by Ibrahim Essa
“Do you know what ‘deferral’ means here? This is where a distinction arose between action and belief, rather like saying that marriage is one thing and love is something else.”
The analogy drew a discreet smile that flashed like lightning across Nashwa’s lips, while there was a hint of thunder in Omayma’s eyes.
“If someone does something bad and unjust,” Hatem continued, “that doesn’t mean that the person isn’t a believer. That’s from the point of view of the rulers and their preachers, because faith is in the heart and is not affected by sin, so we defer judgment on sinners and people who do wrong until the Day of Judgment, when God can judge them personally. That’s what they mean by deferral, and the deferral school of thought was favored and promoted by the Umayyad regime against the Kharijites, who thought that an unjust ruler was a prima facie infidel, but amazingly after a time the Umayyads’ opponents became advocates of the deferral doctrine. Their demands were that rulers should again consult the people and that governors and police chiefs should be dismissed. Along with the idea of deferral came another idea, which was that of determinism. This idea also came about as a result of political repression. The Umayyads and their preachers didn’t want to admit they had mistreated people, so they came out with the theory that all acts, good or bad, are determined by God, and human beings are compelled to do what they do and don’t have free will, so we have to forgive the bastards who abuse us because it’s out of their hands. In other words they’re compelled by God to give other people hell. The theory worked a dream in the Umayyad period and the two most important pillars in their world became deferral and determinism. But although this approach was widespread and was adopted by the state and its ideologues, many thinkers didn’t like it, including someone called Wasil ibn Ata, who was a disciple of an important character called Hassan of Basra, the head of the justice and monotheism group. Wasil dissociated himself from Hassan, which is why his school of thought became known as the Mutazila, or ‘those who dissociate themselves.’ Wasil ibn Ata said there are five principles. There’s justice, meaning that all of us are fully responsible for what we do and we can’t say we acted under compulsion or that it was God’s command, because God doesn’t do wrong and you can’t drag Him into the argument by saying that you had to mistreat me because God wanted it that way. No, God does not do wrong, so this is something wrong that you have done. That’s justice, the first principle. Then we move on to the second.”
Hatem stopped and looked at the two women. He was relieved to see that they looked interested. Each of them was holding her cup by the handle and resting it on the palm of her hand, paying close attention.
“Do you have time to continue after the break?” he said with a smile.
“Do you want to haggle over your appearance fee, Sheikh Hatem?” Omayma said teasingly.
“You know what sheikhs are like, my love,” said Hatem. “As soon as they finish their work, it’s straight to the buffet for dinner.”
Nashwa found the exchange mildly offensive. Both remarks struck her as demeaning to Hatem and his vocation.
“The second principle was monotheism,” Hatem continued. “At the time there were groups that said that God had a body, not like our bodies, but that he had organs and limbs. They based that on the fact that there are verses in the Quran that talk about the hand of God and the word of God. Then the Mutazila came and said God transcended such things. The third principle was ‘the promise and the warning,’ which means that those who obey God go to Heaven and those who disobey Him go to Hell and it is only our deeds that determine our fate in the afterlife. The fourth principle is ‘the intermediate position,’ which was aimed directly at rulers. It said that people who committed grave sins were not infidels, as the Kharijites claimed, or sinners, as others said, but they were in an intermediate position between the two. The fifth principle was ‘promoting good and preventing evil.’ The hadith people said it was wrong to use force or violence to prevent evil acts, while the Kharijites were in favor and the Shi’a made the use of force conditional on the coming of the long-awaited Imam. But the Mutazila said that the way to prevent evil acts was ‘by the tongue, by the heart, and by the hand bearing a weapon,’ so they were the leaders of uprisings against Umayyad and Abbasid rule and strong supporters of Shi’ite opposition movements at that time. That’s why there was so much anger against them, so much so that their ideas were banned and they were ostracized and prevented from teaching their ideas, and anyone who disobeyed was banished or imprisoned or killed. The Abbasid rulers, for example, ordered that the Mutazila be cursed from the pulpits of mosques, their books destroyed and burned, and anyone who possessed them punished. The Abbasid state made persecution of the Mutazila official policy with a law approved by the mainstream clerics, circulated in the provinces and in government offices, and read from the pulpits. But despite all that their ideas remained, and by the way there were Mutazilite thinkers in all Muslim sects, Sunni and Shi’a. They set up a secret organization that was strong and widespread but of course over the years the attacks on them and the persecution destroyed the organization. They remained oppressed and condemned, although they were the freethinkers of the Muslim world. But the most important reason why the preachers and sheikhs wage war on the Mutazila even now is because of their position on reason.”
Hatem turned to Omayma and laughed.
“By the way, Nashwa here is an authentic Wahhabi Salafist. There’s no one like our Salafist friends for hating reason. As soon as you say the word ‘reason’ to them, they start rummaging in their bags for fatwas to declare you an infidel.”
Then he turned to Nashwa, who resented Hatem attacking her in front of his wife. “Calling people infidels is the enemy of thought,” he said.
“Mawlana, that’s a slander on me and the Wahhabis,” Nashwa replied irritably.
“I’m trying to place you,” Omayma suddenly cut in, squinting and examining Nashwa’s face carefully. “Have we met somewhere before?”
“I’ve never had the honor,” Nashwa replied tensely.
Before the conversation between the two women could get out of control, Hatem continued.
“The Mutazila were rationalists and, compared to them, all the others are traditionalists. Reason is the principle that underlies all their ideas and the way they deal with texts, whether it’s the Quran or the Sunna. Everything incompatible with reason was wrong. If it was a Quranic verse they found a way to interpret it and if it was a hadith they dismissed it.”
“But does it make sense to let everyone use their reason when they’re interpreting religious texts and saying this is right and this is wrong, and they just say, ‘that’s how my reason sees it’?” said Nashwa.
“See, she just said something very Wahhabi,” said Hatem with a glance toward Omayma.
“Reason here doesn’t mean the reason of anyone walking down the street or writing a comment on some website. It means the reason of people who have studied and done research and who know how to use the tools of reason, not uncontrolled reason. But the Salafists want submissive minds that hear and obey and imitate, whereas the Mutazila want rational Muslims who think and choose, and that’s why a deep rift developed between the Mutazila on one hand and the rulers and their preachers on the others.”
Hatem leaned his head back, took a sip of tea, and pointed at Nashwa to answer, but she didn’t.
“But this is all about politics and not about religion,” he continued. “What’s happened is that politics has been permeated by religion, and religion has been politicized, and that’s what the Mutazila tried to tackle by the use of reason, and their attitude toward sayings of the Prophet was often skepticism about their authenticity and sometimes rejection of the sayings because, as they put it, they judged hadiths by rational principles, and didn’t twist reason to make it conform with what they found in hadiths.”
He paused a moment, then asked Omayma if she was going out today. Omayma was surprised by his sudden silence and hi
s unexpected question. “Yes, I have a few appointments,” she replied.
“Because Hassan is asleep upstairs and I gave him a sleeping pill to calm him down because last night he was giving us hell. Anyway it looks like we won’t be here if he wakes up, so try to get home early because I have filming this evening and I don’t want him to disappear.”
Omayma was surprised that he seemed to have abandoned his earlier caution and was talking about Hassan openly in front of Nashwa, a visitor they hardly knew. She said she had to go right away. Nashwa stood up immediately and took her leave too, and Omayma tried unconvincingly to persuade her to stay.
“Make yourself at home, my dear,” she said, but her “my dear” of course made it clear that this was the signal that she had to leave, and so she left.
Hatem went back to bed, but all he could think of was the way she looked, her laugh, and the way she flirted discreetly when they were sitting together. In the evening she was waiting for him in the studio and she attended the filming of the program, in which he deliberately talked about expressions such as ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘I beg pardon of God’ and the importance of long, moving, tearful prayers.
He described the program to her as “gentle on the heart and cathartic for the soul, rather like a perfumed lotion that they massage into your muscle before they give you an injection.” When he asked her what she thought of it, she replied, “It was beautiful, and you were very sensitive.”
He couldn’t remember being particularly sensitive, and they went back to their conversation about the Mutazila.
“The consensus among the Salafists is that reason and individual judgment rank third after the Quran and the Sunna as sources of sharia law,” he said. “But the Mutazila disagreed with that consensus and put reason at the head of the list because it is by reason that we can tell good from bad and it is by reason that we know that the Quran has authority, along with the Sunna and the consensus of scholars.
“The hadiths are divided into those that have multiple chains of transmission that are all in agreement and those that have only a few narrators. The Mutazila dismissed even those with multiple chains if they were incompatible with reason, so you can ignore accounts by an enormous number of people as long as they’re not holy men and as long as they don’t include anyone who’s infallible.
“The Mutazila reject hadiths that have come down to us from only a few narrators. They certainly don’t recognize a hadith with only one source as the basis for any legal rulings, because doctrine must be proven definitively and convincingly, not by conjecture based on a single source. They didn’t distinguish between hadiths that were seen as sound and other categories of hadiths. The fact that hadiths were irrational or implausible was enough to reject and not to use them.”
They were in the car and she had sat next to him. Sirhan was driving, peeking at them in the rear-view mirror. Hatem noticed him looking in the mirror.
“Understand anything of what I said, Sirhan?” he asked.
“Nothing, Mawlana, I was daydreaming.”
Hatem turned to Nashwa and whispered, “We’re almost at the house. Where are you going to get out?”
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
She put her gloved hand on his hand, which lay on the seat in the gap between them, and he shuddered. She tapped him lightly on the back of his hand and pulled her hand back.
“Why do you switch so easily between being a preacher and being a scholar?” she asked.
“I’m a Rifai and I know how to charm snakes,” he replied, trying to get over his tenseness. He was surprised to see her face contorted in fear and her lips trembling.
*
Nashwa soon got over the shock of hearing that Hatem had been a Rifai. She pulled herself together and laughed.
“You’re pulling my leg of course,” she said.
“Not at all. When I was young I lived with the Rifais for a time and learned some of their powers but I realized I was a fake and a failure. I didn’t go beyond elementary level with them. I did play with snakes, but don’t worry, I left the Rifai order before I learned how to play with wily women.”
He heard what sounded like the beginnings of a vulgar laugh but she quickly held it in check.
“Is that how you see it?” she asked.
“That’s my little fantasy,” he said.
Nashwa took him by surprise by changing her mind about coming home with him. She decided to spend the night with an aunt who lived in a compound nearby and said goodbye at the gate.
When Hatem and Sirhan reached home, Sirhan got out first to knock on the door for the guard to open up for them. Then Hatem got out too and the two of them started up the short flight of stairs that led to the inner gate.
“Sheikh Mukhtar el-Husseini’s wife called, by the way,” said Sirhan. “I told her you were on air and she asked me to tell you that Sheikh Mukhtar didn’t arrive in Saudi Arabia.”
Hatem felt as if he had swallowed a burning piece of coal and it had slipped down into his stomach. The pain was like an earthquake in his heart. He could hardly believe he had been normal a few minutes ago, even relaxed, looking at Nashwa’s face in the back seat of the car.
He stumbled up the stairs, fumbled with the key in the door, and bumped against the edge of the steel door as he walked past it. He almost fell over as he passed the sofa in the reception room.
He sat down and stretched out his legs, breathing heavily. What does this news mean, he wondered.
Sheikh Mukhtar had visited him a few days earlier and told him he would be leaving for the airport within hours. Sheikh Mukhtar thought he was always being followed and harassed. There was the story he had told Hatem, when he asked him to mediate, and then there were the things he had left for Hatem to look after.
Hatem stood up hurriedly and felt the blood rush to his head. His head felt heavy, as if it were pulling him down, so he sat down again.
The things that Mukhtar had left—the flash drive, the CD, the notebook, and the envelope he had given him that day. He had asked Hatem to open them if anything bad happened to him. Did he really tell him to do that? He had asked him to ask after his mother and he hadn’t done that either. How many times had he let the man down? But where were the things Mukhtar had left him? When Mukhtar left had he put them in the small safe in the cupboard in his office, or had he forgotten them and left them on the small table outside the office? Had he taken them with him to his other office?
He was torn between getting up now and looking for them, or calling Sheikh Mukhtar’s number and asking after him, or looking for the telephone number of Mukhtar’s mother and asking her what she knew. He felt something in his fist, which was clenched so tight that his fingernails had left marks in the palm of his hand. He opened out his fist with difficulty and found a piece of paper with a telephone number written on it in Sirhan’s terrible handwriting. Sheikh Mukhtar’s mother, it said. Sirhan had probably handed him the piece of paper and told him she had called, but he was so tense he hadn’t realized it was in his hand all this time. It was too late to call the woman and disturb her. But wasn’t it possible that Sheikh Mukhtar had gone to a country other than Saudi Arabia? But even if he had done that, he would definitely have told his mother.
Had something unpleasant happened to him on the way to the airport? If that had happened, how come he, or at least Mukhtar’s mother, hadn’t heard about it?
The only possibility left was the one he was avoiding: Mukhtar el-Husseini had been the victim of something he had long feared, something he had tried to protect himself against by asking Hatem to intercede with the son of the president and the men around him. Was it possible that they hated him that much? Had they killed him? That wouldn’t be easy, because Sheikh Mukhtar was the sheikh of a Sufi order and his followers were neither few in number nor people without significance. And besides, what could Mukhtar el-Husseini do to them that would make them want to kill him? Even if he had spoken ill of the president’s son and had been diffi
cult or given offense, he was basically harmless. In fact he was someone who called for love and tolerance.
Hatem didn’t dare to get up and look for the things Mukhtar had left in the library. Maybe he was afraid or anxious or incapable of doing it, he didn’t know, but he explained his reluctance by saying he had no right to examine the things Mukhtar had left until he found out what had really happened to the man. Might he not be fine and Hatem was blowing it out of proportion? And what business of his was it? Might they harm him too? What did Mukhtar’s fate matter to him? Would they penalize him for liking Mukhtar el-Husseini? Oh yes, they might want to punish him because Mukhtar trusted him and they may have found out that Mukhtar had told him a secret. But what secret? Hatem thought and said to himself: “Many secrets, in fact.” Then he reassured himself, saying he had the approval of the ruling family, which had handed over their lost son for him to guide, and what confidence could be greater than that honor? But at the same time he knew a terrible secret about them that would shake the country if it leaked out, and he was one of the few people in the country to know it. Did that make him strong, or weak? Could these people stand it if Hatem held two secrets about them, and not just one?