Two Kinds of Innovation, Classically Divided

Islamic jurisprudence did not begin by rejecting every innovation outright. Classical scholars built the concept of bidah, literally a new matter introduced into religion without precedent in the practice of the Prophet or his earliest companions, around a division rather than a blanket condemnation. Al Shafii, the founder of one of the four major Sunni legal schools, held that newly introduced matters fall into two kinds: those that contradict the Quran, the Sunna, a companion's report or established consensus, which count as misguided innovation, and those that introduce something good with no such contradiction, which he refused to call blameworthy at all. Later jurists elaborated this into a fuller scale running from forbidden through discouraged, permitted and recommended innovations, treating the category the same way Islamic law treats any other human action, subject to the same five part classification the law applies elsewhere. On this classical reading, something as basic as compiling the Quran into a single bound text, an act with no precedent in the Prophet's own lifetime, counts as commendable innovation precisely because it served the religion's own preservation without contradicting anything it teaches. That two part structure, and the room it leaves for judgment between the two poles, is exactly what reform minded currents within Sunni Islam later moved to close.