It is sometimes used to mean heresy...

It is sometimes used to mean heresy; and sometimes means all things that used to be done, to show guidance and manner of living, by Allah's Prophet (a.s.). It is considered the second source of thought and legislation after the Holy Qur'an, as well as, a principal fountainhead of guidance and uprightness. And it has a restricted link with the Holy Qur'an by making it clear and more obvious in discovering and expressing its content.

The well-known, contemporary religious authorities have paid much attention to Sunnah through many a hard and organized effort to preserve, revise, adjust, record and quote it. A process of preserving and quoting Sunnah has passed through these following two stages: A. Learning it by heart and quoting, orally, those chains of citations. B.

Recording and writing, as well as, storing the Sunnah into private books, which entails thousands of traditions and narrations that address different events and incidents. Most of those books have acted as legislative, ideological, educational, moral, social, political and economic general rules and principles.

In bringing them together with what is revealed in the Holy Qur'an; to link them to each other, we can obtain a huge wealth of ideas, as well as, a knowledgeable, cultural and unique contribution. Sunnah of the Prophet plays a key role in the Muslim's ideological life and is summed up as follows: A. It is a source of Islamic thought, law and knowledge. B.

It is a standard of achieving rightness and correctness of what Muslim thinkers and researchers are going to produce; besides, it is an instrument to explain both error and correction. C. It is a tool to understand the Qur'an and discover its meaning along with its content.

The Islamic Thought could set up this Islamic, ideological, cultural, knowledgeable and towering structure by way of depending on the Holy Qur'an and Sunnah, as well as, activating their contents together with providing and covering the social, ideological and legislative life with recent originated matters and intellectual legislative events and to classify it and bring some narrations forward which excel others.