Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (11 page)

This splintering was inevitable, because it is in the nature of political power to create rivalries. In Islam, the only exception to this rule was the era of the Prophet Muhammad, whose authority was accepted by all Muslims. His mandate, after all, came from above. But after his death, the mandate came down to earth and became complicated by all things human—differing perceptions, contradictory interests, clashing loyalties. The first caliph, Abu Bakr, did his best by establishing an honest principle. “Obey me so long as I obey God and His Messenger,” he proclaimed. “In case I disobey God and His Messenger, I have no right to obedience from you.”
³
But who would decide whether he and his successors really obeyed God and His Messenger? Who would decide who was righteous? It took only a decade for that question to breed tension, and two decades to create a civil war.

At this point, a modern commentator might suggest a live-and-let-live pluralism, or even the separation of religion and political power. That modern commentator might also add that pluralism and secularity are modern concepts and that it is unfortunate that Islam never had the chance to discover them. But, alas, Islam
did
have the potential to establish pluralism and secularity. One school of thought, at the very least, had developed the perfect theology for it.

A G
OD-
C
ENTERED
P
LURALISM

In the midst of the who-is-right-and-who-is-wrong dispute between Ali and Muawiyah, a group of Muslims came up with a reconciliatory idea. They argued that it was simply impossible to solve a dispute over righteousness. Only God would have the ultimate knowledge, they insisted, so humans should refrain from decisive judgments about each other. “Had God willed, He would have made you a single community,” a verse of the Qur’an declared, quite tellingly. “Every one of you will return to God and He will inform you regarding the things about which you differed.”
⁴
With this verse in hand, these Muslims decided to “postpone” to the afterlife questions of who-is-right-and-who-is-wrong. Hence, they soon became known as the Murjiites (Postponers).

Notably, the theological argument that these seventh-century Muslims found for religious tolerance—that ultimate decisions should be left to God—was the exact argument that John Locke would put forward a millennium later in
A Letter Concerning Toleration
.
⁵

The Postponers strongly opposed the Dissenters and their tendency to judge people’s faith by looking at their outward religious practice. For the former, faith was not a form of action that a Muslim had to display through his works, but rather a consciousness that he would feel in his heart. To be a Muslim, they said, was to internalize “the knowledge of, submission to, and love of God.”
⁶
Once a person had faith, he would be saved despite the sins he had committed. (Some have argued that they had developed an almost “Pauline” theology.)
⁷
The Postponers were so ecumenical that they even said that acceptance of most unorthodox doctrines, such as “tritheism”—the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as it is often understood by Muslims—would not necessarily imply infidelity.
⁸

Besides opening the way to religious pluralism, the Postponers’ theology also invalidated the idea of theocracy or theologically based political opposition. Since God alone could determine the sincerity of the faith of rulers, they argued, political authority should not be justified or questioned on theological grounds.
⁹
That’s why, unlike the fanatic Dissenters who labeled anyone with whom they disagreed an “infidel,” the Postponers were able to dissociate themselves from the mutually despising factions without condemning any of them.
¹⁰

Unfortunately, a separate school of the tolerant Postponers did not last long. Their pluralist theology faded amid the heated conflicts between self-righteous factions. But their stance against fanaticism made sense to other Muslim parties. It especially had a considerable influence on Imam Abu Hanifa, the founder of one of the four—and the most tolerant—Sunni schools: Hanafi.

D
OES
G
OD
W
ILL THE
T
YRANNY OF THE
T
YRANTS
?

We will come back to Abu Hanifa again and again throughout this book. First, however, we need to see how the very force that the Postponers tried to push away from religion—i.e., political power—played a role in the first serious theological controversy in Islamdom: the dispute between the defenders of human free will and the proponents of divine predestination.

Before Islam, Arabs were utterly fatalistic. They believed that men were helpless toys of
dahr
, or fate, which was determined by stars and other forces of nature.
¹¹
The Qur’an rejected this mythology by proclaiming that it was God, an authority to whom men could appeal, who decided their fate. Moreover, the Qur’an spoke about humans’ responsibility to make moral decisions.
¹²
But did this also mean that God, the all-powerful, granted men real power to control their lives?

At the turn of the seventh century, a group of Muslim theologians called Qadaris assembled in Syria, the new intellectual center of Islamdom, and answered that question affirmatively. It would have been unjust for God to reward and punish humans, they argued, if He had not given them the right to choose. Accordingly, they developed a doctrine that emphasized personal responsibility, disposition, and human self-determination.

But not everyone was in favor of the Qadarite movement, and soon an opposing school emerged with the name of Jabriyyah. The term literally meant “proponents of [God’s] enforcement,” and its champions refused to acknowledge that humans had any free will. Men, they believed, were simply doing what God had “written” for them.

This intellectual controversy soon caught the eye of the political authorities: the Umayyad caliphs. The first of these was Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, who had clashed swords with Ali. When Muawiyah died, the caliphate passed to his son, Yazid, a despot who would soon become hated by both Sunnis and Shiites for killing Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, during the tragic massacre at Karbala in 680. Not all of Yazid’s descendants were as terrible as he was, yet the Umayyads still made a bad name for themselves as corrupt tyrants. Among other things, they were despised for introducing forced labor, which was seen by Muslims as a throwback, “one of the perverted practices of pre-Islamic tyranny.”
¹³

In other words, the Umayyads had a legitimacy problem. They first tried to fix it by giving themselves a lavish title: “the Caliph of God.” This was way too ambitious, because even the highly respected Rightly Guided Caliphs, the closest companions of Muhammad, had called themselves only “the Caliph of the Prophet.” The Umayyads were clearly eager to manipulate religion for political power. That’s why the debate between the Qadaris and the Jabriyyah interested them: The latter’s predestinarian argument, they realized, could be very useful for justifying their rule. If God had determined everything in eternity, they argued, He must have determined the sovereignty of the Umayyad dynasty as well. If God had not willed it, they said, they would not be sitting on the throne.

The theological controversy then turned into a political one between the Qadaris and the Umayyad court. In his
Epistle on Free Will
, the leader of the Qadaris, an ascetic scholar named Hasan al-Basri, openly challenged Umayyad caliph Ibn Marwan.
¹⁴
One of al-Basri’s followers, Ghaylan al-Dimashqi, went even further. Rulers did not have the right to regard their power as “a gift of God,” he argued; they had to be aware of their responsibility for people before God. He even asserted that if all Muslims truly obeyed God and His law, there would be no need for any caliph.
¹⁵

That was too much. The caliph soon had al-Dimashqi arrested and executed, along with two like-minded colleagues. The movement would remain suppressed during the ninety-year reign of the Umayyad dynasty.

Then there is one final and quite telling detail about the Umayyad era. Of the fourteen successive Umayyad caliphs, two of them, Umar II and Yazid III, can be regarded as exceptions to the rule, for they were pious and modest men who tried to reverse the tide of repression and corruption. Yazid III in particular is famous for the inaugural speech he gave in Damascus in 744, when he stressed his accountability to the people and vowed to avoid his predecessors’ abuses of power. He promised not to squander money on wives or children, not to transfer wealth from one province to another without reason, and not to overtax the
dhimmis
, the “protected” Christians and Jews. He even assured his audience that he would step down if he failed to fulfill these promises and that he would accept whomever they chose in his stead.
¹⁶

Now, this good caliph did not just come out of the blue; historians think that he was closely connected with the Qadaris.
¹⁷
Apparently, the political idea of responsibility to people was closely linked with the theological idea of free will. Regrettably, Yazid III stayed in power for only six months before he died from natural causes. And then Umayyad rule returned to business as usual.

T
HE
R
ISE OF THE
P
EOPLE OF
R
EASON

The controversy between the proponents of free will and predestination was an important one, but it was only a prelude to the real war of ideas in the formative centuries of Islam: the clash between the
ahl al-ray
and
ahl al-hadith
, or the People of Reason and the People of Tradition.

This dispute started mainly as a disagreement over the method of the making of the Shariah, whose crucial role for Islamdom we examined in the previous chapter. All Muslims agreed that the Qur’an must be the primal source of the Shariah, but that did not explain much, for the Qur’an is a relatively short book—no longer than the New Testament—and its main focus is purely spiritual issues, such as God’s purposes, man’s moral duties, and the afterlife. Qur’anic verses about crime and punishment or marriage and inheritance, strictly earthly issues, would barely cover a few pages altogether. The bulk of the Qur’an consists of “broad, general moral directives.”
¹⁸

How these general moral directives—such as justice, fairness, and goodness—would be applied to specific rules and regulations was the central question of the Shariah. The Qur’an itself pointed to two other sources: (1) human reason, and (2) the Prophet himself, as an “example” for Muslims to follow. But this example was somewhat limited to Muhammad’s own context, so Muslims started to face totally new questions as they left the Arabian Peninsula and moved to more cosmopolitan centers of the Middle East, such as Egypt, Syria, and, especially, Iraq.

Little wonder that Iraq would become the center for the Shariah scholars who used human reason as the second definitive source after the Qur’an. They were, in other words, adherents of
ray
, an Arabic term that means “reason,” or “reasoned opinion.” The most famed and authoritative scholar to emerge from this school was Abu Hanifa, the sympathizer of the Postponers’ school. His thinking was based firmly on the Qur’an and human reason and a little less on the “example” of the Prophet:

He felt apparently that local conditions differed, and that even if Medina was through force of circumstances the city of Mohammed, yet it was a desert town and therefore you could not possibly expect a desert law to apply to city life, when it came to matters of universal import. . . . [Hence] Abu Hanifa relied on his threefold cord of Koran,
qiyas
, and
Ra’i
, with occasional use for
istihsan
, and scarcely any for
Hadith
.
¹⁹

The Arabic terms used here are important.
Qiyas
means “analogical reasoning,” and
istihsan
means “legal preference for the sake of the common good.” These two rational tools, along with a third one,
urf
, which refers to local customs in any given society, would be Abu Hanifa’s main frames of reference. Hence, his version of the Shariah would be a dynamic and flexible one that would uphold the general principles of the Qur’an in any context, by being able to adapt itself to new realities.