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February 14 - July 22, 2017
The ‘double sale’ soon became widely allowed and practiced. In fact, it ultimately became the basis of modern Islamic finance, which accomplishes the same process through almost instantaneous platinum transactions arranged by the bank lender.21 But when Malik looked at the ‘double sale,’ he saw only a clear plan to violate the spirit of God’s law. The ‘double sale’ was a means to precisely the interest-bearing loan that God and the Prophet had forbidden, and Malik prohibited it.22
The Qur’an had encouraged Muhammad and his followers to use their reason, to scan the heavens and appreciate the ordered infinity of God’s creation. But the Qur’an also cautioned against trusting too much in reason when pondering matters of the unseen, for the Devil is forever urging man to ‘say about God that which you do not know’ (2:169).
This presented a quandary. The Qur’an had been preserved unaltered since the death of the Prophet, the foundation of Muslim faith and practice.* But this foundation did not provide all the answers to theological questions or the necessary details for basic rituals and laws. These could be found in plenty in the teachings attributed to Muhammad, but the Hadiths inundating the garrison cities of the Near East were very often totally made up, frequently deserving of suspicion and at best transmitted from the Prophet by a fraction of that great plurality of Muslims who memorized the Qur’an by
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If the Qur’an warned Muslims against following mere supposition, and if ‘supposition can never take the place of truth’ (53:28), how could Muslims ‘know’ anything about God or their duties to Him from a source as questionable as the Hadiths?
Malik’s most famous student, however, was a very different creature and a symbol of an interconnected new day. Muhammad bin Idris Shafi‘i was born in Gaza, studied for many years with Malik in Medina, served as the Abbasid governor in the Yemeni city of Najran, traveled to Baghdad to study with Abu Hanifa’s acolyte Shaybani and others and ended his days settled in Egypt. His travels showed Shafi‘i how isolated and idiosyncratic the local schools of Islam really were.
In light of this disagreement, what could provide a thread of unity for the scholars’ interpretive efforts and serve as a common standard of proof? Shah Wali Allah explained that Shafi‘i ‘took law from the source.’ The answer was to return to the Hadiths of the Prophet.35 All the regions and varied scholars believed firmly that they were adhering to the Prophet’s Sunna in the sense of his overall precedent.
But, as Shafi‘i had pointed out, all these supposedly accurate understandings of the Sunna disagreed with each other. He believed that only by obeying strictly the actual words of the Prophet as transmitted in Hadiths could a true and unified vision of the Sunna triumph. This was the mantra of a dynamic but highly conservative new group with which Shafi‘i identified. Calling themselves the Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama‘a, ‘The People of the Sunna and the Collective,’ their vision of the faith would become known by the abbreviated name of Sunni Islam.
The Mutazila opponents of this argument were pious and learned Muslims, however, and they countered that core Islamic practices like prayer were indeed drawn from outside the Qur’an – from the living tradition of the Muslim community, which handed down these sacred customs generation after generation by consensus.
The Qur’an and the Sunna functioned in tandem. Like a locked door without a key, the Qur’an could not be accessed without the Sunna. The Qur’an contained the totality of God’s message, but the Sunna explained, adjusted and added to it in order to convey God’s complete guidance.
Shah Wali Allah explained how Shafi‘i’s vision of law erased regional boundaries and built on a common body of Hadiths, Companion rulings and regimented reasoning. Finding the answer to a new question about how to act or adjudicate would begin with consulting the verses of the Qur’an and reliable Hadiths together. The local practice of Medina or the teachings of Kufa had no weight. If nothing in the Qur’an, Hadiths or universally agreed-upon positions among the early Muslims could be found to address the question, then the scholar could search for a ruling by a leading Companion or use strict
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The Isnad, or chain of transmission, would be used to verify Hadiths and guarantee the authenticity of sacred knowledge. Muslims need not accept Hadiths blindly. In fact, they should not accept any instruction or claim uncritically. Rather, they only had to obey a Hadith if they found an Isnad demonstrating that it had been transmitted reliably from the Prophet. ‘The Isnad is part of the religion,’ proclaimed a Sunni contemporary of Shafi‘i. ‘If not for the Isnad, whoever wanted could say whatever they wanted.’
A Hadith that met these requirements was considered ‘sound’ (sahih). If it was widely transmitted through many circles of Hadith scholars, then it was also deemed
‘well known’ (mashhur). A Hadith with some flaw in its chain of transmission was termed ‘weak’ (da‘if).
like law and theology, Hadith transmission and study had remained localized until Shafi‘i’s time in the late 700s.
The preference for relying on Hadiths over rational devices such as Istihsan was a hallmark of the emergent Sunni school as a whole. More than any other sect, it took to heart the Qur’anic warning against an overreliance on man’s frail reason in understanding God and morality.
Both the followers of Abu Hanifa and the theological school of the Mutazila (many followers of Abu Hanifa’s school, in fact, subscribed to Mutazila theology) had used the Qur’an, the consensus of the Muslims and reason as criteria for determining if a Hadith was authentic or a forgery attributed to the Prophet. Its contents had to be tested against these criteria. If a Hadith contradicted any of them, it could not be true. It had to be a forgery regardless of who was claiming the Prophet had said it.
Hadiths, as the units that composed the Sunna, explained and added to the Qur’an. What seemed to be contradicting the Qur’an might really be explaining its true meaning, as was the case with the Hadith informing men that they could not marry a woman and her aunt at the same time. Second, human reason, with its limited understanding of reality and its inability to grasp God’s power and truth, was not fit to act as a litmus test for the wisdom of a prophet. As Shah Wali Allah remarked, when it comes to knowing what is best the Messenger of God is ‘more trustworthy than our own reason.’
The Sunni solution to the problem of authenticating Hadiths was to try and remove reason from the process, focusing on tracing and evaluating their chains of transmission instead of examining their contents.
In their extensive travels in the quest for Hadiths, scholars like Ibn Hanbal collected thousands and thousands of reports attributed to the Prophet. Sometimes they might collect a dozen or even several dozen transmissions of the same statement, its chains of transmission intertwining and converging through a web of pious ancestors back to Muhammad (the Musnad contains seven transmissions alone of the Hadith of Umar kissing the Black Stone). These would all be analyzed and compared with one another to determine their individual and collective soundness. Ibn Hanbal’s Musnad contained some
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Literal belief in these Hadith-born tenets of faith became a hallmark of early Sunni theology, while the Mutazila dismissed them as fable or considered them allegorical.
Although they began as a small, conservative and ideologically xenophobic network of scholars obsessed with collecting and evaluating Hadiths, the Sunni mantra of the primacy of revealed text over reason would attain a paramount place among the populations of cities like Baghdad and would eventually draw other schools under its banner.
During this time of tremendous ferment and productivity in Islamic thought, ninth- and tenth-century scholars traveled, taught and disputed along the Silk Road that linked the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia. There were many more luminaries of law than just Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi‘i and Ibn Hanbal. Awza‘i of Beirut, Tabari of Baghdad and Thawri of Kufa developed their own approaches to the Shariah and attracted followers. The legacies of Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi‘i and Ibn Hanbal, however, flourished above all others.
Far from a myopic or rigid body of law, the Sunni Shariah tradition thus became a swirl of stunning diversity. Not only were there four distinct schools of law, but each school also had a range of opinions on any one question.
Each madhhab conquered its own territory over time. The Hanafi school proliferated among the Turks of Central Asia, becoming dominant in India and later in the Ottoman Empire when Turkic Muslim dynasties established themselves in those climes. The Shafi‘i school, based in Egypt and Yemen, spread through Indian Ocean trade to Southeast Asia, where it is the monopoly madhhab until today. The Maliki school spread with Malik’s students from North Africa to the west, becoming the exclusive madhhab from Andalusia to West Africa and even east to the Sudan. The Hanbali school was predominant in
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Always a minority movement, it became increasingly influential in the eighteenth century, when the isolated Hanbalis of Central Arabia formed the powerful Wahhabi movement.
Their approach to the unity and diversity of the Shariah was best expressed by the twelfth-century Hanafi scholar of Central Asia, Abu Hafs Nasafi: ‘Our school is correct with the possibility of error, and another school is in error with the possibility of being correct.’64
Scholars like the tenth-century Ibn Mundhir of Nishapur compiled books of Ijma‘, listing the points of law on which all schools agreed. After the eleventh century it became effectively impossible to start a new madhhab, with one Baghdad scholar composing a poem on how the four schools’ founders ‘Are our proofs, and whoever is guided by anyone other will go astray.’
After their death, these saints only grew in power and station. The same Hadiths that established the Punishment of the Grave established that the souls of the dead are still conscious and active, and in other Hadiths the Prophet tells how: ‘The prophets are alive, praying in their graves.’80 Saints were thought to be no different, as able in death to answer invocations for assistance as they had been in this earthly life. Especially after the 1100s, their graves became centers of pilgrimage for the masses of Muslims seeking their Baraka, or blessing.
The mystical insights and methods of spiritual and ethical discipline taught by these masters were organized by their senior disciples into regimented Sufi orders, or ‘paths’ (tariqa). Sufi orders centered on the devotional exercises and liturgical poems (wird) penned by the masters to focus aspiring Sufis on God, the Prophet and greater piety.
In the barren desert of Najd in Central Arabia, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab perceived the superstitions, grave visitations and sinful lifestyles around him as no different than the pre-Islamic, polytheist Arabs that Muhammad had battled. The alliance he formed with the ruling Saud family in the town of Dir‘iyya, known as the ‘Muwahhid’ movement, or those calling for restoring Tawhid (called ‘Wahhabis’ by their detractors), engaged in a violent conquest of Central Arabia that forced their revivalist message on the tribes they defeated.
The young Egyptian doctor could not believe the Prophet had said it. The Hadith contradicted everything he had learned about disease and standards of hygiene in Cairo’s modern Qasr Al-Ayni Medical School. ‘If a fly lands in your drink, push it all the way under, then throw the fly out and drink. On one of the fly’s wings is disease, on the other is its cure.’ Such were the words of the Prophet as Tawfiq Sidqi found them.
the young doctor could not escape an alarming conclusion: the Hadiths of the Sunni tradition were little more than fable. The Sunna as a whole, he would write in a controversial 1906 article, was only ever meant for the Arabs of the Prophet’s time. From that point on, Muslims were meant to rely on the Qur’an and reason alone to find their way.
The Hadith of the Fly was found in the Sahih al-Bukhari, which Sunnis claimed was ‘the most authentic book after the Qur’an.’
Writing about his late classmate, Abu Rayya recalled how he had been called a kafir, an infidel, for doubting a Hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari.2
Sometimes medieval exegetes simply admitted that they had no answers to explain perplexing Hadiths. But this was their failing, they felt, and no more than an unsmoothed wrinkle in the pages of scripture.
When they came to a Hadith recounting how ‘God created Adam, and he was sixty arms tall,’ and that, after Adam fell, ‘mankind has continued to shrink since that time,’ Ibn Hajar noticed a problem. The houses he had seen carved out of cliffs by ancient, bygone peoples were the same size as those in his own time. Their inhabitants had not been any taller than his fellow Cairenes. Ibn Hajar admitted frankly that ‘to this day, I have not found how to resolve this problem’ and promptly moved on to the next Hadith.5
Like all faith communities, Muslims’ approach to their scriptures has been influenced by their epistemological worldview. This is that lens that a person or group of like-minded people habitually apply to the world around them, to the history they read and the beliefs they hold. It dictates what are the primary truths against which other claims and data are tested. In the epistemological worldview of modern Western historians, events must be explained through material or social causes. Claims of some miraculous occurrence must be fabrications or delusions.
Yet, inconceivable for academics in today’s disenchanted world, in the seventeenth century even the most skeptical Jesuit historians had no compunction reporting that they had seen the blood of a long-dead saint liquefy again before their very eyes. They had expected no less. To them, the world was still a theatre of God’s power where miracles could occur.
The Gospels, Shakespeare’s plays and the Constitution of the United States are not just revered tomes, mere works of literature or meditations on law and justice. Each is part of a canon, a set of texts deemed authoritative by its community of readers. For Western European civilization from the fourth century until the early modern period, the Bible was the recognized vehicle of God’s truth. It remains so for many to this day. Shakespeare’s works are the measure of literary achievement in the English language, graciously bearing aphorisms on love and mortality. His grammar cannot be ‘wrong’ or
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The appearance of the historical-critical study of the Bible and the fall of the Bible from scriptural canon to mere literature among scholars has been one of the great events of modern Western history.
As Augustine, Saadia Gaon and the Muslim legal theorists appreciated, the sources of knowledge for ‘Peoples of the Book’ are scripture, the light of reason and the perceived realities of the outside world. But God’s word intrudes into man’s world as no equal partner.
The Old Testament was suited to a specific place and time, for an ancient people who did not find anthropomorphism or the admissions of a ‘jealous God’ objectionable. That world found nothing odd about forbidding cooking a lamb in its mother’s milk, though Augustine thought the verse too absurd to be anything but allegory and Maimonides could only explain it as an ethical reminder not to cook an animal in a substance that should have nourished it.
Rome was still played out under the auspices of Jupiter Capitolinus, and Cicero required skeptical priests to keep their debates over the gods private. As Gibbon mused, they ‘concealed the sentiments of an atheist under sacerdotal robes,’ but they concealed them all the same.19 Similarly, Voltaire did not want to share his skepticism about the Bible with the masses of the poor, for whom Christianity provided both a rare comfort and ‘that necessary fear that prevents secret crimes.’20
The eleventh-century poet Ma‘arri gained acclaim for his cynical agnosticism, jibing that ‘The people of the earth are of two types: those with reason and no religion, and religious folk with no reason at all.’ But such skeptics still abided by or concealed themselves within the confines of Islam’s canonical culture.
In Shah Wali Allah’s day, two great camps of Sunni thought contended with one another: those we might term the Sunni traditionalists, who believed that the institutions of the triad heritage of the madhhabs, speculative theology and Sufi orders represented the true embodiment of Islam; and the iconoclastic ‘Salafi’ revivalists, who called for bypassing what they considered rigid and often misguided traditions to return to the Qur’an and Hadiths, the pure Islam of the Prophet’s community.
The conviction that the Qur’an and its application in the Sunna together embodied truth, and thus had to be read in that light, was core to the pre-modern Islamic interpretive tradition.
That one had to move from the evident meaning of a text to a secondary meaning because compelling evidence required it was known as Ta’wil, or interpretation.
Even the earliest Muslims understood that literal meanings could, in fact, be dangerous. In a series of verses chastising the Jews and Christians of Medina for not following the sacred laws revealed to them or submitting to the Prophet’s judgment, the Qur’an declares: ‘And whoever does not rule by what God has revealed, truly they are the unbelievers’ (5:44). This verse has echoed violently among militant revivalist groups in the modern period. It literally condemns as kafirs – unbelievers – those who do not rule by the law revealed by God, the Shariah.
One could object that these readings of the Qur’an and Hadiths contradict what the texts explicitly ‘say.’ But texts themselves do not say anything. What they say and what they mean is determined by the reader in the unavoidable and sometimes unconscious act of interpretation.
‘What is the Torah?’ Talmudic rabbis replied simply, ‘It is the interpretation of the Torah.’
