth century, authors of sharply opposed orientations each claimed these words for their own community, among them a hadith scholar, a Mu’tazili, and an Isma’ili. A name that a rationalist theologian, a traditionalist, and a member of a Shi’i movement can all apply to themselves is not yet the name of a single established religion.
The decisive pressure came from the miḥna, the inquisition run by the Abbasid state from 833 to 848 under al-Ma’mun and his successors, which tested scholars on whether they held that the Quran was created. Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s refusal made him the hero of the hadith folk, the ahl al-ḥadīth, and gave their position a martyr, a creed, and a grievance. After the state reversed course, the traditionalist camp was in a position to define itself against the Mu’tazila and, increasingly, against the Shi’a and others.
The language of the camp shows the label forming. The Hadith compiler al-Tirmidhi, who died in the late ninth century, appears in one recent study as the earliest datable figure to use ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamā’a for himself and his own side. The Hanafi scholar al-Tahawi, who died in 933, opens his creed by presenting it as the belief of the ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamā’a according to the jurists of the community. Abu’l-Hasan al-Ash’ari, who died around 935, claimed the title for his own school but mostly preferred other formulas such as ahl al-sunna wa’l-ḥadīth, and used the longer phrase rarely. Before the end of the ninth century, as far as the sources show, no one used the phrase as the settled name for a defined community, and it spread as a standard only in the century after that.
How the label hardened
The names stiffened into a sectarian identity in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the cause was politics and rivalry. The Fatimids established a Shi’i caliphate in North Africa in 909 and took Egypt in 969. The Buyids, a Shi’i dynasty, controlled Baghdad from 945 and dominated the Abbasid caliph. In that world, “Sunni” was useful as the name of the other side of a contest over who spoke for Islam.
When the balance shifted, so did the way the label was used. In 1017 and 1018, the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir issued a creed, the Qadiri declaration, that condemned the Mu’tazila and other opponents and set out the doctrine of the traditionalists as the faith of the community. After the Seljuk Turks, who were Sunni, took Baghdad in 1055, their vizier Nizam al-Mulk founded the Nizamiyya colleges, beginning in Baghdad in the 1060s, to train a scholarly class in the approved law and theology and to counter Isma’ili propaganda. Here the state stepped in to sponsor an orthodoxy and to name it.
The scholars supplied the theory. ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Baghdadi, who died in 1037, wrote al-Farq bayna’l-firaq, a catalog of the sects of Islam organized around a famous hadith in which the community splits into seventy-three groups and only one is saved. The hadith appears in several versions with different wording and different chains, and in some it identifies the saved group with the jamā’a. Al-Baghdadi identified that group with the ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamā’a, and treated everyone else as a deviant branch. Once a heresiography like this exists, Sunni identity is complete: it has borders, a founding story, a list of enemies, and a promise of salvation that excludes them.
The objection and the answer
The standard reply is that the Prophet did tell his followers to hold to his sunna, that jamā’a is also a prophetic concern, and that a label describing loyalty to those things is simply an accurate description of what the first Muslims were. The label may be late, the argument goes, but the thing it names is original.
There are two problems with this reply. First, every early party claimed the Prophet’s example. The Shi’a claimed it through his family, the Khawarij through their reading of his strictness, the Murji’a and the Mu’tazila through their own accounts of his teaching. If everyone claims fidelity to the Prophet, a group that defines itself as the people of his sunna is not describing a common inheritance but staking a claim against everyone else who made the same claim. That is what makes the label a product of opposition: it only has content once there are others to be excluded. Second, the thing now named by Sunnism is not what the earliest generation held in common. It is a specific package assembled over centuries: the authority of the canonical hadith collections, the four legal schools, the Ash’ari and Maturidi creeds, and the doctrine of the justice of all the Companions. None of it existed in the Prophet’s lifetime, and much of it was still being argued over in the ninth century. To call that package the original faith assumes the conclusion.
What this means
The historical record gives a consistent answer. The Quran names the believers Muslims and warns against dividing into named factions. The first generations had political parties and no Sunni identity. The phrase ahl al-sunna began as praise for reliable transmitters and sound believers, was claimed by rival camps in the eighth and ninth centuries, and became the name of a defined community only after the inquisition, the rise of the traditionalist creed, and the sectarian rivalry of the tenth and eleventh centuries made it useful. Sunni identity is a response to the groups it was defined against, and the Prophet and his companions would not have recognized it as a name for themselves. They would not have recognized the thing the name now points to either. The sunna of the first generation was a living practice, and the memory of the Prophet’s example, and the Sunni tradition’s own historians remember Umar burning written collections of the Prophet’s sayings, comparing them to the Mishnah, and telling his governors to strip the Quran bare and ration the narration. A library of hadith, treated as a second source of law, was argued into existence by al-Shafi’i and his successors, and it became the mark of a party only when that party needed a banner against its rivals.