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The Semitic Series
DEVELOPMENT OF
MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE
AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
BY DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D.
SERIES OF HAND-BOOKS IN SEMITICS
EDITED BY JAMES ALEXANDER CRAIG
PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND HELLENISTIC GREEK IN
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Recent scientific research has stimulated an increasing interest in
Semitic studies among scholars, students, and the serious reading public
generally. It has provided us with a picture of a hitherto unknown
civilization, and a history of one of the great branches of the human
family.
The object of the present Series is to state its results in popularly
scientific form. Each work is complete in itself, and the Series, taken
as a whole, neglects no phase of the general subject. Each contributor is
a specialist in the subject assigned him, and has been chosen from the
body of eminent Semitic scholars in Europe and in this country.
This Series will be composed of the following volumes:
I. HEBREWS. _History and Government._ By Professor J. F.
McCurdy, University of Toronto, Canada.
II. HEBREWS. _Ethics and Religion._ By Professor Archibald
Duff, Airedale College, Bradford, England. [_Now Ready._
III. HEBREWS. _The Social Life._ By the Rev. Edward Day,
Springfield, Mass. [_Now Ready._
IV. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS, with introductory chapter on
the Sumerians. _History to the Fall of Babylon._ By Dr. Hugo
Winckler, University of Berlin. [_In Press._
V. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. _Religion._ By Professor J. A.
Craig, University of Michigan.
VI. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. _Life and Customs._ By Professor
A. H. Sayce, University of Oxford, England. [_Now Ready._
VII. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. Excavations and Account of
Decipherment of Inscriptions.
VIII. SYRIA AND PALESTINE. _Early History._ By Professor Lewis
Bayles Paton, Hartford Theological Seminary. [_Now Ready._
IX. DEVELOPMENT OF MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE AND
CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY. By Professor D. B. Macdonald, Hartford
Theological Seminary. [_Now Ready._
The following volumes are to be included in the Series, and others may be
added:
X. PHŒNICIA. _History and Government_, including Colonies,
Trade, and Religion.
XI. ARABIA, _Discoveries in, and History and Religion until
Muhammad_.
XII. ARABIC LITERATURE AND SCIENCE SINCE MUHAMMAD.
XIII. THE INFLUENCE OF SEMITIC ART AND MYTHOLOGY ON WESTERN
NATIONS.
The Semitic Series
DEVELOPMENT OF
Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence
and Constitutional Theory
BY
DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D.
SOMETIME SCHOLAR AND FELLOW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
GLASGOW; PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN
HARTFORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published; March, 1903
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
MEMORIÆ MATRIS SACRVM
PREFACE
It is with very great diffidence that I send out this book. Of the lack
and need of some text-book of the kind there can be little doubt. From
the educated man who wishes to read with intelligence his “Arabian
Nights” to the student of history or of law or of theology who wishes
to know how it has gone in such matters with the great Muslim world,
there is demand enough and to spare. Still graver is the difficulty for
the growing body of young men who are taking up the study of Arabic. In
English or German or French there is no book to which a teacher may send
his pupils for brief guidance on the development of these institutions;
on the development of law there are only scattered and fragmentary
papers, and on the development of theology there is practically nothing.
But of the difficulty of supplying this need there can be even less
doubt. Goldziher could do it fully and completely; no other Arabist alive
could approach the task other than with trepidation. The following pages
therefore form a kind of forlorn attempt, a rushing in on the part of
one who is sure he is not an angel and is in grave doubt on the question
of folly, but who also sees a gap and no great alacrity on the part of
his betters toward filling it. One thing, however, I would premise
with emphasis. All the results given here have been reached or verified
from the Arabic sources. These sources are seldom stated either in the
text or in the bibliography, as the book is intended to be useful to
non-Arabists, but, throughout, they lie behind it and are its basis.
By this it is not meant that the results of this book are claimed as
original. Every Arabist will recognize at once from whose wells I have
drawn and who have been my masters. Among these I would do homage in the
first instance to Goldziher; what Arabist is not deep in his debt? With
Goldziher’s influence through books I would join the kindred influence
of the living voice of my teacher Sachau. To him I render thanks and
reverence now for his kindly sympathy and guidance. Others in whose debt
I am are Nöldeke, Snouck Hurgronje, von Kremer, Lane—many more. Those who
are left of these will know their own in my pages and will be merciful to
my attempts to tread in their steps and to develop their results. What is
my own, too, they will know; into questions of priority I have no desire
to enter. Foot-notes which might have given to each scholar his due have
been left unwritten. For the readers of this book such references in so
vast a subject would be useless. Such references, too, would have in the
end to be made to Arabic sources.
More direct help I have to acknowledge on several sides. To the
atmosphere and scholarly ideals of Hartford Seminary I am indebted for
the possibility of writing such a book as this, so far from the ordinary
theological ruts. Among my colleagues Professor Gillett has especially
aided me with criticism and suggestions on the terminology of scholastic
theology. Dr. Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia, illumined for me the
Idrisid movement in North Africa. One complete sentence on p. 85 I have
conveyed from a kindly notice in _The Nation_ of my inaugural lecture on
the development of Muslim Jurisprudence. Finally, and above all, I am
indebted to my wife for much patient labor in copying and for keen and
luminous criticism in planning and correcting. With thanks to her this
preface may fitly close.
DUNCAN B. MACDONALD.
HARTFORD, December, 1902.
⁂ As it has proved impracticable to give in the body of the
book a full transliteration of names and technical terms, the
learner is referred for such exact forms to the chronological
table and the index. In these _hamza_ and _ayn_, the long
vowels and the emphatic consonants are uniformly represented,
the last by italic.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
PART I
_CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT_
CHAPTER I
FROM DEATH OF MUHAMMAD TO RISE OF ABBASIDS 7
CHAPTER II
TO RISE OF AYYUBIDS 34
CHAPTER III
TO PRESENT SITUATION 50
PART II
_DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE_
CHAPTER I
TO CLOSE OF UMAYYAD PERIOD 65
CHAPTER II
TO PRESENT SITUATION 91
PART III
_DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY_
CHAPTER I
TO CLOSE OF UMAYYAD PERIOD 119
CHAPTER II
TO FOUNDATION OF FATIMID KHALIFATE 153
CHAPTER III
TO TRIUMPH OF ASH‘ARITES IN EAST 186
CHAPTER IV
AL-GHAZZALI 215
CHAPTER V
TO IBN SAB‘IN AND END OF MUWAHHIDS 243
CHAPTER VI
TO PRESENT SITUATION 266
APPENDICES
I. ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS IN TRANSLATION 291
II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 358
III. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 368
INDEX 373
ERRATA
Page 30, line 5, for al-Mukanna read al-Muqanna.
” 86, l. 19, for first Khalifa read second Khalifa.
” 201, l. 26, for _tasalsal_ read _tasalsul_.
” 237, for Mansell read Mansel.
” 267, l. 30, for Haqqari read Hakkari.
” 299, l. 10, for _Mushriqs_ read _Mushriks_.
” 300, l. 4, for kalimatan ash-shahada read kalimata-sh-shabada.
” 325, l. 23, for _wihdaniya_ read _wahdaniya_.
” 339, l. 11, for _ihtiyaz_ read _ihtiyaj_.
Transcriber’s Note: The errata have been corrected.
DEVELOPMENT OF MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE, AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
INTRODUCTION
In human progress unity and complexity are the two correlatives forming
together the great paradox. Life is manifold, but it is also one. So
it is seldom possible, and still more seldom advisable, to divide a
civilization into departments and to attempt to trace their separate
developments; life nowhere can be cut in two with a hatchet. And this is
emphatically true of the civilization of Islam. Its intellectual unity,
for good and for evil, is its outstanding quality. It may have solved
the problem of faith and science, as some hold; it may have crushed all
thought which is not of faith, as many others hold. However that may be,
its life and thought are a unity.
So, also, with its institutions. It might be possible to trace the
developments of the European states out of the dying Roman Empire, even
to watch the patrimony of the Church grow and again vanish, and yet take
but little if any account of the Catholic theology. It might be possible
to deal adequately with the growth of that system of theology and yet
never touch either the Roman or the civil law, even to leave out of our
view the canon law itself. In Europe the State may rule the Church, or
the Church may rule the State; or they may stand side by side in somewhat
dubious amity, supposedly taking no account each of the other. But
in Muslim countries, Church and State are one indissolubly, and until
the very essence of Islam passes away, that unity cannot be relaxed.
The law of the land, too, is, in theory, the law of the Church. In the
earlier days at least, canon and civil law were one. Thus we can never
say in Islam, “he is a great lawyer; he, a great theologian; he, a great
statesman.” One man may be all three, almost he must be all three, if he
is to be any one. The statesman may not practice theology or law, but his
training, in great part, will be that of a theologian and a legist. The
theologian-legist may not be a man of action, but he will be a court of
ultimate appeal on the theory of the state. He will pass upon treaties;
decide disputed successions; assign to each his due rank and title. He
will tell the Commander of the Faithful himself what he may do and what,
by law, lies beyond his reach.
It was, then, under the pressure of necessity only that the following
sketch of the development of Muslim thought was divided into three parts.
By no possible arrangement did it seem feasible to treat the whole at
once. Intolerable confusions and unintelligible complications would, to
all appearance, be the result. As the most concrete and simple side,
the development of the state is taken first. Second, on account of the
shortness of the course which it ran, comes the development of the legal
ideas and schools. Third comes the long and thrice complicated thread
of theological thought. It is for the student to hold firmly in mind
that this division is purely mechanical and for convenience only; that
it corresponds to little or nothing in the real nature of the case.
This will undoubtedly become clear to him as he proceeds. He will meet
with the same names in all three divisions; he will meet with the same
technicalities and the same scholastic system. A treatise on canon law
is certainly different from one on theology, but each touches the other
at innumerable points; their authors may easily be the same; each will
be in great part unintelligible without the other. He must then labor to
merge these three sections again into one another. His principal helps
in this, along with diligent parallel reading, will be the chronological
table and the index. In the table he will watch the succession of men and
events grouped from all the three sections; from the index he will trace
the activities of each man in these different spheres. The index, too,
will give him the technical terms and he will observe their recurrence in
historical, legal, and theological theory. Further, it will serve him as
a vocabulary when he comes to read technical texts.
But, again, another warning is necessary. The sketch given here is
incomplete, not only in details but in the ground that it covers.
Important phases of Muslim law, theology, and state theory are of
necessity passed over entirely. Thus Babism is not touched at all and
the Shi‘ite theology and law hardly at all. The Ibadite systems have the
merest mention and Turkish and Persian mysticism are equally neglected.
For such weighty organizations the Darwish Fraternities are most
inadequately dealt with, and Muslim missionary enterprise might well be
treated at length. Guidance on these and other points the student will
seek in the bibliography. It, too, makes no pretence to completeness
and consists of selected titles only. But it will serve at least as an
introduction and clew to an exceedingly wide field. And it may be well
to state here, in so many words, that no work can be done in this field
without a reading knowledge of French and German, and no satisfactory
work without some knowledge of Arabic.
And, again, this sketch is incomplete because the development of Islam is
not yet over. If, as some say, the faith of Muhammad is a _cul-de-sac_,
it is certainly a very long one; off it many courts and doors open; down
it many peoples are still wandering. It is a faith, too, which brings
us into touching distance with the great controversies of our own day.
We see in it, as in a somewhat distorted mirror, the history of our own
past. But we do not yet see its end, even as the end of Christianity is
not yet in sight. It is for the student, then, to remember that Islam is
a present reality and the Muslim faith a living organism, a knowledge
of whose laws may be of life or death for us who are in another camp.
For there can be little doubt that the three antagonistic and militant
civilizations of the world are those of Christendom, Islam, and China.
When these are unified, or come to a mutual understanding, then, and only
then, will the cause of civilization be secure. To aid some little to the
understanding of Islam among us is the object of this book.
PART I
Constitutional Development
CHAPTER I
The death of Muhammad and the problem of the succession; the
parties; families of Hashimids, Umayyads and Abbasids; election
of Abu Bakr; nomination of Umar; his constitution; election
of Uthman; Umayyads in power; murder of Uthman; origin of
Shi‘ites; election of Ali; civil war; Mu‘awiya first Umayyad;
origin of Kharijites; their revolts; Ibadites; development
of Shi‘ites; al-Husayn at Karbala; different Shi‘ite
constitutional theories; doctrine of the hidden Imam; revolts
against Umayyads; rise of Abbasids; Umayyads of Cordova.
With the death of Muhammad at al-Madina in the year 11 of the Hijra
(A.D. 632), the community of Islam stood face to face with three great
questions. Of the existence of one they were conscious, at least in
its immediate form; the others lay still for their consciousness in
the future. The necessity was upon them to choose a leader to take the
place of the Prophet of God, and thus to fix for all time what was to
be the nature of the Muslim state. Muhammad had appointed no Joshua;
unlike Moses he had died and given no guidance as to the man who should
take up and carry on his work. If we can imagine the people of Israel
left thus helpless on the other side of the Jordan with the course of
conquest that they must pursue opening before them, we shall have a
tolerably exact idea of the situation in Islam when Muhammad dropped
the reins. Certainly, the people of Islam had little conception of what
was involved in the great precedent that they were about to establish,
but, nevertheless, there lies here, in the first elective council
which they called, the beginning of all the confusions, rivalries, and
uncertainties that were to limit and finally to destroy the succession of
the Commanders of the Faithful.
[Sidenote: EARLY PARTIES]
Muhammad had ruled as an absolute monarch—a Prophet of God in his
own right. He had no son; though had he left such issue it is not
probable that it would have affected the direct result. Of Moses’s son
we hear nothing till long afterward, and then under very suspicious
circumstances. The old free spirit of the Arabs was too strong, and as
in the Ignorance (_al-jahiliya_), as they called the pre-Muslim age, the
tribes had chosen from time to time their chiefs, so it was now fixed
that in Islam the leader was to be elected by the people. But wherever
there is an election, there are parties; and this was no exception. Of
such parties we may reckon roughly four. There were the Early Believers,
who had suffered with Muhammad at Mecca, accompanied him to al-Madina
and had fought at his side through all the Muslim campaigns. These were
called _Muhajirs_, because they had made with him the Hijra or migration
to al-Madina. Then there was the party of the citizens of al-Madina,
who had invited him to come to them and had promised him allegiance.
These were called _Ansar_ or Helpers. Eventually we shall find these two
factions growing together and forming the one party of the old original
believers and Companions of Muhammad (_sahibs_, _i.e._, all those who
came in contact with the Prophet as believers and who died in Islam),
but at the first they stood apart and there was much jealousy between
them. Then, in the third place, there was the party of recent converts
who had only embraced Islam at the latest moment when Mecca was captured
by Muhammad, and no other way of escape for them was open. They were the
aristocratic party of Mecca and had fought the new faith to the last.
Thus they were but indifferent believers and were regarded by the others
with more than suspicion. Their principal family was descended from a
certain Umayya, and was therefore called Umayyad. There will be much
about this family in the sequel. Then, fourth, there was growing up a
party that might be best described as legitimists; their theory was that
the leadership belonged to the leader, not because he was elected to it
by the Muslim community, but because it was his right. He was appointed
to it by God as completely as Muhammad had been. This idea developed, it
is true, somewhat later, but it developed very rapidly. The times were
such as to force it on.
Those, then, were the parties of which account must be taken, but before
proceeding to individuals in these parties, it will be well to fix
some genealogical relationships, so as to be able to trace the family
and tribal jealousies and intrigues that were so soon to transfer
themselves from the little circle of Mecca and al-Madina and to fight
themselves out on the broad field of Muslim history. For, in truth, in
the development of no other state have little causes produced such great
effects as here. For example, it may be said, broadly and yet truly,
that the seclusion of Muslim women, with all its disastrous effects at
the present day for a population of two hundred millions, runs back to
the fact that A’isha, the fourteen-year-old wife of Muhammad, once lost
a necklace under what the gossips of the time thought were suspicious
circumstances. As to the point now in hand, it is quite certain that
Muslim history for several hundred years was conditioned and motived by
the quarrels of Meccan families. The accompanying genealogy will give
the necessary starting-point. The mythical ancestor is Quraysh; hence
“the Quraysh,” or “Quraysh” as a name for the tribe. Within the tribe,
the two most important families are those of Hashim and Umayya; their
rivalries for the succession of the Prophet fill the first century and a
half of Muslim history, and the immediately pre-Islamic history of Mecca
is similarly filled with a contest between them as to the guardianship of
the Ka‘ba and the care of the pilgrims to that sanctuary. Whether this
earlier history is real, or a reflection from the later Muslim times, we
need not here consider. The next important division is that between the
families of al-Abbas and Abu Talib, the uncles of the Prophet. From the
one were descended the Abbasids, as whose heir-at-law the Sultan of the
Ottoman Empire now claims the Khalifate, and from the other the different
conflicting lines of Shi‘ites, whose intricacies we shall soon have to
face.
[Illustration: GENEALOGICAL CHART FOR EARLIEST HISTORY OF ISLAM.
Names of Khalifas are in black letters; their order in Khalifate is
indicated by prefixed Roman numerals; all dates after A.D. 622 are A.H.]
[Illustration: CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ALIDS.]
[Sidenote: ABU BAKR; UMAR]
To return: in this first elective council the choice fell upon Abu
Bakr. He was a man distinguished by his piety and his affection for and
close intimacy with Muhammad. He was the father of Muhammad’s favorite
wife, A’isha, and was some two years younger than his son-in-law. He
was, also, one of the earliest believers and it is evident that this,
with his advanced age, always respected in Arabia, went far to secure
his election. Yet his election did not pass off without a struggle in
which the elements that later came to absolute schism and revolution
are plainly visible. The scene, as it can be put together from Arabic
historians, is curiously suggestive of the methods of modern politics. As
soon as it was assured that the Prophet, the hand which had held together
all those clashing interests, was really dead, a convention was called
of the leaders of the people. There the strife ran so high between the
Ansar, the Muhajirs and the Muslim aristocrats of the house of Umayya,
that they almost came to blows. Suddenly in the tumult, Umar, a man of
character and decision, “rushed the convention” by solemnly giving to Abu
Bakr the hand-grasp of fealty. The accomplished fact was recognized—as
it has always been in Islam—and on the next day the general mass of the
people swore allegiance to the first Khalifa, literally Successor, of
Muhammad.
On his death, in A.H. 13 (A.D. 634), there followed Umar. His election
passed off quietly. He had been nominated by Abu Bakr and nothing
remained but for the people to confirm that nomination. There thus
entered a second principle—or rather precedent—beside that of simple
election. A certain right was recognized in the Khalifa to nominate his
successor, provided he chose one suitable and eligible in other respects.
Unlike Cromwell in a similar case, Abu Bakr did not nominate one of his
own sons, but the man who had been his right hand and who, he knew, could
best build up the state. His foresight was proved by the event, and Umar
proved the second founder of Islam by his genius as a ruler and organizer
and his self-devotion as a man. Through his generals, Damascus and
Jerusalem were taken, Persia crushed in the great battles of al-Qadisiya
and Nahawand, and Egypt conquered. He was also the organizer of the
Muslim state, and it will be advisable to describe part of his system,
both for its own sake and in order to point the contrast with that of
his successors. He saw clearly what were the conditions under which the
Muslims must work, and devised a plan, evidently based on Persian methods
of government, which, for the time at least, was perfect in its way.
[Sidenote: CONSTITUTION OF UMAR]
The elements in the problem were simple. There was the flood of Arabs
pouring out of Arabia and bearing everything down in their course.
These must be retained as a conquering instrument if Islam were to
exist. Thus they must be prevented from settling down on the rich lands
they had seized,—from becoming agriculturists, merchants, and so on,
and so losing their identity among other peoples. The whole Arab stock
must be preserved as a warrior caste to fight the battles of God.
This was secured by a regulation that no new lands should be held by a
Muslim. When a country was conquered, the land was left to its previous
possessors with the duty of paying a high rent to the Muslim state
and, besides, of furnishing fodder and food, clothing and everything
necessary to the Muslim camp that guarded them. These camps, or rather
camp-cities, were scattered over the conquered countries and were
practically settlements of Muslims _in partibus infidelium_. The duty
of these Muslims was to be soldiers only. They were fed and clothed by
the state, and the money paid into the public treasury, consisting of
plunder or rents of conquered lands (_kharaj_), or the head-tax on all
non-Muslims (_jizya_), was regularly divided among them and the other
believers. If a non-Muslim embraced Islam, then he no longer paid the
head-tax, but the land which he had previously held was divided among his
former co-religionists, and they became responsible to the state. He,
on the other hand, received his share of the public moneys as regularly
distributed. Within Arabia itself, no non-Muslim was permitted to live.
It was preserved, if we may use the expression, as a breeding-ground
for defenders of the faith and as a sacred soil not to be polluted by
the foot of an unbeliever. It will readily be seen what the results of
such a system must have been. The entire Muslim people was retained as
a gigantic fighting machine, and the conquered peoples were machines
again to furnish it with what was needed. The system was communistic, but
in favor of one special caste. The others—the conquered peoples—were
crushed to the ground beneath their burdens. Yet they could not sell
their land and leave the country; there was no one to buy it. The Muslims
would not, and their fellow-co-religionists could not, for with it went
the land-tax.
[Sidenote: UTHMAN]
Such was, in its essence, the constitution of Umar, forever famous in
Muslim tradition. It stood for a short time, and could not have stood
for a long time; but the cause of its overthrow was political and not
social-economic. With the next Khalifa and the changes which came with
him, it went, in great part, to the ground. The choice of Umar to the
Khalifate had evidently been dictated by a consideration of his position
as one of the earliest believers and as son-in-law of the Prophet. The
party of Early Believers had thus succeeded twice in electing their
candidate. But with the death of Umar in A.H. 23 (A.D. 644) the Meccan
aristocratic party of the family of Umayya that had so long struggled
against Muhammad and had only accepted Islam when their cause was
hopelessly lost, had at last a chance. Umar left no directions as to his
successor. He seems to have felt no certainty as to the man best fitted
to take up the burden, and when his son sought to urge him to name a
Khalifa, he is reported to have said, “If I appoint a Khalifa, Abu Bakr
appointed a Khalifa; and if I leave the people without guidance, so did
the Apostle of God.” But there is also a story that after a vain attempt
to persuade one of the Companions to permit himself to be nominated,
he appointed an elective council of six to make the choice after his
death under stringent conditions, which went all to wreck through
the pressure of circumstances. The Umayyads succeeded in carrying the
election of Uthman, one of their family, an old man and also a son-in-law
of Muhammad, who by rare luck for them was an Early Believer. After his
election it was soon evident that he was going to rule as an Umayyad
and not as a Muslim. For generations back in Mecca, as has already been
said, there had been, according to tradition, a continual struggle
for pre-eminence between the families of Umayya and of Hashim. In the
victory of Muhammad and the election of the first two Khalifas, the
house of Hashim had conquered, but it had been the constant labor of the
conquerors to remove all tribal and family distinctions and frictions and
to bring the whole body of the Arabs to regard one another as brother
Muslims. Now, with a Khalifa of the house of Umayya, all that was swept
away, and it was evident that Uthman—a pious, weak man, in the hands of
his energetic kinsfolk—was drifting to a point where the state would
not exist for the Muslims but for the Umayyads. His evil spirit was
his cousin Marwan ibn al-Hakam, whom he had appointed as his secretary
and who eventually became fourth Umayyad Khalifa. The father of this
man, al-Hakam ibn al-As, accepted Islam at the last moment when Mecca
was captured, and, thereafter, was banished by Muhammad for treachery.
Not till the reign of Uthman was he permitted to return, and his son,
born after the Hijra, was the most active assertor of Umayyad claims.
Under steady family pressure, Uthman removed the governors of provinces
who had suffered with Muhammad and fought in the Path of God (_sabil
Allah_), and put in their places his own relations, late embracers of the
faith. He broke through the Constitution of Umar and gifted away great
tracts of state lands. The feeling spread abroad that in the eyes of the
Khalifa an Umayyad could do no wrong, and the Umayyads themselves were
not backward in affording examples. To the Muhajirs and Ansar they were
godless heathen, and probably the Muhajirs and Ansar were right. Finally,
the indignation could no longer be restrained. Insurrections broke out
in the camp-cities of al-Kufa and al-Basra, and in those of Egypt and
at last in al-Madina itself. There, in A.H. 35 (A.D. 655), Uthman fell
under the daggers of conspirators led by a Muhammad, a son of Abu Bakr,
but a religious fanatic strangely different from his father, and the
train was laid for a long civil war. In the confusion that followed the
deed the chance of the legitimist party had come, and Ali, the cousin and
son-in-law of the Prophet, was chosen.
[Sidenote: SHI‘ITES AND SUNNITES]
Fortunately this is not a history of Islam, but of Muslim political
institutions, and it is, therefore, unnecessary to go into the manifold
and contradictory stories told of the events of this time. These have
evidently been carefully redacted in the interests of later orthodoxy,
and to protect the character of men whose descendants later came to
power. The Alids built up in favor of Ali a highly ingenious but flatly
fictitious narrative, embracing the whole early history and exhibiting
him as the true Khalifa kept from his rights by one after the other
of the first three, and suffering it all with angelic patience. This
varies from the extreme Shi‘ite position, which damns all the three at
a sweep as usurpers, through a more moderate one which contents itself
with cursing Umar and Uthman, to a rejection of Uthman only, and even,
at the other extreme, satisfies itself with anathematizing the later
Umayyads. At this point the Shi‘ites join hands with the body of orthodox
believers, who are all sectaries of Ali to a certain degree. Yet this
tendency has been counteracted to some extent by a strongly catholic
and irenic spirit which manifests itself in Islam. After a controversy
is over and the figures in it have faded into the past, Islam casts a
still deeper veil over the controversy itself and glorifies the actors on
both sides into fathers and doctors of the Church. An attempt is made to
forget that they had fought one another so bitterly, and to hold to the
fact only that they were brother Muslims. The Shi‘ites well so-called,
for _Shi‘a_ means sect, have never accepted this; but it is the usage
of orthodox, commonly called Sunnite, Islam. A concrete expression of
any result reached by the body of the believers then often takes the
form of a tradition assigned to Muhammad. In this case, it is a saying
of his that ten men, specified by name and prominent leaders in these
early squabbles, were certain of Paradise. It has further become an
article in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet are not to
be mentioned save with praise; and one school of theologians, in their
zeal for the historic Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Yazid, the
slayer of al-Husayn (p. 28 below), and reckoned as the worst of all the
Umayyads, because he had been a Khalifa in full and regular standing.
This catholic recognition of the unity of Islam we shall meet again and
again.
[Sidenote: ALI; CIVIL WAR]
Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details and to adjust the
rights and wrongs of this story, we return to the fixed fact of the
election of Ali and the accession to power of the legitimist party. This
legitimist party, or parties, had been gradually developing, and their
peculiar and mutually discordant views deserve attention. These views all
glorified Ali, the full cousin of Muhammad and husband of his daughter
Fatima, but upon very different grounds. There could not but exist the
feeling that a descendant of the Prophet should be his successor, and the
children of Ali, al-Hasan and al-Husayn were his only grandchildren and
only surviving male descendants. This, of course, reflected a dignity
upon Ali, their father, and gave him a claim to the Khalifate. Again, Ali
himself seems to have made a great and hardly comprehensible impression
upon his contemporaries. The proverb ran with the people, “There is no
sword save _Dhu-l-faqar_, and no youth save Ali.” He was not, perhaps, so
great a general as one or two others of his time, but he stood alone as a
warrior in single combat; he was a poet and an orator, but no statesman.
As one of the earliest of the Early Believers, it might be expected that
the Muhajirs would support him, and so they did; but the matter went much
farther, and he seems to have excited a feeling of personal attachment
and devotion different from that rendered to the preceding Khalifas.
Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat as to his claim. The idea of
election was thrown aside, and his adherents proclaimed his right by the
will and appointment of God to the successorship of the Prophet. As God
had appointed Muhammad as Prophet, so He had appointed Ali as his helper
in life and his successor in death. This was preached in Egypt as early
as the year 32.
It will easily be seen that with such a following, uniting so many
elements, his election could be brought about. Thus it was; but an evil
suspicion rested upon him. Men thought, and probably rightly, that he
could have saved the aged Uthman if he had willed, and they even went
the length of accusing him of being art and part in the murder itself.
The ground was hollow beneath his feet. Further, there were two other
old Companions of the Prophet, Talha and az-Zubayr, who thought they had
a still better claim to the Khalifate; and they were joined by A’isha,
the favorite wife of Muhammad, now, as a finished _intrigante_, the evil
genius of Islam. Ali had reaped all the advantage of the conspiracy
and murder, and it was easy to raise against him the cry of revenge
for Uthman. Then the civil war began. In the struggle with Talha and
az-Zubayr, Ali was victorious. Both fell at the battle of the Camel
(A.H. 36), so called from the presence of A’isha mounted on a camel
like a chieftainess of the old days. But a new element was to enter.
The governorship of Syria had been held for a long time by Mu‘awiya,
an Umayyad, and there the Umayyad influence was supreme. There, too,
had grown up a spirit of religious indifference, combined with a
preservation of all the forms of the faith. Mu‘awiya was a statesman by
nature, and had moulded his province into an almost independent kingdom.
The Syrian army was devoted to him, and could be depended upon to have
no other interests than his. From the beginning of Ali’s reign, he had
been biding his time; had not given his allegiance, but had waited for
the hour to strike for revenge for Uthman and power for himself. The time
came and Mu‘awiya won. We here pass over lightly a long and contradictory
story. It is enough to note how the irony of history wrought itself out,
and a son of the Abu Sufyan who had done so much to persecute and oppose
Muhammad in his early and dark days and had been the last to acknowledge
his mission, became his successor and the ruler of his people. But with
Ali ends the revered series of the four “Khalifas who followed a right
course” (_al-khulafa ar-rashidun_), reverenced now by all orthodox
Muslims, and there begins the division of Islam into sects, religious and
political—it comes to the same thing.
[Sidenote: KHARIJITES]
The Umayyads themselves clearly recognized that with their accession
to power a change had come in the nature of the Muslim state. Mu‘awiya
said openly that he was the first king in Islam, though he retained and
used officially the title of Khalifa and Commander of the Faithful. Yet
such a change could not be complete nor could it carry with it the whole
people—that is clear of itself. For more than one hundred years the house
of Umayya held its own. Syria was solid with it and it was supported by
many statesmen and soldiers; but outside of Syria and north Arabia it
could count on no part of the population. An anti-Khalifa, Abd Allah,
son of the az-Zubayr of whom we have already heard, long held the sacred
cities against them. Only in A.H. 75 (A.D. 692) was he killed after
Mecca had been stormed and taken by their armies. Southern Arabia and
Mesopotamia, with its camp-cities al-Kufa and al-Basra, Persia and Egypt,
were, from time to time, more or less in revolt. These risings went in
one or other of two directions. There were two great anti-Umayyad sects.
At one time in Mu‘awiya’s contest with Ali, he trapped Ali into the
fatal step of arbitrating his claim to the Khalifate. It was fatal, for
by it Ali alienated some of his own party and gained less than nothing
on the other side. Part of Ali’s army seceded in protest and rebellion,
because he—the duly elected Khalifa—submitted his claim to any shadow
of doubt. On the other hand, they could not accept Mu‘awiya, for him
they regarded as unduly elected and a mere usurper. Thus they drifted
and split into innumerable sub-sects. They were called Kharijites—goers
out—because they went out from among the other Muslims, refused to regard
them as Muslims and held themselves apart. For centuries they continued
a thorn in the side of all established authority. Their principles were
absolutely democratic. Their idea of the Khalifate was the old one of the
time of Abu Bakr and Umar. The Khalifa was to be elected by the whole
Muslim community and could be deposed again at need. He need be of no
special family or tribe; he might be a slave, provided he was a good
Muslim ruler. Some admitted that a woman might be Khalifa, and others
denied the need of any Khalifa at all; the Muslim congregation could rule
itself. Their religious views were of a similarly unyielding and antique
cast, but with that we have nothing now to do.
[Sidenote: IBADITES]
It cannot be doubted that these men were the true representatives of
the old Islam. They claimed for themselves the heirship to Abu Bakr and
Umar, and their claim was just. Islam had been secularized; worldly
ambition, fratricidal strife, luxury, and sin had destroyed the old bond
of brotherhood. So they drew themselves apart and went their own way, a
way which their descendants still follow in Uman, in east Africa, and in
Algeria. To them the orthodox Muslims—meaning by that the general body
of Muslims—were antipathetic more than even Christians or Jews. These
were “people of a book” (_ahl kitab_), i.e., followers of a revealed
religion, and kindly treatment of them was commanded in the Qur’an. They
had never embraced Islam, and were to be judged and treated on their own
merits. The non-Kharijite Muslims, on the other hand, were renegades
(_murtadds_) and were to be killed at sight. It is easy to understand
to what such a view as this led. Numberless revolts, assassinations,
plunderings marked their history. Crushed to the ground again and again,
again and again they recovered. They were Arabs of the desert; and the
desert was always there as a refuge. It is probable, but as yet unproved,
that mingled with the political reasons for their existence as a sect
went tribal jealousies and frictions; of such there have ever been enough
and to spare in Arabia. Naturally, under varying conditions, their
views and attitudes varied. In the wild mountains of Khuzistan, one of
their centres and strongholds, the primitive barbarism of their faith
had full sway. It drew its legitimate consequence, lived out its life,
and vanished from the scene. The more moderate section of the Kharijites
centred round al-Basra. Their leader there was Abd Allah ibn Ibad, and
from about the year 60 on the schism between his followers and the more
absolute of these “come-outers” can be traced. It is characteristic of
the latter that they aided for a time Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr when he was
besieged in Mecca by the Umayyads, but deserted him finally because he
refused to join the names of Talha and his own father, az-Zubayr, with
those of Uthman and Ali in a general commination. The Kharijites were
all good at cursing, and the later history of this section of them shows
a process of disintegration by successive secessions, each departing
in protest and cursing those left behind as heathen and unbelievers.
Characteristic, too, for the difference between the two sections, were
their respective attitudes toward the children of their opponents. The
more absolute party held that the children of unbelievers were to be
killed with their parents; the followers of Abd Allah ibn Ibad, that they
were to be allowed to grow up and then given their choice. Again, there
was a difference of opinion as to the standing of those who held with the
Kharijites but remained at home and did not actually fight in the Path of
God. These the one party rejected and the other accepted. Again, were
the non-Kharijites Muslims to the extent that the Kharijites might live
amongst them and mix with them? This the severely logical party denied,
but Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed.
From this it will be abundantly clear that the only party with a possible
future was that of Ibn Ibad. His sect survives to the present day under
the name of Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, according to
their traditions, their first Imam, or president, was elected about A.H.
134. He was of a family which had reigned there before Islam, and from
the time of his election on, the Ibadites have succeeded in holding Uman
against the rest of the Muslim world. Naturally, the election of the
Imam by the community has turned into the rule of a series of dynasties;
but the theory of election has always held fast. They were sailors,
merchants, and colonizers already by the tenth century A.D., and carried
their state with its theology and law to Zanzibar and the coast of East
Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite fugitives passed into North
Africa, and there they still maintain the simplicity of their republican
ideal and their primitive theological and legal views. Their home is in
the Mzab in the south of Algeria, and, though as traders and capitalists
they may travel far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling in
marriage with other Muslims is forbidden them.
[Sidenote: SHI‘ITES]
At the opposite extreme from these in political matters stands the sect
that is called the Shi‘a. It, as we have seen, is the name given to the
party that glorifies Ali and his descendants and regards the Khalifate as
belonging to them by right divine. How early this feeling arose we have
already seen, but the extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the
innumerable differing views that developed, the maze of conspiracies,
tortuous and underground in their methods, some in good faith and some
in bad, to which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi‘a the most
difficult side of a knowledge of the Muslim East. Yet some attempt at it
must be made. If there was ever a romance in history, it is the story
of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt; if there was ever the
survival of a petrifaction in history, it is the survival to the present
day of the Assassins and the Druses; if there was ever the persistence
of an idea, it is in the present Shi‘ite government in Persia and in the
faith in that Mahdi for whom the whole world of Islam still looks to
appear and bring in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth.
All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and his children on the
part of their followers twelve centuries ago.
In A.H. 40 (A.D. 660) Ali fell by the dagger of a Kharijite. These being
at the opposite pole from the Shi‘ites, are the only Muslim sect that
curses and abhors Ali, his family and all their works. Orthodox Islam
reveres Ali and accepts his Khalifate; his family it also reverences,
but rejects their pretensions. The instinct of Islam is to respect the
accomplished fact, and so even the Umayyads, one and all, stand in the
list of the successors of the Prophet, much as Alexander VI and his
immediate predecessors do in that of the Popes.
To Ali succeeded his son, al-Hasan, but his name does not stand on the
roll of the Khalifate as usually reckoned. It shows some Shi‘ite tinge
when the historian says, “In the Khalifate of al-Hasan,” and, thereafter,
proceeds with, “In the days of Mu‘awiya,” the Umayyad Khalifa who
followed him. Mu‘awiya had received the allegiance of the Syrian Muslims
and when he advanced on al-Kufa, where al-Hasan was, al-Hasan met him
and gave over into his hands all his supposed rights. That was in A.H.
41; in A.H. 49 he was dead by poison. Twelve years later al-Husayn, his
brother, and many of his house fell at Karbala in battle against hopeless
odds. It is this last tragedy that has left the deepest mark of all on
the Muslim imagination. Yearly when the fatal day, the day of Ashura, the
tenth of the month Muharram, comes round, the story is rehearsed again
at Karbala and throughout, indeed, all the Shi‘ite world in what is a
veritable Passion Play. No Muslim, especially no Persian, can read of the
death of al-Husayn, or see it acted before his eyes, without quivering
and invoking the curse of God upon all those who had aught to do with
it or gained aught by it. That curse has clung fast through all the
centuries to the name of Yazid, the Umayyad Khalifa of the time, and only
the stiffest theologians of the traditional school have labored to save
his memory through the merits of the historical Khalifate. But even after
this tragedy it was not out with the blood of Muhammad. Many descendants
were left and their party lived on in strange, half underground fashion,
as sects do in the East, occasionally coming to the surface and bursting
out in wild and, for long, useless rebellion.
[Sidenote: SHI‘ITE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORIES]
In these revolts the Shi‘a was worthy of its name, and split into many
separate divisions, according to the individuals of the house of Ali to
whom allegiance was rendered and who were regarded as leaders, titular or
real. These subdivisions differed, also, in the principle governing the
choice of a leader and in the attitude of the people toward him. Shi‘ism,
from being a political question, became theological. The position of
the Shi‘ite was and is that there must be a law (_nass_) regulating the
choice of the Imam, or leader of the Muslim community; that that law is
one of the most important dogmas of the faith and cannot have been left
by the Prophet to develop itself under the pressure of circumstances;
that there is such an Imam clearly pointed out and that it is the duty
of the Muslim to seek him out and follow him. Thus there was a party who
regarded the leadership as belonging to Ali himself, and then to any of
his descendants by any of his wives. These attached themselves especially
to his son Muhammad, known from his mother as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya,
who died in 81, and to his descendants and successors. It was in this
sect that the most characteristic Shi‘ite views first developed. This
Muhammad seems to have been the first concerning whom it was taught,
after his death, that he was being preserved by God alive in retirement
and would come forth at his appointed time to bring in the rule of
righteousness upon the earth. In some of the innumerable sub-sects the
doctrine of the deity, even, of Ali was early held, in others a doctrine
of metempsychosis, generally among men and especially from one Imam to
his successor; others, again, advanced the duty of seeking the rightful
Imam and rendering allegiance to him till it covered the whole field of
faith and morals—no more was required of the believer. To one of these
sects, al-Muqanna, “the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan,” adhered before he
started on his own account.
We have seen already that so early as 32 the doctrine had been preached
in Egypt that Ali was the God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here
we have its legitimate development, which was all the quicker as it had,
or assumed, a theological basis, and did not simply urge the claims
to leadership of the family of the Prophet after the fashion in which
inheritance runs among earthly kings. That was the position at first of
the other and far more important Shi‘ite wing. It regarded the leadership
as being in the blood of Muhammad and therefore limited to the children
of Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Again, the attitude
toward the person of the leader varied, as we have already seen. One
party held that the leadership was by the right of the appointment of
God, but that the leader himself was simply a man as other men. These
would add to “the two words” (_al-kalimatani_) of the creed, “There is
no god but God, and Muhammad is the Apostle of God,” a third clause,
“and Ali is the representative of God.” Others regarded him as an
incarnation of divinity; a continuing divine revelation in human form.
His soul passed, when he died, to his next successor. He was, therefore,
infallible and sinless, and was to be treated with absolute, blind
obedience. Here there is a mingling of the most strangely varied ideas.
In Persia the people had been too long accustomed to looking upon their
rulers as divine for them to be capable of taking up any other position.
A story is told of the governor of a Persian province who wrote to the
Khalifa of his time that he was not able to prevent his people from
giving him the style and treatment of a god; they did not understand any
other kind of ruler; it was as much as his authority was worth to attempt
to make them desist. From this attitude, combined with the idea of the
transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi‘ite doctrine was derived.
[Sidenote: THE HIDDEN IMAM]
But though the party of Ali might regard the descendants of Ali
as semi-divine, yet their conspiracies and revolts were uniformly
unsuccessful, and it became a very dangerous thing to head one. The
party was willing to get up a rising at any time, but the leader was apt
to hang back. In fact, one of the most curious features of the whole
movement was the uselessness of the family of Ali and the extent to which
they were utilized by others. They have been, in a sense, the cat’s-paws
of history. Gradually they themselves drew back into retirement and
vanished from the stage, and, with their vanishing, a new doctrine
arose. It was that of the hidden Imam. We have already seen the case
of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of these
concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on another line of descent,
vanished in the same way in the latter part of the second century of the
Hijra, and another about A.H. 260. Their respective followers held that
they were being kept in concealment by God and would be brought back at
the appointed time to rule over the world and bring in a kind of Muslim
millennium. This is the oriental version of the story of Arthur in Avalon
and of Frederick Barbarossa in Kyffhaüser.
But that has led us far away and we must go back to the fall of the
Umayyads and the again disappointed hopes of the Alids. By the time
of the last Khalifa of the Umayyad house, Marwan II, A.H. 127-132
(A.D. 744-750), the whole empire was more or less in rebellion, partly
Shi‘ite and partly Kharijite. The Shi‘ites themselves had, as usual, no
man strong enough to act as leader; that part was taken by as-Saffah,
a descendant of al-Abbas, an uncle of Muhammad. The rebellion was
ostensibly to bring again into power the family of the Prophet, but
under that the Abbasids understood the family of Hashim, while the
Alids took it in the more exact sense of themselves. They were made a
cat’s-paw, the Abbasid dynasty was founded, and they were thrown over.
Thus, the Khalifate remained persistently in the hands of those who, up
to the last, had been hostile to the Prophet. This al-Abbas had embraced
the faith only when Mecca was taken by the Muslims. Later historians,
jealous for the good name of the ancestor of the longest line of all
the Successors, have labored to build up a legend that al-Abbas stayed
in Mecca only because he could there be more useful in the cause of his
nephew. This is one of the perversions of early history of which the
Muslim chronicles are full.
[Sidenote: UMAYYADS OF SPAIN]
But the story of the Umayyads is not yet out. From the ruin that
overwhelmed them, one escaped and fled to North Africa. There, he vainly
tried to draw together a power. At last, seeing in Spain some better
prospect of success, he crossed thither, and by courage, statesmanship,
and patience, carved out a new Umayyad empire that lasted for 300 years.
One of his descendants in A.H. 317 (A.D. 929) took the title of Khalifa
and claimed the homage due to the Commander of the Faithful. There is a
story that al-Mansur, the second Abbasid, once asked his courtiers, “Who
is the Falcon of Quraysh?” They named one after another of the great men
of the tribe, beginning, naturally, with his majesty himself, but to no
purpose. “No,” he said, “the Falcon of Quraysh is Abd ar-Rahman, the
Umayyad, who found his way over deserts and seas, flung himself alone
into a strange country, and there, without any helper but himself, built
up a realm. There has been none like him of the blood of Quraysh.”
CHAPTER II
Shi‘ite revolts against Abbasids; Idrisids; Zaydites; Imamites;
the Twelvers; constitutional theory of modern Persia; origin
of Fatimids; Maymun the oculist; plan of the conspiracy; the
Seveners; the Qarmatians; Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi and founding of
Fatimid dynasty in North Africa; their spread to Egypt and to
Syria; al-Hakim Bi’amrillah; the Druses; the Assassins; Saladin
and the Ayyubids.
[Sidenote: IDRISIDS]
It is not in place here to deal with all the numberless little Shi‘ite
revolts against the Abbasids which now followed. Those only are of
interest to us which had more or less permanent effect on the Muslim
state and states. Earliest among such comes the revolt which founded
the dynasty of the Idrisids. About the middle of the second century the
Abbasids were hard pressed. The heavens themselves seemed to mingle in
the conflict. The early years of their rule had been marked by great
showers of shooting stars, and the end of the age was reckoned near by
both parties. Messianic hope was alive, and a Mahdi, a Guided of God,
was looked for. This had long been the attitude of the Alids, and the
Abbasids began to feel a necessity to gain for their _de facto_ rule
the sanction of theocratic hopes. In 143 Halley’s comet was visible for
twenty days, and in 147 there were again showers of shooting stars. On
the part of the Abbasids, homage was solemnly rendered to the eldest
son of al-Mansur, the Khalifa of the time, as successor of his father,
under the title al-Mahdi, and several sayings were forged and ascribed
to the Prophet which told who and what manner of man the Mahdi would
be, in terms which clearly pointed to this heir-apparent. The Alids, on
their side, were urged on to fresh revolts. These risings were still
political in character and hardly at all theological; they expressed the
claims to sovereignty of the house of the Prophet. On the suppression
of one of them at al-Madina in 169, Idris ibn Abd Allah, a grandson
of al-Hasan, escaped to North Africa—that refuge of the politically
disaffected—and there at the far-off Volubilis of the Romans, in the
modern Morocco, founded a state. It lasted till 375, and planted firmly
the authority of the family of Muhammad in the western half of North
Africa. Other Alid states rose in its place, and in 961 the dynasty of
the Sharifs of Morocco was established by a Muhammad, a descendant of
a Muhammad, brother of the same Abd Allah, grandson of al-Hasan. This
family still rules in Morocco and claims the title of Khalifa of the
Prophet and Commander of the Faithful. Strictly, they are Shi‘ites, but
their sectarianism sits lightly upon them; it is political only and they
have no touch of the violent religious antagonism to the Sunnite Muslims
that is to be found in Persian Shi‘ism. As adherents of the legal school
of Malik ibn Anas, their Sunna is the same as that of orthodox Islam.
The _Sahih_ of al-Bukhari (see below, p. 79) is held in especially high
reverence, and one division of the Moorish army always carries a copy of
it as a talisman. They are really a bit of the second century of the
Hijra crystallized and surviving into our time.
Another Shi‘ite line which lasts more or less down to the present day,
is that of the Zaydites of al-Yaman. They were so called from their
adherence to Zayd, a grandson of al-Husayn, and their sect spread in
north Persia and south Arabia. The north Persian branch is of little
historic importance for our purpose. For some sixty-four years, from
250 on, it held Tabaristan, struck coins and exercised all sovereign
rights; then it fell before the Samanids. The other branch has had a
much longer history. It was founded about 280, at Sa‘da in al-Yaman and
there, and later at San‘a, Zaydite Imams have ruled off and on till our
day. The Turkish hold upon south Arabia has always been of the slightest.
Sometimes they have been absolutely expelled from the country, and their
control has never extended beyond the limits of their garrisoned posts.
The position of these Zaydites was much less extreme than that of the
other Shi‘ites. They were strictly Fatimites, that is, they held that any
descendant of Fatima could be Imam. Further, circumstances might justify
the passing over, for a time, of such a legitimate Imam and the election
as leader of someone who had no equally good claim. Thus, they reverenced
Abu Bakr and Umar and regarded their Khalifate as just, even though Ali
was there with a better claim. The election of these two Khalifas had
been to the advantage of the Muslim state. Some of them even accepted
the Khalifate of Uthman and only denounced his evil deeds. Further, they
regarded it as possible that there might be two Imams at the same time,
especially when they were in countries widely apart. This, apparently,
sprang from the sect being divided between north Persia and south Arabia.
Theologically, or philosophically—it is hard to hold the two apart in
Islam—the Zaydites were accused of rationalism. Their founder, Zayd, the
grandson of al-Husayn, had studied under the great Mu‘tazilite, Wasil ibn
Ata, of whom much more hereafter.
[Sidenote: IMAMITES]
But if the Zaydites were lax both in their theology and in their theory
of the state, that cannot be said of another division of the Shi‘ites,
called the Imamites on account of the stress which they laid on the
doctrine of the person of the Imam. For them the Imam of the time was
explicitly and personally indicated, Ali by Muhammad and each of the
others in turn by his predecessor. But it was hard to reconcile with this
_a priori_ position that an Imam must have been indicated, the fact that
there was no agreement as to the Imam who had been indicated. Down all
possible lines of descent the sacred succession was traced until, of the
seventy-two sects that the Prophet had foretold for his people, seventy,
at least, were occupied by the Imamites alone. Further, the number of
Hidden Imams was constantly running up; with every generation, Alids
found it convenient to withdraw into retirement and have reports given
out of their own deaths. Then two sects would come into existence—one
which stopped at the Alid in question, and said that he was being
kept in concealment by God to be brought back at His pleasure; and
another which passed the Imamship on to the next generation. Out of
this chaos two sects, adhering to two series of Imams, stand clear
through their historical importance. The one is that of the Twelvers
(_Ithna‘ashariya_); theirs is the official creed of modern Persia.
About A.H. 260 a certain Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, twelfth in descent from
Ali, vanished in the way just described. The sect which looked for his
return increased and flourished until, at length, with the conquest of
Persia in A.H. 907 (A.D. 1502) by the Safawids—a family of Alid descent
which joined arms to sainthood—Persia became Shi‘ite, and the series of
the Shahs of Persia was begun. The position of the Shah is therefore
essentially different from that of the Khalifa of the Sunnites. The
Khalifa is the successor of Muhammad, with a dignity and authority which
inheres in himself; he is both king and pontiff; the Shah is a mere
_locum tenens_, and reigns only until God is pleased to restore to men
the true Imam. That Imam is still in existence, though hidden from human
eyes. The Shah, therefore, has strictly no legal authority; he is only
a guardian of the public order. True legal authority lies, rather, with
the learned doctors of religion and law. As a consequence of this, the
Shi‘ites still have _Mujtahids_, divines and legists who have a right to
form opinions of their own, can expound the original sources at first
hand, and can claim the unquestioning assent of their disciples. Such men
have not existed among the Sunnites since the middle of the third century
of the Hijra; from that time on all Sunnites have been compelled to
swear to the words of some master or other, long dead.
[Sidenote: FATIMIDS]
This division of the Shi‘ites is the only one that exists in great
numbers down to the present day. The second of the two mentioned above
came to power earlier, ran a shorter course, and has now vanished from
the stage, leaving nothing but an historical mystery and two or three
fossilized, half-secret sects—strange survivals which, like the survivals
of geology, tell us what were the living and dominant forces in the older
world. It will be worth while to enter upon some detail in reciting its
history, both for its own romantic interest and as an example of the
methods of Shi‘ite propaganda. Its success shows how the Abbasid empire
was gradually undermined and brought to its fall. It itself was the most
magnificent conspiracy, or rather fraud, in all history. To understand
its possibility and its results, we must hold in mind the nature of the
Persian race and the condition of that race at this time. Herodotus was
told by his Persian friends that one of the three things Persian youth
was taught was to tell the truth. That may have been the case in the time
of Herodotus, but certainly this teaching has had no effect whatever on
an innate tendency in the opposite direction; and it is just possible
that Herodotus’s friends, in giving him that information, were giving
also an example of this tendency. Travellers have been told curious
things before now, but certainly none more curious than this. As we know
the Persian in history, he is a born liar. He is, therefore, a born
conspirator. He has great quickness of mind, adaptability, and, apart
from religious emotion, no conscience. In the third century of the Hijra
(the ninth A.D.), the Persians were either devoted Shi‘ites or simple
unbelievers. The one class would do anything for the descendants of Ali;
the other, anything for themselves. This second class, further, would by
preference combine doing something for themselves with doing something
against Islam and the Arabs, the conquerors of their country. So much by
way of premise.
In the early part of this third century, there lived at Jerusalem
a Persian oculist named Maymun. He was a man of high education,
professional and otherwise; had no beliefs to speak of, and understood
the times. He had a son, Abd Allah, and trained him carefully for a
career. Abd Allah, however—known as Abd Allah ibn Maymun—though he had
thought of starting as a prophet himself, saw that the time was not
ripe, and planned a larger and more magnificent scheme. This was to be
no ordinary conspiracy to burst after a few years or months, but one
requiring generations to develop. It was to bring universal dominion to
his descendants, and overthrow Islam and the Arab rule. It succeeded in
great part, very nearly absolutely.
[Sidenote: A UNIQUE CONSPIRACY]
His plan was to unite all classes and parties in a conspiracy under one
head, promising to each individual the things which he considered most
desirable. For the Shi‘ites, it was to be a Shi‘ite conspiracy; for
the Kharijites, it took a Kharijite tinge; for Persian nationalists,
it was anti-Arab; for free-thinkers, it was frankly nihilistic. Abd
Allah himself seems to have been a sceptic of the most refined stamp.
The working of this plan was achieved by a system of grades like those
in freemasonry. His emissaries went out, settled each in a village and
gradually won the confidence of its inhabitants. A marked characteristic
of the time was unrest and general hostility to the government. Thus,
there was an excellent field for work. To the enormous majority of
those involved in it the conspiracy was Shi‘ite only, and it has been
regarded as such by many of its historians; but it is now tolerably
plain how simply nihilistic were its ultimate principles. The first
object of the missionary was to excite religious doubt in the mind of
his subject, by pointing out curious difficulties and subtle questions
in theology. At the same time he hinted that there were those who could
answer these questions. If his subject proved tractable and desired
to learn further, an oath of secrecy and absolute obedience and a fee
were demanded—all quite after the modern fashion. Then he was led up
through several grades, gradually shaking his faith in orthodox Islam
and its teachers and bringing him to believe in the idea of an Imam,
or guide in religious things, till the fourth grade was reached. There
the theological system was developed, and Islam, for the first time,
absolutely deserted. We have dealt already with the doctrine of the
Hidden Imam and with the present-day creed of Persia, that the twelfth in
descent from Ali is in hiding and will return when his time comes. But
down the same line of descent seven Imams had been reckoned to a certain
vanished Isma‘il, and this Isma‘il was adopted by Abd Allah ibn Maymun
as his Imam and as titular head of his conspiracy. Hence, his followers
are called Isma‘ilians and Seveners (_Sab‘iya_). The story which is told
of the split between the Seveners and the Twelvers, which were to be,
is characteristic of the whole movement and of the wider divergence of
the Seveners from ordinary Islam and its laws. The sixth Imam was Ja‘far
as-Sadiq (d. A.H. 148); he appointed his son Isma‘il as his successor.
But Isma‘il was found drunk on one occasion, and his father in wrath
passed the Imamship on to his brother, Musa al-Qazam, who is accordingly
reckoned as seventh Imam by the Twelvers. One party, however, refused to
recognize this transfer. Isma‘il’s drunkenness, they held, was a proof
of his greater spirituality of mind; he did not follow the face-value
(_zahr_) of the law, but its hidden meaning (_batn_). This is an example
of a tendency, strong in Shi‘ism, to find a higher spiritual meaning
lying within the external or verbal form of the law; and in proportion as
a sect exalted Ali, so it diverged from literal acceptance of the Qur’an.
The most extreme Shi‘ites, who tended to deify their Imam, were known on
that account as Batinites or Innerites. On this more hereafter.
[Sidenote: THE SYSTEM OF SEVENS]
But to return to the Seveners: in the fourth grade a further refinement
was added. Everything went in sevens, the Prophets as well as the Imams.
The Prophets had been Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and
Isma‘il, or rather his son Muhammad, for Isma‘il himself had died in his
father’s lifetime. Each of these Prophets had had a helper. The helper
of Adam had been Seth; of Noah, Shem; and the helper of Muhammad, the
son of Isma‘il, was Abd Allah ibn Maymun himself. Between each pair of
Prophets there came six Imams—it must be remembered that the world was
never left without an Imam—but these Imams had had no revelation to make;
were only guides to already revealed truth. Thus, we have a series of
seven times seven Imams, the first, and thereafter each seventh, having
the superior dignity of Prophet. The last of the forty-nine Imams,
this Muhammad ibn Isma‘il, is the greatest and last of the Prophets,
and Abd Allah ibn Maymun has to prepare the way for him and to aid him
generally. It is at this point that the adherent of this system ceases
to be a Muslim. The idea of a series of Prophets is genuinely Islamic,
but Muhammad, in Muslim theology, is the last of the Prophets and the
greatest, and after him there will come no more.
Such, then, was the system that those who passed the fourth degree
learned and accepted. The great majority did not pass beyond; but those
who were judged worthy were admitted to three further degrees. In these
degrees, their respect for religious teaching of every kind, doctrinal,
moral, ritual, was gradually undermined; the Prophets and their works
were depreciated and philosophy and philosophers put in their place. The
end was to lead the very few who were admitted to the inmost secrets of
the conspiracy to the same position as its founder. It is clear what
a tremendous weapon, or rather machine, was thus created. Each man
was given the amount of light he could bear and which was suited to
his prejudices, and he was made to believe that the end of the whole
work would be the attaining of what he regarded as most desirable. The
missionaries were all things to all men, in the broadest sense, and could
work with a Kharijite fanatic, who longed for the days of Umar; a Bedawi
Arab, whose only idea was plunder; a Persian driven to wild cries and
tears by the thought of the fate of Ali, the well-beloved, and of his
sons; a peasant, who did not care for any family or religion but only
wished to live in peace and be let alone by the tax-gatherers; a Syrian
mystic, who did not know very well what he thought, but lived in a world
of dreams; or a materialist, whose desire was to clear all religions out
of the way and give humanity a chance. All was fish that came to their
net. So the long seed-planting went on. Abd Allah ibn Maymun had to flee
to Salamiya in Syria, died there and went to his own place—if he got
his deserts, no desirable one—and Ahmad, his son or grandson, took up
the work in his stead. With him the movement tends to the surface, and
we begin to touch hard facts and dates. In southern Mesopotamia—what is
called the Arab Iraq—we find a sect appearing, nicknamed Qarmatians, from
one of their leaders. In A.H. 277 (A.D. 890-1) they were sufficiently
numerous and knew their strength enough to hold a fortress and thus enter
upon open rebellion. They were peasants, we must remember, Nabateans
and no Arabs, only Muslims by compulsion, and thus what we have here is
really a _Jacquerie_, or Peasants’ War. But a disturbance of any kind
suited the Isma‘ilians. From there the rising spread into Bahrayn and
on to south Arabia, varying in its character with the character of the
people.
[Sidenote: UBAYD ALLAH AL-MAHDI]
But there was another still more important development in progress. A
missionary had gone to North Africa and there worked with success among
the Berber tribes about Constantine, in what is now Algeria. These have
always been ready for any change. He gave himself out as forerunner
of the Mahdi, promised them the good of both worlds, and called them
to arms. The actual rising was in A.H. 289 (A.D. 902). Then there
appeared among them Sa‘id, the son of Ahmad, the son of Abd Allah, the
son of Maymun the oculist; but it was not under that name. He was now
Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi himself, a descendant of Ali and of Muhammad ibn
Isma‘il, for whom his ancestors were supposed to have worked and built
up this conspiracy. In A.H. 296 (A.D. 909) he was saluted as Commander
of the Faithful, with the title of al-Mahdi. So far the conspiracy had
succeeded. This Fatimid dynasty, so they called themselves from Fatima,
their alleged ancestress, the daughter of Muhammad, conquered Egypt and
Syria half a century later and held them till A.H. 567 (A.D. 1171). When
in A.H. 317 the Umayyads of Cordova also claimed the Khalifate and used
the title, there were three Commanders of the Faithful at one time in the
Muslim world. Yet it should be noticed that the constitutional position
of these Umayyads was essentially different from that of the Fatimids.
To the Fatimids, the Abbasids were usurpers. The Umayyads of Cordova,
on the other hand, held, like the Zaydites and some jurisconsults of
the highest rank, that, when Muslim countries were so far apart that
the authority of the ruler of the one could not make itself felt in the
other, it was lawful to have two Imams, each a true Successor of the
Prophet. The good of the people of Muhammad demanded it. Still, the unity
of the Khalifate is the more regular doctrine.
[Sidenote: AL-HAKIM]
But only half of the work was done. Islam stood as firmly as ever and
the conspiracy had only produced a schism in the faith and had not
destroyed it. Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on the one hand,
of ruling a people who were in great bulk fanatical Muslims and did not
understand any jesting with their religion, and, on the other hand, of
being head of a conspiracy to destroy that very religion. The Syrians
and Arabs had apparently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and North
Africans, and Ubayd Allah found himself between the devil and the deep
sea. The Qarmatians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans, stormed
the holy city Mecca, and, most terrible of all, carried off the sacred
black stone. When an enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they
declined—they had orders not to send it back. Everyone understood that
the orders were from Africa. So Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address
them in a public letter, exhorting them to be better Muslims. The writing
and reading of this letter must have been accompanied by mirth, at any
rate no attention was paid to it by the Qarmatians. It was not till
the time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that they were permitted to do
business with that stone. Then they sent it back with the explanatory
or apologetic remark that they had carried it off under orders and now
sent it back under orders. Meanwhile the Fatimid dynasty was running its
course in Egypt but without turning the people of Egypt from Islam. Yet
it produced one strange personality and two sects, stranger even than
the sect to which it itself owed its origin. The personality is that of
al-Hakim Bi’amrillah, who still remains one of the greatest mysteries
that are to be met with in history. In many ways he reminds us curiously
of the madness of the Julian house; and, in truth, such a secret movement
as that of which he was a part, carried on through generations from
father to son, could not but leave a trace on the brain. We must remember
that the Khalifa of the time was not always of necessity the head of the
conspiracy, or even fully initiated into it. In the latter part of the
Fatimid rule we find distinct traces of such a power behind the throne,
consisting, as we may imagine, of descendants and pupils of those who
had been fully initiated from the first and had passed through all the
grades. In the case of al-Hakim, it is possible, even, to trace, to a
certain extent, the development of his initiation. During the first
part of his reign he was fanatically Muslim and Shi‘ite. He persecuted
alternately the Christians and the Jews, and then the orthodox and the
Shi‘ites. In the latter part, there was a change. He had, apparently,
reached a point of philosophical indifference, for the persecutions of
Christians and Jews ceased, and those who had been forced to embrace
Islam were permitted to relapse. This last was without parallel, till
in 1844 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe wrung from the Porte the concession
that a Muslim who apostatized to Christianity should not be put to death.
But, mingled with this indifference, there appeared a strange but regular
development of Shi‘ite doctrine. Some of his followers began to proclaim
openly that the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident that he
himself accepted and believed this. But the Egyptian populace would have
none of it, and the too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the
Lebanon and there preached to the native mountain tribes. The results of
their labors are the Druses of to-day, who worship al-Hakim still and
expect his return to introduce the end of all things. Finally, al-Hakim
vanished on the night of February 12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery
unread to this day. Whether he was murdered, and if so why, or vanished
of free-will, and if so again why, we have no means of telling. Our
guess will depend upon our reading of his character. So much is certain,
that he was a ruler of the autocratic type, who introduced many reforms,
most of which the people of his time could not in the least understand
and therefore misrepresented as the mere whims of a tyrant, and many of
which, from our ignorance, are still obscure to us. If we can imagine
such a man of strong personality and desire for the good of his people
but with a touch of madness in the brain, cast thus in the midst between
his orthodox subjects and a wholly unbelieving inner government, we shall
perhaps have the clew to the strange stories told of him.
[Sidenote: THE ASSASSINS]
Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to which we shall
refer, is the sect known as the Assassins, whose Grand Master was a name
of terror to the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain. It, too,
was founded, and apparently for a purpose of personal vengeance, by a
Persian who began as a Shi‘ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt,
studied under the Fatimids—they had established at Cairo a great school
of science—and returned to Persia as their agent to carry on their
propaganda. His methods were the same as theirs, with a difference.
That was the reduction of assassination to a fine art. From his eagle’s
nest of Alamut—such is the meaning of the name—and later from Masyaf in
the Lebanon and other mountain fortresses, he and his successors spread
terror through Persia and Syria and were only finally stamped out by the
Mongol flood under Hulagu in the middle of the seventh century of the
Hijra (the 13th A.D.). Of the sect there are still scattered remnants
in Syria and India, and as late as 1866 an English judge at Bombay had
to decide a case of disputed succession according to the law of the
Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid dynasty itself fell before the Kurd,
Salah ad-Din, the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was again orthodox.
CHAPTER III
The problem of the Abbasids; the House of Barmak; the crumbling
of the empire; the Prætorians of Baghdad; the Buwayhids;
the situation of the Khalifa under them; the Saljuqs; the
possibilities of development under them; the Mongols and the
Abbasid end; the Egyptian Abbasids; the Ottoman Sultans, their
heirs; theory of the Khalifate; the modern situation; the signs
of sovereignty for Muslims; five grounds of the claim of the
Ottoman Sultan; the consequences for the Sultan; other Muslim
constitutions; the Shi‘ites; the Ibadites; the Wahhabites; the
Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.
[Sidenote: CRUMBLING OF THE EMPIRE]
We must now return to the Abbasids, whose empire we left crumbling away.
It was a shrewd stroke of policy on the part of its founder to put the
new capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Persia, Syria and
Arabia. For the only hope of permanence to the empire lay in welding
these into a unity. For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous
rulers, and, especially, during fifty years of guidance by the House of
Barmak—Persians who flung in their lot with the Abbasids and were their
stay till the madness of Harun ar-Rashid cast them down—this seemed to be
succeeding; but, just as the empire of Charlemagne melted under his sons,
so did the empire of al-Mansur and al-Ma’mun. The Bedawi tribes fell
back into the desert and to the free chaos of the old pre-Islamic life.
As the great philosophical historian, Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the
Arabs by their nature are incapable of founding an empire except when
united by religious enthusiasm, and are of all peoples least capable of
governing an empire when founded. After the first Abbasids, it is a fatal
error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab or to speak of the Muslim
civilization as Arabian. The conquered peoples overcame their conquerors.
Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in native independent dynasties
flung off the Arab yoke. These dynasties were mostly Shi‘ite; Shi‘ism,
in great part, is the revolt of the Aryan against Semitic monotheism.
The process in all this was gradual but certain. Governors of provinces
revolted and became semi-independent. Sometimes they acknowledged a
shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, by having his name on their coins
and in the Friday prayers; sometimes they did not. At other times they
were, or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted, they revolted
absolutely. With them, it was a question of conscience. At last, not even
in his own City of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa master.
As in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of mercenaries assumed control
and their leader was _de facto_ ruler. Later, from A.H. 320 to 447 (A.D.
932-1055), the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward and puppet of
the Shi‘ite Buwayhids. Baghdad itself they held from 334. But still,
a curious spiritual value—we cannot call it authority—was left to the
shadowy successors of Muhammad. Muslim princes even in far-off India did
not feel quite safe upon their thrones unless they had been solemnly
invested by the Khalifa and given their fitting title. Those very rulers
in whose power the Khalifa’s life lay sought sanction from him for their
rule. At one time there seemed to be some hope that the fatal unity
of theocratical Islam would be broken and that a dualism with promise
of development through conflict—such as the rivalry between Pope and
Emperor which kept Europe alive and prevented both State and Church from
falling into decrepit decay—might grow up; that the Khalifa might become
a purely spiritual ruler with functions of his own, ruling with mutual
subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction beside a temporal Sultan. The
Buwayhids were Shi‘ites and merely tolerated, for state reasons, the
impieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (A.D. 1055), Tughril Beg,
the Saljuq, entered Baghdad, was proclaimed Sultan of the Muslims and
freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite yoke. By 470, all western Asia, from
the borders of Afghanistan to those of Egypt and the Greek Empire, were
Saljuq. With the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as Pope, there
was a chance that the Muslim State might enter on a stage of healthy
growth through conflict. But that was not to be. Neither State nor
Church rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was finally and
forever cut off by the Mongol flood. When the next great Sultanate—that
of the Ottoman Turks—arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of the
Khalifate as well. This is what might have been in Islam, built on actual
history in Europe. The situation that did arise in Islam may become more
clear to us if we can imagine that in Europe the vast plans of Gregory
VII. had been carried out and the Pope had become the temporal as well as
the spiritual head of the Christian world. Such a situation would have
been similar to that in the world of Islam at its earliest time during
some few years under the dynasty of the Umayyads, when the one temporal
and spiritual sovereign ruled from Samarqand to Spain. Then we can
imagine how the vast fabric of such an imperial system broke down by its
own weight. Under conflicting claims of legitimacy, an anti-Pope arose
and the great schism began. Thereafter the process of disintegration was
still more rapid. Provinces rose in insurrection and dropped away from
each rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the sovereigns over them professed
themselves to be the lieutenants of the supreme Pontiff and sought
investiture from him. Last, the States of the Church itself—all that was
left to it—came under the rule of some one of these princes and the Pope
was, to all intents, a prisoner in his own palace. Yet the sovereignty
of the Khalifa was not simply a legal fiction, any more than that of the
Pope would have been in the parallel just sketched. The Muslim princes
thought it well to seek spiritual recognition from him, just as Napoleon
I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius VII.
[Sidenote: SOVEREIGNTY OF KHALIFATE]
But a wave was soon to break in and sweep away all these forms. It came
with the Mongols under Hulagu, who passed from the destruction of the
Assassins to the destruction of Baghdad and the Khalifate. In A.H. 656
(A.D. 1258), the city was taken and the end of the Abbasids had come. An
uncle of the reigning Khalifa escaped and fled to Egypt, where the Mamluk
Sultan received him and gave him a spiritual court and ecclesiastical
recognition. He found it good to have a Khalifa of his own to use in
any question of legitimacy. The name had yet so much value. Finally, in
1517, the Mamluk rule went down before the Ottoman Turks, and the story
told by them is that the last Abbasid, when he died in 1538, gave over
his rights to their Sultan, Sulayman the Great. Since then, the Ottoman
Sultan of Constantinople has claimed to be the Khalifa of Muhammad and
the spiritual head of the Muslim world.
Such were the fates of the Commanders of the Faithful. We have traced
them through a long and devious course, full of confusions and
complications. Leaving aside the legitimist party, the whole may be
summed in a word. The theoretical position was that the Imam, or leader,
must be elected by the Muslim community, and that position has never,
theoretically, been abandoned. Each new Ottoman sovereign is solemnly
elected by the Ulama, or canon lawyers and divines of Constantinople.
His temporal sovereignty comes by blood; in bestowing this spiritual
sovereignty the Ulama act as representatives of the People of Muhammad.
Thus the theoretical position was liable to much modification in
practice. The Muslim community resolves itself into the people of the
capital; still further, into the body-guard of the dead Khalifa; and,
finally, as now, into the peculiar custodians of the Faith. Among the
Ibadites the position from the first seems to have been that only those
learned in the law should act as electors. Along with this, the doctrine
developed that it was the duty of the people to recognize _un fait
accompli_ and to do homage to a successful usurper—until another more
successful should appear. They had learned that it was better to have
a bad ruler than no ruler at all. This was the end of the democracy of
Islam.
[Sidenote: CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION OF TO-DAY]
Finally, it may be well to give some account of the constitutional
question as it exists at the present day. The greatest of the Sultans
of Islam is undoubtedly the Emperor of India. Under his rule are far
more Muslims than fall to any other. But the theory of the Muslim State
never contemplated the possibility of Muslims living under the rule of
an unbeliever. For them, the world is divided into two parts, the one is
_Dar al-Islam_, abode of Islam; and the other is _Dar al-harb_, abode of
war. In the end, _Dar al-harb_ must disappear into _Dar al-Islam_ and the
whole world be Muslim. These names indicate with sufficient clearness
what the Muslim attitude is toward non-Muslims. It is still a moot point
among canon lawyers, however, whether _Jihad_, or holy war, may be made,
unprovoked, upon any _Dar al-harb_. One thing is certain, there must be
a reasonable prospect of success to justify any such movement; the lives
of Muslims must not be thrown away. Further, the necessity of the case—in
India, especially—has brought up the doctrine that any country in which
the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its injunctions—even some
of them—followed, must be regarded as _Dar al-Islam_ and that _Jihad_
within its borders is forbidden. We may doubt, however, if this doctrine
would hold back the Indian Muslims to any extent if a good opportunity
for a _Jihad_ really presented itself. The Shi‘ites, it may be remarked,
cannot enter upon a _Jihad_ at all until the Hidden Imam returns and
leads their armies.
[Sidenote: THEORIES OF THE KHALIFATE]
Again the two signs of sovereignty for Muslims are that the name of the
sovereign should be on the coinage and that he should be prayed for in
the Friday sermon (_khutba_). In India, the custom seems to be to pray
for “the ruler of the age” without name; then each worshipper can apply
it as he chooses. But there has crept in a custom in a few mosques of
praying for the Ottoman Sultan as the Khalifa; the English government
busies itself little with these things until compelled, and the custom
will doubtless spread. The Ottoman Sultan is certainly next greatest to
the Emperor of India and would seem, as a Muslim ruling Muslims, to have
an unassailable position. But in his case also difficult and ambiguous
constitutional questions can be raised. He has claimed the Khalifate, as
we have seen, since 1538, but the claim is a shaky one and brings awkward
responsibilities. As stated at the present day, it has five grounds.
First, _de facto_ right; the Ottoman Sultan won his title by the sword
and holds it by the sword. Second, election; this form has been already
described. Third, nomination by the last Abbasid Khalifa of Egypt; so
Abu Bakr nominated Umar to succeed him, and precedent is everything
in Islam. Fourth, possession and guardianship of the two Harams, or
Sacred Cities, Mecca and al-Madina. Fifth, possession of some relics
of the Prophet saved from the sack of Baghdad and delivered to Sultan
Salim, on his conquest of Egypt, by the last Abbasid. But these all
shatter against the fixed fact that absolutely accepted traditions from
the Prophet assert that the Khalifa must be of the family of Quraysh;
so long as there are two left of that tribe, one must be Khalifa and
the other his helper. Still, here, as everywhere, the principal of
Ijma, Agreement of the Muslim people, (see p. 105) comes in and must
be reckoned with. These very traditions are probably an expression in
concrete form of popular agreement. The Khalifate itself is confessedly
based upon agreement. The canon lawyers state the case thus: The Imamites
and Isma‘ilians hold that the appointment of a leader is incumbent
upon God. There is only the difference that the Imamites say that a
leader is necessary in order to maintain the laws unimpaired, while the
Isma‘ilians regard him as essential in order to give instruction about
God. The Kharijites, on the other hand, recognize no fundamental need
of an Imam; he is only allowable. Some of them held that he should be
appointed in time of public trouble to do away with the trouble, thus a
kind of dictator; others, in time of peace, because only then can the
people agree. The Mu‘tazilites and the Zaydites held that it was for man
to appoint, but that the necessity was based on reason; men needed such
a leader. Yet some Mu‘tazilites taught that the basis was partly reason
and partly obedience to tradition. On the other hand, the Sunnites hold
that the appointment of an Imam is incumbent upon men and that the basis
is obedience to the tradition of the Agreement of the Muslim world from
the earliest times. The community of Islam may have disputed over the
individual to be appointed, but they never doubted that the maintenance
of the faith in its purity required a leader, and that it was, therefore,
incumbent on men to appoint one. The basis is Ijma, Agreement, not
Scripture or tradition from Muhammad or analogy based on these two.
It will be seen from this that the _de facto_ ground to the claim of the
Ottoman Sultan is the best. The Muslim community must have a leader;
this is the greatest Muslim ruling Muslims; he claims the leadership and
holds it. If the English rule were to become Muslim, the Muslims would
rally to it. The ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomination
to little more, except for antiquarians; the possession of the Prophetic
relics is a sentiment that would have weight with the crowd only; no
canon lawyer would seriously urge it. The guardianship of the two Harams
is precarious. A Turkish reverse in Syria would withdraw every Turkish
soldier from Arabia and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of the
blood of the Prophet, would proclaim a Khalifa from among themselves. At
present, only the Turkish garrison holds them in check.
[Sidenote: PAN-ISLAMISM]
But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely cannot become a
constitutional monarch in our sense. He rules under law—divine law—and
the people can depose him if he breaks it; but he cannot set up beside
himself a constitutional assembly and give it rights against himself. He
is the successor of Muhammad and must rule, within limitations, as an
absolute monarch. So impossible is the modern Khalifate, and so gigantic
are its responsibilities. The millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and
all Muslims of central Asia; the Muslims of India who are not Shi‘ite
also look to him. So, too, in Africa and wherever in the world the People
of Muhammad have gone, their eyes turn to the Bosphorus and the Great
Sultan. This is what has been called the modern Pan-Islamic movement; it
is a modern fact.
The position of the other Muslim sects we have already seen. Of Shi‘ite
rulers, there are the Imamites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still
in south Arabia and fugitive in Africa; strange secret bodies of
Isma‘ilians—Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins—still holding their own in
mountain recesses, forgotten by the world; oldest of all, the Sharifs
of Morocco, who are Sunnites and antedate all theological differences,
holding only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar, Uman and the Mzab
in Algeria are the descendants of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere
or other, there are some fossilized descendants of every sect that has
ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of Islam or to save it from
scholastic decrepitude and death. Insurrections and heresies have their
own uses.
It only remains to make mention of two modern movements which have
deeply affected the Islam of to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed
above, strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim world into closer
touch with the science and thought of the Christian world, rallying all
the Muslim peoples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as their
spiritual head and holding fast by the kernel of Islam. It is a reform
movement whose trend is forward. The other two, to which we now come, are
reform movements also, but their trend is backward. They look to the good
old days of early Islam and try to restore them.
The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab (Slave of the Bountiful), its founder, a native of Najd in
central Arabia, who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam back to its
primitive purity and to do away with all the usages and beliefs which
had arisen to cloud its absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation
in Islam have never led to anything but the founding of new dynasties.
They may begin with a saintly reformer, but in the first or the second
generation there is sure to come the conquering disciple; religion and
rule go together, and he who meddles with the one must next grasp at
the other. The third stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the
vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect, the vitality of
which is again directed into religious channels. The Wahhabites were
no exception. Their rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Red
Sea, touched al-Yaman and Hadramawt and included some districts of the
Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early in the nineteenth century; but now,
after many dynastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites proper has almost
ceased, although the Turks have not gained any new footing in Najd.
There, a native Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turkish
control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha’il. But the zeal of the
Wahhabites gave an impulse to reform in the general body of Muslims
which is not yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India, their views
have been widely spread by missionaries, and at one time there was grave
fear of a Wahhabite insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise
again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the Muslim Church as a
whole. Politically it has failed, but the spirit of reform remains and
has undoubtedly influenced the second reform movement to which we now
come.
[Sidenote: BROTHERHOOD OF AS-SANUSI]
That is the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, founded in 1837 by Muhammad ibn
Ali as-Sanusi in order to reform and spread the faith. The tendency
to organize has always been strong among Orientals, and in Islam
itself there have risen, as we have seen, from the earliest times,
secret societies for conspiracy and insurrection. But apart from these
dubious organizations, religious feeling has also expressed itself in
brotherhoods closely corresponding to the monastic orders of Europe,
except that they were, and are, self-governing and under no relations
but those of sentiment to the head of the Muslim Faith. Rather, these
orders of darwishes have been inclined toward heresies of a mystical
and pantheistic type more than toward the development and support of
the severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This is a side of
Muhammadanism with which we shall have to deal in some detail hereafter.
In the meantime, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi
is one of the orders of darwishes, but distinguished from all its
predecessors in its severely reforming and puritanic character. It
has taken up the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the same
problem in a rather different way. Its principles are of the strictest
monotheism; all usages and ideas that do not accord with their views of
the exact letter of the Qur’an are prohibited. The present head of the
Brotherhood, the son of the founder, who himself died in 1859, claims to
be the Mahdi and has established a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the
eastern Sahara, between Egypt and Tripolis. The mother house of the order
is there, and from it missionaries have gone out and established other
houses throughout all north Africa and Morocco and far into the interior.
The Head himself has of late retreated farther into the desert. There is
also an important centre at Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis
are initiated into the order in great numbers. From Mecca these brethren
return to their homes all over the Muslim world, and the order is said to
be especially popular in the Malay Archipelago.
[Sidenote: THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE]
So there has sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications, an
_imperium in imperio_. All the brethren in all the degrees—for, just
as in the monastic orders of Europe, there are active members and lay
members—reverence and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inaccessible
oasis in the African desert. There he works toward the end, and there
can be little doubt what that end will be. Sooner or later Europe—in
the first instance, England in Egypt and France in Algeria—will have to
face the bursting of this storm. For this Mahdi is different from him of
Khartum and the southern Sudan in that he knows how to rule and wait; for
years he has gathered arms and munitions, and trained men for the great
_Jihad_. When his plans are ready and his time is come, a new chapter
will be opened in the history of Islam, a chapter which will cast into
forgetfulness even the recent volcanic outburst in China. It will then
be for the Ottoman Sultan of the time to show what he and his Khalifate
are worth. He will have to decide whether he will throw in his lot with
a Mahdi of the old Islam and the dream of a Muslim millennium, or boldly
turn to new things and carry the Successorship and the People of Muhammad
to join the civilized world.
PART II
Development of Jurisprudence
CHAPTER I
The scope of jurisprudence among Muslims; the earliest elements
in it, Arab custom, Jewish law, personality of Muhammad; his
attitude toward law; elements after death of Muhammad; Qur’an,
Usage of the Prophet, common law of al-Madina; conception
of _Sunna_ before Muhammad and after; traditions and their
transmission; traditions in book form; influence of Umayyads;
forgery of traditions; the _Muwatta_ of Malik ibn Anas; the
_Musnad_ of Ahmad ibn Hanbal; the _musannafs_; al-Bukhari;
Muslim; Ibn Maja; at-Tirmidhi; an-Nasa’i; al-Baghawi; the
problem of the Muslim lawyers; their sources; Roman law; the
influence of the doctrine of the _Responsa prudentium_; Opinion
in Islam; the Law of Nature or Equity in Islam; _istihsan_;
_istislah_; Analogy; the patriarchal period in Islam; the
Umayyad period; the growth of the canon law.
In tracing the development of Muslim jurisprudence few of the
difficulties are encountered which surrounded Sir Henry Maine when he
first examined the origins and history of European law. We do not need
to push our researches back to the primitive family, nor to work our way
through periods of centuries guided by the merest fragments of documents
and hints of usage. Our subject was born in the light of history; it ran
its course in a couple of hundred years and has left at every important
point authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its whither.
Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently great. Shortly, they are
two. The mass of material is overpowering; the strangeness of the ideas
involved is perplexing. The wealth of material will become plain, to some
extent at least, as the history is traced; but for the strangeness of
the contents, of the arrangement and the atmosphere of these codes some
preparation must be given from the outset. How, indeed, can we meet a
legal code which knows no distinction of personal or public, of civil or
criminal law; which prescribes and describes the use of the toothpick and
decides when a wedding invitation may be declined, which enters into the
minutest and most unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of
religious retreat? Is it by some subtle connection of thought that the
chapter on oaths and vows follows immediately that on horse-racing, and
a section on the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter on
bankruptcy and composition? One thing, at least, is abundantly clear.
Muslim law, in the most absolute sense, fits the old definition, and is
the science of all things, human and divine. It tells what we must render
to Cæsar and what to God, what to ourselves, and what to our fellows.
The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering to each man his due
it utterly shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything that a
man shall _believe_ of things in heaven and in earth and beneath the
earth—and this is no flat rhetoric—Muslim law prescribes everything that
a man shall _do_ to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It takes all
duty for its portion and defines all action in terms of duty. Nothing
can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of
Islam never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of
the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so.
[Sidenote: SCOPE OF MUSLIM LAW]
It will, therefore, be well for the student to work through the sketch
of a code of Muslim law which is inserted in Appendix I. One has been
chosen which belongs to the school of ash-Shafi‘i because of its general
accessibility. It should be remembered that what is given is the merest
table of contents. The standard Arabic commentary on the book extends
to eight hundred and eleven closely printed quarto pages. Even a mere
reading of this table of contents, however, will show in how different
a sphere of thought from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must
return to the beginning of things, to the egg from which this tremendous
system was hatched.
The mother-city of Islam was the little town of Yathrib, called Madinat
an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the
Hijra or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of the Christian
era. Here the first Muslim state was founded, and the germinal principles
of Muslim jurisprudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were the
result of the inter-working of the same highly complicated causes. The
ferments in the case may be classified and described as follows: First,
in the town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on its little
stage—little, but so momentous for the future—there were two parties,
often at war, oftener at peace. There was a genuine Arab element and
there was a large settlement of Jews. To the Arabs any conception of
law was utterly foreign. An Arab tribe has no constitution; its system
is one of individualism; the single man is a sovereign and no writ can
lie against him; the tribe can cast him forth from its midst; it cannot
otherwise coerce him. So stands the case now in the desert, and so it
was then. Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through the
fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, always a somewhat
cynical sceptic, that hold was of the slightest. Further, the avenging
of a broken oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath; if he
did not care to right his client, no one else would interfere. There
was customary law, undoubtedly, but it was protected by no sanction and
enforced by no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, well;
if not, neither had anything to fear but the anger of his opponent.
That law of custom we shall find again appearing in the system of
Islam, but there it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God
working through the authority of the state. The Jewish element was in
a different case. They may have been Jewish immigrants, they may have
been Jewish proselytes—many Arab tribes, we know, had gone over bodily
to Judaism—but their lives were ruled and guided by Jewish law. To the
primitive and divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense accretion
by legal fiction and by usage; the Roman codes had left their mark and
the customary law of the desert as well. All this was working in the
life of the town when Muhammad and his little band of fugitives from
Mecca entered it. Being Meccans, they must have brought with them the
more developed legal ideas of that trading centre; but these were of
comparatively little account in the scale. The new and dominating element
was the personality of Muhammad himself. His contribution was legislation
pure and simple, the only legislation that has ever been in Islam.
Till his death, ten years later, he ruled his community as an absolute
monarch, as a prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and judged
the people. He had no need of a code, for his own will was enough. He
followed the customary law of the town, as it has been described above,
when it suited him, and when he judged that it was best. If not, he left
it and there was a revelation. So the legislative part of the Qur’an
grew out of such scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of the
squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al-Madina. The system was
one of pure opportunism; but of what body of legislation can that not
be said? Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were backed by a
revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the other, to have made a few attempts
to deal systematically with certain standing and constantly recurring
problems—such, for example, as the conflicting claims of heirs in an
estate, and the whole complicated question of divorce—but in general,
the position holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand to mouth.
He did not draw up any twelve tables or ten commandments, or code, or
digest; he was there and the people could come and ask him questions when
they chose, and that was enough. The conception of a rounded and complete
system which will meet any case and to which all cases must be adjusted
by legal fiction or equity, the conception which we owe to the genius and
experience of the Roman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From time
to time he got into difficulties. A revelation proved too wide or too
narrow, or left out some important possibility. Then there came another
to supplement or correct, or even to set the first quite aside—Muhammad
had no scruples about progressive revelation as applied to himself.
Thus, through these interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat
contradictions have come into the Qur’an and have proved the delight of
generations of Muslim jurisconsults.
[Sidenote: MUHAMMAD AS A LEGISLATOR]
Such, then, was the state of things legal in al-Madina during the ten
years of Muhammad’s rule there until his death in A.D. 632. Of law there
was, strictly speaking, none. In his decisions, Muhammad could follow
certainly the customary law of the town; but to do so there was no
necessity upon him other than prudence, for his authority was absolute.
Yet even with such authority and such freedom, his task was a hard one.
The Jews, the native Arabs of al-Madina, and his fellow fugitives from
Mecca lived in more or less of friction. He had to see to it that his
decisions did not bring that friction to the point of throwing the whole
community into a flame. The Jews, it is true, were soon eliminated, but
the influence of their law lasted in the customary law of the town long
after they themselves had become insignificant. Still, with all this, the
suitor before Muhammad had no certainty on what basis his claims would be
judged; whether it would be the old law of the town, or a rough equity
based on Muhammad’s own ideas, or a special revelation _ad hoc_. So far,
then, we may be said to have the three elements—common law, equity,
legislation. Legal fiction we shall meet later; Muhammad had no need of
it.
[Sidenote: QUR’AN; USAGE OF MUHAMMAD]
But with the death of Muhammad in A.D. 632 the situation was completely
changed. We can now speak of Muslim law; legislation plays no longer any
part; the process of collecting, arranging, correlating, and developing
has begun. Consider the situation as it must have presented itself to
one of the immediate successors of Muhammad, as he sat in his place and
judged the people. When a case came up for decision, there were several
sources from which a law in point might be drawn. First among them was
the Qur’an. It had been collected from the fragmentary state in which
Muhammad had left it by Abu Bakr, his second Khalifa, some two years
after his death. Again, some ten years later, it was revised and given
forth in a final public recension by Uthman, the third Khalifa. This
was the absolute word of God—thoughts and language—and stood and, in
theory, still stands first of all sources for theology and law. If it
contained a law clearly applying to the case in hand, there was no more
to be said; divine legislation had settled the matter. If not, recourse
was next had to the decisions of the Prophet. Had a similar one come
before him, and how had he ruled? If the memories of the Companions of
the Prophet, the _Sahibs_, could adduce nothing similar from one of his
decisions, then the judge had to look further for an authority. But the
decisions of Muhammad had been many, the memories of his Companions
were capacious, and possessed further, as we must recognize with regret,
a constructive power that helped the early judges of Islam out of many
close corners. But if tradition even—true or false—finally failed, then
the judge fell back on the common law of al-Madina, that customary law
already mentioned. When that, too, failed, the last recourse was had
to the common-sense of the judge—roughly, what we would call equity.
At the beginning, therefore, of Muslim law, it had the following
sources—legislation, the usage of Muhammad, the usage of al-Madina,
equity. Naturally, as time went on and the figure of the founder drew
back and became more obscure and more venerated, equity fell gradually
into disuse; a closer search was made for decisions of that founder
which could in any way be pressed into service; a method of analogy,
closely allied to legal fiction, was built up to assist in this, and the
development of Muslim jurisprudence as a system and a science was fairly
begun. Further, in later times, the decisions of the first four Khalifas
and the agreement (_ijma_) of the immediate Companions of Muhammad came
to assume an importance only second to that of Muhammad himself. Later
still, as a result of this, the opinion grew up that a general agreement
of the jurisconsults of any particular time was to be regarded as a
legitimate source of law. But we must return to consider our subject more
broadly and in another field.
[Sidenote: LEGAL CLASSES OF ACTIONS]
The fact has already been brought out that the sphere of law is
much wider in Islam than it has ever been with us. By it all the
minutest acts of a Muslim are guarded. Europe, also, passed through a
stage similar to this in its sumptuary laws; and the tendency toward
inquisitorial legislation still exists in America, but not even the
most mediævally minded American Western State has ventured to put upon
its statute-book regulations as to the use of the toothpick and the
wash-cloth. Thus, the Muslim conception of law is so wide as to reach
essential difference. A Muslim is told by his code not only what is
required under penalty, but also what is either recommended or disliked
though without reward or penalty being involved. He may certainly consult
his lawyer, to learn how near the wind he can sail without unpleasant
consequences; but he may also consult him as his spiritual director with
regard to the relative praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of classes of
actions of which our law takes no cognizance. In consequence, actions
are divided by Muslim canon lawyers (_faqihs_) into five classes. First,
necessary (_fard_ or _wajib_); a duty the omission of which is punished,
the doing rewarded. Secondly, recommended (_mandub_ or _mustahabb_);
the doing is rewarded, but the omission is not punished. Thirdly,
permitted (_ja’iz_ or _mubah_); legally indifferent. Fourthly, disliked
(_makruh_); disapproved by the law, but not under penalty. Fifthly,
forbidden (_haram_); an action punishable by law. All this being so, it
will be easily understood that the record of the manners and customs of
the Prophet, of the little details of his life and conversation, came
to assume a high importance. Much of that was too petty ever to reach
expression in the great digests of law; not even the most zealous fixer
of life by rule and line would condemn his fellow-religionist because he
preferred to carry a different kind of walking-stick from that approved
by the Prophet, or found it fitting to arrange his hair in a different
way. But still, all pious Muslims paid attention to such things, and
fenced their lives about with the strictest Prophetic precedent.
[Sidenote: SUNNA; HADITH]
In consequence of this, there early arose in Islam a class of students
who made it their business to investigate and hand down the minutest
details as to the habits of Muhammad. This was a separate thing from the
study of law, although fated to be eventually connected with it. Even in
the time of the _Jahiliya_—the period before Islam, variously explained
as the ignorance or as the rudeness, uncivilizedness—it had been a
fixed trait of the Arab mind to hold closely to old paths. An inherent
conservatism canonized the _sunna_—custom, usage—of the ancients; any
stepping aside from it was a _bid‘a_—innovation—and had to win its way
by its merits, in the teeth of strong prejudice. With the coming of
Muhammad and the preaching of Islam, this ancestral _sunna_ had in great
part to yield. But the temper of the Arab mind remained firm, and the
sunna of Muhammad took its place. Pious Muslims did not say, “Such was
the usage of our fathers, and it is mine;” but, “I follow the usage of
the Prophet of God.” Then, just as the old sunna of the heathen times
had expressed itself through the stories of great warriors, of their
battles and loves; through anecdotes of wise men, and their keen and
eloquent words; so it was with the sunna of the one man, Muhammad. What
he said, and what he did; what he refrained from doing; what he gave
quasi-approval to by silence; all was passed on in rapidly increasing,
pregnant little narratives. First, his immediate Companions would note,
either by committing to memory or to a written record, his utterances
and table-talk generally. We have evidence of several such Boswells, who
fixed his words as they fell. Later, probably, would come notes of his
doings and his customs, and of all the little and great happenings of
the town. Above all, a record was being gathered of all the cases judged
by him, and of his decisions; of all the answers which he gave to formal
questions on religious life and faith. All this was jotted down by the
Companions on _sahifas_—odd sheets—just as they had done in the Ignorance
with the proverbs of the wise and their dark sayings. The records of
sayings were called _hadiths_; the rest, as a whole, sunna—custom, for
its details was used the plural, _sunan_—customs. At first, each man
had his own collection in memory or in writing. Then, after the death
of the Prophet and when his first Companions were dropping off, these
collections were passed on to others of the second generation. And so
the chain ran on and in time a tradition came to consist formally of
two things—the text or matter (_matn_) so handed on, and the succession
(_isnad_) over whose lips it had passed. A said, “There narrated to me
B, saying, ‘There narrated to me C, saying,’” so far the _isnad_, until
the last link came, and the _matn_, the Prophet of God said, “Some of my
injunctions abrogate others,” or “The Jann were created of a smokeless
flame,” or whatever it might be. What has just been said suggests that
it was at first indifferent whether traditions were preserved orally
or in writing. That is true of the first generation; but it must be
remembered at the same time, that the actual passing on was oral; the
writing merely aided the memory to hold that which was already learned.
But with time, and certainly by the middle of the second century of
the Hijra, two opposing tendencies in this respect had developed. Many
continued to put their trust in the written word, and even came to pass
traditions on without any oral communication. But for others there lay
grave dangers in this. One was evidently real. The unhappy character of
the Arabic script, especially when written without diacritical points,
often made it hard, if not practically impossible, to understand such
short, contextless texts as the traditions. A guide was necessary to show
how the word should be read, and how understood. At the present time a
European scholar will sometimes be helpless before even a fully vocalized
text, and must take refuge in native commentaries or in that oral
tradition, if it still exists and he has access to it, which supplies at
least a third of the meaning of an Arabic book. Strengthening this came
theological reasons. The words of the Prophet would be profaned if they
were in a book. Or, again, they would be too much honored and the Qur’an
itself might be neglected. This last fear has been justified to a certain
extent by the event. On these grounds, and many more, the writing and
transmitting in writing of traditions came to be fiercely opposed; and
the opposition continued, as a theological exercise, long after many
books of traditions were in existence, and after the oral transmission
had become the merest farce and had even frankly dropped out.
[Sidenote: TRADITIONS IN LITERATURE]
It is to the formation of these books of traditions, or, as we might
say, traditions in literature, that we must now turn. For long, the
fragmentary _sahifas_ and private collections made by separate scholars
for their own use sufficed. Books dealing with law (_fiqh_) were written
before there were any in that department of literature called _hadith_.
The cause of this is tolerably plain. Law and treatises of law were a
necessity for the public and thus were encouraged by the state. The
study of traditions, on the other hand, was less essential and of a more
personal and private nature. Further, under the dynasty of the Umayyads,
who reigned from A.H. 41 to A.H. 132, theological literature was little
encouraged. They were simple heathen in all but name, and belonged, and
recognized that they belonged, not to Islam but to the Jahiliya. For
reasons of state, they encouraged and spread—also freely forged and
encouraged others to forge—such traditions as were favorable to their
plans and to their rule generally. This was necessary if they were to
carry the body of the people with them. But they regarded themselves as
kings and not as the heads of the Muslim people. This same device has
been used after them by all the contending factions of Islam. Each party
has sought sanction for its views by representing them in traditions
from the Prophet, and the thing has gone so far that on almost every
disputed point there are absolutely conflicting prophetic utterances in
circulation. It has even been held, and with some justification, that the
entire body of _normative_ tradition at present in existence was forged
for a purpose. With this attitude of the Umayyads we shall have to deal
at greater length later. It is sufficient now to note that the first real
appearance of _hadith_ in literature was in the _Muwatta_ of Malik ibn
Anas who died in A.H. 179.
Yet even this appearance is not so much of _hadith_ for its own sake,
as of usages bearing upon law and of the law that can be drawn from
these usages. The book is a _corpus iuris_ not a _corpus traditionum_.
Its object was not so much to separate from the mass of traditions in
circulation those which could be regarded as sound of origin and to unite
them in a formal collection, as to build up a system of law based partly
on tradition. The previous works dealing with law proper had been of a
speculative character, had shown much subjective reliance on their own
opinion on the part of the writers and had drawn little from the sacred
usage of the Prophet and quoted few of his traditional sayings. Against
that the book of Malik was a protest and formed a link between such law
books pure and the collections of traditions pure with which we now come
to deal.
[Sidenote: THE MUSNADS]
To Malik the _matn_, or text, of a tradition had been the only thing
of importance. To the _isnad_, or chain of authority running back to
the Prophet, he had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was a
lawyer and gathered traditions, not for their own sake but to use them
in law. To others, the tradition was the thing, and too much care could
not be given to its details and its authenticity. And the care was really
called for. With the course of time and the growing demand, the supply
of traditions had also grown until there was no doubt in the mind of
anyone that an enormous proportion were simple forgeries. To weed out
the sound ones, attention had to be given to the _isnad_; the names upon
it had to be examined; the fact of their having been in intercourse to
be determined; the possibility of the case in general to be tested. Thus
there were formed real collections of supposedly sound traditions, which
were called _Musnads_, because each tradition was _musnad_—propped,
supported—against the Companions from whom it proceeded. In accordance
with this also they were arranged according to the Companions. After
the name of the Companion were given all the traditions leading back to
him. One of the earliest and greatest of these books was the _Musnad_ of
Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died A.H. 241; of him more hereafter. This book has
been printed recently at Cairo in six quarto volumes of 2,885 pages and
is said to contain about thirty thousand traditions going back to seven
hundred Companions.
But another type of tradition-book was growing up, less mechanical
in arrangement. It is the _Musannaf_, the arranged, classified—and
in it the traditions are arranged in chapters according to their
subject matter. The first _Musannaf_ to make a permanent mark was the
_Sahih_—sound—of al-Bukhari, who died in A.H. 257. It is still extant
and is the most respected of all the collections of traditions. The
principle of arrangement in it is legal; that is, the traditions are
classified in these chapters so as to afford bases for a complete system
of jurisprudence. Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent of speculative law and
his book was thus a protest against a tendency which, as we shall see
later, was strong in his time. Another point in which al-Bukhari made
his influence felt and with greater effect, was increased severity in
the testing of traditions. He established very strict laws, though of a
somewhat mechanical kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them. His
book contains about seven thousand traditions, and he chose those, so
at least runs the story, out of six hundred thousand which he found in
circulation. The rest were rejected _as failing to meet his tests_. How
far the forgery of traditions had gone may be seen from the example of
Ibn Abi Awja, who was executed in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he had
himself put into circulation four thousand that were false. Another and
a similar _Sahih_ is that of Muslim, who died in A.H. 261. He was not so
markedly juristic as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the mass
of existing tradition from illegitimate accretions than to construct a
basis for a complete law code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on
the science of tradition generally. In some slight details his principle
of criticism differed from that of al-Bukhari.
These two collections, called the two _Sahihs—as-Sahihan_—are technically
_jami‘s, i.e._ they contain all the different classes of traditions,
historical, ethical, dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by
common agreement, the two most honored authorities in the Muslim world. A
believer finds it hard, if not impossible, to reject a tradition that is
found in both.
[Sidenote: THE SUNAN]
But there are four other collections which are called _Sunan_—Usages—and
which stand only second to the two _Sahihs_. These are by Ibn Maja
(d. 303), Abu Da’ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279) and
an-Nasa’i (d. 303). They deal almost entirely with legal traditions,
those that tell what is permitted and what is forbidden, and do not
convey information on religious and theological subjects. They are also
much more lenient in their criticisms of dubious traditions. To work
exclusion with them, the rejection needed to be tolerably unanimous. This
was required by their stand-point and endeavor, which was to find a basis
for all the minutest developments and details of jurisprudence, civil and
religious.
These six books, the two _Sahihs_ and the four _Sunans_, came to
be regarded in time as the principal and all-important sources for
traditional science. This had already come about by the end of the fifth
century, although even after that voices of uncertainty continued to make
themselves heard. Ibn Maja seems to have been the last to secure firm
footing, but even he is included by al-Baghawi (d. 516) in his _Masabih
as-sunna_, an attempted epitome into one book of what was valuable in
all. Still, long after that, Ibn Khaldun, the great historian (d. 808),
speaks of five fundamental works; and others speak of seven, adding the
_Muwatta_ of Malik to the six above. Others, again, especially in the
West, extended the number of canonical works to ten, though with varying
members; but all these must be regarded as more or less local, temporary,
and individual eccentricities. The position of the six stands tolerably
firm.
So much it has been necessary to interpolate and anticipate with regard
to the students of tradition whose interest lay in gathering up and
preserving, not in using and applying. From the earliest time, then,
there existed these two classes in the bosom of Islam, students of
tradition proper and of law proper. For long they did not clash; but a
collision was inevitable sooner or later.
Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not widened beyond the
little market-town of al-Madina, that collision might have been long in
coming. Its immediate causes were from without, and are to be found in
the wave of conquest that carried Islam, within the century, to Samarqand
beyond the Oxus and to Tours in central France. Consider what that wave
of conquest was and meant. Within fourteen years of the Hijra, Damascus
was taken, and within seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the
year 21, the Muslims held Persia; in 41 they were at Herat, and in 56
they reached Samarqand. In the West, Egypt was taken in the year 20; but
the way through northern Africa was long and hard. Carthage did not fall
till 74, but Spain was conquered with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in
A.D. 732, the year of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was turned
and the mercy of Tours was wrought by Charles the Hammer; but the Muslims
still held Narbonne and raided in Burgundy and the Dauphiné. The wealth
that flowed into Arabia from these expeditions was enormous; money and
slaves and luxuries of every kind went far to transform the old life of
hardness and simplicity. Great estates grew up: fortunes were made and
lost; the intricacies of the Syrian and Persian civilizations overcame
their conquerors. All this meant new legal conditions and problems. The
system that had sufficed to guard the right to a few sheep or camels
had to be transformed before it would suffice to adjust the rights and
claims of a tribe of millionnaires. But it must not be thought that
these expeditions were only campaigns of plunder. With the Muslim armies
everywhere went law and justice, such as it was. Jurists accompanied
each army and were settled in the great camp cities which were built to
hold the conquered lands. Al-Basra and al-Kufa and Fustat, the parent
of Cairo, owe their origin to this, and it was in these new seats of
militant Islam that speculative jurisprudence arose and moulded the
Muslim system.
[Sidenote: RISE OF SPECULATIVE JURISPRUDENCE]
The early lawyers had much to do and much to learn, and it is to their
credit that they recognized both necessities. Muslim law is no product
of the desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have said; but rather
of the labor of these men, struggling with a gigantic problem. They
might have taken their task much more easily than they did; they might
have lived as Muhammad had done, from hand to mouth, and have concealed
their own sloth by force and free invention of authorities. But they
recognized their responsibility to God and man and the necessity of
building up a stable and complete means of rendering justice. These
armies of Muslims, we must remember, were not like the hordes of Attila
or Chingis Khan, destroyers only. The lands they conquered were put to
hard tribute, but it was under a reign of law. They recognized frankly
that it was for them that this mighty empire existed; but they recognized
also that it could continue to exist only with order and duty imposed
upon all. They saw, too, how deficient was their own knowledge and
learned willingly of the people among whom they had come. And here, a
second time, Roman law—the parent-law of the world—made itself felt.
There were schools of that law in Syria at Cæsarea and Beyrout, but we
need not imagine that the Muslim jurists studied there. Rather, it was
the practical school of the courts as they actually existed which they
attended. These courts were permitted to continue in existence till Islam
had learned from them all that was needed. We can still recognize certain
principles that were so carried over. That the duty of proof lies upon
the plaintiff, and the right of defending himself with an oath upon the
defendant; the doctrine of invariable custom and that of the different
kinds of legal presumption. These, as expressed in Arabic, are almost
verbal renderings of the pregnant utterances of Latin law.
[Sidenote: RESPONSA PRUDENTIUM; OPINION]
But most important of all was a liberty suggested by that system to the
Muslim jurisconsults. This was through the part played in the older
school by the _Responsa Prudentium_, answers by prominent lawyers to
questions put to them by their clients, in which the older law of the
Twelve Tables was expounded, expanded, and often practically set aside by
their comments. Sir Henry Maine thus states the situation: “The authors
of the new jurisprudence, during the whole progress of its formation,
professed the most sedulous respect for the letter of the code. They were
merely explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its full meaning; but
then, in the result, by placing texts together, by adjusting the law to
states of fact which actually presented themselves, and by speculating
on its possible application to others which might occur, by introducing
principles of interpretation derived from the exegesis of other written
documents which fell under their observation, they educed a vast variety
of canons which had never been dreamt of by the compilers of the Twelve
Tables, and which were in truth rarely or never to be found there.” All
this precisely applies to the development of law in Islam.
[Sidenote: EQUITY; LEGAL FICTION]
The part of the Twelve Tables was taken by the statute law of the Qur’an
and the case law derived from the Usage of Muhammad; that of the Roman
_Iurisprudentes_ by those speculative jurists who worked mostly outside
of al-Madina in the camp cities of Mesopotamia and Syria—the very name
for lawyer in Arabic, _faqih_, plural _fuqaha_, is a translation of
_prudens_, _prudentes_; and that of the _Responsa_, the answers, by the
“Opinion” which they claimed as a legitimate legal method and source.
Further, the validity of a general agreement of jurisconsults “reminds
us of the rescript of Hadrian, which ordains that, if the opinions
of the licensed _prudentes_ all agreed, such common opinion had the
force of statute; but if they disagreed, the judge might follow which
he chose.” The Arabic term, _ra’y_, here rendered Opinion, has passed
through marked vicissitudes of usage. In old Arabic, before it, in the
view of some, began to keep bad company, it meant an opinion that was
thoughtful, weighed and reasonable, as opposed to a hasty dictate of
ill-regulated passion. In that sense it is used in a tradition—probably
forged—handed down from Muhammad. He was sending a judge to take charge
of legal affairs in al-Yaman, and asked him on what he would base his
legal decisions. “On the Qur’an,” he replied. “But if that contains
nothing to the purpose?” “Then upon your usage.” “But if that also fails
you?” “Then I will follow my own opinion.” And the Prophet approved his
purpose. A similar tradition goes back to Umar, the first Khalifa, and
it, too, is probably a later forgery, written to defend this source of
law. But, with the revolt against the use of Opinion, to which we shall
soon come, the term itself fell into grave disrepute and came to signify
an unfounded conclusion. In its extremest development it went beyond the
_Responsa_, which professed always to be in exact accord with the letter
of the older law, and attained to be Equity in the strict sense; that
is, the rejection of the letter of the law for a view supposed to be
more in accordance with the spirit of justice itself. Thus, Equity, in
the English sense, is the law administered by the Court of Chancery and
claims, in the words again of Sir Henry Maine, to “override the older
jurisprudence of the country on the strength of an intrinsic ethical
superiority.” In Roman law, as introduced by the edict of the Prætor, it
was the law of Nature, “the part of law ‘which natural reason appoints
for all mankind.’” This is represented in Islam under two forms, covered
by two technical terms. The one is that the legist, in spite of the
fact that the analogy of the fixed code clearly points to one course,
“considers it better” (_istihsan_) to follow a different one; and the
other is that, under the same conditions, he chooses a free course “for
the sake of general benefit to the community” (_istislah_). Further scope
of Equity Muslim law never reached, and the legitimacy of these two
developments was, as we shall see, bitterly contested. The freedom of
opinion, with its possibility of a system of Equity, had eventually to
be given up, and all that was left in its place was a permissibility of
analogical deduction (_qiyas_), the nearest thing to which in Western law
is Legal Fiction. In a word, the possibility of development by Equity was
lost, and Legal Fiction entered in its place. But this anticipates, and
we must return to the strictly historical movement.
During the first thirty years after the death of Muhammad—the period
covered by the reigns of the four theocratic rulers whom Islam still
calls “the Four Just, or Rightly Guided Khalifas” (_al-Khulafa
ar-rashidun_)—the two twin studies of tradition (_hadith_) and of law
(_fiqh_) were fostered and encouraged by the state. The centre of that
state was still in al-Madina, on ground sacred with the memories of the
Prophet, amid the scenes where he had himself been lord and judge, and
under the conditions in which his life as ruler had been cast. All the
sources, except that of divine revelation, which had been open to him,
were open to his successors and they made full use of all. Round that
mother-hearth of Islam was still gathered the great body of the immediate
Companions of Muhammad, and they formed a deliberative or consulting
council to aid the Khalifa in his task. The gathering of tradition and
the developing of law were vital functions; they were the basis of the
public life of the state. This patriarchal period in Muslim history is
the golden age of Islam. It ended with the death of Ali, in the year 40
of the Hijra, and the succession of Mu‘awiya in the following year. “For
thirty years,” runs a tradition from the Prophet, “my People will tread
in my Path (_sunna_); then will come kings and princes.”
[Sidenote: GROWTH OF CANON LAW]
And so it was; Mu‘awiya was the first of the Umayyad dynasty and with him
and them Islam, in all but the name, was at an end. He and they were Arab
kings of the old type that had reigned before Muhammad at al-Hira and
Ghassan, whose will had been their law. The capital of the new kingdom
was Damascus; al-Madina became a place of refuge, a Cave of Adullam, for
the old Muslim party. There they might spin theories of state and of
law, and lament the good old days; so long as there was no rebellion,
the Umayyads cared little for those things or for the men who dreamt
them. Once, the Umayyads were driven to capture and sack the holy city,
a horror in Islam to this day. After that there was peace, the peace of
the accomplished fact. This is the genuinely Arab period in the history
of Islam. It is a period full of color and light and life; of love and
song, battle and feasting. Thought was free and conduct too. The great
theologian of the Greek Church, John of Damascus, held high office at the
Umayyad court, and al-Akhtal, a Christian at least in name, was their
poet laureate. It is true that the stated services of religion were
kept up and on every Friday the Khalifa had to entertain the people by
a display of eloquence and wit in the weekly sermon. But the old world
was dead and the days of its unity would never come again. So all knew,
except the irreconcilable party, the last of the true Muslims who still
haunted the sacred soil of al-Madina and labored in the old paths. They
gathered the traditions of the Prophet; they regulated their lives more
and more strictly by his usage; they gave ghostly council to the pious
who sought their help; they labored to build up elaborate systems of law.
But it was all elaboration and hypothetical purely. There was in it no
vitalizing force from practical life.
From this time on Muslim law has been more or less in the position held
by the canon law of the Roman Church in a country that will not recognize
it yet dares not utterly reject it. The Umayyads were statesmen and
opportunists; they lived, in legal things, as much from hand to mouth as
Muhammad had done. He cut all knots with divine legislation; they cut
them with the edge of their will. Under them, as under him, a system
of law was impossible. But at the same time, in quiet and in secret,
this canon law of Islam was slowly growing up, slowly rounding into
full perfection of detailed correlation. It was governing absolutely
the private lives of all the good Muslims that were left, and even the
godless Umayyads, as they had to preach on Fridays to the People of
Muhammad, so they had to deal with it cautiously and respectfully. Of
the names and lives of these obscure jurists little has reached us and
it is needless to give that little here. Only with the final fall of the
Umayyads, in the year of the Hijra 132, do we come into the light and see
the different schools forming under clear and definite leaders.
CHAPTER II
The Abbasid revolution; the compromise; the problem of the
Abbasids; the two classes of canon lawyers and theologians;
the rise of legal schools; Abu Hanifa; his application of
Legal Fiction; _istihsan_; the Qadi Abu Yusuf; Muhammad ibn
al-Hasan; Sufyan ath-Thawri; al-Awza‘i; Malik ibn Anas; the
Usage of al-Madina; _istislah_; the doctrine of Agreement; the
beginning of controversy; traditionalists or historical lawyers
versus rationalists or philosophical lawyers; ash-Shafi‘i, a
mediator and systematizer; the Agreement of the Muslim people
a formal source; “My People will never agree in an error;” the
resultant four sources, Qur’an, Usage, Analogy, Agreement; the
traditionalist revolt; Da’ud az-Zahiri and literalism; Ahmad
ibn Hanbal; the four abiding schools; the Agreement of Islam;
the Disagreement of Islam; _iurare in verba magistri_; the
degrees of authority; the canon and the civil codes in Islam;
their respective spheres; distribution of schools at present
day; Shi‘ite law; Ibadite law.
That great revolution which brought the Abbasid dynasty to power seemed
at first to the pious theologians and lawyers to be a return of the old
days. They dreamt of entering again into their rights; that the canon law
would be the full law of the land. It was only slowly that their eyes
were opened, and many gave up the vain contest and contented themselves
with compromise. This had been rare under the Umayyads; the one or two
canon lawyers who had thrown in their lot with them had been marked men.
Az-Zuhri (d. 124), a man of the highest moral and theological reputation
who played a very important part in the first codifying of traditions,
was one of these, and the later pious historians have had hard work to
smooth over his connection with the impious Umayyads. Probably—it may
be well to say here—the stories against the Umayyads have been much
heightened in color by their later tellers and also az-Zuhri, being a man
of insight and statesmanship, may have recognized that their rule was
the best chance for peace in the country. Muslims have come generally to
accept the position that unbelief on the part of the government, if the
government is strong and just, is better than true belief and anarchy.
This has found expression, as all such things do, in traditions put in
the mouth of the Prophet.
[Sidenote: THE PROBLEM OF THE ABBASIDS]
But while only a few canonists had taken the part of the Umayyads, far
more accepted the favors of the Abbasids, took office under them and
worked in their cause. The Abbasids, too, had need of such men. It was
practically the religious sentiment of the people that had overthrown
the Umayyads and raised them to power; and that religious sentiment,
though it could never be fully satisfied, must yet be respected and,
more important still, used. There is a striking parallel between the
situation then, and that of Scotland at the Revolution Settlement of
1688. The power of the Stuarts—that is, of the worldly Umayyads—had been
overthrown. The oppressed Church of the Covenant—that is, the old Muslim
party—had been freed. The state was to be settled upon a new basis. What
was that basis to be? The Covenanting party demanded the recognition of
the Headship of Christ—that the Kirk should rule the state, or should
be the state, and that all other religious views should be put under
penalty. The old Muslim party looked for similar things. That religious
life should be purified; that the canon law should be again the law of
the state; that the constitution of Umar should be restored. How the
Covenanters were disappointed, how much they got and how much they failed
to get, needs no telling here.
Exactly in the same way it befell the old Muslims. The theological
reformation was sweeping and complete. The first Abbasids were pious,
at least outwardly; the state was put upon a pious footing. The canon
law also was formally restored, but with large practical modifications.
Canon lawyers were received into the service of the state, provided they
were adaptable enough. Impossible men had no place under the Abbasids;
their officials must be pliable and dexterous, for a new _modus vivendi_
was to be found. The rough and ready Umayyad cutting of the knot had
failed; the turn had now come for piety and dexterity in twisting law.
The court lawyers learned to drive a coach and four through any of the
old statutes, and found their fortunes in their brains. So the issue was
bridged. But a large party of malcontents was left, and from this time on
in Islam the lawyers and the theologians have divided into two classes,
the one admitting, as a matter of expediency, the authority of the
powers of the time and aiding them in their task as rulers; the other,
irreconcilable and unreconciled, denouncing the state as sunk in unbelief
and deadly sin and its lawyers as traitors to the cause of religion. To
pursue our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by a handful of
Covenanting congregations and in America by the much more numerous and
powerful Reformed Presbyterian Church.
It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the Umayyad pressure
and the encouragement of legal studies—such as it was—by the Abbasids,
definite and recognized schools of law began to form. What had so long
been in process in secret became public, and its results crystallized
under certain prominent teachers. We will now take up these schools in
the order of the death dates of their founders; we will establish their
principles and trace their histories. We shall find the same conceptions
recurring again and again which have already been brought out, Qur’an,
tradition (_hadith_), agreement (_ijma_), opinion (_ra’y_), analogy
(_qiyas_), local usage (_urf_), preference (_istihsan_), in the teeth of
the written law—till at length, when the battle is over, the sources will
have limited themselves to the four which have survived to the present
day—Qur’an, tradition, agreement, analogy. And, similarly, of the six
schools to be mentioned, four only will remain to the present time, but
these of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believers.
[Sidenote: ABU HANIFA]
The Abbasids came to power in the year of the Hijra 132, and in 150
died Abu Hanifa, the first student and teacher to leave behind him a
systematic body of teaching and a missionary school of pupils. He was
a Persian by race, and perhaps the most distinguished example of the
rule that Muslim scientists and thinkers might write in Arabic but were
seldom of Arab blood. He does not seem to have held office as a judge
or to have practised law at all. He was, rather, an academic student, a
speculative or philosophical jurist we might call him. His system of law,
therefore, was not based upon the exigencies of experience; it did not
arise from an attempt to meet actual cases. We might say of it, rather,
but in a good sense, that it was a system of casuistry, an attempt to
build up on scientific principles a set of rules which would answer every
conceivable question of law. In the hands of some of his pupils, when
applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casuistry in a bad
sense; but no charge of perverting justice for his own advantage seems to
have been brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief instruments in
constructing his system were opinion and analogy. He leaned little upon
traditions of the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the Qur’anic
texts and develop from them his details. But the doing of this compelled
him to modify simple opinion—equivalent to equity as we have seen—and
limit it to analogy of some written statute (_nass_). He could hardly
forsake a plain _res iudicata_ of Muhammad, and follow his own otherwise
unsupported views, but he might choose to do so if he could base it on
analogy from the Qur’an. Thus, he came to use what was practically legal
fiction. It is the application of an old law in some sense or way that
was never dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which may, in
fact, run directly counter to the purpose of the law. The fiction is
that it is the original law that is being observed, while, as a matter
of fact, there has come in its place an entirely different law. So Abu
Hanifa would contend that he was following the divine legislation of the
Qur’an, while his adversaries contended that he was only following his
own opinion.
But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from equity to legal
fiction, on another he developed a new principle of even greater freedom.
Reference has already been made to the changes which were of necessity
involved in the new conditions of the countries conquered by the Muslims.
Often the law of the desert not only failed to apply to town and
agricultural life; it was even directly mischievous. On account of this,
a consideration of local conditions was early accepted as a principle,
but in general terms. These were reduced to definiteness by Abu Hanifa
under the formula of “holding for better” (_istihsan_). He would say,
“The analogy in the case points to such and such a rule, but under the
circumstances I hold it for better to rule thus and thus.”
[Sidenote: THE QADI ABU YUSUF]
This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently attacked by his
opponents, as was his system in general. Yet that system by its
philosophical perfection—due to its theoretical origin—and perfection in
detail—due to generations of practical workers—has survived all attack
and can now be said to be the leading one of the four existing schools.
No legal writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he seem to
have, himself, cast his system into a finished code. That was done by his
immediate pupils, and especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in
182, and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189. The first was consulting
lawyer and chief Qadi to the great Khalifa Harun ar-Rashid, and, if
stories can be believed, proved himself as complaisant of conscience as
a court casuist need be. Innumerable are the tales afloat of his minute
knowledge of legal subtleties and his fertility of device in applying
them to meet the whims of his master, Harun. Some of them have found a
resting place in that great mirror of mediæval Muslim life, _The Thousand
and One Nights_; reference may be made to _Night 296_. Through his
influence, the school of Abu Hanifa gained an official importance which
it never thereafter lost. He wrote for Harun a book which we have still,
on the canon law as applied to the revenues of the state, a thorny and
almost impossible subject, for the canon law makes really no provision
for the necessary funds of even a simple form of government and much less
for such an array of palaces and officials as had grown up around the
Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in expression and by ability
of the highest kind in reconciling the irreconcilable.
But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily with the new ways.
Many found that only in asceticism, in renunciation of the world and
engaging in pious exercises was there any chance of their maintaining
the old standards in a state that was for them based on oppression and
robbery. One of these was Sufyan ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high repute,
who narrowly missed founding a separate school of law and who died in
161. There has come down to us a correspondence between him and Harun,
which, though it cannot possibly be genuine, throws much light on the
disappointment of the sincerely religious section. Harun writes on his
accession to the Khalifate (170), complaining that Sufyan had not visited
him, in spite of their bond of brotherhood, and offering him wealth
from the public treasury. Sufyan replied, denouncing such use of public
funds and all the other uses of them by Harun—many enough—except those
precisely laid down in the codes. On the basis of these, Harun would have
had to work for his own living. There are also other denunciations for
crimes in the ruler which he punished in others. Harun is said to have
kept the letter and wept over it at intervals, but no change of life on
his part is recorded. Apparently, with the accession of the Abbasids
ascetic and mystical Islam made a great development. It became plain to
the pious that no man could inherit both this world and the next.
While Abu Hanifa was developing his system in Mesopotamia, al-Awza‘i
was working similarly in Syria. He was born at Baalbec, lived at
Damascus, and at Beyrout where he died in 157. Of him and his teaching
we know comparatively little. But so far it is clear that he was not a
speculative jurist of the same type as Abu Hanifa, but paid especial
attention to traditions. At one time his school was followed by the
Muslims of Syria and the entire West to Morocco and Spain. But its day
was a short one. The school of Abu Hanifa, championed by Abu Yusuf with
his tremendous influence as chief Qadi of the Abbasid empire, pushed it
aside, and at the present day it has no place except in history. For us,
its interest is that of another witness to the early rise and spread of
systems of jurisprudence outside of Arabia.
[Sidenote: MALIK IBN ANAS]
In A.H. 179, three years before the death of Abu Yusuf and twenty-nine
after that of Abu Hanifa, there died at al-Madina the founder and head
of an independent school of a very different type. This was Malik ibn
Anas, under whose hands what we may call, for distinction, the historical
school of al-Madina took form. Al-Madina, it will be remembered, was the
mother-city of Muslim law. It was the special home of the traditions
of the Prophet and the scene of his legislative and judicial life. Its
pre-Islamic customary law had been sanctioned, in a sense, by his use. It
had been the capital of the state in its purest days. From the height of
all these privileges its traditionists and lawyers looked down upon the
outsiders and _parvenus_ who had begun to intermeddle in sacred things.
But it must not be thought that this school was of a rigid traditionism.
The case was quite the reverse, and in many respects it is hard to make a
distinction between it and that of Abu Hanifa. Its first source was, of
necessity, the Qur’an. Then came the usage of the Prophet. This merged
into the usage of the Successors of the Prophet and the unwritten custom
of the town. It will be seen that here the historical weight of the place
came to bear. No other place, no other community, could furnish that
later tradition with anything like the same authority. Further, Malik ibn
Anas was a practical jurist, a working judge. He was occupied in meeting
real cases from day to day. When he sat in public and judged the people,
or with his pupils around him and expounded and developed the law, he
could look back upon a line of canon lawyers who had sat in his place
and done as he was doing. In that lies the great difference. He was in
practical touch with actual life; that was one point; and, secondly, he
was in the direct line of the apostolic succession, and in the precise
environment of the Prophet. So when he went beyond Qur’an, prophetic
usage, agreement, and gave out decisions on simple opinion, the feeling
of the community justified him. It was a different thing for Malik ibn
Anas, sitting there in state in al-Madina, to use his judgment, than
for some quick-brained vagabond of a Persian or Syrian proselyte, some
_pauvre diable_ with neither kith nor kin in the country, to lay down
principles of law. So the pride of the city of the Prophet distinguished
between him and Abu Hanifa.
But though the speculative element in the school of Malik, apart from
its local and historical environment, which gave it unifying weight, was
essentially the same as in the school of Abu Hanifa, yet it is true that
at al-Madina it played a less important part. Malik used tradition more
copiously and took refuge in opinion less frequently. Without opinion, he
could not have built his system; but for him it was not so much a primary
principle as a means of escape. Yet one principle of great freedom he
did derive from it and lay down with clearness; it is the conception of
the public advantage (_istislah_). When a rule would work general injury
it is to be set aside even in the teeth of a valid analogy. This, it
will be seen, is nearly the same as the preference of Abu Hanifa. The
technical term _istislah_, chosen by Malik to express his idea, was
probably intended to distinguish it from that of Abu Hanifa, and also to
suggest in the public advantage (_maslaha_) a more valid basis than the
mere preference of the legist.
[Sidenote: THE DOCTRINE OF AGREEMENT]
Another conception which Malik and his school developed into greater
exactitude and force was that of the agreement (_ijma_). It will be
remembered that from the death of Muhammad all the surviving Companions
resident in al-Madina formed a kind of consultive council to aid the
Khalifa with their store of tradition and experience. Their agreement
on any point was final; it was the voice of the Church. This doctrine
of the infallibility of the body of the believers developed in Islam
until at its widest it was practically the same as the canon of catholic
truth formulated by Vincent of Lerins, _Quod ubique, quod semper, quod
ab omnibus_. But Malik, according to the usual view, had no intention of
granting any such deciding power to the outside world. The world for him
was al-Madina and the agreement of al-Madina established catholic verity.
Yet there are narratives which suggest that he approved the agreement and
local usage of al-Madina for al-Madina because they suited al-Madina.
Other places might also have their local usages which suited them better.
In the next school we shall find the principle of agreement put upon a
broader basis and granted greater weight. Finally, Malik is the first
founder of a system from whom a law book, the _Muwatta_ mentioned
above, has come down to us. It is not in the exact sense, a manual
or code; rather a collection of materials for a code with remarks by
the collector. He gives the traditions which seem to him of juristic
importance—about seventeen hundred in all—arranged according to subject,
and follows up each section, when necessary, with remarks upon the usage
of al-Madina, and upon his own view of the matter. When he cannot find
either tradition or usage, he evidently feels himself of sufficient
authority to follow his own opinion, and lay down on that basis a binding
rule. This, however, as we have seen, is very different from allowing
other people, outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same thing. The school
founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles is one of the surviving
four. As that of Abu Hanifa spread eastward, so that of Malik spread
westward, and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip which it
has especially gained in western North Africa may be due to the influence
of the Idrisids whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when Malik was
in the height of his reputation there, and also to hatred of the Abbasids
who championed the school of Abu Hanifa.
But now we pass from simple development to development through conflict.
Open conflict, so far as there had been any, had covered points of
detail; for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu Hanifa, on the
one hand, and by Malik, on the other. One of the chiefest of the pupils
of Abu Hanifa, the Muhammad ibn al-Hasan already mentioned, spent three
years in study with Malik at al-Madina and found no difficulty in thus
combining his schools. The conflict of the future was to be different
and to touch the very basis of things. The muttering of the coming storm
had been heard for long, but it was now to burst. Exact dates we cannot
give, but the reaction must have been progressing in the latter part of
the life of Malik ibn Anas.
[Sidenote: HISTORICAL _V._ PHILOSOPHICAL LAWYERS]
The distinction drawn above between traditionists and lawyers will
be remembered, and the promise of future collision which always has
come between historical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical
students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side points to the
absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies of a system based upon tradition
and developing by usage; the other says that we are not wise enough to
rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a necessity; those retort
an inability. Add to this a belief on the part of the traditionists that
they were defending a divine institution and the situation is complete
as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right said that law should be based
on Qur’an and tradition only; the extreme left, that it was better to
leave untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a system of rules
by logic and the necessities of the case. To and fro between these two
extremes swayed the conflict to which we now come.
In that conflict three names stand out: ash-Shafi‘i who died in 204,
Ahmad ibn Hanbal who died in 241 and Da’ud az-Zahiri who died in 270.
Strangely enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi‘i, struck the mediating
note and the other two diverged further and further from the via media
thus shown toward a blank traditionism.
Ash-Shafi‘i is without question one of the greatest figures in the
history of law. Perhaps he had not the originality and keenness of Abu
Hanifa; but he had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and
full grasp of means and ends that enabled him to say what proved to be
the last word in the matter. After him came attempts to tear down; but
they failed. The fabric of the Muslim canon law stood firm. There is a
tradition from the Prophet that he promised that with the end of every
century would come a restorer of the faith of his people. At the end of
the first century was the pious Khalifa, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, who by
some accident strayed in among the Umayyads. At the end of the second
came ash-Shafi‘i. His work was to mediate and systematize and bore
especially on the sources from which rules of law might be drawn. His
position on the positive side may be stated as one of great reverence
for tradition. “If you ever find a tradition from the Prophet saying
one thing,” he is reported to have said, “and a decision from me saying
another thing, follow the tradition.” An absolutely authentic—according
to Muslim rules of evidence—and clear tradition from the Prophet he
regarded as of equally divine authority with a passage in the Qur’an.
Both were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form; the Qur’an
was verbally inspired; such traditions were inspired as to their content.
And if such a tradition contradicted a Qur’anic passage and came after it
in time, then the written law of the Qur’an was abrogated by the oral law
of the tradition. But this involved grave difficulties. The speculative
jurists had defended their position from the beginning by pointing to
the many contradictory traditions which were afloat, and asking how the
house of tradition could stand when so divided against itself. A means
of reconciling traditions had to be found, and to this ash-Shafi‘i gave
himself. We need not go over his methods here; they were the same that
have always been used in such emergencies. The worship of the letter led
to the straining of the letter, and to explaining away of the letter.
[Sidenote: AGREEMENT AS A SOURCE]
But there lay a rock in his course more dangerous than any mere
contradiction in differing traditions. Usages had grown up and taken fast
hold which were in the teeth of all traditions. These usages were in the
individual life, in the constitution of the state, and in the rules and
decisions of the law courts. The pious theologian and lawyer might rage
against them as he chose; they were there, firmly rooted, immovable.
They were not arbitrary changes, but had come about in the process of
time through the revolutions of circumstances and varying conditions.
Ash-Shafi‘i showed his greatness by recognizing the inevitable and
providing a remedy. This lay in an extension of the principle of
agreement and the erection of it into a formal source. Whatever the
community of Islam has agreed upon at any time, is of God. We have met
this principle before, but never couched in so absolute and catholic a
form. The agreement of the immediate Companions of Muhammad had weight
with his first Successors. The agreement of these first Companions and
of the first generation after them, had determining weight in the early
church. The agreement of al-Madina had weight with Malik ibn Anas. The
agreement of many divines and legists always had weight of a kind. Among
lawyers, a principle, to the contrary of which the memory of man ran not,
had been determining. But this was wider, and from this time on the unity
of Islam was assured. The evident voice of the People of Muhammad was to
be the voice of God. Yet this principle, if full of hope and value for
the future, involved the canonists of the time in no small difficulties.
Was it conceivable that the agreement could override the usage of the
Prophet? Evidently not. There must, then, they argued, once have existed
some tradition to the same effect as the agreement, although it had now
been lost. Some such lost authority must be presupposed. This can remind
us of nothing so much as of the theory of the inerrant but lost original
of the Scriptures. And it had the fate of that theory. The weight of
necessity forced aside any such trifling and the position was frankly
admitted that the agreement of the community was a safer and more certain
basis than traditions from the Prophet. Traditions were alleged to that
effect. “My People will never agree in an error,” declared Muhammad, or,
at least, the later church made him so declare.
[Sidenote: ANALOGY; THE FOUR SOURCES]
But ash-Shafi‘i found that even the addition of agreement to Qur’an and
Prophetic usage did not give him basis enough for his system. Opinion
he utterly rejected; the preference of Abu Hanifa and the conception of
the common welfare of Malik ibn Anas were alike to him. It is true also
that both had been practically saved under agreement. But he held fast
by analogy, whether based on the Qur’an or on the usage of the Prophet.
It was an essential instrument for his purpose. As was said, “The laws
of the Qur’an and of the usage are limited; the possible cases are
unlimited; that which is unlimited can never be contained in that which
is limited.” But in ash-Shafi‘i’s use of analogy there is a distinction
to be observed. In seeking to establish a parallelism between a case
that has arisen and a rule in the Qur’an or usage, which is similar
in some points but not precisely parallel, are we to look to external
points of resemblance, or may we go further and seek to determine the
reason (_illa_) lying behind the rule and from that draw our analogy?
The point seems simple enough and the early speculative jurists sought
the reason. For that they were promptly attacked by the traditionists.
Such a method was an attempt to look into the mysteries of God, they were
told; man has no business to inquire after reasons, all he has to do is
to obey. The point thus raised was fought over for centuries and schools
are classified according to their attitude toward it. The position of
ash-Shafi‘i seems to have been that the reason for a command was to be
considered in drawing an analogy, but that there must be some clear
guide, in the text itself, pointing to the reason. He thus left himself
free to consider the causes of the divine commands and yet produced the
appearance of avoiding any irreverence or impiety in doing so.
Such then are the four sources or bases (_asls_) of jurisprudence as
accepted and defined by ash-Shafi‘i—Qur’an, prophetic usage, analogy,
agreement. The last has come to bear more and more weight. Every
Shafi‘ite law book begins each section with words to this effect, “The
basis of this rule, before the agreement (_qabla-l-ijma_), is” Qur’an or
usage as the case may be. The agreement must put its stamp on every rule
to make it valid. Further, all the now existing schools have practically
accepted ash-Shafi‘i’s classification of the sources and many have
contended that a lawyer, no matter what his school, who does not use all
these four sources, cannot be permitted to act as a judge. Ash-Shafi‘i
has accomplished his own definition of a true jurist, “Not he is a jurist
who gathers statements and prefers one of them, but he who establishes a
new principle from which a hundred branches may spring.”
[Sidenote: DA’UD AZ-ZAHIRI]
But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied with this compromise.
They objected to analogy and they objected to agreement; nothing but the
pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them. And their numbers
were undoubtedly large. The common people always heard traditions gladly,
and it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the professional
lawyers. How much simpler, it struck the average mind, it would be
to follow some clear and unambiguous saying of the Prophet; then one
could feel secure. This desire of the plain man to take traditions and
interpret them strictly and literally was met by the school of Da’ud
az-Zahiri, David the literalist. He was born three or four years before
the death of ash-Shafi‘i, which occurred in 204. He was trained as a
Shafi‘ite and that, too, of the narrower, more traditional type; but
it was not traditional enough for him. So he had to cut himself loose
and form a school of his own. He rejected utterly analogy; he limited
agreement, as a source, to the agreement of the immediate Companions of
Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by the Wahhabites alone among
moderns; he limited himself to Qur’an and prophetic usage.
In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi‘i had evidently exercised
a very great personal influence upon his followers. All looked up to him
and were prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a tendency
for a scholar to take a thing upon the word of his master. “Ash-Shafi‘i
taught so; I am a Shafi‘ite and I hold so.” This, too, Da’ud utterly
rejected. The scholar must examine the proofs for himself and form his
own opinion. But he had another peculiarity, and one which gained him
the name of literalist. Everything, Qur’an and tradition, must be taken
in the most exact sense, however absurd it might be. Of course, to have
gone an inch beyond the very first meaning of the words would have been
to stray in the direction of analogy. Yet, as fate would have it, to
analogy, more or less, he had in the end to come. The inexorable law that
the limited cannot bound the unlimited was proved again. “Analogy is
like carrion,” confessed a very much earlier traditionist, “when there
is nothing else you eat it.” Da’ud tried to make his meal more palatable
by a change in name. He called it a proof (_dalil_) instead of a source
(_asl_); but what difference of idea he involved in that it is hard to
determine. This brought him to the doctrine of cause, already mentioned.
Were we at liberty to seek the cause of a divine word or action and lead
our “proof” from that? If the cause was directly stated, then Da’ud held
that we must regard it as having been the cause in this case; but we were
not at liberty, he added, to look for it, or on it, as cause in any other
case.
It is evident that here we have to do with an impossible man and school,
and so the Muslim world found. Most said roundly that it was illegal
to permit a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same grounds that
objection to circumstantial evidence will throw out a man now as juror.
If they had been using modern language, they would have said that it
was because he was a hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite school lasted for
centuries and drew long consequences, historical and theological, for
which there is no space here. It never held rank as an acknowledged
school of Muslim law.
We now come to the last of the four schools, and it, strange as its
origin was, need not detain us long. The Zahirite reaction had failed
through its very extremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted
Shafi‘ite to head the last attack upon the school of his master. Ahmad
ibn Hanbal was a theologian of the first rank; he made no claim to be a
constructive lawyer. His _Musnad_ has already been dealt with. It is an
immense collection of some thirty thousand traditions, but these are not
even arranged for legal purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox
faith in the rationalist persecution under the Khalifa al-Ma’mun, and his
sufferings gained him the position of a saint. But he never dreamed of
forming a school, least of all in opposition to his master, ash-Shafi‘i.
He died in 241, and after his death his disciples drew together and
the fourth school was founded. It was simply reactionary and did not
make progress in any way. It minimized agreement and analogy and tended
toward literal interpretation. As might be expected from its origin, its
history has been one of violence, of persecution and counter-persecution,
of insurrection and riot. Again and again the streets of Baghdad ran
blood from its excesses. It has now the smallest following of the four
surviving schools.
[Sidenote: PRINCIPLES OF UNITY AND VARIETY]
There is no need to pursue this history further. With ash-Shafi‘i the
great development of Muslim jurisprudence closes. Legislation, equity,
legal fiction have done their parts; the hope for the future lay, and
lies, in the principle of the agreement. The common-sense of the Muslim
community, working through that expression of catholicity, has set aside
in the past even the undoubted letter of the Qur’an, and in the future
will still further break the grasp of that dead hand. It is the principle
of unity in Islam. But there is a principle of variety as well. The four
schools of law whose origin has been traced are all equally valid and
their decisions equally sacred in Muslim eyes. The believer may belong
to any one of these which he chooses; he must belong to one; and when
he has chosen his school, he accepts it and its rules to the uttermost.
Yet he does not cast out as heretics the followers of the other schools.
In every chapter their codes differ more or less; but each school
bears with the others; sometimes, it may be, with a superior tone,
but still bears. This liberty of variety in unity is again undoubtedly
due to the agreement. It has expressed itself, as it often does, in
apocryphal traditions from the Prophet, the last rag of respect left to
the traditionist school. Thus we are told that the Prophet said, “The
disagreement of My People is a Mercy from God.” This supplements and
completes the other equally apocryphal but equally important tradition:
“My People will never agree upon an error.”
But there is a third principle at work which we cannot view with the
same favor. As said above, every Muslim must attach himself to a legal
school, and may choose any one of these four. But once he has chosen his
school he is absolutely bound by the decisions and rules of that school.
This is the principle against which the Zahirites protested, but their
protest, the only bit of sense they ever showed, was in vain. The result
of its working throughout centuries has been that now no one—except
from a spirit of historical curiosity—ever dreams of going back from
the text-books of the present day to the works of the older masters.
Further, such an attempt to get behind the later commentaries would not
be permitted. We have comment upon comment upon comment, abstract of this
and expansion of that; but each hangs by his predecessor and dares not go
another step backward. The great masters of the four schools settled the
broad principles; they were authorities of the first degree (_mujtahidun
mutlaq_), second to Muhammad in virtue of his inspiration only. Second,
came the masters who had authority within the separate schools
(_mujtahidun fi-l-madhahib_) to determine the questions that arose
there. Third, masters of still lesser rank for minor points (_mujtahidun
bil-fatwa_). And so the chain runs on. The possibility of a new legal
school arising or of any considerable change among these existing schools
is flatly denied. Every legist now has his place and degree of liberty
fixed, and he must be content.
[Sidenote: THE CANON AND CIVIL CODES]
These three principles, then, of catholic unity and its ability to
make and abrogate laws, of the liberty of diversity in that unity, and
of blind subjection to the past within that diversity, these three
principles must be our hope and fear for the Muslim peoples. What that
future will be none can tell. The grasp of the dead hand of Islam is
close, but its grip at many points has been forced to relax. Very early,
as has already been pointed out, the canon law had to give way to the
will of the sovereign, and ground once lost it has never regained. Now,
in every Muslim country, except perhaps the Wahhabite state in central
Arabia, there are two codes of law administered by two separate courts.
The one judges by this canon law and has cognizance of what we may call
private and family affairs, marriage, divorce, inheritance. Its judges,
at whose head in Turkey stands the Shaykh al-Islam, a dignity first
created by the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II in 1453, after the capture
of Constantinople, also give advice to those who consult them on such
personal matters as details of the ritual law, the law of oaths and
vows, etc. The other court knows no law except the custom of the country
(_urf_, _ada_) and the will of the ruler, expressed often in what are
called _Qanuns_, statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, besides
the codices of canon law, there is an accepted and authoritative corpus
of such _Qanuns_. It is based on the _Code Napoléon_ and administered
by courts under the Minister of Justice. This is the nearest approach
in Islam to the development by statute, which comes last in Sir Henry
Maine’s analysis of the growth of law. The court guided by these _Qanuns_
decides all matters of public and criminal law, all affairs between man
and man. Such is the legal situation throughout the whole Muslim world,
from Sulu to the Atlantic and from Africa to China. The canon lawyers, on
their side, have never admitted this to be anything but flat usurpation.
There have not failed some even who branded as heretics and unbelievers
those who took any part in such courts of the world and the devil. They
look back to the good old days of the rightly guided Khalifas, when there
was but one law in Islam, and forward to the days of the Mahdi when that
law will be restored. There, between a dead past and a hopeless future,
we may leave them. The real future is not theirs. Law is greater than
lawyers, and it works in the end for justice and life.
[Sidenote: DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS]
Finally, it may be well to notice an important and necessary modification
which holds as to the above statement that a Muslim may choose any
one of the four schools and may then follow its rules. As might be
expected, geographical influences weigh overwhelmingly in this choice.
Certain countries are Hanifite or Shafi‘ite; in each, adherents of the
other sects are rare. This geographical position may be given roughly
as follows: central Asia, northern India, and the Turks everywhere are
Hanifite. Lower Egypt, Syria, southern India and the Malay Archipelago
are Shafi‘ite. Upper Egypt and North Africa west of Egypt are Malikite.
Practically, only the Wahhabites in central Arabia are Hanbalites.
Further, the position holds in Islam that the country, as a whole,
follows the legal creed of its ruler, just as it follows his religion.
It is not only _cuius regio eius religio_, but _cuius religio eius lex_.
Again and again, a revolution in the state has driven one legal school
from power and installed another. Yet the situation occurs sometimes that
a sovereign finds his people divided into two parties, each following
a different rite, and he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis
belonging to both, and enforcing the decisions of these Qadis. Thus, at
Zanzibar, at present, there are eight Ibadite judges and two Shafi‘ite,
all appointed by the Sultan and backed by his authority. On the other
hand, the Turkish government, ever since it felt itself strong enough,
has thrown the full weight of its influence on the Hanifite side. In
almost all countries under its rule it appoints Hanifite judges only;
valid legal decisions can be pronounced only according to that rite. The
private needs of non-Hanifites are met by the appointment of salaried
_Muftis_—givers of _fatwas_, or legal opinions—of the other rites.
[Sidenote: IBADITES]
In the above sketch there have been of necessity two considerable
omissions. The one is of Shi‘ite and the other of Ibadite law. Neither
seems of sufficient importance to call for separate treatment. The legal
system of the Shi‘ites is derived from that of the so-called Sunnites
and differs in details only. We have seen already (p. 38) that the
Shi‘ites still have Mujtahids who are not bound to the words of a master,
but can give decisions on their own responsibility. These seem to have
in their hands the teaching power which strictly belongs only to the
Hidden Imam. They thus represent the principle of authority which is the
governing conception of the Shi‘a. The Sunnites, on the other hand, have
reached the point of recognizing that it is the People of Muhammad as a
whole which rules through its agreement. In another point the Shi‘ite
conception of authority affects their legal system. They utterly reject
the idea of co-ordinate schools of law; to the doctrine of the varying
(_ikhtilaf_) as it is called, and the liberty of diversity which lies in
it, they oppose the authority of the Imam. There can be only one truth
and there can be no trifling with it even in details. Among the Shi‘ites
of the Zaydite sect this was affected also by their philosophical
studies and a philosophical doctrine of the unity of truth; but to the
Imamites it is an authoritative necessity and not one of thought. Thus
on two important points the Shi‘ites lack the possibility of freedom and
development which is to be found with the Sunnites. Of the jurisprudence
of the Ibadites we know comparatively little. A full examination of
Ibadite _fiqh_ would be of the highest interest, as the separation of its
line of descent goes far back behind the formation of any of the orthodox
systems and it must have been codified to a greater or less extent by
Abd Allah ibn Ibad himself. Its basis appears to be threefold, Qur’an,
prophetic usage, agreement—naturally that of the Ibadite community. There
is no mention of analogy, and traditions seem to have been used sparingly
and critically. Qur’an bore the principal emphasis. See above, (p. 26)
for the Ibadite position on the form of the state and on the nature of
its headship.
PART III
Theology.
CHAPTER I
The three principles in the development; first religious
questionings; Murji’ites, Kharijites, Qadarites; influence of
Christianity; the Umayyads and Abbasids; the Mu‘tazilites; the
Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the Qur’an.
[Sidenote: THE THREE PRINCIPLES]
Before entering upon a consideration of the development of the theology
of Islam, it will be well to mark clearly the three principles which run
continuously through that development, which conditioned it for evil and
for good and which are still working in it. In dealing with jurisprudence
and with the theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly how
false is the current idea that Islam has ceased to grow and has no hope
of future development. The organism of Islam, like every other organism,
has periods of rest when it appears to have reached a _cul de sac_ and to
have outlived its life. But after these periods come others of renewed
quickening and its vital energy pours itself forth again _alter et idem_.
In the state, we saw how the old realms passed into decrepitude and
decay, but new ones rose to take their places. The despotism by the grace
of God of formal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of insurrection
and revolution, and the People of Muhammad, in spite of kings and
princes, asserted, from time to time, its unquenchable vitality.
In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than
through the masses; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take
biographical form wherever our knowledge renders that possible.
But whether we have men or naked movements, the begetters of which are
names to us or less, three threads are woven distinctly through the web
of Muslim religious thought. There is tradition (_naql_); there is reason
(_aql_); and there is the unveiling of the mystic (_kashf_). They were
in the tissue of Muhammad’s brain and they have been in his church since
he died. Now one would be most prominent, now another, according to the
thinker of the time; but all were present to some degree. Tradition in
its strictest form lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood
of as-Sanusi; reason has become a scholastic handmaid of theology except
among the modern Indian Mu‘tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no more
accept as Muslims than a Trinitarian of the Westminster confession
would give the name of Christian to a Unitarian of the left wing; the
inner light of the mystic has assumed many forms, running from plainest
pantheism to mere devout ecstasy. But in the church of Muhammad they are
all working still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zealots,
persecutions and counter-persecutions, has attained here, too, as in law,
a liberty of variety in unity. Two of the principles we have met already
in the students of _hadith_ and of speculative law. The Hanbalites
maintained in theology their devotion to tradition; they fought for
centuries all independent thinking which sought to rise above what the
fathers had told; they fought even scholastic theology of the strictest
type and would be content with nothing but the rehearsal of the old
dogmas in the old forms; they fought, too, the mystical life in all its
phases. On the other hand, Abu Hanifa was tinged with rationalism and
speculation in theology as in law, and his followers have walked in his
path. Even the mystical light has been touched in our view of the theory
of the state. It has flourished most among the Shi‘ites, who are driven
to seek and to find an inner meaning under the plain word of the Qur’an,
and whose devotion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission has
kept alive the thought of a continuous speaking of God to mankind and of
an exalting of mankind into the presence of God. It is for the student,
then, to watch and hold fast these three guiding threads.
* * * * *
The development of Muslim theology, like that of jurisprudence, could not
begin till after the death of Muhammad. So long as he lived and received
infallible revelations in solution of all questions of faith or usage
that might come up, it is obvious that no system of theology could be
formed or even thought of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even
show him setting his face against all discussions of dogma and repeating
again and again, in answer to metaphysical and theological questions, the
crude anthropomorphisms of the Qur’an. But these questions and answers
are probably forgeries of the later traditional school, shadows of future
warfare thrown back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, in
the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad’s death, the Muslims
were too much occupied with the propagation of their faith to think
what that faith exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning spirit
in this direction was aroused comparatively late and remained for some
time on what might be called a private basis. Individual men had their
individual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and when they did were
vague and hard to define in their positions. It may be said, broadly,
that everything which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies
is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names, dates, influences
and doctrines are all seen through a haze, and nothing more than an
approximation to an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed
down of the early questionings and disputings of certain _ahl-al-ahwa_,
“people of wandering desires,” a name singularly descriptive of the
always flighty and sceptical Arabs; of how they compared Scripture with
Scripture and got up theological debates, splitting points and defining
issues, to great scandal and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded
pious. These were not yet heretics; they were the first investigators and
systematizers.
[Sidenote: MURJI’ITES]
Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their existence can be
tolerably conditioned through the historical facts and philosophical
necessities of the time. The one is that of the Murji’ites, and the
other of the Qadarites. A Murji’ite is literally “one who defers or
postpones,” in this case postpones judgment until it is pronounced by
God on the Day of Judgment. They arose as a sect during and out of the
civil war between the Shi‘ites, the Kharijites and the Umayyads. All
these parties claimed to be Muslims, and most of them claimed that they
were the only true Muslims and that the others were unbelievers. This
was especially the attitude of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites toward the
Umayyads; to them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were godless
heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed and slaughtered the true
saints of God. The Murji’ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on
which they could still support the Umayyads without homologating all
their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they
held, were _de facto_ the rulers of the Muslim state; fealty had been
sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God and the apostleship
of the Prophet. Thus, they were not polytheists, and there is no sin
that can possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism (_shirk_). It
was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to acknowledge their sovereignty
and to postpone until the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or
condemnation of any sins they might have committed. Sins less than
polytheism could justify no one in rising in revolt against them and in
breaking the oath of fealty.
Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji’ites, and it was the
origin also of the theory of the accomplished fact in the state, of which
we have had to take account several times. Thus, between the fanatical
venerators of the canon law, to whom all the Khalifas, after the first
four, were an abomination, and the purely worldly lawyers of the court
party, there came a group of pious theologians who taught that the good
of the Muslim community required obedience to the ruler of the time, even
though his personal unworthiness were plain. As a consequence, success
can legitimate anything in the Muslim state.
But with the passing away of the situation which gave rise to Murji’ism,
it itself changed from politics to theology. As a political party it
had opposed the political puritanism of the Kharijites; it now came to
oppose the uncompromising spirit in which these damned all who differed
from them even in details and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God
over their opponents. It is true that this came natural to Islam. The
earlier Muslims seem in general to have been oppressed by a singularly
gloomy fatalism. To use modern theological language, they labored under
a terrible consciousness of sin. They viewed the world as an evil
temptress, seducing men from heavenly things. Their lives were hedged
about with sins, great and little, and each deserved the eternal wrath of
God. The recollection of their latter end they kept ever before them and
the terrors that it would bring, for they felt that no amount of faith in
God and His Prophet could save them in the judgment to come. The roots
of this run far back. Before the time of Muhammad and at his time there
were among the Arab tribes, scattered here and there, many men who felt
a profound dissatisfaction with heathenism, its doctrines and religious
rites. The conception of God and the burden of life pressed heavily
upon them. They saw men pass away and descend into the grave, and they
asked whither they had gone and what had become of them. The thought
of this fleeting, transitory life and of the ocean of darkness and
mystery that lies around it, drove them away to seek truth in solitude
and the deserts. They were called _Hanifs_—the word is of very doubtful
derivation—and Muhammad himself, in the early part of his career,
reckoned himself one of them. But we have evidence from heathen Arab
poetry that these _Hanifs_ were regarded as much the same as Christian
monks, and that the term _hanif_ was used as a synonym for _rahib_, monk.
[Sidenote: THE WRATH OF GOD IN ISLAM]
And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from these solitary hermits,
scattered here and there throughout the desert, consecrating their lives
to God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in pre-Islamic Arabic
poetry we feel how strong was the impression made on the Arab mind by the
gaunt, weird men with their endless watchings and night prayers. Again
and again there is allusion to the lamp of the hermit shining through
the darkness, and we have pictures of the caravan or of the solitary
traveller on the night journey cheered and guided by its glimmer. These
Christian hermits and the long deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten
tribes—judged and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold—that lie
throughout the Syrian waste and along the caravan routes were the two
things that most stirred the imagination of Muhammad and went to form
his faith. To Muhammad, and to the Semite always, the whole of life was
but a long procession from the great deep to the great deep again. Where
are the kings and rulers of the earth? Where are the peoples that were
mighty in their day? The hand of God smote them and they are not. There
is naught real in the world but God. From Him we are, and unto Him we
return. There is nothing for man but to fear and worship. The world is
deceitful and makes sport of them that trust it.
Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite
ever returns in the end. To this the later Murji’ites opposed a doctrine
of Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they declared, saved,
and Faith alone. If the sinner believed in God and His Prophet he would
not remain in the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held that
the sinner who died unrepentant would remain therein eternally, even
though he had confessed Islam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they
considered, could not be a believer in the true sense. This is still
the Ibadite position, and from it developed one of the most important
controversies of Islam as to the precise nature of faith. Some extreme
Murji’ites held that faith (_iman_) was a confession in the heart,
private intercourse with God, as opposed to Islam, public confession with
the lips. Thus, one could be a believer (_mu’min_), and outwardly confess
Judaism or Christianity; to be a professed Muslim was not necessary.
This is like the doctrine of the Imamites, called _taqiya_, that it is
allowable in time of stress to dissemble one’s religious views; and it is
worth noticing that Jahm ibn Safwan (killed, 131?), one of these extreme
Murji’ites, was a Persian proselyte in rebellion against the Arab rule,
and of the loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians were no more
Muslims than the Anabaptists of Munster had a claim to be Christians. The
other wing of the Murji’ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who held that
faith (_iman_) is acknowledgment with the tongue as well as the heart and
that works are a necessary supplement. This is little different from the
orthodox position which grew up, that persuasion, confession, and works
made up faith. When Murji’ism dropped out of existence as a sect it left
as its contribution to Islam a distinction between great and little sins
(_kabiras_, _saghiras_), and the position that even great sins, if not
involving polytheism (_shirk_), would not exclude the believer forever
from the Garden.
[Sidenote: QADARITES]
The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin in a philosophical
necessity of the human mind. A perception of the contradiction between
man’s consciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and
the absolute rule and predestination of God, on the other, is the usual
beginning of the thinking life, both in individuals and in races. It was
so in Islam. In theology as in law, Muhammad had been an opportunist pure
and simple. On the one hand, his Allah is the absolute Semitic despot who
guides aright and leads astray, who seals up the hearts of men and opens
them again, who is mighty over all. On the other hand, men are exhorted
to repentance, and punishment is threatened against them if they remain
hardened in their unbelief. All these phases of a wandering and intensely
subjective mind, which lived only in the perception of the moment,
appear in the Qur’an. Muhammad was a poet rather than a theologian; just
as he was a prophet rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the
Muslims paused in their career of conquest and began to think at all,
they thought of this. Naturally, so long as they were fighting in the
Path of God, it was the conception of God’s absolute sovereignty which
most appealed to them; by it their fates were fixed, and they charged
without fear the ranks of the unbelievers. In these earliest times,
the fatalistic passages bore most stress and the others were explained
away. This helped, at least, to bring it about that the party which in
time came to profess the freedom of man’s will, began and ended as an
heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never lose sight of the
fact that the eventual victory in Islam of the absolute doctrine of God’s
eternal decree was the victory of the more fundamental of Muhammad’s
conflicting conceptions. The other had been much more a campaigning
expedient.
This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have been conditioning, derived
its name from their position that a man possessed _qadar_, or power, over
his actions. One of the first of them was a certain Ma‘bad al-Juhani,
who paid for his heresy with his life in A.H. 80. Historians tell that
he with Ata ibn Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to the
celebrated ascetic, al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110), and said, “O Abu Sa‘id,
those kings shed the blood of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say
that their works are by the decree of God.” To this al-Hasan replied,
“The enemies of God lie.” The story is only important as showing how the
times and their changes were widening men’s thoughts. Very soon, now,
we come from these drifting tendencies to a formal sect with a formal
secession and a fixed name. The Murji’ites and the Qadarites melt from
the scene, some of their tenets pass into orthodox Islam; some into the
new sect.
[Sidenote: ORIGIN OF MU’TAZILITES]
The story of its founding again connects with the outstanding figure
of al-Hasan al-Basri. He seems to have been the chief centre of the
religious life and movements of his time; his pupils appear and his
influence shows itself in all the later schools. Someone came to him
as he sat among his pupils and asked what his view was between the
conflicting Murji’ites and Wa‘idites, the first holding that the
committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an unbeliever, was to
be accepted as a Muslim and his case left in the hands of God; the other
laying more stress upon the threats (_wa‘id_) in the Book of God and
teaching that the committer of a great sin could not be a believer, that
he had, _ipso facto_, abandoned the true faith, must go into the Fire and
abide there. Before the master could reply, one of his pupils—some say
Amr ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 144), others, Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131)—broke in
with the assertion of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither
a believer nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle which sat round
the master, went to another part of the mosque and began to develop his
view to those who gathered round him. The name believer (_mu’min_),
he taught, was a term of praise, and an evil-doer was not worthy of
praise, and could not have that name applied to him. But he was not an
unbeliever, either, for he assented to the faith. If he, then, died
unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire—for there are only two
divisions in the next world, heaven and hell—but his torments would be
mitigated on account of his faith. The position to which orthodox Islam
eventually came was that a believer could commit a great sin. If he did
so, and died unrepentant, he went to hell; but after a time would be
permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell became for believers a sort of
purgatory. On this secession, al-Hasan only said “_I‘tazala anna_”—He
has seceded from us. So the new party was called the Mu‘tazila, the
Secession. That, at least, is the story, which may be taken for what it
is worth. The fixed facts are the rise at the beginning of the second
century after the Hijra of a tolerably definite school of dissenters from
the traditional ideas, and their application of reason to the dogmas of
the Qur’an.
We have noted already the influence of Christianity on Muhammad through
the hermits of the desert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam
and that asceticism grew and developed into quietism and thence into
mysticism. The last step was still in the future, but already at this
time there were wandering monks who imitated their Christian brethren in
the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were thence called Sufis, from
_suf_, wool. It was not long before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the
third of the three great threads was definitely woven into the fabric of
Muslim thought. But that was not the limit of Christian influence. Those
anchorites in their caves and huts had little training in the theology of
the schools; the dogmas of their faith were of a practical simplicity.
But in the development of the Murji’ites and Qadarites it is impossible
to mistake the workings of the dialectic refinements of Greek theology
as developed in the Byzantine and Syrian schools. It is worth notice,
too, that, while the political heresies of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites
held sway mostly in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, these more religious
heresies seem to have arisen in Syria first and especially at Damascus,
the seat of the Umayyads.
[Sidenote: INFLUENCE OF JOHN OF DAMASCUS]
The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was in many ways a return to
pre-Muslim times and to an easy enjoyment of worldly things; it was a
rejection of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and name. The fear
of the wrath of God had small part with the most of them; sometimes it
appeared in the form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Further, as
Muslim governments always have done, they sought aid in their task of
governing from their non-Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius,
the father of Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer under them and that
after his death, this John of Damascus himself, the last great doctor of
the Greek Church and the man under whose hands its theology assumed final
form, became wazir and held that post until he withdrew from the world
and turned to the contemplative life. In his writings and in those of
his pupil, Theodoras Abucara (d. A.D. 826), there are polemic treatises
on Islam, cast in the form of discussions between Christians and Muslims.
These represent, there can be little doubt, a characteristic of the time.
The close agreement of Murji’ite and Qadarite ideas with those formulated
and defended by John of Damascus and by the Greek Church generally can
only be so explained. The Murji’ite rejection of eternal punishment and
emphasis on the goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the
Qadarite doctrine of free-will and responsibility, are to be explained in
the same way as we have already explained the presence of sentences in
the Muslim _fiqh_ which seem to be taken bodily from the Roman codes. In
this case, also, we are not to think of the Muslim divines as studying
the writings of the Greek fathers, but as picking up ideas from them
in practical intercourse and controversy. The very form of the tract
of John of Damascus is significant, “When the Saracen says to you such
and such, then you will reply....” This, as a whole, is a subject which
calls for investigation, but so far it is clear that the influence of
Greek theology on Islam can hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding
fact of the enormous emphasis laid by both on the doctrine of the nature
of God and His attributes is enough. It may even be conjectured that
the harsher views developed by western Muslims, and especially by the
theologians of Spain, were due, on the other hand, to Augustinian and
Roman influence. It is, to say the least, a curious coincidence that
Spanish Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholastic theology,
in the exact sense, but gave almost all its energy to canon law.
[Sidenote: INFLUENCES AT BAGHDAD]
But there were other influences to come. With the fall of the Umayyads
and the rise of the Abbasids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved
to the basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story of the founding
of Baghdad there, in 145, we have already heard. We have seen, too, that
the victory of the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the Arabs by
the Persians. _Græcia capta_ and the rest came true here; the battles
of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand were avenged; Persian ideas and Persian
religion began slowly to work on the faith of Muhammad. At the court of
the earliest Abbasids it was fashionable to affect a little free thought.
People were becoming enlightened and played with philosophy and science.
Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Manichæism, the old heathenism of
Harran, Judaism, Christianity—all were in the air and making themselves
felt. So long as the adherents and teachers of these took them in a
purely academic way, were good subjects and made no trouble, the earlier
Abbasids encouraged their efforts, gathered in the scientific harvest,
paid well for translations, instruments, and investigations, and
generally posed as patrons of progress.
But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn tightly. The victory of
the Abbasids had raised high hopes among the Persian nationalists. They
had thought that they were rallying to the overthrow of the Arabs, and
found, when all was done, that they had got only another Arab dynasty.
So revolts had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously enough,
they were of a marked religious character. They were an expression of
religious sects, Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, Manichæan, and parties with
prophetic leaders of their own; all are swept together by Muslim writers
as _Zindiqs_, probably literally, “initiates,” originally Manichæans,
thereafter, practically non-Muslims concealing their unbelief. For
when not in open revolt they must needs profess Islam. In 167, we find
al-Mahdi, who was also, it is true, much more strict than his father,
al-Mansur, appointing a grand inquisitor to deal with such heretics.
Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself with crushing actual rebellion;
and Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, and heathen of Harran were tolerated so
long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek science and philosophy.
That they did willingly, and so, through three intermediaries, science
came to the Arabs. There was a heathen Syrian source with its centre at
Harran, of which we know comparatively little. There was a Christian
Syrian source working from the multitudinous monasteries scattered over
the country. There was a Persian source by which natural science, and
medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the fifth century A.D.
an academy of medicine and philosophy had been founded at Gondeshapur
in Khuzistan. One of the directors of this institution was summoned,
in 148, to prescribe for al-Mansur, and from that time on it furnished
court physicians to the Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle
and Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocrates reached the Muslim
peoples.
[Sidenote: GOLDEN AGE OF MUSLIM SCIENCE]
The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate was the golden age of
Muslim science, the period of growth and development for the People of
Muhammad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease with the
close of that period, but the Khalifate ceased to aid in carrying the
torch. Thereafter, learning was protected and fostered by individual
rulers here and there, and individual investigators and scholars still
went on their own quiet paths. But free intellectual life among the
people was checked, and such learning as still generally flourished
fell more and more between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal
methods and systems, its subtle deductions and endless ramifications of
proof and counter-proof, drew away attention from the facts of nature.
The oriental brain studied itself and its own workings to the point
of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to the certainties of
revelation. Under this spell heresy and orthodoxy proved alike sterile.
We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu‘tazilites. These served
themselves heirs upon the Qadarites and denied that God predestined
the actions of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and external
vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God’s _qadar_, but it was
unthinkable that man should be punished for actions not in his control.
The freedom of the will is an _a priori_ certainty, and man possesses
_qadar_ over his own actions. This was the position of Wasil ibn Ata, of
whom we have already heard. But to it he added a second doctrine, the
origin of which is obscure, although suggestive of discussions with Greek
theologians. The Qur’an describes God as willing, knowing, decreeing,
etc.—strictly as the Willing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One,
etc.—and the orthodox hold that such expressions could only mean that
God possesses as Qualities (_sifat_) Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc.
To this Wasil raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities would
be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the Mu‘tazilites always called
themselves the People of Unity and Justice (_Ahl-at-tawhid wal‘adl_); the
Unity being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in that they
opposed God’s _qadar_ over men and held that He must do for the creature
that which was best for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there can
be no necessity upon God, even to do justice; He is absolutely free,
and what He does man must accept. It flatly opposes the position held
by the Mu‘tazilites in general, that good and evil can be perceived and
distinguished by the intellect (_aql_). Good and evil have their nature
by God’s will, and man can learn to know them only by God’s teachings and
commands. Thus, except through revelation, there can be neither theology
nor ethics.
[Sidenote: ABU HUDHAYL]
The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl Muhammad al-Allaf (d.
_circa_ 226), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil. At his
hands the doctrine of God’s qualities assumed a more definite form. Wasil
had reduced God to a vague unity, a kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl
taught that the qualities were not _in_ His essence, and thus separable
from it, thinkable apart from it, but that they _were_ His essence. Thus,
God was omnipotent by His omnipotence, but it _was_ His essence and not
in His essence. He was omniscient by His omniscience and it _was_ His
essence. Further, he held that these qualities must be either negations
or relations. Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that would
mean that there was in God the complexity of subject and predicate, being
and quality; and God is absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians
regard as a close approximation to the Christian Trinity; for them, the
persons of the Trinity have always been personified qualities, and such
seems really to have been the view of John of Damascus. Further, God’s
Will, according to Abu Hudhayl, as expressed in His Creative Word, did
not necessarily exist in a subject (_fi mahall_, _in subiecto_). When God
said, “Be!” creatively, there was no subject. Again, he endeavored—and in
this he was followed by most of the Mu‘tazilites—to cut down the number
of God’s attributes. His will, he said, was a form of His knowledge; He
knew that there was good in an action, and that knowledge was His will.
His position on the _qadar_ question was peculiar. With regard to this
world, he was a Qadarite; but in the next world, both in heaven and in
hell, he thought that all changes were by divine necessity. Otherwise,
that is, if men were free, there would be obligation to observe a law
(_taklif_); but there is no such obligation in the other world. Thus,
whatever happened there happened by God’s decree. Further, he taught
that, eventually, nothing would happen there; that there would be no
changes, but only an endless stillness in which those in heaven had all
its joys and those in hell all its pains. This is a close approximation
to the view of Jahm ibn Safwan, who held that after the judgment both
heaven and hell would pass away and God remain alone as He was in the
beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl seems to have been led by two
considerations, both significant for the drift of the Mu‘tazilites.
First, there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic touched with
utilitarianism. Thus, from their position that man could come by the
light of his reason to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew the
conclusion that it was man’s duty so to attain, and that God would damn
eternally every man who did not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out
strikingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at present, were
serving no useful purpose because they had no inhabitants; therefore, at
present, they did not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hudhayl.
What has a beginning must have an end. So he explained the end as the
ceasing of all changes. Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from
Greek philosophy. The Qur’an teaches that the world has been created in
time; Aristotle, that it is from eternity and to eternity. The creation,
Abu Hudhayl applied to changes; before that, the world _was_, but in
eternal rest. Hereafter, all changes will cease; rest will again enter
and endure to all eternity. We shall see how largely this doctrine was
advanced and developed by his successors.
But there were further complications in the doctrine of man’s actions and
into some of these we must enter, on account of their later importance.
Not everything that comes from the action of a man is by his action. God
has a creative part in it, apparently as regards the effects. Especially,
knowledge in the mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but from
God. The idea seems to be that the teacher may teach, but that the being
taught in the pupil is a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished
motions in the mind, which he held were not altogether due to the man,
and external motions which were. There is given, too, to a man at the
time of his performing an action an ability to perform the action, which
is a special accident in him apart from any mere soundness of health or
limb.
In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God’s working through man. Another
of his positions had a similar basis and was a curious combination of
historical criticism and mysticism, a combination which we shall find
later in al-Ghazzali, a much greater man. The evidence of tradition for
things dealing with the Unseen World (_al-ghayb_) he rejected. Twenty
witnesses might hand on the tradition in question, but it was not to be
received unless among them there was one, at least, of the People of
Paradise. At all times, he taught, there were in the world these Friends
of God (_awliya Allah_, sing. _wali_), who were protected against all
greater sins and could not lie. It is the word of these that is the basis
for belief, and the tradition is merely a statement of what they have
said. This shows clearly how far the doctrine of the ecstatic life and of
knowledge gained through direct intercourse between the believer and God
had already advanced.
But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of daring and absolutely
free-minded speculators. They were applying to the ideas of the Qur’an
the keen solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they obtained
were of the most fantastically original character. Thrown into the wide
sea and utter freedom of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the
bursting point and, more than even a German metaphysician, they had lost
touch of the ground of ordinary life, with its reasonable probabilities,
and were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate truth, wielding as
their weapons definitions and syllogisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad
in the Qur’an gave scope enough of strange ideas from which to start, or
which had to be explained away. Their belief in the powers of the science
of logic was unfailing, and, armed with Aristotle’s “Analytics,” they
felt sure that certainty was within their reach. It was at the court and
under the protection of al-Ma’mun that they especially flourished, and
some account of the leading spirits among them will be necessary before
we describe how they reached their utmost pride of power and how they
fell.
[Sidenote: AN-NAZZAM]
An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later historians of having made
use, to a high degree, of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He
was one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they; he read the books of
the philosophers and mingled their teachings with the doctrines of the
Mu‘tazilites. He taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do
nothing to a creature, either in this world or in the next, that was
not for the creature’s good and in accordance with strict justice. It
was not only that God _would_ not do it; He had not the power to do
anything evil. Evidently the personality of God was fast vanishing behind
an absolute law of right. To this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine
that God could do anything; He could forgive whom He willed, and punish
whom He willed. Further, he taught that God’s willing a thing meant only
that He did it in accordance with His knowledge; and when He willed
the action of a creature that meant only that He commanded it. This is
evidently to evade phrases in the Qur’an. Man, again, he taught, was
spirit (_ruh_), and the body (_badan_) was only an instrument. But this
spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the body like the essential
oil in a rose, or butter in milk. In a universe determined by strict
law, man alone was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the air,
and by his action the stone went up; but when the force of his throw was
exhausted it came again under law and fell. If he had only asked himself
how it came to fall, strange things might have happened. But he, and all
his fellows, were only playing with words like counters. Further, he
taught that God had created all created things at once, but that He kept
them in concealment until it was time for them to enter on the stage of
visible being and do their part. All things that ever will exist are thus
existing now, but, in a sense, _in retentis_. This seems to be another
attempt to solve the problem of creation in time, and it had important
consequences. Further, the Qur’an was no miracle (_mu‘jiz_) to him. The
only miraculous elements in it are the narratives about the Unseen World,
and past things and things to come, and the fact that God deprived the
Arabs of the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they could
easily have surpassed it as literature. As a high Imamite he rejected
utterly agreement and analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had the
right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad. We pass over some of his
metaphysical views, odd as they are. The Muslim writers on theological
history have classified him rightly as more of a physicist than a
metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness for playing with
metaphysical paradoxes which often goes with it.
[Sidenote: BISHR; MA‘MAR]
Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu‘tamir. His principal
contribution was the doctrine of _tawlid_ and _tawallud_, begetting and
deriving. It is the transmission of a single action through a series of
objects; the agent meant to affect the first object only; the effect on
the others followed. Thus, he moves his hand, and the ring on his finger
is moved. What relation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these
derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a complex of causes acting
together and across one another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is
worth giving at this point. God creates in the man the will to move his
hand; He creates the movement of the hand and also the movement of the
ring. All is by God’s direct creation at the time. Further, could God
punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of the faith? Bishr’s reply
on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid saying
frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His answer on the
second was that God could have made a different and much better world
than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He was
not bound to make a better world—in this Bishr separates from the other
Mu‘tazilites—He was only bound to give man free-will and, then, either
revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.
With Ma‘mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious.
He succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable
something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of
something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was
a union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the
divine nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma‘mar was evidently
on the road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on
the existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with
His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God’s Will. Nor could He be
described as _qadim_, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic,
suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our
conceptions cannot be applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us.
On creation, he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (_jisms_)
only were created by God, and by “substances” he seems to mean matter as
a whole; all changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from its
nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms; or of free-will, as always
in the animal world. God has no part in these things. He has given the
material and has nothing to do with the coming and going of separate
bodies; such are simple changes, forms of existence, and proceed from the
matter itself. Man is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man and
his body is but a cover. This true man can only know and will; the body
perceives and does.
The last of this group whose views we need consider, is Thumama ibn
Ashras. He was of very dubious morals; was imprisoned as a heretic by
Harun ar-Rashid, but highly favored by al-Ma’mun, in whose Khalifate
he died, A.H. 213. He held that actions produced through _tawallud_
had no agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could
be produced by _tawallud_ through speculation, and is, therefore, an
action without an agent, and required even before revelation. That
Jews, Christians, Magians will be turned into dust in the next world
and will not enter either Paradise or Hell; the same will be the fate
of cattle and children. That any one of the unbelievers who does not
know his Creator is excusable. That all knowledge is _a priori_. That
the only action which men possess is will; everything besides that is a
production without a producer. That the world is the act of God by His
nature, _i.e._, it is an act which His nature compels Him to produce;
is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with Him. It may be doubted
how far Thumama was a professional theologian and how far he was a
free-thinking, easy-living man of letters.
In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of Aristotle can be
clearly traced. With Aristotle had come to them the idea of the world
as law, an eternal construction subsisting and developing on fixed
principles. This conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly
at strife with Muhammad’s conception of God as will, as the sovereign
over all. Hence, the crudities and devices by which they strove to make
good their footing on strange ground and keep a right to the name of
Muslim, while changing the essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic
God of Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the
believer and settles Himself firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit,
and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind.
[Sidenote: THE VISION OF GOD]
It remains now only to touch upon one or two points common to all the
Mu‘tazilites. First, the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a
fixed agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on texts of the Qur’an
and on tradition, that some believers, at least, would see and gaze upon
God in the other world; this was the highest delight held out to them.
But the Mu‘tazilites perceived that vision involved a directing of the
eyes on the part of the seer and position on the part of the seen. God
must, therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they were compelled
to reject the agreement and the traditions in question and to explain
away the passages in the Qur’an. Similarly, in Qur’an vii. 52, we read
that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne. This, with other
anthropomorphisms of hands and feet and eyes, the Mu‘tazilites had to
explain away in a more or less cumbrous fashion.
With one other detail of this class we must deal at greater length. It
was destined to be the vital point of the whole Mu‘tazilite controversy
and the test by which theologians were tried and had their places
assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the
Mu‘tazilites. There had grown up very early in the Muslim community
an unbounded reverence and awe in the presence of the Qur’an. In it
God speaks, addressing His servant, the Prophet; the words, with
few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily
intelligible that it came to be called the word of God (_kalam Allah_).
But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had
existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may
have been brought forward later from the Qur’an itself, we can have no
difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian
Logos and that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damascus, has
again played a formative part. So, in correspondence with the heavenly
and uncreated Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this
uncreated and eternal Word of God; to the earthly manifestation in Jesus
corresponds the Qur’an, the Word of God which we read and recite. The
one is not the same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the
expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which we would gain
from the other, if the veil of the flesh were removed from us and the
spiritual world revealed.
[Sidenote: THE WORD OF GOD]
That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from
the fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward
the end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind
of transfusion of ideas from Christianity and not as a result of
controversy or dialectic about the teachings of the Qur’an. We find
the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion on the subject, as
indeed they did on all theological subjects. “Our fathers have told
us; it is the faith received from the Companions;” was their argument
from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas used to cut off all
discussions with “_Bila kayfa_” (Believe without asking how); and he held
strongly that the Qur’an was uncreated. The same word _kalam_ which we
have found applied to the Word of God—both the eternal, uncreated Logos
and its manifestation in the Qur’an—was used by them most confusingly for
“disputation;” “he disputed” was _takallam_ and “one who disputed” was
_mutakallim_. All that was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to
see the origin of what became later the technical terms for scholastic
theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all “talking
about” the sacred mysteries.
This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an
inch beyond the statements in the Qur’an and tradition and to draw
consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem
to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which
shows how far this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got
up against him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of
attack was the orthodoxy of his position on the _lafz_ (utterance) of the
Qur’an; was it created or uncreated? He said readily that the Qur’an was
uncreated and was obstinately silent as to the utterance of it by men.
At last, persistent questioning drove him to an outburst. “The Qur’an
is the Word of God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created and
inquisition (_imtihan_) is an innovation (_bid‘a_).” But beyond that he
would not go, even to draw the conclusion of the syllogism which he had
indicated. Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt themselves
driven to hold that not only the Qur’an in itself but also the utterance
of it by the lips of men and the writing of it by men’s hands—all between
the boards, as they said—was uncreated. Others were coming to deny
absolutely the existence of the eternal Logos and that this revealed
Qur’an was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bukhari, while
holding tenaciously that the Qur’an was uncreated, refused to make any
statement as to its utterance by men. There was nothing said about that
in Qur’an or tradition.
The second form of opposition was to any upholding of their belief by
arguments, except of the simplest and most apparent. That was an invasion
by reason (_aql_) of the realm of traditional faith (_naql_). When the
pious were eventually driven to dialectic weapons, their arguments show
that these were snatched up to defend already occupied positions. They
ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur’an itself, the Qur’an is
called “knowledge from God.” It is, then, inseparable from God’s quality
of knowledge. But that is eternal and uncreated; therefore, so too, the
Qur’an. Again, God created everything by the word, “Be.” But this word
cannot have been created, otherwise a created word would be a creator.
Therefore, God’s word is uncreated. Again, there stands in the Qur’an
(vii, 52), “Are not the creation and the command His?” The command
here is evidently different from the creation, _i.e._, not created.
Further, God’s command creates; therefore it cannot be created. But it
is God’s word in command. It will be noticed here how completely God’s
word is hypostatized. This appears still more strongly in the following
argument. God said to Moses, (Qur. vii, 141), “I have chosen thee over
mankind with my apostolate and my word.” God, therefore, has a word. But,
again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses Moses with this word (_kallama-llahu
Musa taklima_, evidently regarded as meaning that God’s word addressed
Moses) and said, “Lo, I am thy Lord.” This argument is supposed to put
the opponent in a dilemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being
so addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and is, therefore,
unbelief; or he holds that the _kalam_ which so addresses Moses is a
created thing. Then, a created thing asserts that it is Moses’ Lord.
Therefore, God’s _kalam_ with which He addresses the prophets, or which
addresses the prophets, is eternal, uncreated.
But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, opposition to it was
not slow in appearing, and that on different sides. Literary vanity,
national pride, and philosophical scruples all made themselves felt.
Even in Muhammad’s lifetime, according to the legend of the poet Labid
and the verses which he put up in challenge on the Ka‘ba, the Qur’an had
taken rank as inimitable poetry. At all points it was the Word of God
and perfect in every detail. But, among the Arabs, a jealous and vain
people, if there was one thing on which each was more jealous and vain
than another, it was skill in working with words. The superiority of
Muhammad as a Prophet of God they might endure, though often with a bad
grace; but Muhammad as a rival and unapproachable literary artist they
could not away with. So we find satire of the weaknesses of the Qur’an
appearing here and there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and
freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and balance it against
other products of the Arab genius. The rival productions of Musaylima,
the False Prophet, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and Abu
Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a treatise in defence of
the metaphors of the Qur’an. Among the Persians this was still more the
case. To them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also an Arab; and
while they accepted his mission, accepting his books in a literary way
was too much for them. As a prophet, he was a man; as a literary artist,
he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may have felt; so, certainly, others
felt later. The poet Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a
companion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubious orthodoxy, used
to amuse himself by comparing poems by himself and others with passages
in the Qur’an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn al-Muqaffa
(killed about 140), the translator of “Kalila and Dimna” and many other
books into Arabic, and a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an
imitation of the Qur’an.
[Sidenote: MU‘TAZILITE ATTITUDE]
Added to all this came the influence of the Mu‘tazilite theologians. They
had a double ground for their opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely
divine and perfect book limited them too much in their intellectual
freedom. They were willing to respect and use the Qur’an, but not to
accept its _ipsissima verba_. Regarded as the production of Muhammad
under divine influence, it could have a human and a divine side, and
things which needed to be dropped or changed in it could be ascribed to
the human side. But that was not possible with a miraculous book come
down from heaven. In a word, they were meeting the difficulty which has
been met by Christianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The least they could do was to deny that the Qur’an was uncreated.
But they had a still more vital, if not more important, philosophical
base of objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of
God’s qualities (_sifat_) and tried to limit them in every way. These
qualities ran danger, they held, of being hypostatized into separate
persons like those in the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how
near that danger really lay in the case of God’s _kalam_. In orthodox
Islam it has become a plain Logos.
The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting
as showing that the Qur’an, even then, was given as a probative miracle
(_mu‘jiz_) because it deprived all men of power (_i‘jaz_) to imitate it.
That is, its æsthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and
then regarded as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of
Bishr ibn al Mu‘tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of
the Mu‘tazilites, went still further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as
unbelievers all who held the eternity of the Qur’an; they had taken unto
themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men were quite capable of
producing a work even finer than the Qur’an in point of style. But the
force of this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality with which
he denounced his opponents in general as unbelievers. Stories are told
of him very much like those in circulation with us about those who hold
that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that upon this point of
salvability the Mu‘tazilites were even narrower than the orthodox.