Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (13 page)

In fact, Hanbal did not even consider these People of Reason to be Muslims, even going so far as to advocate their execution. Anyone who declared that the Qur’an was “created,” he said, must be asked to repent; if he refuses, he must be killed.
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Luckily, Hanbal had no law enforcement under his command to execute his enemies. Yet his followers were able to be intimidating in different ways. Once, an ascetic from Tarsus (Asia Minor) named Ahmad al-Sarrak, a proponent of the “created Qur’an” view, arrived in Baghdad. Hearing about the man’s “heresy,” Hanbal commanded that no one sit with him. The humiliated al-Sarrak fled to Abadan, but an associate of Hanbal’s convinced the ruler there to have a crier announce at all the inns that no one was to sit with him, and the poor man was expelled from that city as well.
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Hanbal’s own alternative to reason as a source in religion was twofold. In matters of theology, it was a simple and blunt dogmatism. For example, he simply refused to discuss the meanings of some of the ambiguous verses in the Qur’an—such as the ones about God’s “face” or “throne.” All such mysteries, Hanbal argued, had to be accepted
bila kayf
(without asking how). That term would soon become a theological principle for his followers.

Hanbal’s second emphasis, which was the basis for his whole notion of jurisprudence, was the “tradition” (Sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad—which we shall now examine more closely.

S
UNNA VERSUS
R
EASON

All Muslims deeply respect Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, so his tradition is invaluable for all of them. But exactly what his tradition means, and how it should be understood, is disputed. This was, at the very least, a serious bone of contention in the ninth century.

In the eyes of the People of Reason, the Prophet was the most righteous interpreter and practitioner of the Qur’an, but he did not possess any special, suprahuman wisdom. The Qur’an included all the revelation God transmitted to the Prophet, and he, as “the first of the Muslims,” followed the scripture just as all other Muslims are supposed to do.
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Thus, a Muslim would already be following the example of the Prophet if he follows the Qur’an and uses his judgment when faced with new questions. The Qur’an, after all, constantly calls men to
aqala
, to reason.

The People of Tradition disagreed. Since they were unhappy with the “excess of reason,” to put it mildly, they had to find some authority that would limit the scope of reason, which they saw as an instrument of temptation and deviation. That’s why, in their eyes, the tradition of the Prophet became an all-encompassing source of wisdom that defined everything. Ahmad Hanbal was famous for never having eaten a single watermelon because he could find no precedent for that in the tradition of the Prophet.
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In another instance, he is reported to have asked his wife Rayhana to stop wearing a certain kind of shoe because “it didn’t exist in the Prophet’s time.”
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This new understanding of the Sunna was a radical break from a liberal maxim that earlier scholars of the Shariah, such as Abu Hanifa, subscribed to: “The primary principle is permission.”
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This meant that liberty was to be presumed as the natural human condition and not abridged without reason.
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But in Hanbal’s world, only what could be proven to be in the Sunna was permitted. Some fundamentalist Muslims today, who refuse such “innovations” as democracy by arguing that “the Prophet did not vote,” are echoing this very same mindset.
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To be fair, not all People of Tradition were as rigid as Hanbal. His teacher, al-Shafi, was a little more flexible, and some have defined al-Shafi’s school as “semi-rationalist.”
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Al-Shafi’s teacher, Malik, was even a little more adaptable, for he and his Medina-based community subscribed to the “living tradition” of the Prophet, whose scope was more modest than the all-encompassing tradition adhered to by Hanbal and his followers.

These names—Hanbal, al-Shafi, and Malik—are important, for they were the founders of three of the four major Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Among them, al-Shafi’s school became the most definitive, for the method that he devised soon became the norm for others. The “Shafi revolution” would be so significant, and rule-setting, that even the students of Abu Hanifa, the standard-bearer for the People of Reason, would have to conform to it and thus withdraw from some of the rationalism espoused by their teacher.

T
HE
R
ISE OF THE
H
ADITHS

Al-Shafi’s impact on Islamic jurisprudence is quite complex, but at its core lies the elevation of the prophetic tradition (Sunna) to the level of the Qur’an. He envisioned the Prophet—who until then had been widely seen as an interpreter and practitioner of God’s law—as a second “lawgiver” whose words and deeds were as authoritative as the Qur’an.
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Hence, it started to matter whether the Prophet really ate watermelons—and how he dressed, ate, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and grew his beard.

By the time al-Shafi developed his theory, almost two centuries had passed since the death of the Prophet, so figuring out his Sunna was no easy task. There was a “living Sunna” that encapsulated such practices as the way daily prayers should be performed, which had been transmitted from the Prophet’s time in an unbroken chain of observance. But in an age when there when no archives, records, or newspapers, how could anyone find out what the Prophet had said or done in a particular situation two centuries earlier?

Al-Shafi, Hanbal, and their adherents found their answers in the Hadiths, or sayings, attributed to the Prophet and allegedly witnessed by his closest companions. (That’s why they were called
ahl al-hadith
, the People of Hadith.) These narratives were actually hearsay—what people believed, or claimed to believe, to be accurate reports from the Prophet’s era. “One day I saw the Prophet walking toward the mosque,” for example, a Hadith would recount from one of the Prophet’s companions. Then this would be supported by an account of the six or seven people, on average, who heard the story from one another: “This is what Al-Imam Tirmithi narrated through Ibn Mahdi from At-Thawri from Waasil and Mansour and Al-A’mash from Abee Wae’l from Amr ibn Shurahbeel from Ibn Mas’oud who said . . .”

Of course—as in “telephone game”—it was highly optimistic to think that the original message could have survived such a long chain of transmitters. The presence of so many embellished stories only intensified the challenge. The Qur’an was written down during the Prophet’s lifetime, and canonized right after his death, but the Hadiths were simply oral traditions. That’s why it was an open field for anyone who wanted to put some alleged word into the mouth of the Prophet in order to justify a view to which he subscribed, or an interest he wanted to pursue. The very fact that the Hadiths became more authoritative under al-Shafi and other People of Tradition added to the motivation for fabrication.

Hence, at the turn of the second century after the Prophet’s death, Islamdom became a Hadith wasteland, with traditions justifying almost every view. Arab nationalists made up narratives showing the Prophet as an Arab supremacist; others soon responded with Hadiths praising the virtues of Persians or Turks.
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Another motivation was simple self-interest. “Eating flour cookies makes man stronger,” one Hadith read, and it was no accident that the man who put this into circulation, Muhammed b. Hajjaj Mahai, was selling—guess what?—flour cookies.
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Other forgeries were clearly designed to denounce the schools of thought that the People of Tradition despised. “Two groups in my community were cursed by seventy prophets,” one such Hadith declared, allegedly citing the Prophet. “They are the Qadariya and the Murjia.”
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These two groups were, as we have seen, the defenders of free will and the pluralist Postponers. There was an apparent absurdity here, for these groups had emerged several decades after the Prophet’s death so he had never known about them. But while the Prophet of the Qur’an was a modest man who said, “I am only a mortal like you,”
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and “I do not know the unseen,”
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the Hadiths had already turned him into an omniscient prognosticator who knew everything about the future.

This aggrandized and manipulated Prophet could also comment on the rulers who came after him and say such incredible things as, “God writes down only the good deeds of the ruler and not the evil ones.”
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This was probably a forgery put in circulation during the early eighth century in order to justify the tyranny and corruption of the Umayyad caliphs.

Another very interesting Hadith seems to have been devised specifically to denounce those who did not show enough obedience to the Hadith reports: “Let me find no one of you reclining on his couch,” the Prophet allegedly says in it, “who, when confronted with an order of permission or prohibition from me, says: ‘I do not know [whether this is obligatory or not]; we will follow only what we find in the Book of God.’ ”
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At the turn of Islam’s second century, everyone, including the most dedicated supporters of the Hadiths, knew that there was a staggering number of forged traditions. The People of Tradition just claimed that it was possible to sort out the authentic ones from the forgeries, and that they had the authority to make that evaluation. Thus, beginning with Ahmad Hanbal himself, they started to compile the narratives, work out their chains of transmitters, and create collections of
sahih
(sound) Hadiths. The most prominent of these scholars, al-Bukhari, is said to have chosen 2,602 Hadiths from a pool of more than 300,000. This gives an idea of not only the number of inauthentic Hadiths that were present at the time but also the likelihood that al-Bukhari would have sorted out only the authentic ones.

Yet soon the
Sahih Bukhari
and the Hadith collections of five other scholars became highly respected, and even sanctified, among the People of Tradition. Some even started to argue that these Hadiths were so authoritative that they could abrogate the Qur’an. (This theory of abrogation was among al-Shafi’s inventions.)
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This ascendance of the tradition (Sunna), which was constructed two centuries after the Prophet it claimed to represent, would lead to the creation of what French historian Maxime Rodinson calls “the post-Qur’anic ideology.” And this would be quite different from that of the Qur’an, which “accord[ed] a greater role to reasoning and rationality.”
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“T
OWARD
S
TRICTNESS AND
R
IGORISM
”

The ascendance of the People of Tradition marked a turning point in the history of Islamdom. With their introduction of a huge number of Hadiths as authoritative religious injunctions, the scope of rational inquiry was minimized, and the Shariah became a much more rigid set of rules. The whole tendency, notes Joseph Schacht, a leading Western scholar on Islamic law, was “toward strictness and rigorism.”
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Ironically, while zealously opposing rationality as a dangerous “innovation,” the People of Tradition brought their own innovations to the Shariah, such as the stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates, social limitations on women, bans on art and music, and punishments for wine drinking and other sorts of sinful behavior. None of these are in the Qur’an; all of them are in the Hadiths.

What really brought about this hardening of the Shariah was the projection of the customs and values of the medieval Orient back to the Prophet. The degradation of women’s rights was one example. In fact, the Qur’an and thus the Prophet had taken a great leap forward, “endowing them with property and some other rights, and giving them a measure of protection against ill treatment by their husbands. . . . But the position of women remained poor, and worsened when, in this as in so many other respects, the original message of Islam lost its impetus and was modified under the influence of pre-existing attitudes and customs.”
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These “pre-existing attitudes and customs” crept into the Shariah via Hadiths attributed to the Prophet. The seclusion of women was a case in point. The Qur’an ordered seclusion only for the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, as a sign of their unique status. Yet in the Byzantine and Persian cultures that Muslims gradually adopted, it was customary for upper-class women to be secluded from all men but their own. The egalitarianism of Islam paradoxically spread this upper-class seclusion, and “the Qur’anic injunctions to propriety were stretched, by way of hadith, to cover the fashionable latter-day seclusion.”
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