section_path: Adherents/Three group doctrines
section_name: Three group doctrines
paragraph_text: Three group doctrines
  
  Regarding the question which dogmatic tendencies are to be assigned to Sunnism, there is no agreement among Muslim scholars. Since the early modern period, is the idea that a total of three groups belong to the Sunnis: 1. those named after Abu l-Hasan al-Aschʿari (d. 935) Ashʿarites, 2. those named after Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. 941) named Maturidites and 3. a differently named third group, which is traditionalistic-oriented and rejects the rational discourse of Kalām advocated by the Maturidites and Ashʿarites. The Syrian scholar ʿAbd al-Baqi Ibn Faqih Fussa (d. 1661) calls this third traditionalist group the Hanbalites. The late Ottoman thinker İsmail Hakkı İzmirli (d. 1946), who agreed to dividing Sunnis into these three groups, called the traditionalist group Salafiyya, but also used Athariyya as an alternative term. For the Maturidiyya he gives Nasafīyya as a possible alternative name. Another used for the traditionalist-oriented group is "people of Hadith " (ahl al-ḥadīṯ). It is used, for example, in the final document of the Grozny Conference. Only those "people of the Hadith" are assigned to Sunnism who practice tafwīḍ, i.e. who refrain from interpreting the ambiguous statements of the Quran.