A Word on the Hadith: (… So whoever turns away from my Sunnah is not one of me).

The Shaykh : … and this is very clear in the hadithThe Shaykh : … in the two Sahihs from Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him) that a group of the Companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) came to his wives and did not find him (peace be upon him), so they asked them about his worship (peace and blessings be upon him), regarding his fasting, his standing in prayer, and his visiting his wives. Their answer was what is known in the Sunnah: that he (peace and blessings be upon him) would stand in prayer at night and sleep, fast and break the fast, and marry women, based on His saying: Anas said: When they heard the answer of his wives (peace be upon him) regarding his worship (peace and blessings be upon him), they considered it little. They considered it little, meaning they found it to be little, because they imagined, based on their correct belief, that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is the master of mankind and the best of mankind, so he should be the most worshipful of mankind, and he is so. But they imagined that he would not be the most worshipful of mankind unless he worshipped according to their conception of worship. They conceived worship as standing in prayer at night and not sleeping, fasting the whole year and not breaking the fast, and not marrying women, because women, as some of the fabricators said about the Messenger of Allah, "knowledge is lost between the laps of women." So how could the Messenger of Allah marry? How could he sleep at night and not stand in prayer the whole night? How could he break the fast and not fast the whole year? This is how they imagined it, so that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) would be the most worshipful of mankind, and he is undoubtedly the most worshipful and the most perfect of them, but not within the limits of their conception of worship. They expressed their wrong conception by saying that they found his worship to be little. The Prophet sleeps at night and does not pray the whole night. The Prophet breaks the fast and does not fast the whole year. The Prophet marries women, not one or two or four, but he gathers nine and married more than nine. This is little worship. Then they returned to themselves to justify such worship which they considered little, with an excuse that is uglier than the thing excused, where they said: This is the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), Allah has forgiven him what has passed of his sin and what remains. The language of their state, the meaning of their words, is this: Why does the Messenger (peace be upon him) strain himself? Why do we seek from him that he stand in prayer the whole night, fast the whole year, and not marry women, since Allah has forgiven him what has passed of his sin and what remains? Does not one of us live in this worldly life to attain the forgiveness of Allah in the Hereafter? Yes. So since the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) has been forgiven by Allah what has passed of his sin and what remains, in their wrong viewpoint, the Messenger does not stand in prayer the whole night, and so on, from what they said wrongly. They said: As for us, we have no promise from Allah that He has forgiven us, so we must strive, and resolve, and gather our affairs, and worship our Lord with all worship, so that we may attain the forgiveness of Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He) as the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) attained it. So one of them said: As for me, I will fast the whole year. The second said: As for me, I will stand in prayer at night and not sleep. The third said: As for me, I will not marry women. Soon the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) returned to his family, and they informed him of the news, the news of the group. So he (peace and blessings be upon him) preached in the mosque and said, hinting and not being explicit about the people: He repeated their phrases that they said regarding the Prophet, that he stands in prayer at night and sleeps, this is little worship, and so on. And here the intended meaning of the hadith is: He (peace be upon him) said: So the Sunnah here does not mean the one that opposes the obligatory as the jurists have defined it, but rather it is the Shari'ah, including what is in it of action, which is worship, and what is in it of leaving, which is the Sunnah. Here I wanted to pause a little and then I turned away, because I remembered that if I stopped at talking about the active Sunnah and talking about the Sunnah of leaving, we would go far and very far from answering the original question, which is the Shafi'i terminology in naming some of the Prophetic actions that he (peace be upon him) used to do, especially in prayer, as being among the forms. So in order not to go far from concluding the answer to this question, I now turn away from the talk that occurred to me just now, regarding the necessity of clarifying the difference between the active Sunnah and the Sunnah of leaving, especially since such a terminology, I know, is strange, and there is no strangeness in that, because we live in a strange estrangement from knowledge and distance from the jurisprudence of the Book and the Sunnah…