Hadith, the need to adopt an extra-jurisprudential approach

In Islamic heritage and culture, "jurisprudence" has been one of the main concerns of Muslim scholars throughout history. This obsession has paved the way for the approach according to which determining the non-jurisprudential nature of a subject calls for detailed inspection, thereby preventing the generalization of jurisprudential analyses to the entire set of hadiths.  Orientalists, by generalizing the method of jurisprudential works to hadith, have drawn false conclusions. As an example, Schacht has generalized his theory to all hadiths solely based on jurisprudential instances. However, the separation of jurisprudence from non-jurisprudence thwarts the generalization of such disputes. In fact, the sole generalization of jurisprudence to hadith is a common fallacy that could only be eschewed by establishing the principle of "distinguishing hadith from jurisprudence". In this article, this distinction is evaluated in four areas: "historical distinction", "methodological distinction ", "distinction in approach" and "distinction in valuation".