The Gertrude Bell Jar

Ashura & Shiism

Ashura in New York. Great pictures, plus a very short history of the Shia/Sunni split from the Shia perspective:

It all started hours after Mohammad's death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad's burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet's named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement.

This is interesting for how much of the conventional Sunni narrative it leaves out, I think (you can see my summary here, if you skip down to the paragraph beginning “Following the death of Muhammad”; I didn’t know that I was summarizing Sunni-only accounts at the time that I wrote it). In the Sunni version, the split doesn’t date from the time of Abu Bakr, but from after the rule of all four “rightly-guided” Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, then finally Ali), and after the civil war over Ali’s succession. Then, finally, when the community accepts the rule of the Umayyads for sake of peace, this is when the Sunni accept the split between temporal and spiritual leadership the Umayyads represent, and the Shia do not. Presumably from the Sunni point of view, the problem doesn’t arise during the rule of the first four Caliphs because they believe those rulers were also legitimate spiritual leaders. A Sunni recounting of the tale will also never fail to mention that Abu Bakr was Mohammad’s father-in-law, and (possibly only according to Sunni sources?) the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife, Khadija. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sunni source mention that Ali was excluded from the shura council, or even note in passing that Shia Muslims complain that he was.

This kind of makes me wonder just how much the two groups differ in other areas of Muslim historiography. Shiism is pretty invisible in most mainstream scholarship on Islam, which rarely even bothers to note that Shia Muslims have radically different interpretations of some topics. Tmatt over at GetReligion frequently complains about the lack of attention journalists pay to explaining the differences between the two sects, but I have to say I’ve never come across a really good, comprehensive summary; I think I've probably only encountered a small slice of it in the course of reading other things.

Cook Lecture

I’m adding a new item to the sidebar, a transcript of a talk by Michael Cook, a scholar of medieval Islam and Islamic history, with follow-up questions from assorted journalists. He addresses questions of jihad, the status of Muhammad, the political nature of Islam, etc. etc. It covers a lot of a ground, it’s all worth a read. A new name for my infinitely lengthening "to read" list!

Apocalypse Then And Now

Well, the David Cook books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, have come in the mail, and dipping into the latter, I find that its relevance to parsing the public statements of our Shia Persian of interest will be uncertain, since Cook notes that he is focussing exclusively on Arab Sunni sources. (In his introduction to another book I found at the library, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, author Timothy R. Furnish states that he will deal exclusively with Sunni Mahdist movements, and further that he began working on correcting the misperception that Madhism is primarily a Shia phenomenon in his own doctoral dissertation, so perhaps that will be the best place for me to look for references to works that deal with Shia variants of Mahdism).

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature looks like it will be a profitable read nonetheless. See this, for example:

[One level] of the anti-Semitic conspiracy stems from the frustrations Muslims feel about their inability to deal with Israel and their inability to convince the larger world of the justice of their concerns.

He continues the thought in a footnote:

There is also the inability to understand the freedom of choice and the marketplace of ability created by a free society, which promotes the view that since the Jews are prominent in Western society (and are regarded as even more so by the exagerrations created by discovery of "hidden Jews"), there must be some conspiracy to explain this fact. Coming from a hierarchical society where ability is not necessarily rewarded and where it is more important to have a protective group supporting an individual than to get a good education and to work hard, the conspiracy accusation at this level is understandable.

Ah. The footnotes concludes, "See H. 'Abd-al Hamid (1996, 5-6)," but probably you don't want to, since the reference is to his work Yajuj and Majuj, or, Gog and Magog, so the book most likely presents an example of this phenomenon rather than a critique of it. On the other hand, it's an English translation, so go nuts if you want to, I guess.

Beyond this, it looks like Cook will be fleshing out one of the central claims in Bernard Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites, that modern Arab anti-Semitism is almost entirely dependent on European and Christian sources and influences for its theory, and pretty much dates from the latter half of the 20th Century. As Lewis explains, though Jews and Christians were indeed thought inferior and assigned secondary dhimmi status and subject to many special restictions in Islamic civilizations, the notion that Jews are any kind of threat to Muslims is a modern one. After all, in Islamic history the Muslims triumphed over Jews on the battlefield, and though the Jews did plot to kill Jesus, they were too incompetent to succeed (Muslims believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross and was simply taken bodily into heaven by God rather than resurrected). Persecution of Jews in Islamic civilization did occasionally occur, but was exceptionally rare as compared to Europe, which is why Muslim lands were a haven for European Jews during the European Middle Ages.

Cook states that the so-called "rocks and trees" hadith,

The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’

which is cited repeatedly by Islamists and apocalypticists alike (and even appears verbatim in the Hamas Charter) is actually the only hadith or reference of any kind in classic Muslim apocalyptic literature which assigns the Jews a particular role in the end times, and that in some versions of the hadith, the Jews are not mentioned at all. This is too slender a reed for contemporary apocalyptic writers who want to connect theories about the end times to the International Jewish Conspiracy, so they tend to lean heavily instead on sources from outside the Islamic tradition, chiefly Biblical passages, European anti-Semitic writing (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a core text), and all manner of Western crackpot books on topics like the Masons and UFOs.

The Emperor Has Fabulous Clothes

An interesting exhibit at the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian: Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey. It’s closing January 22nd, but perhaps the online tour will be up a bit longer than that.

Notes on Aisha

I encountered the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile (or "pedophile rapist" to be precise) again the other day in comments to a blog, and while it never seems quite worthwhile to answer this in blog comments, since the issue of Aisha’s age at marriage is complicated enough to take a bit of doing to discuss in full, and the person raising the issue rarely seems interested in hearing contradictory evidence anyway, I thought I would just do an entry here that I could link back to the next time the temptation to respond arises.

The Wikipedia article on Aisha has a good summary of the conflicting traditions and histories about Aisha’s age at marriage to Muhammad, and also of the difficulties resolution of this controversy pose to Islamic theological method. Another critic of the story that Aisha was married at the age of nine goes further and attacks the credibility of the narrator of the main hadith in question (the most important ones are attributed to Aisha, but hadith were preserved only as an oral tradition for about 170 years; M. Amir Ali is challenging the credibility of the transmitter of traditions attributed to Aisha and others, which were in turn collected and authenticated by al-Bukhari et al), finding also a few more hadith in addition to the historical sources cited in the Wikipedia article that seem to conflict with the marriage at nine story.

So that’s about as clear as mud. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the story clearly has been garbled in the transmission one way or the other. Why has 9 prevailed over the more customary marriage age of 13 or post-puberty for Arabs, which some sources also support as the marriage age for Aisha, in Muslim historiography? I think a partial answer may be found in D.A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr.

Spellberg relates two lists of attributes supposedly recited by Aisha herself in the works of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d. They are both related in the first person; the first is introduced with the words: I was preferred above the [other] wives of the Prophet by ten [attributes]:

1. He [Muhammad] married no other wife as a virgin except me.
2. He didn’t marry anyone else whose mother and father were both emigrants.
3. Allah sent down my innocence from heaven.
4. Gabriel brought him [Muhammad] my likeness in silk from heaven saying, "Marry her for she is your wife."
5. He and I used to wash from a single vessel and he didn’t do that with any of his wives except me.
6. He used to pray when I was in his presence. He did that with none of his wives except me.
7. He received revelation while he was with me. This didn’t happen when he was with any of his other wives.
8. He [Muhammad] died in my arms.
9. He died on a night which had been turned over to me.
10. He was buried under my house.

And introducing a second list, Aisha says "I received attributes which were not granted [any other] wife."

1. The Prophet of Allah took me as his wife when I was a girl of seven.
2. The angel brought Muhammad my likeness in the palm of his hand.
3. He [Muhammad] consummated the marriage when I was nine.
4. I saw Gabriel and no other wife saw him except me.
5. I was the most beloved of his wives.
6. My father was the most beloved of his companions.
7. The Prophet of Allah fell ill in my house.
8. I nursed him.
9. Muhammad died and no one witnessed it except myself and the angels.

Spellberg observes:

Four factors found in the two lists of Ibn Sa'd make specific mention of A'isha's marriage. In the first list, A'isha states that she was the only woman the Prophet married "as a virgin." (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8:58, 63; ibn Hisham, Kitab sirat rasul Allah, v.1 pt.2: 1001). This obviously prized though fleeting physical asset allowed A'isha to remind her husband that all his other wives, as widows, had been physically intimate with other men. Reference to her unique virginity, narrated on A'isha's authority, caused the Prophet to smile (Ibn Sa'd, 8:80). A'isha's virginity, defined as a special attribute, emphasizes her sexuality as the Prophet's marital prize, a mark of distinction which supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity. Unlike the Prophet's daughter Fatima, whose designation in later medieval sources as al-Batul, "the virgin," will allow her transcend aspects of more mundane female biology, not in the conception of her children but in matters of menstruation and parturition, A'isha's virginity merits no honorary epithet, but remains part of her sensual legacy as the Prophet's spouse.

The second list confirms the particulars of the marriage by explaining that A'isha was seven when she married the Prophet and nine when the union was consummated. A'isha's age is a major preoccupation in Ibn Sa'd where her marriage age varies between six and seven; nine seems constant as her age at the marriage's consummation. (Ibn Sa'd, 8: 58-62, where hadith concerning her age are repeated more than ten times. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4: 71.; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6: 118. Both al-Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal maintain the ages as six and nine.) Only Ibn Hisham's biography of the Prophet mentions that A'isha may have been ten years old when the Prophet consummated the marriage (Ibn Hisham, v.1 pt.2: 1001). All of these specific references to the bride's age reinforce A'isha's pre-menarcheal status and, implicitly, her virginity. They also suggest the variability of A'isha's age in the historical record. (For disputed date of birth, see al-Tabari, Ta'rikh, 4: 2135 and its contradiction within the same chronicle, 4: 1262. For her death date at sixty-seven, not sixty-six, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-a'yan, 3: 16).

So firstly it seems that a pre-menarchal age was always attributed to Aisha in early sources; it is only where this indirectly trips up other methods of historical dating linked to Aisha that we see any real disagreement. Secondly, her young age and therefore indisputable virginity were seen by her biographers (and perhaps Aisha herself if we can trust the sources) as evidence of her specialness to the Prophet.

And why is the specialness of Aisha important in Muslim history? Spellberg notes that Ibn Sa’d and the other medieval historians she quotes were writing just around the time when the ongoing dispute among Muslims about the status of Ali had finally been formalized into a sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Muhammad had died leaving no male children who survived into adulthood. Community leaders chose Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, as the first successor to Muhammad. Some members of the community thought that Ali, the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, should have been chosen instead. However, Ali was passed over two more times, in favor of Umar and Uthmann. When Ali was finally chosen as the fourth caliph to succeed Muhammad, Aisha led part of the community into a battle to prevent his succession. The battle was a bloodbath, but more so for Aisha’s side, and Ali assumed the Caliphate (but was soon thereafter assassinated, and the Umayyad dynasty began its rule of the Ummah).

Aisha’s presumed special status is understood by Sunni Muslims as evidence for the legitimacy of Abu Bakr as Caliph, and therefore implicitly the whole chain of succession after him, since the subsequent decisions of the leaders of the community are implicitly validated by the legitimacy of the first one. And Aisha herself was deeply involved in these controversies, and may have exaggerated some aspects of her history in order to legitimate herself (according to a standard that "supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity" to be sure) following her instigation of a battle that nearly destroyed the Ummah.

Or maybe Aisha really was nine when she married Muhammad. In a discussion on the islamicfeminist community (which unfortunately has since been deleted, and was also where I found the links above) at LiveJournal, one commenter noted that it was probably time for Muslims to begin taking a more anthropological view of Muhammad and the original Muslim community, viewing them as products of a very different society from ours in the far past, instead of treating every single thing they did as exemplary, and falling into the "trap" of trying to justify every aspect of their history, good or bad. This is probably easier said than done, since so much Islamic theology and jurisprudence uses the details of the lives of the Prophet and the Companions as guides to law and ethics. But it would simplify more than a few things, too.

History of the Arab Peoples/Albert Hourani

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani.

Geez, that took me long enough; I started this book many many months ago and have been reading it in tiny increments. It's just so hard to read while asleep, isn't it? Hourani is not at all boring as historians go, but I am so not History Girl. Anyhoo, this is a survey of Arab history from the time of Muhammad to the present day, in about 450 pages and with tons of helpful maps and dynastic lists and references and whatnot in the back, and cover endorsements by both Daniel Pipes and Edward Said, due to the almost inhumanly careful balance maintained on controversial issues like Israel. Hourani has a very elegant writing style and is a pleasure to read. But still, the book contains a prodigious amount of facts about dead people, so what are you gonna do?

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past/D.A. Spellberg

Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr by D.A. Spellberg.

Aisha is a pivotal figure in the Sunni/Shia split in Islam; a wife of Muhammad, her father was the first of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs in the Sunni version of Islamic history, and she later took the field to lead the opposition to Ali, the Shia candidate for legitimate successor to Muhammad. This book is a careful review of the treatment of Aisha in Medieval Islamic sources, tracing how the legacy of Aisha, with respect to the Shia/Sunni divide, Islamic notions of the feminine ideal, and theological positions on the role of women in society and politics, was shaped by the editing of and commentary on hadith literature relating to Aisha by both Sunni and Shia scholars. A good example of how interpretation of Islamic texts has been contingent on changing social and political contexts, in relatively lucid prose for an academic work.

Semites and Anti-Semites/Bernard Lewis

Semites and Anti-Semites: an Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice by Bernard Lewis.

A concise overview of the history and practice of anti-Semitism, including the nature of anti-Semitism in Europe, the somewhat nonsensical meaning of the word "Semite" (and its coinage, along with "anti-Semite," by a social Darwinist in an attempt to put a "scientific" gloss on Jew-hating), the traditional position of and attitudes towards Jews in Islamic civilization, the importation and flowering of European-style anti-Semitism in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel and the end of WWII, and some notes on distinguishing anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism in the current discourse on the Israel/Palestine issue. Extremely useful for anyone trying to follow this discourse in the media and academia.

Islam & Politics, Early History

Here's a stab at beginning to answer this notion, spotted frequently on some of the pro-war blogs I read, that the religion of Islam is inherently and irredeemably toxic. I've been putting this off for a while because for one thing I have limited confidence in my own bloviating on this subject (the sudden discovery of previously unsuspected false assumptions continuing to be a regular and frequent consequence of more reading, with no signs of tapering off), and for another I don't really know where to start.

At the beginning, I guess. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe residing in Mecca, a small urban community that thrived as a stop along a trade route and as something of a pilgrimage site because a polytheistic temple (the altar of which survives as the Kaaba) was located in the town. He was hired as the agent of a wealthy widow and tradeswoman (Khadija), and would have encountered Jewish and Christian communities while traveling north on her business. Khadija married Muhammad, and became the first convert to Islam when Muhammad told her of his visions of the angel Gabriel. A small number of Meccans converted to Islam (Abu Bakr being the first or one of the first among them, which will become important later), but on the whole monotheism received a cold reception in Mecca, not least because the gods populating the local temple were an important source of commerce from pilgrims. When Muhammad found himself being denounced and derided by members of his own tribe, he and his community of believers accepted an invitation from the Jewish and Christian communities (collectively referred to in the Koran as the Ansar, or "helpers") of Medina to shelter there. This remove is known as the Hejira, and the Muslim calendar dates from the year of this event.

At this point in time, only a small portion of the population of the Arabian peninsula was urbanized. Most Arabs were still organized into Bedouin tribes, and relations between tribes were mostly defined by warfare. Each tribe had its own god, and would routinely raid other tribes for treasure and slaves. The god of the loser would be smashed and repudiated by his or her previous adherents who had escaped the raid intact, and who would then sometimes adopt the god of the victors as evidently the stronger deity.

Muhammad sought to convert the Arabs to Islam by warfare in a similar fashion. For one thing, victory in warfare was the major sign of the efficacy of any god in the minds of the Arabs; for another, monotheism offered the promise, ultimately, of peace. Muhammad's innovation was to offer prisoners of war the option of conversion to Islam and membership in the Muslim community rather than execution or enslavement; his theory was that once all the Arabs were united under the god of Abraham, war itself would cease. In this theory and in this context, warfare for the sake of Islam was understood to be basically defensive, it being only a matter of time before any prosperous community, including any community of Muslims if it gained any traction or success, would be attacked and raided by another under a different banner. (The notion of preemptive "defensive" warfare, with the additional. purpose of creating the conditions for a more permanent peace, will perhaps be familiar to those following current events). In essence, the goal was to replace warring tribal affiliations with shared Muslim confessional identity as the basis of community.

Muhammad launched his military campaign from Medina in the period following the Hejira, and about half the verses of the Koran record the revelations of the Prophet from this period. Most of the Koranic sura announcing murderous intentions towards unbelievers and particularly polytheists date from this period; so does the Dhimmi contractual relationship between Muslims and non-Muslim "peoples of the Book," Jews and Christians. The notion at the time was total warfare against polytheists and death to those who would not convert, but tolerance of Jews and Christians within conquered communities, in recognition partly of their shared confessional relationship to the god of Abraham, and partly of the assistance of the Ansar of Medina. The Dhimmi authorizes a diminished role and certain limitations on the rights of Jews and Christians under Muslim rule; where Jews and Christians resisted Muslim conquest, they were fought and sometimes slaughtered as well. Sura from this period also both authorize the making and honoring of peace contracts with unbelievers, and breaking them when necessary for some strategic purpose or other.

Various Koranic sura relating to the initial Muslim conquest are frequently cited as evidence that Muslims believe they are enjoined by God to be in a state of permanent warfare with non-Muslims until conversion is universal. The notion of jihad, which signifies the faithful struggle towards any goal of the faith, including purely spiritual and ethical ones, is objectified as a central tenet of Islam, and defined primarily as "holy war." Both of these propositions are basically Islamist propaganda; commentators who urge us to "take what our enemies say seriously" err in assuming that these interpretations describe Islam itself rather than Islamism. In fact the word jihad is used in many contexts in the Koran, and the history of Islamic civilization is clearly not one of endless proselytizing warfare.

The Islamist interpretation of the Koran and Hadith represents a deep rupture with traditional Islam, which has been modified and qualified over time within specific political realities, most importantly the gulf that quickly emerged between Muhammad's ideal community of believers and the type of political organization subsequent generations were able to achieve. Muhammad instituted no church and chose no successors; the community of believers would eventually divide permanently over questions of succession and political legitimacy, and ultimately the story of assassinations and civil war surrounding these events would become, in Muslim consciousness, a story about why the Muslim community had a Caliph rather than an Imam at its head.

Following the death of Muhammad, the Companions of the Prophet decided to select Abu Bakr as successor to Muhammad's political and spiritual headship of the Muslim community. Abu Bakr was both an early convert to Islam, and the father of Aisha, one of Muhammad's wives (who had collectively been given the title Mothers of the Believers by Muhammad during his lifetime). Some members of the community felt that Ali ibn Abi Talib, both a cousin of Muhammad's and the husband of his daughter Fatima (the only child of Muhammad to both survive to adulthood and produce male progeny, Hasan and Husayn), and an early convert, should have succeeded, but he was passed over two more times, following the natural death of Abu Bakr a year later. Umar, another father-in-law of Muhammad's and an early Qurayshi convert, followed; his rule was ended with his death by private vengeance. Uthmann, another Qurayshi early Companion related to Muhammad by marriage was next. He was assassinated for political reasons; supporters of Ali were suspected. When Ali was finally chosen as successor, Aisha led the opposition to him in the Battle of the Camel, the first Muslim civil war. Aisha's faction was crushed, but Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, a close kinsman of Uthmann's (and a somewhat distant one of Muhammad's), challenged Ali's rule. After the two parties fought to a draw, they entered a period of negotiation during which Ali was assassinated, whereupon Mu'awiya assumed the Caliphate. Succession was basically hereditary from this point forward, passing from the Umayyad to the Abbasid branch of the Quraysh about a hundred years later.

Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthmann, and Ali are regarded as the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs of Islam, or el-Rashidun, by Sunni Muslims; Shia, or "partisans of Ali," regard the first three as usurpers, and Ali and his descendants as the rightful heirs to Muhammad's leadership of the community of Muslims (or Ummah). Both groups regard the Umayyads and the Caliphs who succeeded them as usurpers, but made their peace with this political reality in different ways.

Sunni Muslims base their belief in the legitimacy of the first four on their status as those selected by the consensus of the community arising from mutual consultation and deliberation (shura), and to a wealth of Hadith literature indicating Muhammad's preference for Abu Bakr during his lifetime, which Shia Muslims reject. The ascension of the Umayyads and the hereditary caliphate robbed the ulema (originally Companions of the Prophet and later the religious scholars who succeeded in their capacity as spiritual leaders of the Ummah) of their role in selecting their own political leader. However, the ulema elected to accept Mu'awiya's rule rather than engage in further warfare. This decision was based on numerous warnings against fitna, or rebellion, found in the Koran, and on a Koranic sura enjoining Muslims to obey "those who rule over you." From the ascension of Mu'awiya forward, Sunni Muslims have not regarded the Caliph as the spiritual leader or Imam of the Ummah in the way that Muhammad and the Rashidun were. Instead, the Caliph was required only to be a Muslim and to act as a sort of custodian of Islam, instituting the Shari'a through his courts and providing a social order within which Islam could flourish. The ulema would act as intermediaries between the people and their ruler, and would in some cases act as government officials, for example as judges in Shari'a courts, but would never again have a direct role in governing. In fact entire areas of administrative, commercial and civil law were instituted that had no relationship to Shari'a, the Koran being silent on many matters that concern an empire. (The Sunni attitude towards the caliphate somewhat resembled the European notion of the divine right of kings, though the ulema never had even a ceremonial role in legitimizing each new ruler).

Shia Muslims, in contrast, have never been so accepting of the authority of the Caliph, but can trace the bloodline of Ali only to his 12th descendant, Muhammad al-Muntazar, who disappeared in 874. There are many different Shia sects, but the largest one believes that this hidden or occulted Imam will someday reappear as the Mahdi, to provide legitimate and true guidance to the Ummah once again. The nature of this expectation is somewhat similar to that of Christians for the Second Coming; not even Ayatollah Khomeini dared to claim the title (though some of the more sycophantic mullahs would give it to him from time to time). The notion of the occulted Imam permits Shia Muslims to tolerate imperfect and Islamically illegitimate rulers while they wait; their traditional political stance has been quietism coupled with a culture of vigorous Islamic interpretation and debate to supply the missing guidance of the Mahdi.

Some aspects of the two foregoing paragraphs, it strikes me, might be revisionist history. There is some evidence that the Umayyads at least regarded themselves as rightful successors to Muhammad, and the mainstream of Islamic scholarship did not begin calling itself Sunni ("of the tradition") and the partisans of Ali Shia until the 4th century of Islamic scholarship. Previously, Shiism had merely been a stubborn and growing strain of criticism of the Muslim status quo. Sunni representation of the immediate period following the death of the Prophet may well be an attempt to legitimate the actual political development of this status quo long after the fact, in a way that accommodated the most stinging of Shia criticism while holding onto the legitimacy of the Rashidun by treating the ascension of the Umayyads rather than that of Abu Bakr as the critical change-point in Islamic leadership. Certainly representation of pivotal figures in the crisis of succession such as Aisha underwent substantial revision in medieval Muslim scholarship in a similar attempt to incorporate Shia criticism while maintaining the authority of Abu Bakr and Aisha and all the Hadith attributed to their authority. But for our purposes the point is how this way of understanding the Muslim past legitimated the disconnect between religious and political authority in the entire ensuing history of Islamic civilization, until the 20th Century.

That history is difficult to summarize. Following the Abbasid dynasty, the Caliphate breaks up a bit--in his industrious youth Mr. Bell Jar made a chart of all the dynasties that ruled all the various lands of Islamic civilization throughout its history, and between the monochrome Abbasids and Ottomans is a riot of color--but in general, Muhammad had united the Arabian peninsula during his lifetime, and subsequent rulers continued the expansion, though the lands of Islam were not always united under one Caliph. The name of jihad was given to many of these wars of conquest, but in most instances they were undertaken for the same reason any empire expands: acquisition of wealth and territory, strategic protection of existing possessions, etc. The notion of jihad in this history reflects imperial confidence in the superiority of its own rule over that existing in the lands it is conquering rather than a fanatical religious motivation for warfare. The idea of the Caliph as an Imam with a revolutionary and universalizing religious/political agenda was buried on the other side of the death of Ali, or so successors to the Caliphate must have hoped.

And so it stood for about 1400 years, more or less. (To be continued later, maybe ...)

More on Ijtihad

Further to my previous post, here's what Zubaidi has to say about ijtihad. (in Law and Power in the Islamic World):

It is commonly stated that in the Sunni schools, the 'gate of ijtihad was closed at some stage, often assumed to be the third or fourth century. The formation of the four schools and the recognition of their canonical status (to the detriment of others), it is assumed, 'fixed' the main contours of fiqh and substantive law, and left no room for ijtihad. Jurists from then on would follow the authority of the founders (taqlid), their canons being contained in the major texts and early commentaries. Rather than independent ijtihad, arguments and rulings would have to be sought in the existing corpus. It is further argued that the authoritative 'ijma [consensus] of previous generations was binding on jurists, thus further restricting the scope of ijtihad. This feature of Sunni schools is often advanced as a distinction from Shi'I fiqh, which sanctioned and required independent ijtihad, recognizing the rank of mujtahid as the highest in the clerical hierarchy. This is also the position challenged by modern reformers and fundamentalists alike, asserting their right to practice ijtihad to arrive at novel formulations in line with their respective projects.

Contrary to what we may be lead to expect from this proclamation of the closure of ijtihad, we find many jurists throughout the history of fiqh who exercised independent judgement to reach novel theoretical as well as substantive formulations. Hallaq (1997: 143-61; 1984) traces the controversy which resulted in the generalization of this position to the sixth century, when some Hanafi and Maliki jurists argued that there were no longer any mujtahids [persons qualified to engage in ijtihad], and that the practitioners of each school must follow authority. Their arguments were opposed by Hanbalis and some Shafi'is, who insisted on the necessity of ijtihad at all time, indeed on the religious duty (fardh kifaya) of the learned to practise it on behalf of the community. At issue in this argument was whether ijtihad is a necessary qualification for ifta' [the function of issuing fatwa or religious opinions], and that a mufti must be ipso facto a mujtahid. Hallaq states that until that point ijtihad was considered a necessary qualification, and one direction of the argument against the continuation of ijtihad was the denial of the necessity of this qualification for a mufti.

It seems, then, that the assertion of the closure of the gate of ijtihad became a common position in all the schools except the Hanbali. However, as Hallaq shows, this position cannot be sustained in the light of the actual legal developments in subsequent periods …Why, then, is this claim so persistent and insistent? And why have the modernists found it necessary to refute it? The answers to these questions are probably to be sought outside the confines of legal theory.

In politics, in other words. The struggle between traditionalists, reformers and Islamists is heavily freighted with questions of authenticity and religious authority. As Zubaidi explains in his introduction:

The quest for shari'a is multifaceted: social protestors seek justice from corrupt regimes in its terms, clerics seek to restore their authority by imposing it, conservatives seek patriarchal virtues in its commandments, and those same corrupt rulers seek legitimacy in adopting it. In practice it is an ideological project which has highly variable manifestations in the politics and legal systems of different countries, which will be explored in what follows.

Except for those of us who have to return your book half-read, sir. It's due back tomorrow. I've gotten up to the Ottoman reforms, though.

The history of shari'a is really interesting, and according to Zubaidi, the sources of authority through which it is formulated now are actually reversed in the sequence of its historical development:

The notion of shari'a rests on a theological base: it consists of rules and commands which have divine origin, first in the Quran, which is the word of God, then in the sunna of the Prophet, also of divine inspiration. The formula is clearly expressed by Calder: "The words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad (his sunna), being an embodiment of the divine command and expression of God's law (shari'a), were preserved by the Companions of the Prophet, in the form of discrete anedotes (hadith). These were transmitted orally through the generations and became the source of juristic discussion (fiqh)." (Calder 1993: v.1) The shari'a, then, rules of divine origin, is transmitted and developed through human agency. Fiqh is literally 'understanding,' the effort of pious men to understand and formulate the divine will. The historical shari'a, as it developed in texts and practices, is the work of fuqaha (plural of faqih, the practitioner of fiqh). The shari'a, then, as it came down to us, is largely man-made, based on exegesis, interpretations, analogies, and extensive borrowing from customary practices ('urf, recognized as a source of law) and existing Middle Eastern legal traditions, such as Babylonian, Jewish, and Arab, a well as possible adaptations of Roman law. This hybrid formation poses interesting questions for modern contexts of reform and of 'fundamentalism': both try to rescue the divine message from the man-made historical accretions, but come to quite different conclusions regarding the essence of the divine message …

In the order of exposition of the bases of shari'a, a hierarchy of sources are presented. Top of the hierarchy is the Quran, as the word of God, followed by prophetic tradition, the hadith, reports of the sayings of the Prophet, and the sunna. Ijma', consensus, is authoritative, springing from the Prophet's pronouncement, 'my community cannot agree on an error.' Qiyas, analogy (strictly a method rather than a source), comes next in the hierarchy of sources, followed by minor and not always agreed sources, such as istihsan, preference of jurists, and the more controversial 'aql, reason, and ra'y, jurist's opinion …

The chonology of the evolution of legal thought in the third century, according to Calder's account, is the following: the formulation of rules and reflection upon them comes first and is put forward in the terminology of ra'y, opinion. Eventually the justification of rules is sought in preceding juristic authority, such as Malik or Abu Hanifa. At a subsequent stage, and driven by competition between schools to justify their particular rules, arises the appeal to prophetic precedent, now developed in the discipline of 'ilm al-hadith, the compilation and verification of prophetic narrative. At this point there is a polemic of ahlu-al-hadith against ahlu-al-ra'y, one compounded by other intellectual and political contests between philosophers and mystics on the one side and jurists on the other, challenging the legitimacy of opinion and speculation not fully backed by prophetic precedent. The advocates of hadith win, and it then becomes obligatory to justify rules and procedures by derivation from prophetic precedent. The last stage is the introduction of scriptural sanction, the articulation of the rules so far developed to texts from the Quran. 'Chronologically the last state, this [scriptural sanction] became, ideologically, the first principle of Islamic legal justification … The Qur'an was an influence on the law, usually secondary and intrusive.' (Calder 1993: 218-19).

Zubaidi describes a process whereby the Ottomans later recapitulate this process somewhat by "Islamicizing" Turkish law, which is based on Turkish and Mongol tribal law and to a lesser extent the Persian model of kingship which had been adapted by the Abbasids. The law is not so much changed as recast in Islamic terms, retaining, for example, a fine-based punitive structure in penal law, alien to Islam, and articulating an upper limit (15%) on and rules regarding interest, which is entirely forbidden in Islam. The Ottomans then begin to "etatize" the shari'a in an attempt to competitively modernize in the face of military defeats from the West in the latter half of the 19th century; the crucial shift according to Zubaidi is to locate the notion of just authority not in the person of the ruler or in religious tradition, but in state institutions. (In between the development of shari'a and the secularization of the Ottoman, Zubaidi lays out the history of the shifting roles of clerics and sultans, essentially secular rulers with religious imprimatur, and how they legitimate and sometimes challenge each other over time.)

There's a whole chapter on the Islamic Republic of Iran! Too bad I can't seem to absorb this stuff for more than an hour or two at a time. Oh well, maybe I can get the Calder. Also, considering my library copy of The Neglected Duty got recalled too, maybe somebody here is going to write something cool about all this eventually.