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| UNDERSTANDING THE FOUR MADHHABSthe problem with anti-madhhabism[revised edition] © Abdal-Hakim Murad as appeared in Brother Mas'ud Khan Home page (http://ds.dial.pipex.com/masud) The ummah's greatest
achievement over the past
millennium has undoubtedly been its internal intellectual cohesion. From the
fifth century of the Hijra almost to the present day, and despite the outward
drama of the clash of dynasties, the Sunni Muslims have maintained an almost
unfailing attitude of religious respect and brotherhood among themselves. It is
a striking fact that virtually no religious wars, riots or persecutions divided
them during this extended period, so difficult in other ways.
The history of religious movements
suggests that this is an unusual outcome. The normal sociological view, as
expounded by Max Weber and his disciples, is that religions enjoy an initial
period of unity, and then descend into an increasingly bitter factionalism led
by rival hierarchies. Christianity has furnished the most obvious example of
this; but one could add many others, including secular faiths such as Marxism.
On the face of it, Islam's ability to avoid this fate is astonishing, and
demands careful analysis. There is, of course, a straightforwardly
religious explanation. Islam is the final religion, the last bus home, and as
such has been divinely secured from the more terminal forms of decay. It is true
that what Abdul Wadod Shalabi has termed spiritual entropy has been at work ever
since Islam's inauguration, a fact which is well-supported by a number of
hadiths. Nonetheless, Providence has not neglected the ummah. Earlier religions
slide gently or painfully into schism and irrelevance; but Islamic piety, while
fading in quality, has been given mechanisms which allow it to retain much of
the sense of unity emphasised in its glory days. Wherever the antics of the
emirs and politicians might lead, the brotherhood of believers, a reality in the
initial career of Christianity and some other faiths, continues, fourteen
hundred years on, to be a compelling principle for most members of the final and
definitive community of revelation in Islam. The reason is simple and
unarguable: God has given us this religion as His last word, and it must
therefore endure, with its essentials of tawhid, worship and ethics
intact, until the Last Days. Such an explanation has obvious merit. But
we will still need to explain some painful exceptions to the rule in the
earliest phase of our history. The Prophet himself (pbuh) had told his
Companions, in a hadith narrated by Imam Tirmidhi, that "Whoever among you
outlives me shall see a vast dispute". The initial schisms: the disastrous
revolt against Uthman (r.a.), the clash between Ali (r.a.) and Muawiyah, the
bloody scissions of the Kharijites - all these drove knives of discord into the
Muslim body politic almost from the outset. Only the inherent sanity and love of
unity among scholars of the ummah assisted, no doubt, by Providence overcame the
early spasms of factionalism, and created a strong and harmonious Sunnism which
has, at least on the purely religious plane, united ninety percent of the ummah
for ninety percent of its history. It will help us greatly to understand our
modern, increasingly divided situation if we look closely at those forces which
divided us in the distant past. There were many of these, some of them very
eccentric; but only two took the form of mass popular movements, driven by
religious ideology, and in active rebellion against majoritarian faith and
scholarship. For good reasons, these two acquired the names of Kharijism and
Shi'ism. Unlike Sunnism, both were highly productive of splinter groups and
sub-movements; but they nonetheless remained as recognisable traditions of
dissidence because of their ability to express the two great divergences from
mainstream opinion on the key question of the source of religious authority in
Islam. Confronted with what they saw as moral
slippage among early caliphs, posthumous partisans of Ali (r.a.) developed a
theory of religious authority which departed from the older egalitarian
assumptions by vesting it in a charismatic succession of Imams. We need not stop
here to investigate the question of whether this idea was influenced by the
Eastern Christian background of some early converts, who had been nourished on
the idea of the mystical apostolic succession to Christ, a gift which supposedly
gave the Church the unique ability to read his mind for later generations. What
needs to be appreciated is that Shi'ism, in its myriad forms, developed as a
response to a widely-sensed lack of definitive religious authority in early
Islamic society. As the age of the Righteous Caliphs came to a close, and the
Umayyad rulers departed ever more conspicuously from the lifestyle expected of
them as Commanders of the Faithful, the sharply-divergent and still nascent
schools of fiqh seemed inadequate as sources of strong and unambiguous
authority in religious matters. Hence the often irresistible seductiveness of
the idea of an infallible Imam. This interpretation of the rise of Imamism
also helps to explain the second great phase in Shi'i expansion. After the
success of the fifth-century Sunni revival, when Sunnism seemed at last to have
become a fully coherent system, Shi'ism went into a slow eclipse. Its extreme
wing, as manifested in Ismailism, received a heavy blow at the hands of Imam al-Ghazali,
whose book "Scandals of the Batinites" exposed and refuted
their secret doctrines with devastating force. This decline in Shi'i fortunes
was only arrested after the mid-seventh century, once the Mongol hordes under
Genghis Khan had invaded and obliterated the central lands of Islam. The
onslaught was unimaginably harsh: we are told, for instance, that out of a
hundred thousand former inhabitants of the city of Herat, only forty survivors
crept out of the smoking ruins to survey the devastation. In the wake of this
tidal wave of mayhem, newly-converted Turcoman nomads moved in, who, with the
Sunni ulama of the cities dead, and a general atmosphere of fear, turbulence,
and Messianic expectation in the air, turned readily to extremist forms of Shi'i
belief. The triumph of Shi'ism in Iran, a country once loyal to Sunnism, dates
back to that painful period. The other great dissident movement in
early Islam was that of the Kharijites, literally, the seceders, so-called
because they seceded from the army of the Caliph Ali when he agreed to settle
his dispute with Muawiyah through arbitration. Calling out the Quranic slogan,
"Judgement is only Gods", they fought bitterly against Ali and his
army which included many of the leading Companions, until Ali defeated them at
the Battle of Nahrawan, where some ten thousand of them perished.
Although the first Kharijites were
destroyed, Kharijism itself lived on. As it formulated itself, it turned into
the precise opposite of Shi'ism, rejecting any notion of inherited or
charismatic leadership, and stressing that leadership of the community of
believers should be decided by piety alone. This was assessed by very
rudimentary criteria: the early Kharijites were known for extreme toughness in
their devotions, and for the harsh doctrine that any Muslim who commits a major
sin is an unbeliever. This notion of takfir (declaring Muslims to be
outside Islam), permitted the Kharijite groups, camping out in remote mountain
districts of Khuzestan, to raid Muslim settlements which had accepted Umayyad
authority. Non-Kharijis were routinely slaughtered in these operations, which
brought merciless reprisals from tough Umayyad generals such as al-Hajjaj ibn
Yusuf. But despite the apparent hopelessness of their cause, the Kharijite
attacks continued. The Caliph Ali (r.a.) was assassinated by Ibn Muljam, a
survivor of Nahrawan, while the hadith scholar Imam al-Nasai, author of one of
the most respected collections of sunan, was likewise murdered by
Kharijite fanatics in Damascus in 303/915. Like Shi'ism, Kharijism caused much
instability in Iraq and Central Asia, and on occasion elsewhere, until the
fourth and fifth centuries of Islam. At that point, something of historic moment
occurred. Sunnism managed to unite itself into a detailed system that was now so
well worked-out, and so obviously the way of the great majority of ulama,
that the attraction of the rival movements diminished sharply.
What happened was this. Sunni Islam,
occupying the middle ground between the two extremes of egalitarian Kharijism
and hierarchical Shi'ism, had long been preoccupied with disputes over its own
concept of authority. For the Sunnis, authority was, by definition, vested in
the Quran and Sunnah. But confronted with the enormous body of hadiths, which
had been scattered in various forms and narrations throughout the length and
breadth of the Islamic world following the migrations of the Companions and
Followers, the Sunnah sometimes proved difficult to interpret. Even when the
sound hadiths had been sifted out from this great body of material, which
totalled several hundred thousand hadith reports, there were some hadiths which
appeared to conflict with each other, or even with verses of the Quran. It was
obvious that simplistic approaches such as that of the Kharijites, namely,
establishing a small corpus of hadiths and deriving doctrines and law from them
directly, was not going to work. The internal contradictions were too numerous,
and the interpretations placed on them too complex, for the qadis
(judges) to be able to dish out judgements simply by opening the Quran and
hadith collections to an appropriate page. The reasons underlying cases of apparent
conflict between various revealed texts were scrutinised closely by the early
ulama, often amid sustained debate between brilliant minds backed up with the
most perfect photographic memories. Much of the science of Islamic jurisprudence
(usul al-fiqh) was developed in order to provide consistent mechanisms
for resolving such conflicts in a way which ensured fidelity to the basic ethos
of Islam. The term taarud al-adilla (mutual contradiction of proof-texts)
is familiar to all students of Islamic jurisprudence as one of the most
sensitive and complex of all Muslim legal concepts. Early scholars such as Ibn
Qutayba felt obliged to devote whole books to the subject. The ulama of usul recognised as
their starting assumption that conflicts between the revealed texts were no more
than conflicts of interpretation, and could not reflect inconsistencies in the
Lawgiver's message as conveyed by the Prophet (pbuh). The message of Islam had
been perfectly conveyed before his demise; and the function of subsequent
scholars was exclusively one of interpretation, not of amendment.
Armed with this awareness, the Islamic
scholar, when examining problematic texts, begins by attempting a series of
preliminary academic tests and methods of resolution. The system developed by
the early ulama was that if two Quranic or hadith texts appeared to contradict
each other, then the scholar must first analyse the texts linguistically, to see
if the contradiction arises from an error in interpreting the Arabic. If the
contradiction cannot be resolved by this method, then he must attempt to
determine, on the basis of a range of textual, legal and historiographic
techniques, whether one of them is subject to takhsis, that is, concerns
special circumstances only, and hence forms a specific exception to the more
general principle enunciated in the other text. The jurist must also assess the
textual status of the reports, recalling the principle that a Quranic verse will
overrule a hadith related by only one isnad (the type of hadith known as ahad),
as will a hadith supplied by many isnads (mutawatir or mashhur).
If, after applying all these mechanisms, the jurist finds that the conflict
remains, he must then investigate the possibility that one of the texts was
subject to formal abrogation (naskh) by the other. This principle of naskh is an
example of how, when dealing with the delicate matter of taarud al-adilla,
the Sunni ulama founded their approach on textual policies which had already
been recognised many times during the lifetime of the Prophet (pbuh). The
Companions knew by ijma that over the years of the Prophets ministry, as
he taught and nurtured them, and brought them from the wildness of paganism to
the sober and compassionate path of monotheism, his teaching had been divinely
shaped to keep pace with their development. The best-known instance of this was
the progressive prohibition of wine, which had been discouraged by an early
Quranic verse, then condemned, and finally prohibited. Another example, touching
an even more basic principle, was the canonical prayer, which the early ummah
had been obliged to say only twice daily, but which, following the Miraj,
was increased to five times a day. Mutah (temporary marriage) had been
permitted in the early days of Islam, but was subsequently prohibited as social
conditions developed, respect for women grew, and morals became firmer. There
are several other instances of this, most being datable to the years immediately
following the Hijra, when the circumstances of the young ummah changed in
radical ways. There are two types of naskh:
explicit (sarih) or implicit (dimni). The former is easily
identified, for it involves texts which themselves specify that an earlier
ruling is being changed. For instance, there is the verse in the Quran (2:142)
which commands the Muslims to turn in prayer to the Kaba rather than to
Jerusalem. In the hadith literature this is even more frequently encountered;
for example, in a hadith narrated by Imam Muslim we read: "I used to forbid
you to visit graves; but you should now visit them." Commenting on this,
the ulama of hadith explain that in early Islam, when idolatrous practices were
still fresh in peoples memories, visiting graves had been forbidden because of
the fear that some new Muslims might commit shirk. As the Muslims grew stronger
in their monotheism, however, this prohibition was discarded as no longer
necessary, so that today it is a recommended practice for Muslims to go out to
visit graves in order to pray for the dead and to be reminded of the akhira.
The other type of naskh is more
subtle, and often taxed the brilliance of the early ulama to the limit. It
involves texts which cancel earlier ones, or modify them substantially, but
without actually stating that this has taken place. The ulama have given many
examples of this, including the two verses in Surat al-Baqarah which give
differing instructions as to the period for which widows should be maintained
out of an estate (2:240 and 234). And in the hadith literature, there is the
example of the incident in which the Prophet (pbuh) once told the Companions
that when he prayed sitting because he was burdened by some illness, they should
sit behind him. This hadith is given by Imam Muslim. And yet we find another
hadith, also narrated by Muslim, which records an incident in which the
Companions prayed standing while the Prophet (pbuh) was sitting. The apparent
contradiction has been resolved by careful chronological analysis, which shows
that the latter incident took place after the former, and therefore takes
precedence over it. This has duly been recorded in the fiqh of the great
scholars. The techniques of naskh
identification have enabled the ulama to resolve most of the recognised cases of
taarud al-adilla. They demand a rigorous and detailed knowledge not just
of the hadith disciplines, but of history, sirah, and of the views held
by the Companions and other scholars on the circumstances surrounding the
genesis and exegesis of the hadith in question. In some cases, hadith scholars
would travel throughout the Islamic world to locate the required information
pertinent to a single hadith. In cases where in spite of all efforts,
abrogation cannot be proven, then the ulama of the salaf recognised the need to
apply further tests. Important among these is the analysis of the matn (the
transmitted text rather than the isnad of the hadith). Clear (sarih)
statements are deemed to take precedence over allusive ones (kinayah),
and definite (muhkam) words take precedence over words falling into more
ambiguous categories, such as the interpreted (mufassar), the obscure (khafi)
and the problematic (mushkil). It may also be necessary to look at the
position of the narrators of the conflicting hadiths, giving precedence to the
report issuing from the individual who was more directly involved. A famous
example of this is the hadith narrated by Maymunah which states that the Prophet
(pbuh) married her when not in a state of consecration (ihram) for the
pilgrimage. Because her report was that of an eyewitness, her hadith is given
precedence over the conflicting report from Ibn Abbas, related by a similarly
sound isnad, which states that the Prophet was in fact in a state of ihram
at the time. There are many other rules, such as that
which states that prohibition takes precedence over permissibility. Similarly,
conflicting hadiths may be resolved by utilising the fatwa of a
Companion, after taking care that all the relevant fatwa are compared and
assessed. Finally, recourse may be had to qiyas (analogy). An example of
this is the various reports about the solar eclipse prayer (salat al-kusuf),
which specify different numbers of bowings and prostrations. The ulama, having
investigated the reports meticulously, and having been unable to resolve the
contradiction by any of the mechanisms outlined above, have applied analogical
reasoning by concluding that since the prayer in question is still called salaat,
then the usual form of salaat should be followed, namely, one bowing and
two prostrations. The other hadiths are to be abandoned. This careful articulation of the methods
of resolving conflicting source-texts, so vital to the accurate derivation of
the Shariah from the revealed sources, was primarily the work of Imam al-Shafi'i.
Confronted by the confusion and disagreement among the jurists of his day, and
determined to lay down a consistent methodology which would enable a fiqh
to be established in which the possibility of error was excluded as far as was
humanly possible, Shafi'i wrote his brilliant Risala (Treatise on Islamic
jurisprudence). His ideas were soon taken up, in varying ways, by jurists of the
other major traditions of law; and today they are fundamental to the formal
application of the Shariah. Shafi'i's system of minimising mistakes in
the derivation of Islamic rulings from the mass of evidence came to be known as usul
al-fiqh (the roots of fiqh). Like most of the other formal academic
disciplines of Islam, this was not an innovation in the negative sense, but a
working-out of principles already discernible in the time of the earliest
Muslims. In time, each of the great interpretative traditions of Sunni Islam
codified its own variation on these roots, thereby yielding in some cases
divergent branches (i.e. specific rulings on practice). Although the debates
generated by these divergences could sometimes be energetic, nonetheless, they
were insignificant when compared to the great sectarian and legal disagreements
which had arisen during the first two centuries of Islam before the science of usul
al-fiqh had put a stop to such chaotic discord. It hardly needs remarking that although
the Four Imams, Abu Hanifa, Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i and Ibn Hanbal, are
regarded as the founders of these four great traditions, which, if we were asked
to define them, we might sum up as sophisticated techniques for avoiding
innovation, their traditions were fully systematised only by later generations
of scholars. The Sunni ulama rapidly recognised the brilliance of the
Four Imams, and after the late third century of Islam we find that hardly any
scholars adhered to any other approach. The great hadith specialists, including
al-Bukhari and Muslim, were all loyal adherents of one or another of the madhhabs,
particularly that of Imam al-Shafi'i. But within each madhhab, leading
scholars continued to improve and refine the roots and branches of their school.
In some cases, historical conditions made this not only possible, but necessary.
For instance, scholars of the school of Imam Abu Hanifah, which was built on the
foundations of the early legal schools of Kufa and Basra, were wary of some
hadiths in circulation in Iraq because of the prevalence of forgery engendered
by the strong sectarian influences there. Later, however, once the canonical
collections of Bukhari, Muslim and others became available, subsequent
generations of Hanafi scholars took the entire corpus of hadiths into account in
formulating and revising their madhhab. This type of process continued
for two centuries, until the Schools reached a condition of maturity in the
fourth and fifth centuries of the Hijra. It was at that time, too, that the
attitude of toleration and good opinion between the Schools became universally
accepted. This was formulated by Imam al-Ghazali, himself the author of four
textbooks of Shafi'i fiqh, and also of Al-Mustasfa, widely
acclaimed as the most advanced and careful of all works on usul usul
al-fiqh fil madhhab (Ihya Ulum al-Din, III, 65) While it was
necessary for the Muslim to follow a recognised madhhab in order to avert the
lethal danger of misinterpreting the sources, he must never fall into the trap
of considering his own school categorically superior to the others. With a few
insignificant exceptions, the great scholars of Sunni Islam have followed the
ethos outlined by Imam al-Ghazali, and have been conspicuously respectful of
each others madhhab. Anyone who has studied under traditional ulama will be
well-aware of this fact. The evolution of the Four Schools did not
stifle, as some Orientalists have suggested, the capacity for the refinement or
extension of positive law. On the contrary, sophisticated mechanisms were
available which not only permitted qualified individuals to derive the Shariah
from the Quran and Sunnah on their own authority, but actually obliged them to
do this. According to most scholars, an expert who has fully mastered the
sources and fulfilled a variety of necessary scholarly conditions is not
permitted to follow the prevalent rulings of his School, but must derive the
rulings himself from the revealed sources. Such an individual is known as a mujtahid,
a term derived from the famous hadith of Muadh ibn Jabal. Few would seriously deny that for a Muslim
to venture beyond established expert opinion and have recourse directly to the
Quran and Sunnah, he must be a scholar of great eminence. The danger of
less-qualified individuals misunderstanding the sources and hence damaging the
Shariah is a very real one, as was shown by the discord and strife which
afflicted some early Muslims, and even some of the Companions themselves, in the
period which preceded the establishment of the Orthodox Schools. Prior to Islam,
entire religions had been subverted by inadequate scriptural scholarship, and it
was vital that Islam should be secured from a comparable fate.
In order to protect the Shariah from the
danger of innovation and distortion, the great scholars of usul laid down
rigorous conditions which must be fulfilled by anyone wishing to claim the right
of ijtihad for himself. These conditions include: (a) mastery of the
Arabic language, to minimise the possibility of misinterpreting Revelation on
purely linguistic grounds; (b)
a profound knowledge of the Quran and Sunnah and the circumstances surrounding
the revelation of each verse and hadith, together with a full knowledge of the
Quranic and hadith commentaries, and a control of all the interpretative
techniques discussed above; (c)
knowledge of the specialised disciplines of hadith, such as the assessment of
narrators and of the matn [text]; (d)
knowledge of the views of the Companions, Followers and the great imams, and of
the positions and reasoning expounded in the textbooks of fiqh, combined with
the knowledge of cases where a consensus (ijma) has been reached;
(e)
knowledge of the science of juridical analogy (qiyas), its types and
conditions; (f)
knowledge of ones own society and of public interest (maslahah);
(g)
knowing the general objectives (maqasid) of the Shariah;
(h)
a high degree of intelligence and personal piety, combined with the Islamic
virtues of compassion, courtesy, and modesty. A scholar who has
fulfilled these conditions can be considered a mujtahid fil-shar, and is
not obliged, or even permitted, to follow an existing authoritative madhhab.
This is what some of the Imams were saying when they forbade their great
disciples from imitating them uncritically. But for the much greater number of
scholars whose expertise has not reached such dizzying heights, it may be
possible to become a mujtahid fil-madhhab, that is, a scholar who remains
broadly convinced of the doctrines of his school, but is qualified to differ
from received opinion within it. There have been a number of examples of such
men, for instance Imam al-Nawawi among the Shafi'is, Qadi Ibn Abd al-Barr among
the Malikis, Ibn Abidin among the Hanafis, and Ibn Qudama among the Hanbalis.
All of these scholars considered themselves followers of the fundamental
interpretative principles of their own madhhabs, but are on record as having
exercised their own gifts of scholarship and judgement in reaching many new
verdicts within them. It is to these experts that the Mujtahid Imams directed
their advice concerning ijtihad, such as Imam al-Shafi'i's instruction that if
you find a hadith that contradicts my verdict, then follow the hadith. It is
obvious that whatever some writers nowadays like to believe, such counsels were
never intended for use by the Islamically-uneducated masses. Other categories of mujtahids are listed
by the usul scholars; but the distinctions between them are subtle and not
relevant to our theme. The remaining categories can in practice be reduced to
two: the muttabi (follower), who follows his madhhab while being aware of
the Quranic and hadith texts and the reasoning, underlying its positions, and
secondly the muqallid (emulator), who simply conforms to the madhhab
because of his confidence in its scholars, and without necessarily knowing the
detailed reasoning behind all its thousands of rulings. Clearly it is recommended for the muqallid
to learn as much as he or she is able of the formal proofs of the madhhab. But
it is equally clear that not every Muslim can be a scholar. Scholarship takes a
lot of time, and for the ummah to function properly most people must have other
employment: as accountants, soldiers, butchers, and so forth. As such, they
cannot reasonably be expected to become great ulama as well, even if we
suppose that all of them have the requisite intelligence. The Holy Quran itself
states that less well-informed believers should have recourse to qualified
experts: So ask the people of remembrance, if you do not know (16:43).
(According to the tafsir experts, the people of remembrance are the ulama.)
And in another verse, the Muslims are enjoined to create and maintain a group of
specialists who provide authoritative guidance for non-specialists: A band
from each community should stay behind to gain instruction in religion and to
warn the people when they return to them, so that they may take heed (9:122).
Given the depth of scholarship needed to understand the revealed texts
accurately, and the extreme warnings we have been given against distorting the
Revelation, it is obvious that ordinary Muslims are duty bound to follow expert
opinion, rather than rely on their own reasoning and limited knowledge. This
obvious duty was well-known to the early Muslims: the Caliph Umar (r.a.)
followed certain rulings of Abu Bakr (r.a.), saying I would be ashamed before
God to differ from the view of Abu Bakr. And Ibn Masud (r.a.), in turn, despite
being a mujtahid in the fullest sense, used in certain issues to follow Umar (r.a.).
According to al-Shabi: Six of the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) used to give
fatwas to the people: Ibn Masud, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Ali, Zayd ibn Thabit,
Ubayy ibn Kab, and Abu Musa (al-Ashari). And out of these, three would abandon
their own judgements in favour of the judgements of three others: Abdallah (ibn
Masud) would abandon his own judgement for the judgement of Umar, Abu Musa would
abandon his own judgement for the judgement of Ali, and Zayd would abandon his
own judgement for the judgement of Ubayy ibn Kab. This verdict, namely that one is
well-advised to follow a great Imam as ones guide to the Sunnah, rather than
relying on oneself, is particularly binding upon Muslims in countries such as
Britain, among whom only a small percentage is even entitled to have a choice in
this matter. This is for the simple reason that unless one knows Arabic, then
even if one wishes to read all the hadith determining a particular issue, one
cannot. For various reasons, including their great length, no more than ten of
the basic hadith collections have been translated into English. There remain
well over three hundred others, including such seminal works as the Musnad of
Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba, the Sahih of Ibn Khuzayma,
the Mustadrak of al-Hakim, and many other multi-volume collections, which
contain large numbers of sound hadiths which cannot be found in Bukhari, Muslim,
and the other works that have so far been translated. Even if we assume that the
existing translations are entirely accurate, it is obvious that a policy of
trying to derive the Shariah directly from the Book and the Sunnah cannot be
attempted by those who have no access to the Arabic. To attempt to discern the
Shariah merely on the basis of the hadiths which have been translated will be to
ignore and amputate much of the Sunnah, hence leading to serious distortions.
Let me give just two examples of this. The
Sunni Madhhabs, in their rules for the conduct of legal cases, lay down the
principle that the canonical punishments (hudud) should not be applied in
cases where there is the least ambiguity, and that the qadi should actively
strive to prove that such ambiguities exist. An amateur reading in the Sound Six
collections will find no confirmation of this. But the madhhab ruling is based
on a hadith narrated by a sound chain, and recorded in theMusannaf of Ibn
Abi Shayba, the Musnad of al-Harithi, and the Musnad of Musaddad
ibn Musarhad. The text is: "Ward off the hudud by means of
ambiguities." Imam al-Sanani, in his book Al-Ansab, narrates the
circumstances of this hadith: "A man was found drunk, and was brought to
Umar, who ordered the hadd of eighty lashes to be applied. When this had
been done, the man said: Umar, you have wronged me! I am a slave! (Slaves
receive only half the punishment.) Umar was grief-stricken at this, and recited
the Prophetic hadith, Ward off the hudud by means of ambiguities."
Another example pertains to the important
practice, recognised by the madhhabs, of performing sunnah prayers as soon as
possible after the end of the Maghrib obligatory prayer. The hadith runs: Make
haste to perform the two rakas after the Maghrib, for they are raised up (to
Heaven) alongside the obligatory prayer. The hadith is narrated by Imam Razin in
his Jami. Because of the traditional pious fear of
distorting the Law of Islam, the overwhelming majority of the great scholars of
the past - certainly well over ninety-nine percent of them - have adhered
loyally to a madhhab. It is true that in the troubled fourteenth century a
handful of dissenters appeared, such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim; but
even these individuals never recommended that semi-educated Muslims should
attempt ijtihad without expert help. And in any case, although these
authors have recently been resurrected and made prominent, their influence on
the orthodox scholarship of classical Islam was negligible, as is suggested by
the small number of manuscripts of their works preserved in the great libraries
of the Islamic world. Nonetheless, social turbulences have in
the past century thrown up a number of writers who have advocated the
abandonment of authoritative scholarship. The most prominent figures in this
campaign were Muhammad Abduh and his pupil Muhammad Rashid Rida. Dazzled by the
triumph of the West, and informed in subtle ways by their own well-documented
commitment to Freemasonry, these men urged Muslims to throw off the shackles of
taqlid, and to reject the authority of the Four Schools. Today in some Arab
capitals, especially where the indigenous tradition of orthodox scholarship has
been weakened, it is common to see young Arabs filling their homes with every
hadith collection they can lay their hands upon, and poring over them in the
apparent belief that they are less likely to misinterpret this vast and complex
literature than Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam Ahmad, and the other great Imams. This
irresponsible approach, although still not widespread, is predictably opening
the door to sharply divergent opinions, which have seriously damaged the unity,
credibility and effectiveness of the Islamic movement, and provoked sharp
arguments over issues settled by the great Imams over a thousand years ago. It
is common now to see young activists prowling the mosques, criticising other
worshippers for what they believe to be defects in their worship, even when
their victims are following the verdicts of some of the great Imams of Islam.
The unpleasant, Pharisaic atmosphere generated by this activity has the effect
of discouraging many less committed Muslims from attending the mosque at all.
No-one now recalls the view of the early ulama, which was that Muslims should
tolerate divergent interpretations of the Sunnah as long as these
interpretations have been held by reputable scholars. As Sufyan al-Thawri said:
If you see a man doing something over which there is a debate among the
scholars, and which you yourself believe to be forbidden, you should not forbid
him from doing it. The alternative to this policy is, of course, a disunity and
rancour which will poison and cripple the Muslim community from within.
In a Western-influenced global culture in
which people are urged from early childhood to think for themselves and to
challenge established authority, it can sometimes be difficult to muster enough
humility to recognise ones own limitations. We are all a little like Pharaoh:
our egos are by nature resistant to the idea that anyone else might be much more
intelligent or learned than ourselves. The belief that ordinary Muslims, even if
they know Arabic, are qualified to derive rulings of the Shariah for themselves,
is an example of this egotism running wild. To young people proud of their own
judgement, and unfamiliar with the complexity of the sources and the brilliance
of authentic scholarship, this can be an effective trap, which ends by luring
them away from the orthodox path of Islam and into an unintentional agenda of
provoking deep divisions among the Muslims. The fact that all the great scholars
of the religion, including the hadith experts, themselves belonged to madhhabs,
and required their students to belong to madhhabs, seems to have been forgotten.
Self-esteem has won a major victory here over common sense and Islamic
responsibility. The Holy Quran commands Muslims to use
their minds and reflective capacities; and the issue of following qualified
scholarship is an area in which this faculty must be very carefully deployed.
The basic point should be appreciated that no categoric difference exists
between usul al-fiqh and any other specialised science requiring lengthy
training. Shaykh Said Ramadan al-Buti, who has articulated the orthodox response
to the anti-Madhhab trend in his book: Non-Madhhabism: The Greatest Bida
Threatening the Islamic Sharia, likes to compare the science of deriving
rulings to that of medicine. "If ones child is seriously ill", he
asks, "does one look for oneself in the medical textbooks for the proper
diagnosis and cure, or should one go to a trained medical practitioner?"
Clearly, sanity dictates the latter option. And so it is in matters of religion,
which are in reality even more important and potentially hazardous: we would be
both foolish and irresponsible to try to look through the sources ourselves, and
become our own muftis. Instead, we should recognise that those who have spent
their entire lives studying the Sunnah and the principles of law are far less
likely to be mistaken than we are. Another metaphor might be added to this,
this time borrowed from astronomy. We might compare the Quranic verses and the
hadiths to the stars. With the naked eye, we are unable to see many of them
clearly; so we need a telescope. If we are foolish, or proud, we may try to
build one ourselves. If we are sensible and modest, however, we will be happy to
use one built for us by Imam al-Shafi'i or Ibn Hanbal, and refined, polished and
improved by generations of great astronomers. A madhhab is, after all, nothing
more than a piece of precision equipment enabling us to see Islam with the
maximum clarity possible. If we use our own devices, our amateurish attempts
will inevitably distort our vision. A third image might also be deployed. An
ancient building, for instance the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, might seem imperfect
to some who worship in it. Young enthusiasts, burning with a desire to make the
building still more exquisite and well-made (and no doubt more in conformity
with their own time-bound preferences), might gain access to the crypts and
basements which lie under the structure, and, on the basis of their own
understanding of the principles of architecture, try to adjust the foundations
and pillars which support the great edifice above them. They will not, of
course, bother to consult professional architects, except perhaps one or two
whose rhetoric pleases them nor will they be guided by the books and memoirs of
those who have maintained the structure over the centuries. Their zeal and pride
leaves them with no time for that. Groping through the basements, they bring out
their picks and drills, and set to work with their usual enthusiasm.
as appeared in Brother Mas'ud Khan Home page (http://ds.dial.pipex.com/masud)
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