such ideas might have already occurred to them; infact, as brother noori was saying [in a private mail] there is a very good collection of Hadith quoted in alaHazrat's fatawa. i had the chance to peruse through this book [in four volumes] here in our mosque and found it to be not one, but atleast three works: - extensive biographies of alaHazrat, and his two sons - a beginner's guide to principles of Hadith [uSul al-Hadith] - collection and takhrij of Hadith found in fatawa riDawiyah. so, the point is that a lot of work is being done; it is only that we - the english speaking sunnis - are not aware. Allah ta'ala knows best. wa's salam.
perhaps ideas such as this can be forwarded to sunni lovers of alaHazrat such as prof dr masud ahmad, mawlana yasin akhtar misbahi, mawlana muhammad ahmad misbahi, mawlana abdul hakim sharaf qadri etc. who can insha'Allah do something to bring them into play.
this is like an ordinary windows user debating the linux vs. freebsd kernel; or trying to understand the intel core microarchitecture. not that it is extremely difficult or humanly impossible; only that it requires some prequisite reading and necessary knowledge of fundamentals and then plenty of mandatory reading... --- the books on principles of fiqh are quite well-known and one can begin to understand them when one has read books of fatawa and fiqh because the illustrations and examples are best understood when one is already exposed to them. i did a quick search and found that imam ibn `abidin's 'rules for the jurist' is translated in english [i don't know how good it is, but there be the book.] if you want an urdu book, you can try to find the 23 or the 24th volume of bahar e shariat [usually in indian editions]; mufti waqaruddin raHimahullah wrote beginner's guide to uSul al-fiqh and rasm al-mufti. in arabic, the first volume of radd al-muHtar along with his monograph `uqud rasm al-mufti [found in rasayil ibn abidin] are mandatory. uSul al-fiqh by allamah khuDri; uSul al-fiqh by ustaz abu zahrah; al-wajiz fi uSul al-fiqh by shaykh wahbah zuHayli are all useful - i would say fawatiH ar-raHmut/musallam ath-thubut and al-mustaSfa, but there are problematic parts which can confuse beginners like us. when you go higher, we talk about subtler differences among madh'habs like Hanafi uSul and Shafiyi uSul; alaHazrat has quoted numerous such principles in his fatawa where relevant - [come to think of it: surely, it would make a good ph.D subject/project to collect the uSul from alaHazrat's fatawa along with his annotations in one place].
:s1: This is a question which intrigues me. Let us say there is a Sunni scholar, X, today. I know that there is no difference of opinion allowed in the principles of aqidah (usul). However, on which areas of the furu' is scholar X allowed to differ from the previous scholars of fiqh and aqidah and still remain a Sunni? In other words, to what extent is ijtihad allowed?
