Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (17 page)

It’s well known that Muslims face Mecca when they pray, but this was not always the case. At first, in fact, Muslims performed their prayers facing Jerusalem. At a certain point in the maturation of the community, however, a revelation came down instructing them to shift direction, and it has been Mecca ever since.

And it will always be Mecca from now on, because Mohammed is gone and there will never be another Messenger, which means that no one will ever again have the authority to change the direction of prayer. In short, while Mohammed was alive, the Islamic project had an organic vitality. It was constantly in the process of unfolding and evolving. Any element of it might change at any time.

But the moment Mohammed died, Muslims had to ask themselves, “What exactly are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to do it? When we pray, should we hold our hands up here or down lower? In preparing for prayer, must we wash our feet all the way to the shins or would just to the ankles be enough?”

And, of course, there was a lot more to being a Muslim than the five pillars. Beyond individual duties such as fasting, alms, and the testament of faith, there was the social aspect of Islam, a person’s obligations to the community, the good-citizenship behaviors that fed into making the community an instrument of God’s will. For example, there was certainly a proscription against drinking. Certainly Muslims had some obligation to defend the community with their lives and fortunes when necessary in the obligation famously called jihad
.
In general, making sacrifices for the com
munal good devolved upon every Muslim because the community might not otherwise endure, and to many if not most Muslims, the community was the template of a new world, charged with an obligation to set a continuous example of how all people should live. Anyone, therefore, who contributed to the health of the community was doing God’s work, and anyone who fell short was misbehaving. But what contributed to the health of the community? And how much contribution was enough?

Once Mohammed died, Muslims had to bring their obligations into focus and get the details down in writing to secure their faith from drift, divergence, and the whims of the powerful. That’s why the first two khalifas collected every scrap of Qur’an in one place and why the third khalifa created that single authorized edition.

But the Qur’an did not explicitly address many questions that cropped up in real life. As a matter of fact, most of the Holy Book spoke in very general terms: Stop sinning; behave yourself; have a heart; you
will
be judged; hell is an awful place; heaven is wonderful; be grateful for all that God has given you; trust in God; obey God; yield to God—such is the gist of the message one gets from much of the Holy Book. Even where the Qur’an gets specific, it is often open to interpretation.

And “interpretation” portended trouble. If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverge wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world mig
ht swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?

Clearly Muslims had to come to unified agreements about the ambiguous passages and do it fast, while the original excitement still burned in communal memory. No one in that early time wanted to offer a personal interpretation of the Truth backed only by his or her reason. If reason were enough, revelation would never have been needed. Certainly, none of the early khalifas laid claim to any such authority. They were devout people who refused to tamper with instructions from God. Their humble modesty was precisely what made them great. They wanted to get the instructions exactly righ
t in letter and spirit—and by “right,” they meant, “exactly as God intended.”

From the start, therefore, Muslims tried to rely on their memories of the Prophet to fill in any gaps in the Qur’an’s guidelines. It was Omar who really set the course here. Whenever a question came up for which no explicit answer could be found in the Qur’an, he asked, “Did Mohammed ever have to deal with a situation like this one? What did he decide?”

Omar’s approach got people motivated to collect everything Mohammed had ever said and done, quotations and anecdotes known to Muslims as hadith. But many people had heard Mohammed say many things. Which ones were credible? Some quotations contradicted other quotations. Some people might have been making stuff up. Who could tell? And some, it turned out, hadn’t actually heard a quotation themselves, but had it only on good authority—or so they claimed, which of course raised the question, who was the original source? Was that person reliable? What about the other people who had transmi
tted it? Were they all reliable? What, finally, constituted a “good authority?”

Omar, as I mentioned, established a body of full-time scholars to examine such questions, thereby establishing a consequential precedent: before Islam had a standing army of professional soldiers, it had a standing army of professional scholars (called “people of the bench” or sometimes “people of the pen”).

Hadith, however, proliferated faster than any small group of scholars could control. New ones were constantly coming to light.
By Umayyad times, thousands of remembered statements, quotations, and decisions of Mohammed’s were floating around. Combing through this jungle and determining which ones were authentic provided employment for an ever-greater number of scholars. The court funded this sort of work, but so did rich men eager to earn merit in God’s eyes. Independent scholars applied themselves to the great task on their own time, as well. If they gained enough fame, they attracted students and patrons. Informal groups of this type ripened into academies, sometimes as adjuncts to the
waqfs
mentioned earlier.

The word
hadith
is sometimes translated as “sayings,” but that term can be misleading. The sayings of Mohammed are not like the sayings of Shakespeare or Einstein or the local wit. They’re not remembered for their felicity of phrasing. No one would bother to record the sayings of the local wit, or even of Shakespeare, unless they were witty, pithy, or profound, but with hadith, what counts is the fact that Mohammed actually said them. It’s true that some hadith have an epigrammatic quality. One can admire the economy of the admonition: “Food for one is enough for two, food for two is eno
ugh for three. . . . ” But many hadith come off as ordinary, even casual, statements. They might have been remarks Mohammed tossed off in the course of daily life. One hadith reports the Prophet telling a fellow who had a sparse beard and had shaved those few scant hairs that he should not have shaved his beard. This comment from anyone else would have been forgettable and forgotten, but anything Mohammed said might offer one more clue about how to live a life pleasing to God.

Since the authenticity of a hadith was absolutely crucial, the authentication of hadith developed into an exacting discipline. At its core, it consisted of nailing down the chain of transmission and testing the veracity of every link. A hadith was only as good as the people who transmitted it. The chain of transmission had to extend to someone who knew the Prophet personally. Only then could a purported hadith be taken seriously. Ideally, it would trace to one of Mohammed’s close companions, and the closer the companion the more sound the hadith. In addition, every person who
transmitted it after that had to enjoy an impeccable reputation for piety, honesty, and learning.

I heard that once the great scholar Bukhari was investigating the chain of transmission for a particular hadith. He found the first link credible;
the second man passed muster too; but when Bukhari went to interview the third man in the chain of transmission, he found the fellow beating his horse. That did it. The word of a man who beat his horse could not be trusted. That hadith had to be discarded.

In short, to gauge the credibility of the people who transmitted a hadith, a scholar had to know a great deal about them and about their times. A scholar also had to know the circumstances in which a hadith was spoken so that its intention might be judged from context. The “science of hadith” thus generated an elaborate discipline of critical historiography.

Some seven or eight decades after Mohammed’s death, scholars across the Muslim world began compiling sifted collections of hadith grouped under specific topics, which functioned as organized statements of Islamic doctrine and as reference works on Islamic living. If you wondered, for example, what Prophet Mohammed had to say about diet, or clothing, or warfare, you could look it up in such a book. The enterprise began in late Umayyad times, but it matured in the Abassid era, and new collections kept emerging for centuries. (In fact, just last year, a distant Afghan acquaintan
ce sent me a handwritten manuscript he was hoping I would translate into English. It constituted, he said, a new set of hadith he himself had collected—after fourteen centuries.)

Even though new hadith kept emerging, however, six collections achieved canonical status by the end of the third century AH. These complemented the Qur’an and came to constitute a second level of authority on the dos, don’ts, shoulds, and shouldn’ts of Muslim life.

Yet even the Qur’an and hadith together failed to give a definitive answer to
every
real-life question, as you can imagine. Sometimes, therefore, it was necessary for someone to make an original decision about a disputed situation. Given the legalistic spirit of Islam, Muslims conceded this right of original decision making only to scholars who had thoroughly absorbed Qur’an and hadith and had mastered the “science of hadith,” the discipline of authentication. Only such folks could be sure their rulings did not contradict some point set forth in the revelations.

Even qualified scholars were to make decisions based strictly on
qiyas
or analogical reasoning, the method Khalifa Omar used to discover the punishment for drinking (and to make many other rulings). That is, for each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an
analogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one already made. And if ambiguities arose about the way to apply qiyas, the matter was settled by
ijma,
the consensus of the community—which really meant the consensus of all the recognized scholars of the time. Such a consensus could guarantee the veracity of an interpretation because Prophet Mohammed had once said, “My community will never agree on an error.”

If a scholar had exhausted Qur’an, hadith, qiyas, and ijma, then and only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative thinking,
ijtihad
, which means “free independent thinking based on reason.” Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents.

And over the centuries, even those cracks grew narrower, because once an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject, his pronouncements also joined the canon. Scholars who came later had to master not just Qur’an, hadith, authentication, qiyas, and ijma, but also this ever-growing corpus of precedents. Only
then
were they qualified to exercise ijtihad!

In this way, an architectonic code took shape by the end of the third century AH, a set of proscriptions and prescriptions, obligations, recommendations, and warnings, guidelines, rules, punishments, and rewards covering every aspect of life from the grandest social and political questions to the minutest minutiae of daily life such as personal hygiene, diet, and sexual activity. This bill of particulars marks out the
shari’a
. The word comes from a cognate meaning “path” or “way,” and shari’a refers to something bigger than “Islamic law.” It is the whole Islamic way of life, which
is not something to be developed but something to be discovered, as immutable as any principle of nature. All the specific legal points elaborated by scholars and jurists are markers that reveal this “path to Allah,” the way stones, signs, and guideposts might show a traveler where the path is amid the brambles and brush of a wilderness.

On the Sunni side, four slightly different versions of this code took shape, and the Shi’i developed yet another one of their own, similar to the Sunni ones in spirit and equally vast in scope. These various codes differ in details, but I doubt that one Muslim in a thousand can name even five such details.

The four schools of Sunni law are named for the scholars who gave them final shape. Thus, the Hanafi school was founded by Abu Hanifa, from the Afghanistan area (though he taught in Kufa, Iraq); the Maliki school, by the Moroccan jurist Ibn Malik (though he worked and taught in Medina); and the Shafi’i school, by Imam al-Shafi’i of Mecca (though he settled finally in Egypt.) The last to crystallize was the Hanbali school, founded by the rigidly uncompromising Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, about whom I will say more later in this chapter.

The schools promote slightly different methods of deriving rulings, which has led to minor variations in the details of their laws, but ever since Abbasid times all four have been considered equally orthodox: a Muslim can subscribe to any of them without taint of heresy. Developing and applying this code in all its versions was itself a gigantic social enterprise that spawned and employed an entire social class of scholars known as the ulama—the title is simply the plural of
alim
, which means “learned one.”

If you had a reputation for religious scholarship—if you were, that is, a member of the ulama—you might be invited to participate in the administration of a waqf. You might teach students, or even run a school. You might work as a judge, and not just one who heard particular cases, but a judge who issued rulings on broad social issues. In the khalifate, your scholarly status might well lead powerful officials to seek your advice, even though the government and the ulama tended to butt heads, being separate (sometimes even competing) loci of power. The ulama defined the law, controlled the co
urts, ran the educational system, and permeated Muslim social institutions. They had tremendous social power throughout the civilized world, the power to muster and direct the approval and disapproval of the community against particular people or behaviors. I emphasize
social
power, because in Muslim society, which is so community oriented, social pressure—the power of shaming—might be the most powerful of all forces, as opposed to political power, which operates through procedural rules, control of money, monopoly control of the instruments of force, and so on.