The relationship between orientalism and rejection of sunnah

After undertaking the mission to halt the spread of Islam, Orientalists launched their most effective attacks in the late 18th century. They initiated their efforts simultaneously with British occupation activities in India, Egypt, Africa, the Hijaz, and Anatolia. The assertions by Orientalists that the Muslims' defeat against the West was due to distortions and superstitions in their understanding of Islam were accepted by some Muslims. Through their representatives in the occupied countries, the Orientalists influenced certain Muslim figures and proposed that reform and modernization in Islam were necessary for the salvation of Muslims. Consequently, revival and reform movements emerged. Colonial administrations exerted pressure on some of these movements, allowed others to operate freely, and covertly agreed with some. As a result, a tendency towards the denial of the Qur'anic Islam and the Sunna emerged in three major regions of the Islamic world. This understanding found supporters among Sayyid Ahmed Khan (d. 1898) and his followers in India, among the group of writers and jurists who were sent to Europe for education and returned, and among students of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) such as Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), Rashid Rida (d. 1935), and Mahmud Shaltut (d. 1963) in Egypt. In the Ottoman territories, the Qur'anic Islamism and translation movements that reflected from Egypt emerged. During the Republican era, the culture of Indian, Egyptian, and European Orientalism reached the Turkish geography. Orientalists, including Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and Farabi (d. 950), share common ground with the deistic Greek philosophers in that the naturalistic belief-oriented Qur'anists of India and Egypt (deniers of the Sunna) considered prophethood as something acquired, attributing the revelations they received to their high creation and the prophetic faculty that emerged through asceticism. Qur'anists similarly think about the concepts of the preserved tablet, the throne, the afterlife, angels, jinn, Satan, heaven, and hell as being symbolic rather than real (and thus not having real existence). Miracles were explicitly denied by Indian Qur'anists and denied by Egyptian Qur'anists by aligning them with natural laws. According to Qur'anic Islamists, the texts of the Sunna are out of context and local. This implies the denial of prophethood within the boundaries drawn by Islam. The Qur'aniyyun claim to accept the Prophet but deny his legislations, miracles, and reports. After openly or indirectly denying the Sunna, the Qur'anists transform the Qur'an into human laws with their belief that the Qur'an is a historical text and contains universal human virtues. This study will address the aspects of this Orientalist activity that conflict with Islam and the Qur'an. It will discuss the views and evidence of this discourse that contradict the information found in Islamic science sources.