The late Fazlur Rahman once remarked: “Obligation and rights are the obverse and converse of the same coin.”
To use it as a currency, one cannot cut them into two. Mutually inseparable and indispensable, the one obviously cannot subsist for any length of time without the other.
Written in the late 1980’s, his Major Themes of the Qur’an further noted that, the Qur’an primarily exhorts mankind to a strong sense of moral responsibility instead of merely demanding rights.
According to Fazlur Rahman, this significant Qur’anic clarity should prompt crucial consideration, that a comprehensive sense of responsibility can very well take care of all human rights, whereas the converse is not true.
Indeed, as he observed, a society that begins to understand rights in terms of permissiveness, or defiance of the Divine Law, spells its own inevitable doom.
This is because submission to the law of God brings harmony to one’s natural inclination, or fitrah; opposition to it brings no other than discord. “No one in Islam has a right to do wrong-to do wrong is injustice (zulm), and this is not a right,” according to renowned scholar, Prof Dr Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas.
In a well-known hadith regarding the first and foremost responsibility in Islam, the Prophet Muhammad stated that, “the pursuit of Knowledge (al-‘Ilm) is obligatory upon each and every Muslim.”
Here, it is incumbent to unravel some concerns pertaining to the aforementioned hadith’s chain of transmitters.
Although there were some scholars who were of the opinion that because a few deficient narrators were involved in transmitting this hadith it is therefore considered a non-established (ghayr thabit) or weak (da‘if) hadith, other erudite luminaries such as al-Muzani (d. 175/791) considered it a well-authenticated (hasan) hadith by virtue of the fact that there were various chains of narrators for it.
Moreover, in the evaluation of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) in the al-Ta‘liqah al-Munifah, this is a rigorously authenticated hadith (sahih) as he found out that it had been transmitted by way of around fifty chains of transmissions.
Be that as it may, it is to be noted that there are various other, more important considerations in order to do justice to this issue. Whether the chain of transmitters renders this hadith sahih, hasan or da‘if is never an issue of grave importance for the aforementioned erudite scholars throughout the history of Islamic scholarship.
Indeed, it has been fundamentally accepted in the Islamic sciences that, it is not logically impossible for a sound text of the Sunnah to be related correctly even by a transmitter with poor memory, or one unknown to the person who recorded the hadith.
According to the same principle, a weak hadith cannot simply be equated with false or forged hadith.
Specifically in this regard, as recorded by among others Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr al-Andalusi (d. 364/1071) and al-Nawawi (d. 676/1277) in his Fatawa, as far as the text and the meaning of this hadith is concerned, it is rigorously authenticated (sahih).
In effect, all genuine Muslim scholars, without exception, are in consensus and accept and commit to the aforementioned purpose and meaning of the foregoing hadith.