much in the minority and whose work on naskh Jami'al-Ta'wil (al-Amidi, al-Ihkam, v.3, 115), has been lost to history. But "concentrated criticism of the abrogation concept only started in the latter part" of the nineteenth century, according to Khaleel Mohammad. According to Karel Steenbrink, "most" of the modernist or reformist scholars of that era (Muhammad Abduh, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, and Rashid Rida), considered the theory of abrogation of the Quran invalid. Muhammad al-Ghazali, writing in 1992, stated "the position taken by all the modern scholars whom I have met, or listened to, or whose works I have read, is contrary to the understanding of naskh that became so widespread among the later exegetes, namely that there exists naskh (if accepted) as meaning the abrogation of verses of the Qur'an." Two lesser known scholars who wrote work and spoke against naskh of Islamic revelation in more depth in the 20th century were Muhammad Amin (an Azhar graduate, active at the beginning of the 20th century), and 'Abd al-Muta'al al-Jabri (who wrote his Master's thesis—entitled Naskh As I Understand It In The Islamic Shari'ah—at the University of Cairo in 1949). Need and scope Dealing with apparent contradictions Islam teaches that the Quran was revealed to Muhammad over 23 years (609-632 CE) until the year of his death. The customs and practices of Muhammad over this same period are known as the Sunnah, and reports of them are known as ahadith. From early in Islam's history, some scholars thought that contradictory commands existed in the Quran, among hadith of the Sunnah, as well as between verses of the Quran and the hadith. Since Islam calls on humanity to obey the Quran and imitate the behavior of the prophet, and also because "a defining claim of Sunni Islam" is that no two authentic hadith could contradict each other or the Quran, (and because some verses in the Quran at least seemed to contradict each other) scholars worked to resolve these apparent contradictions in the verses that give regulations to Muslims. This became especially important, (as mentioned above), after the principle of fiqh was established that in forming Islamic law, hadith attributed to Muhammad overruled those attributed to all other early Muslims on the same issue. This led to the growth in the number of these hadith and contradictions between them, created a danger to their legitimacy as the basis of sharia law. While