The problem with anti-madhhabism
[revised edition]
© Abdal-Hakim Murad
The ummah's greatest
achievement over the past millennium has undoubtedly been its
internal intellectual cohesion. From the fifth century of the Hijra almost
to the present day, and despite the outward drama of the clash of
dynasties, the Sunni Muslims have maintained an almost unfailing attitude
of religious respect and brotherhood among themselves. It is a striking
fact that virtually no religious wars, riots or persecutions divided them
during this extended period, so difficult in other ways.
The history of religious movements suggests that this is an unusual
outcome. The normal sociological view, as expounded by Max Weber and his
disciples, is that religions enjoy an initial period of unity, and then
descend into an increasingly bitter factionalism led by rival hierarchies.
Christianity has furnished the most obvious example of this; but one could
add many others, including secular faiths such as Marxism. On the face of
it, Islam's ability to avoid this fate is astonishing, and demands careful
analysis.
There is, of course, a straightforwardly religious explanation. Islam is
the final religion, the last bus home, and as such has been divinely
secured from the more terminal forms of decay. It is true that what Abdul
Wadod Shalabi has termed spiritual entropy has been at work ever since
Islam's inauguration, a fact which is well-supported by a number of
hadiths. Nonetheless, Providence has not neglected the ummah. Earlier
religions slide gently or painfully into schism and irrelevance; but
Islamic piety, while fading in quality, has been given mechanisms which
allow it to retain much of the sense of unity emphasised in its glory
days. Wherever the antics of the emirs and politicians might lead, the
brotherhood of believers, a reality in the initial career of Christianity
and some other faiths, continues, fourteen hundred years on, to be a
compelling principle for most members of the final and definitive
community of revelation in Islam. The reason is simple and unarguable: God
has given us this religion as His last word, and it must therefore endure,
with its essentials of tawhid, worship and ethics intact, until the Last
Days.
Such an explanation has obvious merit. But we will still need to explain
some painful exceptions to the rule in the earliest phase of our history.
The Prophet himself (pbuh) had told his Companions, in a hadith narrated
by Imam Tirmidhi, that "Whoever among you outlives me shall see a vast
dispute". The initial schisms: the disastrous revolt against Uthman (r.a.),
the clash between Ali (r.a.) and Muawiyah, the bloody scissions of the
Kharijites - all these drove knives of discord into the Muslim body
politic almost from the outset. Only the inherent sanity and love of unity
among scholars of the ummah assisted, no doubt, by Providence overcame the
early spasms of factionalism, and created a strong and harmonious Sunnism
which has, at least on the purely religious plane, united ninety percent
of the ummah for ninety percent of its history.
It will help us greatly to understand our modern, increasingly divided
situation if we look closely at those forces which divided us in the
distant past. There were many of these, some of them very eccentric; but
only two took the form of mass popular movements, driven by religious
ideology, and in active rebellion against majoritarian faith and
scholarship. For good reasons, these two acquired the names of Kharijism
and Shi'ism. Unlike Sunnism, both were highly productive of splinter
groups and sub-movements; but they nonetheless remained as recognisable
traditions of dissidence because of their ability to express the two great
divergences from mainstream opinion on the key question of the source of
religious authority in Islam.
Confronted with what they saw as moral slippage among early caliphs,
posthumous partisans of Ali (r.a.) developed a theory of religious
authority which departed from the older egalitarian assumptions by vesting
it in a charismatic succession of Imams. We need not stop here to
investigate the question of whether this idea was influenced by the
Eastern Christian background of some early converts, who had been
nourished on the idea of the mystical apostolic succession to Christ, a
gift which supposedly gave the Church the unique ability to read his mind
for later generations. What needs to be appreciated is that Shi'ism, in
its myriad forms, developed as a response to a widely-sensed lack of
definitive religious authority in early Islamic society. As the age of the
Righteous Caliphs came to a close, and the Umayyad rulers departed ever
more conspicuously from the lifestyle expected of them as Commanders of
the Faithful, the sharply-divergent and still nascent schools of fiqh
seemed inadequate as sources of strong and unambiguous authority in
religious matters. Hence the often irresistible seductiveness of the idea
of an infallible Imam.
This interpretation of the rise of Imamism also helps to explain the
second great phase in Shi'i expansion. After the success of the
fifth-century Sunni revival, when Sunnism seemed at last to have become a
fully coherent system, Shi'ism went into a slow eclipse. Its extreme wing,
as manifested in Ismailism, received a heavy blow at the hands of Imam al-Ghazali,
whose book "Scandals of the Batinites" exposed and refuted their secret
doctrines with devastating force. This decline in Shi'i fortunes was only
arrested after the mid-seventh century, once the Mongol hordes under
Genghis Khan had invaded and obliterated the central lands of Islam. The
onslaught was unimaginably harsh: we are told, for instance, that out of a
hundred thousand former inhabitants of the city of Herat, only forty
survivors crept out of the smoking ruins to survey the devastation. In the
wake of this tidal wave of mayhem, newly-converted Turcoman nomads moved
in, who, with the Sunni ulama of the cities dead, and a general atmosphere
of fear, turbulence, and Messianic expectation in the air, turned readily
to extremist forms of Shi'i belief. The triumph of Shi'ism in Iran, a
country once loyal to Sunnism, dates back to that painful period.
The other great dissident movement in early Islam was that of the
Kharijites, literally, the seceders, so-called because they seceded from
the army of the Caliph Ali when he agreed to settle his dispute with
Muawiyah through arbitration. Calling out the Quranic slogan, "Judgement
is only Gods", they fought bitterly against Ali and his army which
included many of the leading Companions, until Ali defeated them at the
Battle of Nahrawan, where some ten thousand of them perished.
Although the first Kharijites were destroyed, Kharijism itself lived on.
As it formulated itself, it turned into the precise opposite of Shi'ism,
rejecting any notion of inherited or charismatic leadership, and stressing
that leadership of the community of believers should be decided by piety
alone. This was assessed by very rudimentary criteria: the early
Kharijites were known for extreme toughness in their devotions, and for
the harsh doctrine that any Muslim who commits a major sin is an
unbeliever. This notion of takfir (declaring Muslims to be outside Islam),
permitted the Kharijite groups, camping out in remote mountain districts
of Khuzestan, to raid Muslim settlements which had accepted Umayyad
authority. Non-Kharijis were routinely slaughtered in these operations,
which brought merciless reprisals from tough Umayyad generals such as al-Hajjaj
ibn Yusuf. But despite the apparent hopelessness of their cause, the
Kharijite attacks continued. The Caliph Ali (r.a.) was assassinated by Ibn
Muljam, a survivor of Nahrawan, while the hadith scholar Imam al-Nasai,
author of one of the most respected collections of sunan, was likewise
murdered by Kharijite fanatics in Damascus in 303/915.
Like Shi'ism, Kharijism caused much instability in Iraq and Central Asia,
and on occasion elsewhere, until the fourth and fifth centuries of Islam.
At that point, something of historic moment occurred. Sunnism managed to
unite itself into a detailed system that was now so well worked-out, and
so obviously the way of the great majority of ulama, that the attraction
of the rival movements diminished sharply.
What happened was this. Sunni Islam, occupying the middle ground between
the two extremes of egalitarian Kharijism and hierarchical Shi'ism, had
long been preoccupied with disputes over its own concept of authority. For
the Sunnis, authority was, by definition, vested in the Quran and Sunnah.
But confronted with the enormous body of hadiths, which had been scattered
in various forms and narrations throughout the length and breadth of the
Islamic world following the migrations of the Companions and Followers,
the Sunnah sometimes proved difficult to interpret. Even when the sound
hadiths had been sifted out from this great body of material, which
totalled several hundred thousand hadith reports, there were some hadiths
which appeared to conflict with each other, or even with verses of the
Quran. It was obvious that simplistic approaches such as that of the
Kharijites, namely, establishing a small corpus of hadiths and deriving
doctrines and law from them directly, was not going to work. The internal
contradictions were too numerous, and the interpretations placed on them
too complex, for the qadis (judges) to be able to dish out judgements
simply by opening the Quran and hadith collections to an appropriate page.
The reasons underlying cases of apparent conflict between various revealed
texts were scrutinised closely by the early ulama, often amid sustained
debate between brilliant minds backed up with the most perfect
photographic memories. Much of the science of Islamic jurisprudence (usul
al-fiqh) was developed in order to provide consistent mechanisms for
resolving such conflicts in a way which ensured fidelity to the basic
ethos of Islam. The term taarud al-adilla (mutual contradiction of
proof-texts) is familiar to all students of Islamic jurisprudence as one
of the most sensitive and complex of all Muslim legal concepts. Early
scholars such as Ibn Qutayba felt obliged to devote whole books to the
subject.
The ulama of usul recognised as their starting assumption that conflicts
between the revealed texts were no more than conflicts of interpretation,
and could not reflect inconsistencies in the Lawgiver's message as
conveyed by the Prophet (pbuh). The message of Islam had been perfectly
conveyed before his demise; and the function of subsequent scholars was
exclusively one of interpretation, not of amendment.
Armed with this awareness, the Islamic scholar, when examining problematic
texts, begins by attempting a series of preliminary academic tests and
methods of resolution. The system developed by the early ulama was that if
two Quranic or hadith texts appeared to contradict each other, then the
scholar must first analyse the texts linguistically, to see if the
contradiction arises from an error in interpreting the Arabic. If the
contradiction cannot be resolved by this method, then he must attempt to
determine, on the basis of a range of textual, legal and historiographic
techniques, whether one of them is subject to takhsis, that is, concerns
special circumstances only, and hence forms a specific exception to the
more general principle enunciated in the other text. The jurist must also
assess the textual status of the reports, recalling the principle that a
Quranic verse will overrule a hadith related by only one isnad (the type
of hadith known as ahad), as will a hadith supplied by many isnads (mutawatir
or mashhur). If, after applying all these mechanisms, the jurist finds
that the conflict remains, he must then investigate the possibility that
one of the texts was subject to formal abrogation (naskh) by the other.
This principle of naskh is an example of how, when dealing with the
delicate matter of taarud al-adilla, the Sunni ulama founded their
approach on textual policies which had already been recognised many times
during the lifetime of the Prophet (pbuh). The Companions knew by ijma
that over the years of the Prophets ministry, as he taught and nurtured
them, and brought them from the wildness of paganism to the sober and
compassionate path of monotheism, his teaching had been divinely shaped to
keep pace with their development. The best-known instance of this was the
progressive prohibition of wine, which had been discouraged by an early
Quranic verse, then condemned, and finally prohibited. Another example,
touching an even more basic principle, was the canonical prayer, which the
early ummah had been obliged to say only twice daily, but which, following
the Miraj, was increased to five times a day. Mutah (temporary marriage)
had been permitted in the early days of Islam, but was subsequently
prohibited as social conditions developed, respect for women grew, and
morals became firmer. There are several other instances of this, most
being datable to the years immediately following the Hijra, when the
circumstances of the young ummah changed in radical ways.
There are two types of naskh: explicit (sarih) or implicit (dimni). The
former is easily identified, for it involves texts which themselves
specify that an earlier ruling is being changed. For instance, there is
the verse in the Quran (2:142) which commands the Muslims to turn in
prayer to the Kaba rather than to Jerusalem. In the hadith literature this
is even more frequently encountered; for example, in a hadith narrated by
Imam Muslim we read: "I used to forbid you to visit graves; but you should
now visit them." Commenting on this, the ulama of hadith explain that in
early Islam, when idolatrous practices were still fresh in peoples
memories, visiting graves had been forbidden because of the fear that some
new Muslims might commit shirk. As the Muslims grew stronger in their
monotheism, however, this prohibition was discarded as no longer
necessary, so that today it is a recommended practice for Muslims to go
out to visit graves in order to pray for the dead and to be reminded of
the akhira.
The other type of naskh is more subtle, and often taxed the brilliance of
the early ulama to the limit. It involves texts which cancel earlier ones,
or modify them substantially, but without actually stating that this has
taken place. The ulama have given many examples of this, including the two
verses in Surat al-Baqarah which give differing instructions as to the
period for which widows should be maintained out of an estate (2:240 and
234). And in the hadith literature, there is the example of the incident
in which the Prophet (pbuh) once told the Companions that when he prayed
sitting because he was burdened by some illness, they should sit behind
him. This hadith is given by Imam Muslim. And yet we find another hadith,
also narrated by Muslim, which records an incident in which the Companions
prayed standing while the Prophet (pbuh) was sitting. The apparent
contradiction has been resolved by careful chronological analysis, which
shows that the latter incident took place after the former, and therefore
takes precedence over it. This has duly been recorded in the fiqh of the
great scholars.
The techniques of naskh identification have enabled the ulama to resolve
most of the recognised cases of taarud al-adilla. They demand a rigorous
and detailed knowledge not just of the hadith disciplines, but of history,
sirah, and of the views held by the Companions and other scholars on the
circumstances surrounding the genesis and exegesis of the hadith in
question. In some cases, hadith scholars would travel throughout the
Islamic world to locate the required information pertinent to a single
hadith.
In cases where in spite of all efforts, abrogation cannot be proven, then
the ulama of the salaf recognised the need to apply further tests.
Important among these is the analysis of the matn (the transmitted text
rather than the isnad of the hadith). Clear (sarih) statements are deemed
to take precedence over allusive ones (kinayah), and definite (muhkam)
words take precedence over words falling into more ambiguous categories,
such as the interpreted (mufassar), the obscure (khafi) and the
problematic (mushkil). It may also be necessary to look at the position of
the narrators of the conflicting hadiths, giving precedence to the report
issuing from the individual who was more directly involved. A famous
example of this is the hadith narrated by Maymunah which states that the
Prophet (pbuh) married her when not in a state of consecration (ihram) for
the pilgrimage. Because her report was that of an eyewitness, her hadith
is given precedence over the conflicting report from Ibn Abbas, related by
a similarly sound isnad, which states that the Prophet was in fact in a
state of ihram at the time.
There are many other rules, such as that which states that prohibition
takes precedence over permissibility. Similarly, conflicting hadiths may
be resolved by utilising the fatwa of a Companion, after taking care that
all the relevant fatwa are compared and assessed. Finally, recourse may be
had to qiyas (analogy). An example of this is the various reports about
the solar eclipse prayer (salat al-kusuf), which specify different numbers
of bowings and prostrations. The ulama, having investigated the reports
meticulously, and having been unable to resolve the contradiction by any
of the mechanisms outlined above, have applied analogical reasoning by
concluding that since the prayer in question is still called salaat, then
the usual form of salaat should be followed, namely, one bowing and two
prostrations. The other hadiths are to be abandoned.
This careful articulation of the methods of resolving conflicting
source-texts, so vital to the accurate derivation of the Shariah from the
revealed sources, was primarily the work of Imam al-Shafi'i. Confronted by
the confusion and disagreement among the jurists of his day, and
determined to lay down a consistent methodology which would enable a fiqh
to be established in which the possibility of error was excluded as far as
was humanly possible, Shafi'i wrote his brilliant Risala (Treatise on
Islamic jurisprudence). His ideas were soon taken up, in varying ways, by
jurists of the other major traditions of law; and today they are
fundamental to the formal application of the Shariah.
Shafi'i's system of minimising mistakes in the derivation of Islamic
rulings from the mass of evidence came to be known as usul al-fiqh (the
roots of fiqh). Like most of the other formal academic disciplines of
Islam, this was not an innovation in the negative sense, but a working-out
of principles already discernible in the time of the earliest Muslims. In
time, each of the great interpretative traditions of Sunni Islam codified
its own variation on these roots, thereby yielding in some cases divergent
branches (i.e. specific rulings on practice). Although the debates
generated by these divergences could sometimes be energetic, nonetheless,
they were insignificant when compared to the great sectarian and legal
disagreements which had arisen during the first two centuries of Islam
before the science of usul al-fiqh had put a stop to such chaotic discord.
It hardly needs remarking that although the Four Imams, Abu Hanifa, Malik
ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i and Ibn Hanbal, are regarded as the founders of these
four great traditions, which, if we were asked to define them, we might
sum up as sophisticated techniques for avoiding innovation, their
traditions were fully systematised only by later generations of scholars.
The Sunni ulama rapidly recognised the brilliance of the Four Imams, and
after the late third century of Islam we find that hardly any scholars
adhered to any other approach. The great hadith specialists, including al-Bukhari
and Muslim, were all loyal adherents of one or another of the madhhabs,
particularly that of Imam al-Shafi'i. But within each madhhab, leading
scholars continued to improve and refine the roots and branches of their
school. In some cases, historical conditions made this not only possible,
but necessary. For instance, scholars of the school of Imam Abu Hanifah,
which was built on the foundations of the early legal schools of Kufa and
Basra, were wary of some hadiths in circulation in Iraq because of the
prevalence of forgery engendered by the strong sectarian influences there.
Later, however, once the canonical collections of Bukhari, Muslim and
others became available, subsequent generations of Hanafi scholars took
the entire corpus of hadiths into account in formulating and revising
their madhhab. This type of process continued for two centuries, until the
Schools reached a condition of maturity in the fourth and fifth centuries
of the Hijra.
It was at that time, too, that the attitude of toleration and good opinion
between the Schools became universally accepted. This was formulated by
Imam al-Ghazali, himself the author of four textbooks of Shafi'i fiqh, and
also of Al-Mustasfa, widely acclaimed as the most advanced and careful of
all works on usul usul al-fiqh fil madhhab (Ihya Ulum al-Din, III, 65)
While it was necessary for the Muslim to follow a recognised madhhab in
order to avert the lethal danger of misinterpreting the sources, he must
never fall into the trap of considering his own school categorically
superior to the others. With a few insignificant exceptions, the great
scholars of Sunni Islam have followed the ethos outlined by Imam al-Ghazali,
and have been conspicuously respectful of each others madhhab. Anyone who
has studied under traditional ulama will be well-aware of this fact.
The evolution of the Four Schools did not stifle, as some Orientalists
have suggested, the capacity for the refinement or extension of positive
law. On the contrary, sophisticated mechanisms were available which not
only permitted qualified individuals to derive the Shariah from the Quran
and Sunnah on their own authority, but actually obliged them to do this.
According to most scholars, an expert who has fully mastered the sources
and fulfilled a variety of necessary scholarly conditions is not permitted
to follow the prevalent rulings of his School, but must derive the rulings
himself from the revealed sources. Such an individual is known as a
mujtahid, a term derived from the famous hadith of Muadh ibn Jabal.
Few would seriously deny that for a Muslim to venture beyond established
expert opinion and have recourse directly to the Quran and Sunnah, he must
be a scholar of great eminence. The danger of less-qualified individuals
misunderstanding the sources and hence damaging the Shariah is a very real
one, as was shown by the discord and strife which afflicted some early
Muslims, and even some of the Companions themselves, in the period which
preceded the establishment of the Orthodox Schools. Prior to Islam, entire
religions had been subverted by inadequate scriptural scholarship, and it
was vital that Islam should be secured from a comparable fate.
In order to protect the Shariah from the danger of innovation and
distortion, the great scholars of usul laid down rigorous conditions which
must be fulfilled by anyone wishing to claim the right of ijtihad for
himself. These conditions include:
(a) mastery of the Arabic language, to
minimise the possibility of misinterpreting Revelation on purely
linguistic grounds;
(b) a profound knowledge of the Quran and Sunnah and the circumstances
surrounding the revelation of each verse and hadith, together with a full
knowledge of the Quranic and hadith commentaries, and a control of all the
interpretative techniques discussed above;
(c) knowledge of the specialised disciplines of hadith, such as the
assessment of narrators and of the matn [text];
(d) knowledge of the views of the Companions, Followers and the great
imams, and of the positions and reasoning expounded in the textbooks of
fiqh, combined with the knowledge of cases where a consensus (ijma) has
been reached;
(e) knowledge of the science of juridical analogy (qiyas), its types and
conditions;
(f) knowledge of ones own society and of public interest (maslahah);
(g) knowing the general objectives (maqasid) of the Shariah;
(h) a high degree of intelligence and personal piety, combined with the
Islamic virtues of compassion, courtesy, and modesty.
A scholar who has fulfilled these conditions can be considered a mujtahid
fil-shar, and is not obliged, or even permitted, to follow an existing
authoritative madhhab. This is what some of the Imams were saying when
they forbade their great disciples from imitating them uncritically. But
for the much greater number of scholars whose expertise has not reached
such dizzying heights, it may be possible to become a mujtahid fil-madhhab,
that is, a scholar who remains broadly convinced of the doctrines of his
school, but is qualified to differ from received opinion within it. There
have been a number of examples of such men, for instance Imam al-Nawawi
among the Shafi'is, Qadi Ibn Abd al-Barr among the Malikis, Ibn Abidin
among the Hanafis, and Ibn Qudama among the Hanbalis. All of these
scholars considered themselves followers of the fundamental interpretative
principles of their own madhhabs, but are on record as having exercised
their own gifts of scholarship and judgement in reaching many new verdicts
within them. It is to these experts that the Mujtahid Imams directed their
advice concerning ijtihad, such as Imam al-Shafi'i's instruction that if
you find a hadith that contradicts my verdict, then follow the hadith. It
is obvious that whatever some writers nowadays like to believe, such
counsels were never intended for use by the Islamically-uneducated masses.
Other categories of mujtahids are listed by the usul scholars; but the
distinctions between them are subtle and not relevant to our theme. The
remaining categories can in practice be reduced to two: the muttabi
(follower), who follows his madhhab while being aware of the Quranic and
hadith texts and the reasoning, underlying its positions, and secondly the
muqallid (emulator), who simply conforms to the madhhab because of his
confidence in its scholars, and without necessarily knowing the detailed
reasoning behind all its thousands of rulings.
Clearly it is recommended for the muqallid to learn as much as he or she
is able of the formal proofs of the madhhab. But it is equally clear that
not every Muslim can be a scholar. Scholarship takes a lot of time, and
for the ummah to function properly most people must have other employment:
as accountants, soldiers, butchers, and so forth. As such, they cannot
reasonably be expected to become great ulama as well, even if we suppose
that all of them have the requisite intelligence. The Holy Quran itself
states that less well-informed believers should have recourse to qualified
experts: So ask the people of remembrance, if you do not know (16:43).
(According to the tafsir experts, the people of remembrance are the ulama.)
And in another verse, the Muslims are enjoined to create and maintain a
group of specialists who provide authoritative guidance for
non-specialists: A band from each community should stay behind to gain
instruction in religion and to warn the people when they return to them,
so that they may take heed (9:122). Given the depth of scholarship needed
to understand the revealed texts accurately, and the extreme warnings we
have been given against distorting the Revelation, it is obvious that
ordinary Muslims are duty bound to follow expert opinion, rather than rely
on their own reasoning and limited knowledge. This obvious duty was
well-known to the early Muslims: the Caliph Umar (r.a.) followed certain
rulings of Abu Bakr (r.a.), saying I would be ashamed before God to differ
from the view of Abu Bakr. And Ibn Masud (r.a.), in turn, despite being a
mujtahid in the fullest sense, used in certain issues to follow Umar (r.a.).
According to al-Shabi: Six of the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) used to
give fatwas to the people: Ibn Masud, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Ali, Zayd ibn
Thabit, Ubayy ibn Kab, and Abu Musa (al-Ashari). And out of these, three
would abandon their own judgements in favour of the judgements of three
others: Abdallah (ibn Masud) would abandon his own judgement for the
judgement of Umar, Abu Musa would abandon his own judgement for the
judgement of Ali, and Zayd would abandon his own judgement for the
judgement of Ubayy ibn Kab.
This verdict, namely that one is well-advised to follow a great Imam as
ones guide to the Sunnah, rather than relying on oneself, is particularly
binding upon Muslims in countries such as Britain, among whom only a small
percentage is even entitled to have a choice in this matter. This is for
the simple reason that unless one knows Arabic, then even if one wishes to
read all the hadith determining a particular issue, one cannot. For
various reasons, including their great length, no more than ten of the
basic hadith collections have been translated into English. There remain
well over three hundred others, including such seminal works as the Musnad
of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba, the Sahih of Ibn
Khuzayma, the Mustadrak of al-Hakim, and many other multi-volume
collections, which contain large numbers of sound hadiths which cannot be
found in Bukhari, Muslim, and the other works that have so far been
translated. Even if we assume that the existing translations are entirely
accurate, it is obvious that a policy of trying to derive the Shariah
directly from the Book and the Sunnah cannot be attempted by those who
have no access to the Arabic. To attempt to discern the Shariah merely on
the basis of the hadiths which have been translated will be to ignore and
amputate much of the Sunnah, hence leading to serious distortions.
Let me give just two examples of this. The Sunni Madhhabs, in their rules
for the conduct of legal cases, lay down the principle that the canonical
punishments (hudud) should not be applied in cases where there is the
least ambiguity, and that the qadi should actively strive to prove that
such ambiguities exist. An amateur reading in the Sound Six collections
will find no confirmation of this. But the madhhab ruling is based on a
hadith narrated by a sound chain, and recorded in theMusannaf of Ibn Abi
Shayba, the Musnad of al-Harithi, and the Musnad of Musaddad ibn Musarhad.
The text is: "Ward off the hudud by means of ambiguities." Imam al-Sanani,
in his book Al-Ansab, narrates the circumstances of this hadith: "A man
was found drunk, and was brought to Umar, who ordered the hadd of eighty
lashes to be applied. When this had been done, the man said: Umar, you
have wronged me! I am a slave! (Slaves receive only half the punishment.)
Umar was grief-stricken at this, and recited the Prophetic hadith, Ward
off the hudud by means of ambiguities."
Another example pertains to the important practice, recognised by the
madhhabs, of performing sunnah prayers as soon as possible after the end
of the Maghrib obligatory prayer. The hadith runs: Make haste to perform
the two rakas after the Maghrib, for they are raised up (to Heaven)
alongside the obligatory prayer. The hadith is narrated by Imam Razin in
his Jami.
Because of the traditional pious fear of distorting the Law of Islam, the
overwhelming majority of the great scholars of the past - certainly well
over ninety-nine percent of them - have adhered loyally to a madhhab. It
is true that in the troubled fourteenth century a handful of dissenters
appeared, such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim; but even these
individuals never recommended that semi-educated Muslims should attempt
ijtihad without expert help. And in any case, although these authors have
recently been resurrected and made prominent, their influence on the
orthodox scholarship of classical Islam was negligible, as is suggested by
the small number of manuscripts of their works preserved in the great
libraries of the Islamic world.
Nonetheless, social turbulences have in the past century thrown up a
number of writers who have advocated the abandonment of authoritative
scholarship. The most prominent figures in this campaign were Muhammad
Abduh and his pupil Muhammad Rashid Rida. Dazzled by the triumph of the
West, and informed in subtle ways by their own well-documented commitment
to Freemasonry, these men urged Muslims to throw off the shackles of
taqlid, and to reject the authority of the Four Schools. Today in some
Arab capitals, especially where the indigenous tradition of orthodox
scholarship has been weakened, it is common to see young Arabs filling
their homes with every hadith collection they can lay their hands upon,
and poring over them in the apparent belief that they are less likely to
misinterpret this vast and complex literature than Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam
Ahmad, and the other great Imams. This irresponsible approach, although
still not widespread, is predictably opening the door to sharply divergent
opinions, which have seriously damaged the unity, credibility and
effectiveness of the Islamic movement, and provoked sharp arguments over
issues settled by the great Imams over a thousand years ago. It is common
now to see young activists prowling the mosques, criticising other
worshippers for what they believe to be defects in their worship, even
when their victims are following the verdicts of some of the great Imams
of Islam. The unpleasant, Pharisaic atmosphere generated by this activity
has the effect of discouraging many less committed Muslims from attending
the mosque at all. No-one now recalls the view of the early ulama, which
was that Muslims should tolerate divergent interpretations of the Sunnah
as long as these interpretations have been held by reputable scholars. As
Sufyan al-Thawri said: If you see a man doing something over which there
is a debate among the scholars, and which you yourself believe to be
forbidden, you should not forbid him from doing it. The alternative to
this policy is, of course, a disunity and rancour which will poison and
cripple the Muslim community from within.
In a Western-influenced global culture in which people are urged from
early childhood to think for themselves and to challenge established
authority, it can sometimes be difficult to muster enough humility to
recognise ones own limitations. We are all a little like Pharaoh: our egos
are by nature resistant to the idea that anyone else might be much more
intelligent or learned than ourselves. The belief that ordinary Muslims,
even if they know Arabic, are qualified to derive rulings of the Shariah
for themselves, is an example of this egotism running wild. To young
people proud of their own judgement, and unfamiliar with the complexity of
the sources and the brilliance of authentic scholarship, this can be an
effective trap, which ends by luring them away from the orthodox path of
Islam and into an unintentional agenda of provoking deep divisions among
the Muslims. The fact that all the great scholars of the religion,
including the hadith experts, themselves belonged to madhhabs, and
required their students to belong to madhhabs, seems to have been
forgotten. Self-esteem has won a major victory here over common sense and
Islamic responsibility.
The Holy Quran commands Muslims to use their minds and reflective
capacities; and the issue of following qualified scholarship is an area in
which this faculty must be very carefully deployed. The basic point should
be appreciated that no categoric difference exists between usul al-fiqh
and any other specialised science requiring lengthy training. Shaykh Said
Ramadan al-Buti, who has articulated the orthodox response to the anti-Madhhab
trend in his book: Non-Madhhabism: The Greatest Bida Threatening the
Islamic Sharia, likes to compare the science of deriving rulings to that
of medicine. "If ones child is seriously ill", he asks, "does one look for
oneself in the medical textbooks for the proper diagnosis and cure, or
should one go to a trained medical practitioner?" Clearly, sanity dictates
the latter option. And so it is in matters of religion, which are in
reality even more important and potentially hazardous: we would be both
foolish and irresponsible to try to look through the sources ourselves,
and become our own muftis. Instead, we should recognise that those who
have spent their entire lives studying the Sunnah and the principles of
law are far less likely to be mistaken than we are.
Another metaphor might be added to this, this time borrowed from
astronomy. We might compare the Quranic verses and the hadiths to the
stars. With the naked eye, we are unable to see many of them clearly; so
we need a telescope. If we are foolish, or proud, we may try to build one
ourselves. If we are sensible and modest, however, we will be happy to use
one built for us by Imam al-Shafi'i or Ibn Hanbal, and refined, polished
and improved by generations of great astronomers. A madhhab is, after all,
nothing more than a piece of precision equipment enabling us to see Islam
with the maximum clarity possible. If we use our own devices, our
amateurish attempts will inevitably distort our vision.
A third image might also be deployed. An ancient building, for instance
the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, might seem imperfect to some who worship in
it. Young enthusiasts, burning with a desire to make the building still
more exquisite and well-made (and no doubt more in conformity with their
own time-bound preferences), might gain access to the crypts and basements
which lie under the structure, and, on the basis of their own
understanding of the principles of architecture, try to adjust the
foundations and pillars which support the great edifice above them. They
will not, of course, bother to consult professional architects, except
perhaps one or two whose rhetoric pleases them nor will they be guided by
the books and memoirs of those who have maintained the structure over the
centuries. Their zeal and pride leaves them with no time for that. Groping
through the basements, they bring out their picks and drills, and set to
work with their usual enthusiasm.
There is a real danger that Sunni Islam is being treated in a similar
fashion. The edifice has stood for centuries, withstanding the most bitter
blows of its enemies. Only from within can it be weakened. No doubt, Islam
has its intelligent foes among whom this fact is well-known. The spectacle
of the disunity and fitnas which divided the early Muslims despite their
superior piety, and the solidity and cohesiveness of Sunnism after the
final codification of the Shariah in the four Schools of the great Imams,
must have put ideas into many a malevolent head. This is not to suggest in
any way that those who attack the great madhhabs are the conscious tools
of Islams enemies. But it may go some way to explaining why they will
continue to be well-publicised and well-funded, while the orthodox
alternative is starved of resources. With every Muslim now a proud
mujtahid, and with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and
necessary virtue, the divergent views which caused such pain in our early
history will surely break surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in
harmony, we will have a billion madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous
conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the destruction of Islam could ever
have been devised.
This lecture was delivered in Aylesbury Mosque in
August 1995 and is reproduced courtesy of ISLAMICA Magazine (1995).
Article taken (with Thanks) from Masud.co.uk
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