Voices of Islam (41 page)

The Kharijites rejected the Murji’a doctrine of justification by faith without works. This was, after all, the logical extension of their political stance. They pushed their moral strictness to the point of refusing the title of believer to anyone who committed a mortal sin, regarding a wrongdoer as an apostate. While they regarded all non-Kharijite Muslims as apostates, their extreme wing, known as the Azraqis, believed that such a person became an infi

forever. Since an apostate could never reenter the faith, he should be killed along with his wives and children.
13
This branch of the Kharijites was finally eliminated by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (d. 714
CE
), the Umayyad governor of Iraq.

Either directly or by the impetus that they gave to reflecting on questions of faith and morality, the Kharijites accelerated the pace of development of Islamic thought. The Puritanism that characterized Kharijite thought, in its conception of the state and of faith, was located in ethical principles: the Kharijites demanded purity of conscience as an indispensable complement to bodily purity for acts of worship to be valid.

However, the Kharijites had their moderate elements too. Two other branches of Kharijite thought survived in the Ibadiyya and the Sufriyya move- ments. Both of these groups, unlike the Azraqis, believed that non-Kharijite Muslims were not to be assassinated. The Ibadiyya tried to establish them- selves politically, but apart from a few isolated attempts in various parts of the eastern region of the Arabian peninsula and in North Africa, these efforts did not last. Today the Ibadiyya are the only significant group of Kharijites, living mainly in Oman and with small communities in Algeria and Tunisia. As a group, they represent a comparatively moderate school; their present views, in dogma as well as law, have been to some degree influenced by Sunni schools of thought and survive today mainly as a variant of these schools— proving that in the long run moderation outlasts militancy.

THE SUNNA IN THE UNDERSTANDING AND SYSTEMIZATION OF HADITH AND LAW

Before the Prophet Muhammad, the term
Sunna
referred to a way or man- ner of acting, the approved custom, or norm, what can be loosely called the common law. After the Prophet’s time,
Sunna
embraced the total experience that the Prophet’s followers in Medina knew and lived as an organic whole, including faith, religious practice, and inner spiritual development within the society’s legal, sociological, and politico-economic contexts.

194
Voices of Tradition

Semantically, the Arabic verb
sanna
means to establish, prescribe, or insti- tutionalize a practice or custom, with the noun
Sunna
being an established act or practice that has the force of social custom or institutional precedent. The Qur’an uses the term
Sunna
and its derivatives 17 times, almost all speaking of God’s precedent (
sunnat Allah
) in making an example of the unbelieving communities prior to the time of Muhammad. Notably, the Qur’an never uses the term
Sunna
to refer to Prophetic practice; thus, no Qur’anic basis exists for its later popular usage to refer to the Prophet’s exam- ple. The closest the Qur’an gets to express the sense of Prophetic
Sunna
is when it describes the Prophet as a ‘‘fi exemplar’’ (
uswa hasana,
33:21). In several instances, it commands believers to ‘‘obey God and obey the Prophet’’ (Qur’an 3:32 and 4:59, for example).

During the seventh century
CE
, when the Muslim community was ruled by the ‘‘Rightly Guided’’ Caliphs
14
and then the Umayyads, the term
Sunna
was used in debates on legal and ritual issues to indicate any normative prec- edent set by exemplars of the past, including the Prophet. During the Proph- et’s lifetime and thereafter, when faced with problems to solve, people reminded one another of how the Prophet and his closest Companions had acted under similar circumstances. This resulted in transmitted oral narratives (
hadith
) of remembered practices and customs. Such customs were called
Sunan
(the plural of
Sunna
), and a
hadith
was the report of a
Sunna.

As time went on, people compared their information about normative practices with that of others. Thus, for example, person A would assert that he heard his grandfather say that he heard the Prophet say something about a given matter, while person B would have heard from his uncle a similar or different account of what the Prophet said or did regarding the same matter. These ‘‘chains of transmission’’ (
isnad
) were provided to authenticate the particular transmission of a
Sunna.
Not only were the reports of
Sunan
about what the Prophet did or said, but many were about what the Companions of the Prophet did as well.

Within a generation of the Prophet’s death, the Arabian Peninsula, most of North Africa, and the region eastward to Persia came under Muslim rule. Gradually over the next two centuries, increasing numbers of non-Arabs such as Egyptians, Levantines, and Mesopotamians became Muslim. A growing need emerged to adapt the application of Islamic law to societies whose legal and cultural heritage was different from that of the Arab society. Several great intellects sought to develop a coherent and systematic Muslim hermeneutics to deal with legal matters in these contexts. In the process, they founded schools of jurisprudence that were hybrids of prevailing cultural, social, political, and legal environments and influences. They developed the princi- ples and sources of Islamic law and in doing so shaped the direction of Islamic legal thought.

As companions of the Prophet Muhammad or their direct descendants, the inhabitants of Medina naturally regarded their practice as best reflecting the

What Is Sunni Islam?
195

Prophetic
Sunna.
The followers of Malik ibn Anas (d. 795
CE
), the most important jurist in Medina, referred to themselves as
Ahl al-Hadith
(People of the Hadith), or alternately
Ahl al-Sunna
(People of the Tradition). How- ever, at this point,
Sunna
referred only to the overall practice of the people of Medina and did not clearly distinguish between a
Sunna
of the Prophet or the opinion (
ra’y
) of a Companion. Those who rendered their own opinions and those who lived in more cosmopolitan societies like that of Iraq or Egypt and found themselves forced to exercise a greater level of independent judgment and personal opinion on a matter were labeled
Ahl al-Ra’y
(People of Opinion). When their opinion was not clearly based on a
Sunna,
they were disapprovingly called
Ahl al-Bida‘
(People of Innovation), suggesting that any idea not based on a
Sunna
was heretical.

The jurist Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi (d. 820
CE
), founder of the school of law that bears his name, argued that the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad had a greater legal value than the
Sunna
of a Companion in the determination of a legal injunction. He therefore gave precedence to the Sunna of the Prophet as the second source of law in his framework of legal interpretation. In this framework, the Sunna of the Prophet stood next in importance only to the Qur’an and stood above the practices of those who came after the Prophet. Shafi‘i’s position was that, unlike the position taken by Imam Malik’s followers, it was incorrect to presume an identity between the practices of the people of Medina and the Prophetic Sunna. He rein- forced his argument that the various local traditions of Medina could not refl completely and faithfully the practice of the Prophet with a critique of the practice of blindly conforming to an inherited tradition without under- standing its basis in Prophetic precedent. This practice is called
taqlid
in Islamic legal terminology.
15
According to Shafi‘i, the Prophetic Sunna should be strictly defined as the sayings, actions, and the tacit acquiescence of the Prophet Muhammad as related in authentic Hadith.
16

It was also important to a coherent development of jurisprudence to distin- guish between legal injunctions derived from specific Qur’anic and Prophetic directives and those derived from the Prophet’s cultural context. The Qur’an and the Prophet made specific injunctions on matters that were purely reli- gious (relating to beliefs and worship) as well as on societal matters. These latter issues included laws of personal status such as marriage and child cus- tody; criminal law, laws on murder, theft, or libel; business or contract law; and obligations of believers to follow their leaders, which later developed into the law of nations and governance. Pre-Islamic common law and social prac- tices that were neutral to Qur’anic and Prophetic injunctions, and that may have been incorporated into the practice of the people of Medina, thus were not by definition deemed to be of equal value to the Qur’anic or Prophetic injunctions—even when done by the Prophet himself.

The incorporation of such customary practices led to the recognition of custom (
‘urf
or
‘ada
) as a legitimate source of law. Custom is subsidiary to

196
Voices of Tradition

the primary sources (the Qur’an and the Sunna) but deemed to be legal within Islamic law when it does not contradict or confl t with the primary sources. In addition to this distinction, the jurists later distinguished between a
Sunna
that had the value of a legal precedent (
sunna tashri‘iyya
) and a
Sunna
that was not meant to set a legal precedent (
sunna ghayr tashri‘iyya
).
17
Since the publication of his treatise on Islamic law (
al-Risala
), Shafi‘i’s idea

of the Sunna as referring exclusively to the practice of the Prophet Muham- mad has dominated jurisprudence in Sunni Islam. Today, nearly all Sunni Muslims think of
Sunna
as referring only to the Sunna of the Prophet. Even Shiite Muslims have adopted Shafi‘i’s concept of the preeminent importance of the Prophetic Sunna in their jurisprudence. The only difference is that they include in their defi ition of Sunna the collective teachings of the Shiite Imams. In the absence of the Imam of the Time, the contemporary jurispru- dent—as stand-in for the Imam—can in fact override the legal judgments (
fatwas
) of his predecessors.

Over time, real differences narrowed between Shi‘a and non-Shi‘a schools of jurisprudence.
18
Strictly speaking, the use of the term
Sunna
is of a juris- prudential nature, separating the Sunna of the Prophet from the Sunna of the people, in the sense of the common understandings and practices of the people. This created the legal space for varying interpretations of law and normative practices (or
Sunnas
) of different communities, all following the spirit of the Qur’an and the Prophetic Sunna.
19
Were such a separation not to exist, there would be enormous pressure for all Muslims to abide by a sin- gle society’s understanding of Sunna as being equal to the Prophetic Sunna. This situation is increasingly visible in contemporary times, when a regional or ethnic interpretation of Islam is often incorrectly deemed the only inter- pretation consistent with the Prophetic Sunna.
20

Much of the disagreement among the founders of the schools of law was due to differences in the
sunan
they referred to in establishing their legal opinions. This was because the Hadith collections Muslims now see as authentic had not yet been compiled. Not surprisingly, considering Shafi‘i’s emphasis on the Prophet’s Sunna as a source of precedent, four of the six canonical Hadith collections of Sunni Islam are called
sunan.
The need for such collections was made more acute by the need for jurists to have reliable sources of information on which to base their judgments.
21

THEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES THAT SHAPED THE CREED OF AHL AL-SUNNA WA’L-JAMA‘A

The conflict between ‘Ali and Mu‘awiya gave rise to political groups that evolved into the three main traditions: Kharijite, Shiite, and Sunni. As noted above, by the beginning of the eighth century
CE
, theological movements began to accompany these traditions, with each political group developing a

What Is Sunni Islam?
197

theology to justify its position. At stake were the following issues: What is the status of ‘‘believer?’’ What is faith and how is it determined? What are the conditions for salvation and human responsibility? Parallel considerations concerned the nature of the Qur’an, whether as the Word of God it was cre- ated or uncreated, the divine content and attributes of the Word, the nature of the divine attributes and their connection with the divine essence, and the impact of theology upon the understanding of divine unity. These ques- tions fueled the emergence of theology, known as
kalam,
among Muslims.

These theological questions were not purely theoretical. In the political context of the time, such controversial and divisive questions were targeted at judging contemporary leaders of the community and retroactively applying these judgments to the very fi Caliphs, as well as to the succeeding Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs. Discussions about the Imamate were not safe activities to engage in, with rulers considering many discussions seditious. However, the need continued to define political correctness while simultane- ously defending religious orthodoxy against attacks from nonbelievers of all types.

The expansion of the Islamic state brought Muslims into closer contact with Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and members of other faiths. Greek phi- losophy and Persian, Egyptian, Indian, and Central Asian practices and beliefs percolated into Islamic thought and practice. As a result, many aspects of these previous traditions became ‘‘Islamized,’’ which in practical terms meant bringing pre-Islamic ideas into dialogue with the Qur’an and Hadith.
22
Translations from works of Greek science and philosophy cata- lyzed the birth of a theological–philosophical vocabulary, the systemization of doctrinal positions, and the rise of schools of theology.