by Ed Husain
Row upon row of men praying in ISIS and al-Qaeda videos do so in this Salafi way. When other Muslims see this they worry, and feel helpless in not being able to persuade Salafis of the flaw in their literalist ways. But the rest of the world sees only Muslims at prayer. The detail with which to demarcate ally from enemy is lost.
In the past, despite polemics and fierce intellectual debate between the schools, Muslim jurists recognised and respected each other’s validity. Known as ikhtilaf – disagreement – books on sharia are filled with footnotes and side-notes on which scholar disagreed with his teacher and why. One hadith alleges that the Prophet said: ‘Ikhtilafu ummati rahmah’ – ‘Disagreement among my nation is a mercy.’ Scholars dispute the validity of this hadith, but early Muslims believed it was a reflection of the Islamic spirit of knowledge. This inherent pluralism within Islam was best summarised by the twelfth-century Hanafi scholar Abu Hafs Nasafi when he said: ‘Our school is correct with the possibility of error, and another school is in error with the possibility of being correct.’
Throughout history, political authorities tried to impose absolutism on Muslim societies, but failed. Just 147 years after the city-state of Medina became a home for the Prophet, Imam Malik disagreed with the caliph. The governor of Medina had him whipped naked and dislocated the shoulder for his writing hand. Despite the cruelty of the caliph’s governor, the uncompromising stance and independence of Imam Malik left an imprint on Muslim societies that still cite this incident. The inherent pluralism within Islam survived from its earliest days. Imam Malik died as a result of the punishment inflicted.
Today, once again, there is a global attempt, led by Saudi Arabia, to impose only one approach to Muslim belief, worship, and even dress. For example, religious police in the mosques of Mecca and Medina confiscate material from pilgrims that does not comply with Wahhabism or Salafism. This attempt to eradicate a millennium-old Islamic pluralism bolsters the rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab and other violent movements that seek to impose their strict, literalist reading of sharia on those around them. The tools to uproot this intemperance already exist within mainstream Islam. A better understanding of the depth, diversity, and nuance of the sharia is the answer to the present day’s extremism and violence.
The greatest contextualisation of the sharia and its applicability in the modern world germinated from the Maliki school. Aside from its popularity in Africa, it was also popular in Islamic Spain. There, in Granada, it was Maliki jurists, such as Imam al-Shatibi (d. 1388), who crystallised Islamic law with the legal theory of Maqasid al-Shariah, or the Higher Objectives of the sharia. Shatibi taught, and others accepted, that literal compliance with scripture is the proper course in acts of personal worship, or Ibadat, while consideration of the Maqasid, or higher aim, is called for in worldly or social dealings, or Mu’amalat. In other words, Muslims should abide by the spirit of the law and not the mere letter of the law.
Today, the Muslim world’s leading scholar of scholars, Shaikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, has been teaching the importance of these loftier aims. The Higher Objectives or Maqasid of the sharia are five: to conserve life, faith, family, intellect and property. Taken as a whole, the Quran and hadith seek to preserve these spheres. The Maqasid of sharia is to preserve property, not to amputate the hands of thieves. Sharia is not about whipping fornicators: its higher aim is to conserve the family. In sum, Maqasid is concerned with the wisdom behind the rulings of the sharia.
Other Muslim scholarly giants articulated this conservative and deeper approach to sharia before and after al-Shatibi. They include Imam al-Juwayni (d. 1085), Imam Ghazzali (d. 1111), and others. The historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun, a Maliki scholar, also wrote of the Maqasid in his renowned series of books, Al-Muqaddimah, as a fact of Muslim life. This was not controversial or anything extraordinary when it was first introduced, but knowing that prominent early Muslim thinkers advance the theory helps root it more deeply for Muslims today. Ibn al-Qayyum al-Jawzi (d. 1350), a strict jurist from Syria, wrote:
The foundation of the sharia is wisdom and the safeguarding of people’s welfare in this life and the next. In its entirety it is about justice, mercy, wisdom and goodness. Every rule which replaces justice with injustice, mercy with its opposite, the common good with mischief, and wisdom with folly, is a ruling that does not belong to the sharia, even though it might have been claimed to be according to some interpretation.
The early imam Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 778), reflecting this inbuilt compassion within the sharia, taught: ‘If you see a man doing something over which there is difference of opinion among scholars, and which you believe to be forbidden, you should not forbid him from doing it.’ Even the strictest of imams, the founder of the exacting Hanbali school, Imam Ahmad, was committed to this diversity.
Today, along with Shaikh bin Bayyah, the power of this pluralist approach is on display elsewhere, too. During the Arab uprisings in 2011, parliaments in places like Tunisia and Egypt debated whether the Salafi approach of Tatbiq or legal implementation, a literalist application of sharia punishments, or the Maqasid view championed by conservatives such as Shaikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi in Tunisia worked best in the modern world. The appeal, credibility and methodology of the Maqasid approach was such that even Saudi Arabia’s prominent and unofficial scholar Shaikh Salman Al-Audah, a former mentor to Osama bin Laden, called on Muslims to abandon literalism and embrace the Maqasid of the sharia.
The Maqasid method allows Muslims in the West, and the vast majority of the world’s Muslims who live in countries that do not approach the sharia literally, to thrive. That is because, according to this way of thinking, any government that upholds the Higher Aims of the sharia is, in fact, Islamic by default. By that definition, Britain and America are fully Islamic because they conserve life, faith, family, property and the intellect. The West is already Quran-compliant. Therefore, though no Western states formally uphold sharia as law, there is in fact a full civilisational alignment. The Soviet Union in contrast would not be compliant with this approach because of its attempts to ban prayers and religious observance. China forbids Muslims from growing their beards, gathering for religious occasions, fasting in Ramadan, and even forbids the use of the name ‘Mohamed’.
With the Maqasid, Muslims can credibly question and overturn rulings on killing apostates or blasphemers. With such extreme laws promulgated in several Muslim countries, minorities face intolerance and sometimes oppression, and Muslims are prohibited from changing faiths. But the Quran openly declares that ‘there can be no compulsion in faith’. To literalists – and based on the time when schools of law or madhabs were created – apostasy was the same as treachery. But today, faith is not the same as nationality. When people choose to convert from Islam to Christianity, they are not inherently plotting against a state or Muslim communal welfare. Maqasid allows us to debate this. Some Muslims see this approach as an imposition of liberal secularism. What it actually does is help conserve the sharia and society by making it easy to be pious.
This approach is that of the Muslim mainstream consensus. The Ottoman Empire, and the vast majority of Muslim scholars throughout history, including Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning, Al-Azhar University and Mosque in Cairo, have all used this method to build Ijma, or Muslim consensus, against literalism. Today, the vast majority of the world’s fifty-nine Muslim majority nations does not flog, whip, stone, amputate, or uphold slavery – with the exception of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Indonesia and Nigeria. Salafism and Islamism seek to break that consensus, however (see chapters 8 and 9). This is a symptom of our modern age: the empowerment of the individual over tradition, the sovereignty of the self over collective wisdom, has bred this iconoclasm.
Throughout Muslim history, scholarship on scripture was a specialised discipline. The scholars known as Mufassir studied Quranic commentary; the Muhaddith had expertise on hadith verification; the Mu’arrikh were dedicated historians; and the Faqih, or jurisprudents, had their area s
pecialisms, but drew from the others to make rulings. The Muhaddith were like pharmacists, while a Faqih was a general practitioner. When people went to the Faqih with questions, he or she selectively drew on hadiths. They did so with training, by asking the right questions or by cross-referencing the Quran, the hadith, and history.
Modern Muslims, however, feel confident in accessing the primary sources, bypassing the Faqih and their madhab-based methodology. This has contributed to eroding the spirit of Islam. Homosexuals were not thrown off cliffs at any point in Muslim history; the Quranic arguments for compassion and kindness superseded an alleged hadith about punishing homosexuality. Mostly, Muslims turned a blind eye to homosexuality. (American–Muslim scholar Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle has written persuasively on the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims.)
In Islamic tradition, actions were not undertaken on the basis of a single hadith; they were placed in the context of a number of sources. When leaders of today’s puritanical organisations, who are not trained Islamic scholars, access the hadith, they lose this wider context and the result is many of the actions in Saudi Arabia and ISIS-held territory: executions, flogging, sexual slavery, burning prisoners, and a commitment to perennial warfare.
In sum, prohibitions in the Quran are few and conclusive. Examples include specific bans on murder, stealing or cheating in business dealings. The bulk of the sharia is a man-made attempt, through interpretations and commentary on scripture, to provide an ethical basis to life. Imam Bukhari undertook the greatest of hadith collections for Sunni Muslims, 200 years after the Prophet died. This was also mostly a masculine province. Islamic scholarship was and is dominated by men, with all the inherent problems that entails. The Prophet’s wife, Ayesha, is credited with 2,200 hadiths overall, but only 128 appear in Bukhari’s work.
For a thousand years, male Muslim scholars debated and perfected the elements of the sharia. This process of human reasoning and deliberation on areas that the Quran did not address, or even where there was a Quranic reference, is known as ijtihad. Muslim civilisation and scholarship thrived as ijtihad allowed for new interpretations and new ways in which to respond to new realities. This openness and flexibility lay at the core of Islam even as it was being codified.
But not all Muslims took their orders from the rulebook. The state and its apparatuses maintained security and law, but the Muslim masses were and remain drawn to the mysticism and freedom of the Sufi brotherhoods. They sought the inner significance of the sharia – the Batin, the esoteric, not just the rules and rituals of the exoteric, the Zahir. That inner dimension of Islam is Sufism.
6
Who is a Sufi?
The Sufis tell a story of three men who went to a mosque to pray while a group of people stood outside watching. As the first man walked into the mosque, he saw the crowd, and carefully left his shoes at the door so that they could observe that he was faithfully following the rule of taking one’s shoes off when praying. The crowd murmured appreciatively and praised God for the man’s religiosity. Inside, he performed his prayers in textbook fashion: standing correctly, bowing perfectly, prostrating himself diligently. The crowd peeped in and witnessed this, and he rose even further in their estimation.
A second man, also known to be deeply pious, then entered the mosque. He too removed his shoes, but he carried them with him into the mosque. He too prayed diligently and meticulously. When the two men left the mosque, the crowd engaged them both in earnest debate. Which was correct: to leave one’s shoes outside the mosque or carry them inside?
Meanwhile, as the pious men debated their respective positions with the crowd, a nondescript character slipped in quietly by the side entrance of the mosque, unseen by anyone. He quietly prayed and humbly left. Only God knew of his prayers, his intentions and his spiritual state, but that was all that mattered to him. He had no interest in people’s praise, and no regard for external trivialities such as what to do with one’s shoes while praying. This last man was the Sufi. An aspiring Sufi seeks only to please God, and does so in secret as often as possible. A Sufi shuns the temporal world and its banalities.
To understand the Sufis is to grasp the heart and soul of Islam. Sufis and Sufism are, essentially, Islam’s greatest secret. Idries Shah’s extraordinary book The Sufis, first published in 1964, introduced Sufism to the modern West. This powerful current within the Muslim world is hidden from most outsiders, not intentionally, but because very few non-Muslims either understand it or are willing to grasp the immaterial, metaphysical element in Islam’s appeal for its believers. However, the Sufis have given real life and spiritual depth to Islam and to the religious experience of generations of Muslims.
Sufism is about the Batin, or esoteric, the inner secrets of the Prophet, the Quran and the sharia. Whereas the scholars of the sharia, the ulama, focus on when to pray, where to place the hands, and how to stand, bow and prostrate oneself, the Sufi masters are instead concerned with the state of the worshipper’s heart and soul when standing before God. The sharia specialists are intent on explaining the Quran; the Sufis are, in their words, ‘not interested in the love letter, but the lover Himself’, and so immerse themselves in love, miracles and pious devotion.
There are four explanations of the origin of the term ‘Sufi’. The first is that next to the home of the Prophet in Medina was a place known as the Suffa, where the most dedicated of his disciples spent all their time in study and service to Islam. The ahl al-suffa, ‘the people of the Suffa’, were known for their abstinence from material and worldly things, and their nickname later evolved into ‘Sufis’. Another explanation is that the name comes from safa, an Arabic word for purity and cleanliness, because of the Sufi aspiration to be spiritually cleansed from the corruption of the world. Alternatively, ‘Sufi’ may be derived from the Arabic word soof, or suf, meaning ‘wool’, because, in abstaining from the wealth and splendour of the early Umayyad caliphate, many of the Sufis wore humble, inexpensive clothing made of wool. The fourth suggested derivation stems from the Greek word sophia (wisdom), as many of the early Sufis were seen as lovers of wisdom, or philosophers.
Sufi Muslims are an eclectic bunch, ranging from the very strict in observance of sharia to the very lax, from dancers and dervishes (originally a Persian word referring to those who relinquish the world and seek divine love) to serious scholars, and from the highly secretive to the exceptionally transparent. Most take instruction from teachers of the mystical orders – such as the vast, globally popular Naqshbandi, Qadiri and Chishti schools – while others roam freely and just follow their hearts. However, they all share in common a deep love for the Divine and a vibrant attachment to the Prophet Mohamed (who is spiritually alive to the Sufis); and they possess an otherworldly charisma that touches those who open their hearts to being taught. Their tranquillity is real and brings serenity to those who meet them – like sexual attraction, difficult to explain yet palpable to those who experience it. The Sufis and their masters radiate stillness, divine energy. A visit to a Sufi shrine or to a living master embeds calmness in the soul of the visitor.
The Sufis’ contribution to the spread of Islam was to conquer entire new lands, not with the sword but with their love, miracles and esoteric teachings, and by living pious lives among the masses. Sufi travellers often made long journeys in response to dreams in which they saw the Prophet instructing them to call people to God in India, Africa, central Asia, Turkey and Indonesia. For example, the twelfth-century founder of the Chishti order in India, who came originally from eastern Persia, saw in his sleep the Prophet commanding him to call the people of India to worship the one God.
The Sufis today have hundreds of millions of Muslim followers and mosques spread across the globe – but they do not make news headlines. We constantly hear of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram, but most people in the West know little or nothing of the incomparably larger and centuries-old Muslim Sufi orders of the Naqshbandi, Chishti, Qadiri, Shadhili, Tijani, Rifa’i, Mevlevi, Ce
rrahi and dozens of others. This chapter will delve into civilisations in Persia, India and Turkey, and how leading Sufi personalities thrived across the Muslim world. Through learning more about Rumi, Khayyam and Princess Jahanara, we will enhance our understanding of the ubiquitous spirit of the Sufis inside the House of Islam.
The presence of centuries-old dergahs – shrines built on the tombs of Sufi masters – and khanqahs – Sufi hospices and meeting-rooms – in every major Muslim city bears testament to Sufism’s deep emotional and spiritual appeal. A traveller to Cairo, Mombasa, Khartoum, Xinjiang, Fez, Delhi, Lahore or Istanbul will see, even in our doubt-ridden times, devoted Sufis gathered at these dergahs and khanqahs, and will witness the influence the Sufi masters have on the practice and beliefs of ordinary Muslims today. Many of them are household names, and their continuing influence can be found in contemporary Muslim attitudes, art and poetry, and rebellion against the rise of modern Islamist radicals.
Konya, in Turkey, is one of these ancient cities that still draw countless thousands of devotees. There, in his mausoleum, sleeps Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–73), a renowned Muslim poet and Sufi master who founded the Mevlevi order, more popularly known in the West as the ‘whirling dervishes’, because his adherents dance in remembrance of the divine. Rumi had lived in Konya since the age of five, after his family fled Balkh, in today’s Afghanistan, to escape the Mongol persecution. He is known as ‘Rumi’, meaning ‘Roman’, because Konya was in Anatolia, formerly part of the Byzantine or eastern Roman empire.