A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization

by Vernon O Egger

  The Queen of the Sciences

  The delineation of Islamic law had begun at the initiative of private scholars, and it continued to be elaborated in the same, unofficial manner. Qadis, it is true, were appointed by specific regimes, and their jobs depended upon the good will of those regimes. But the existence and perpetuation of the law itself was totally independent of the patronage of governments. A myriad of “schools,” or traditions of interpretation, arose in the eighth century, but most of them failed to attract a sizable following and disappeared. The number of viable schools continued to decline, and by the end of the tenth century a consensus had been established that no new schools could emerge. The appearance of a new school, after all, would imply a rejection of the methods of fiqh that had been used up to that time.

  By the fourteenth century, the Sunni community had consolidated into four main traditions. Until the thirteenth century, it was not uncommon to hear of riots between the followers of two competing law schools, but thereafter such clashes were less likely to happen. Despite the differences among them, their adherents came to recognize the legitimacy of the others. Ibn Battuta’s experience was typical in this regard. He was trained in the Maliki school of North Africa, and yet his services were welcomed in communities in which the Hanafi, Hanbali, or Shafi‘i traditions predominated.

  Members of the public accorded high respect to a scholar who engaged in fiqh (a faqih). Since scholarship of any kind was regarded to be a form of worship of God, the study of jurisprudence was considered one of the highest acts of piety. The faqih was also respected for his intelligence and perseverance: One was accepted as a faqih only after a long and rigorous course of study. He had to demonstrate that he could derive a legal ruling from the Qur’an or Hadith, know when to stress the literal rather than the metaphorical meaning of a text, realize whether a general rule fit a specific case, and refer to the entire corpus of his school’s literature in order to cite a precedent.

  Despite the insistence of all the schools that their work was not original, but rather was the methodical deduction of the will of God from the Qur’an and Hadith, all the schools tacitly admitted that the process of fiqh involved at least some degree of ijtihad, the “effort” or “exercise” of one’s judgment or reasoning. Everyone acknowledged that such judgment had to be employed when interpreting texts or assessing the authenticity of Hadith, and the jurists who defended its use in fiqh argued that it had to be exercised when extending the principles established by the Qur’an and Sunna to problems not directly addressed by those texts. These faqihs had been careful to point out that they advocated the use of reasoning only when it was subordinate to the dictates of divine revelation. Some early faqihs, notably in the Hanbali school, campaigned vigorously against analogical reasoning. By the twelfth century, however, even the members of the Hanbali school (as we have seen in the case of thirteenth-century Ibn Taymiya) had come to realize that the practice of finding analogies between cases was unavoidable and that the logic and good sense of the faqih had to come into play.

  The period of the most original work in fiqh was the eighth through the twelfth centuries. Most of the problems of ritual, family law, and criminal law had been identified during the first three centuries, but the eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed an increased sophistication of legal concepts, as well as a growing precision in the use of language. As the issues to be addressed declined in number, and the actual work of the faqih became that of framing the legal issues with more clarity and subtlety, it was becoming clear that some faqihs were more original than others. Some were able to recast an issue in a new light, while others were more comfortable simply applying the results of a precedent to a current case.

  The “Closing of the Gate of Ijtihad”?

  During the twelfth century, the fact that fewer faqihs were doing original work led some Sunni scholars to voice the opinion that the era of engaging in ijtihad was now past. In the rhythmic and rhyming style so popular in Arabic prose, this sentiment was often expressed in the phrase “insidad bab al-ijtihad,” or the “closing (blocking) of the gate (door) of ijtihad.” Those who expressed this opinion regarded the earlier members of their legal schools to have been intellectual and spiritual giants and felt that it was disrespectful and even impious to think that further ijtihad could be exercised. This sentiment was expressed most frequently by members of the Hanafi and Maliki schools and by some members of the Shafi‘i school.

  Other legal scholars insisted that the exercise of juristic judgment was a continuing need. They argued that there was no reason to think that intellectual abilities and spiritual qualities had declined over the generations. Moreover, since there was now more legal knowledge available to scholars precisely because of the work of those past generations of jurists, there was more opportunity to make wise judgments than ever before, assuming that jurists made the effort to apply sound reasoning to their decisions. Most members of the Shafi‘i school took this position. More surprising, in light of the antirationalist origins of the Hanbali school, the Hanbalis after the twelfth century were the most adamant in their insistence on the necessity of practicing ijtihad.

  The issue of the closing of the gate of ijtihad slowly grew more controversial within the Sunni community. In the thirteenth century, some scholars began ranking each other in terms of their proficiency in exercising original judgment. Some rankings included up to seven grades of proficiency, ranging from very original to extremely imitative. The rankings provided ammunition to some scholars to argue that the number of genuine mujtahids, (practitioners of ijtihad) was decreasing, that the day would soon come when no qualified scholars would be alive, and that ijtihad could no longer be practiced. The Hanbalis were contemptuous of this position and argued that ijtihad was an obligation imposed on the totality of Muslim scholars and that to stop exercising it would be a sin. This was the position of Ibn Taymiya, and his differences with other faqihs over this issue was a major irritant for many of his critics.

  By the second half of the fourteenth century, the majority of Sunni scholars had come to agree that ijtihad was no longer an option for faqihs. They argued that taqlid (“imitation” of previous scholars) was the only option for “modern” jurists. Taqlid came to be understood as the unquestioning acceptance of a previous decision or doctrine without inquiring into the reasons and evidence that were the basis for them. Most Hanbalis and a few Shafi‘is continued to claim the right to practice ijtihad, but they were in a conspicuous minority. Many Hanafis considered them heretical for doing so.

  The sentiment that led to the near consensus to terminate ijtihad can be appreciated in light of a conservative understanding of Islamic law. Most jurists would have agreed that the Shari‘a, as God’s law, is ultimately unknowable. Fiqh, they would argue, represents the efforts of the jurists to discover God’s law, and thus the jurists’ writings are works of jurisprudence rather than statements of God’s law. In daily life, however, with concrete decisions having to be made, it was easy to slip into the habit of referring to the statements of the jurists as the Shari’a: The jurists needed to feel that what they were doing was worthwhile, and the community needed to have confidence in the rules they were accepting. A Hadith that quoted the Prophet as saying that his community would never agree upon error reassured them that they in fact had approximated God’s will. Since God’s will does not change, one did not have to worry about revising laws; besides, revisions would smack of human agency rather than divine decree.

  In practice, ijtihad could not stop. Legal experts, even Hanafis, continued to employ it, but few faqihs admitted that they were doing so, and those who witnessed it pretended not to see it. New problems continued to arise that needed ijtihad in order to be solved. Jurists who were active in solving those problems understood their work in a different light from that of the outspoken advocates of taqlid. They believed that the work of all jurists throughout Islamic history had been approximate and had been achieved within a specific time and region.
Circumstances, they knew, change from time to time and from society to society, and therefore ijtihad was necessary. Their work can be seen most vividly in the careers of the most preeminent jurists in Muslim societies, who were called upon to give rulings (fatwas) on vexing questions that other jurists could not provide. Such a legal authority, usually known as a shaykh al-islam or mufti, could issue thousands of fatwas on a wide variety of issues during his career.

  The very fact that fatwas from muftis were necessary because other jurists could not agree on an issue seems to the eyes of the twenty-first century to be evidence that ijtihad continued. Nevertheless, taqlid became the official practice of the period after the fourteenth century. As a result, the fundamentals of the law did not change for centuries. The legal concepts that had developed during the creative eleventh and twelfth centuries remained unchanged until the nineteenth century. Discussions among jurists tended to be over hypothetical cases or even over issues that had once been important, but were no longer relevant. The occasional mujtahid did make revisions in practice when necessary, and sometimes a mufti’s defense of his novel decision entered into the corpus of juristic tradition. On the whole, however, jurists understood that their primary mission was not to codify the law and to make the process of adjudication more streamlined and efficient. They continued to learn the body of decisions that had been recorded in the legal books and tried to apply them to their own circumstances with as little innovation as possible.

  Twelver Shi‘ite law faced similar issues, but underwent a different evolution. The Shi‘ite jurists who advocated ijtihad won a tenth-century victory over those who opposed the exercise of reason. The opponents of ijtihad would have to wait until the late seventeenth century to (temporarily) close the “gate.” The advocates of the use of reason continued to develop more sophisticated arguments for its employment. During the fourteenth century, when the Sunnis were achieving a near consensus on agreeing that ijtihad was no longer possible, the great Shi‘ite jurist ‘Allama al-Hilli was reorganizing jurisprudence so as to make reasoning its central feature.

  The practical results of the apparent contrast between Sunni and Shi‘ite jurisprudence were not as great as one might think, however. The actual Shi‘ite experience after the fourteenth century was the mirror image of that of the Sunnis: Whereas the Sunnis claimed that ijtihad was no longer acceptable, but found to their embarrassment that they continued to practice it, the Shi‘ites claimed to practice it, but found that the scope within which reason could be exercised was quite limited. Shi‘ite jurists understood that they must exercise what they called “prudence and caution” in their decisions, so as not to stray from the path of the Imams. This self-censorship limited the number of original initiatives that a jurist might make.

  The Varieties of Religious Expression

  The members of any major religion exhibit a wide variety in their patterns of ritual behaviors and beliefs. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians all belong to the same religion, and yet differ considerably from each other. Even within Protestantism or Catholicism, the range of expression is great: If a Catholic bishop from Paris were to spend a month in the home of fellow Catholics in a village in Haiti, he might well experience moments when he would wonder what religion his hosts practiced, after all. Muslims are equally diverse in their beliefs and practices. Muslims from North Africa, Central Asia, and the littoral of the Indian Ocean inevitably received the Islamic tradition through the filter of their respective cultural heritages. The remarkable fact about Islam is that it has a common identity at all. Unlike most monotheistic traditions, it has no institution with the authority to enforce orthodoxy. During the period of Mongol hegemony, many of the myriad expressions of Islam were becoming organized into institutional form and would be prepared to affect history in profound ways over the following centuries.

  “Orthodoxy” and “Heterodoxy”

  Throughout history, the various Christian denominations have enforced orthodox doctrines and practices within their respective churches. Persons who claim to be within a particular tradition, but who preach or teach contrary to orthodoxy (“correct doctrine”) and engage in other than orthopraxy (“correct practice”) are labeled “heretics.” In earlier centuries, heretics were severely disciplined, often by execution. Since the Enlightenment, the typical response of the officials of the Church in question has been to exclude the person from membership. Islam does not have the equivalent of a pope or patriarch who can enforce conformity. Several individuals have claimed such a role, to be sure: During the first two centuries of Islamic history, some of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs attempted to enforce correct religious practices; the Imams of the various Shi‘ite groups served such a function; and subsequent caliphs of many splinter groups all over the globe claimed such authority. In every case, however, the actual authority of a given leader extended over a limited territory or period of time. The majority of Muslims were unaffected.

  Islamic history has witnessed many instances in which the charge of kufr (“unbelief,” the equivalent of “heresy”) has been leveled at various individuals and groups who claimed to be Muslim. The seventh-century Kharijites stimulated one of the most intense of these crises, for they regarded all Muslims who disagreed with them to be outside the pale, while other Muslims considered that attitude itself to be un-Islamic. This conflict gradually resolved itself over the next couple of centuries as the extreme Kharijites died out in the battles they provoked, and the surviving Ibadi Kharijites of North Africa and Oman were known primarily for their puritanism and reluctance to interact with outsiders, rather than for their aggression.

  Early Shi‘ites who elevated ‘Ali (or other personages) to the status of a divinity were regarded as having compromised the monotheistic status of Islam. The extremist Shi‘ites were gradually marginalized when the major Shi‘ite groups officially denied deifying ‘Ali or anyone else. Two important groups that were excluded from the Muslim Umma in this fashion still play important roles in the countries of the eastern Mediterranean. The Druze, who deified al-Hakim, the eleventh-century Fatimid caliph, were forced by popular pressure to seek refuge in the mountains of Lebanon and southern Syria. Farther north, the Nusayris sought refuge in the mountains of the Lataqiya province of western Syria. The Nusayris were the followers of the ninth-century figure Ibn Nusayr, who had preached the divinity of the eleventh Imam, and thus split from the group that subsequently became the Twelver Shi‘ites. His group came to be associated with a divine trinity of ‘Ali, Muhammad, and Salman the Iranian, in which ‘Ali takes precedence as the God of the Qur’an. Because of this worship of ‘Ali, the Nusayris are often called Alawis. The Nusayris worship in homes instead of mosques, do not observe Ramadan or the hajj, drink wine at religious services, and hold to the doctrine of transmigration of souls. For these reasons, Muslims have frequently persecuted Nusayris as heretics, although in the 1970s, the Nusayri ruler of Syria, Hafez al-Asad, obtained a ruling from Syrian Sunni ulama that declared him to be a Muslim.

  Early Sufis who claimed to have experienced union with God during their mystical experiences were also ostracized. Once again, the central issue at stake was the compromising of the doctrine of the unity of God, which to most scholars also entailed a radical distinction between the Creator and his creatures. Al-Hallaj, the most famous of the extreme Sufis, was even executed by the state in 922 as a threat to public peace. Sufi leaders then began working toward a consensus on the doctrine that union with God was not a legitimate claim for the mystical experience.

  With the exception of the execution of al-Hallaj, these examples of spiritual disciplining were largely collective affairs in which private religious scholars managed to win a consensus among other scholars and influential men of affairs to exclude (and even persecute) groups that had violated basic Islamic tenets. The key to understanding the continuity of Sunni Islam is an appreciation of the insistence upon fidelity to the text of the Qur‘an and to the Sunna (“practice”) of the Prophet as re
vealed in the Hadith. The various schools of Islamic law insisted upon the centrality of those two sources; theologians condemned the practice of philosophical speculation not limited by the truths of revelation; and Sufi orders developed traditions that reputedly linked their practice to the practice of the Prophet. The Sunni tradition was one of self-censorship. It was inevitably conservative and traditional in spirit, leading to the withering of an independent philosophical tradition and the closing of the gate of ijtihad.

  In order to maintain a consensus across the vast Muslim world, scholars corresponded frequently with each other about their own work. They went on journeys to study with scholars greater than themselves. Most importantly, the practice of the hajj ensured that scholars would travel from every part of the Muslim world to Mecca, where they would be kept up to date on current thinking on theology and practice. Meccan scholars served as the touchstone for piety. They had absolutely no authority to enforce any doctrine or practice on anyone in any region, but pilgrims who came to Mecca seeking to study under such scholars for a period of time could learn whether their home community practiced a version of Islam that reflected the Meccan standard. Many pilgrims throughout history returned to their homes to begin reform movements, jolted by their experience on the hajj. Their reform movements could be campaigns of persuasion or of force.

  This Sunni tradition of self-censorship was somewhat different from the attainment of a consensus within the various Kharijite and Shi‘ite traditions. The Kharijites (Ibadis) comprised a relatively small number of Muslims, but they were scattered from Iran to North Africa. They maintained a high level of scholarly activity, and they maintained communications over vast distances in order to stay current with each other. Their political leaders were religious authorities, as well, and they maintained an effective discipline within their oases.