Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (12 page)

The
Hadiths
consisted of sayings or reported acts attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. And, as we shall see in detail later, these would become the pillar of the opposing school of jurisprudence called
ahl al-hadith
, the People of Tradition.

A G
OD WITH
P
RINCIPLES

Abu Hanifa was the pioneer of the juristic side of the rationalist school. Yet matters of jurisprudence were ultimately linked with those of theology—views on the nature of God, revelation, and man. Hence, in Iraq, a school of theologians known as the Mutazilites tried to address all these issues within a rational perspective. As genuine believers of Islam, and sophisticated intellectuals who knew other traditions, including Greek philosophy, their aim was to demonstrate the compatibility of Muslim faith and reason.

Most Mutazilites were followers of Abu Hanifa (thus, Hanafis) in jurisprudence, others were Shiites.
²⁰
But all of them subscribed to the free-will idea of the Qadaris. For them, this was not just a preferred view—it was a logical outcome of one of God’s crucial attributes: justice. Since God was absolutely just, they reasoned, He would not reward or punish His creatures without reason. Thus, humans would receive reward in heaven or punishment in hell as a result of their free choice. Anyone who believes in a just God, the Mutazilites concluded, had to accept that man is “the creator of his deeds.”
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But what did justice mean? And how could humans know what was just or not? The opponents of the Mutazilites argued that it was wrong to first define what justice is and then expect God to conform to it. Whatever God does, they said, that would be the norm for justice. Even if He put all people in hell for no reason, that would be a very just thing, for justice has no definition beyond whatever He does.

For the Mutazilites, this depiction of an unprincipled God was giving Him not praise, as their opponents thought, but disrespect. For them, it was in the nature of God to be just and good, and He would never go against these principles, although He had the power to do everything He willed. “He cannot torture the innocent, and demand the impossible,” Mutazilites insisted, not because He does not have the power to do so, but “simply because He is God.”
²²

Here it might be worth noting that these opposing views of God are also present in the Christian tradition. The equivalent of the Mutazilite view is called “rationalism” or “intellectualism,” because it argues that God is rational and His ways are, at least partly, comprehensible by humans. The other view, called “voluntarism,” defines a God whose ways are simply unknowable and unbound by any principle we know.

One prominent commentator who raised this issue in 2006 was Pope Benedict XVI, who, in his controversial Regensburg (Germany) address, criticized voluntarist views in Islam. He was accurate to warn that such views might “lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness,” but he was not as accurate to assume that that was the only view in Islam. In fact, the Holy Father’s argument—that “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism”—was exactly the view the Mutazilites defended twelve centuries earlier, long before it was passed on to medieval Christendom by a latter-day Mutazilite named Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes.
²³

The rationalism of the Mutazilites also led them to conclude that God, and thus His universe, “operated according to rational laws,” a premise that called on scientific inquiry.
²⁴
From this emerged the scientific boom of the medieval Islamic world.

Besides having their own viewpoint on the nature of God, the Mutazilites disagreed with their opponents over the nature of revelation as well. The revelation in question was the Qur’an, and Mutazilites argued that it was “created,” whereas opponents insisted that it was “uncreated.” Semantics are important here. For the “uncreated Qur’an” adherents, the Muslim scripture had existed with God since eternity—similar to the nature of Jesus as described in the Fourth Gospel of John. For the Mutazilites, the Qur’an was certainly the Word of God, but He spoke it at a certain point in history. Otherwise, they argued, the scripture would be elevated almost to the level of a second deity—something that, they argued, contradicts Islam’s uncompromising monotheism.

Although this debate about the nature of the Qur’an was related mainly to theology, it also had interpretative consequences, for “a created Qur’an can be
interpreted
; an uncreated Qur’an can only be
applied
.”
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No wonder the Mutazilite view of the scripture allowed a less literalist reading of it, which they needed especially for explaining the seemingly anthropomorphic verses of the Qur’an—references to God’s “hands,” “faces,” and “throne.” The Mutazilites were strongly opposed to anthropomorphism, so they developed a method of allegorical interpretation called
ta’wil
, which soon influenced rationalists from other religious persuasions. Indeed, during the ninth and tenth centuries, Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, Coptic Christians, and Shiite and Sunni theologians used the Mutazilite
ta’wil
to defend the rationality of their own scriptures.
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A M
EDIEVAL
T
HEORY OF THE
L
AND OF THE
F
REE

The Mutazilites have often been misunderstood and sometimes have been confused with some of the more secular “philosophers” who also sprang from the Rationalist strain in medieval Islam but then became so enthralled by ancient Greek dogmas that they were almost materialist freethinkers. In fact, the Mutazilites were devout Muslims eager to serve their faith by making it accessible and compelling to educated non-Muslims.
²⁷
They have been described as providing a middle path between “the right” (i.e., the antirational Muslims) and “the left” (i.e., secular or non-Muslim philosophers).
²⁸

Their contributions were impressive. By defining human beings as free and autonomous agents who have the capacity to understand God and His creation, they laid out some of the basic ideas that we today call “modern” and even “liberal.” Their ideas, in the words of an American law professor, indeed “appear to share—indeed to anticipate—many principles associated with Western law,” such as “rationality, objectivity, principles of individual liberty and equality.”
²⁹

An interesting example of this was the extension of the free-will doctrine that the Mutazilites and their predecessors, the Qadaris, upheld. This idea led them to conclude that the world must be a free place so that humans would have “the power to choose” (
al-tamakkun wa-l ikhtiyar
). Thus, the whole world, they argued, had to be seen as an Abode of Trial (
dar al-ibtila
), where people are tested on whether they are willing or unwilling to accept the true faith.
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The Mutazilites also realized that this acceptance of faith could occur only with genuine conviction—with “an action of the heart”—an idea that they also inferred from a Qur’anic verse: “There is no compulsion in religion.”
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Their conclusion was that people deserved the “liberty to make religious choices.”
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This was, a Western scholar notes, a solid basis for tolerance of disbelief and other “erroneous” attitudes, “not because all options were equally valid, as modern pluralists would claim, but rather because erroneous views were meant as a test of Muslim fortitude and thus had to be withstood rather than removed.”
³³

Some political ideas that grew out of this were also remarkable. Al-Farabi, a tenth-century Muslim philosopher who extended the Mutazilite philosophy to sociology and politics, wrote
Kitab as-Siyasah al-Madaniyah
, or
The Book of Civil Politics
. He started by noting that all governments on earth are imperfect, except the one established by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, for that was governed in direct communion with God. Yet, al-Farabi reminded his readers, such a theocracy became impossible after the Prophet’s death, so the rules of a just government had to be established by human reason.

Then he described his own ideal government, which he dubbed “the community state,” whose inhabitants would enjoy complete freedom (
hurriyah
). This would be “an egalitarian organization where people are free (
ahrar
) to do whatever they want.” Moreover, they would be “willing to recognize the leadership of those who promise to give them more freedom . . . and a greater opportunity to follow their particular inclinations.”
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When such a freedom-promoting government exists, al-Farabi added, “people from outside flock to it,” and this leads to a “most desirable kind of racial mixture and cultural diversity,” which would guarantee the flourishing of talented individuals such as philosophers and poets.
³⁵

Sounds a bit like America, doesn’t it?

Al-Farabi was foresighted indeed. Franz Rosenthal, the late professor of Arabic studies, said the following about him:

The modern reader can hardly fail to notice that the Muslim philosopher succeeded in giving a true description of the essentials of democracy. He also captured the full meaning and significance of the concept of political freedom for the happiness and development of the individual.
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The ideas of al-Farabi as well as other Muslim thinkers—such as al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd—were translated into Latin and contributed to the rise of modern Western thought. That’s why all of them also have Latinized names: Alpharibus, Alkindus, Avicenna, and Averroes, respectively. Another Muslim thinker, Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, wrote
Introduction to History,
which is, according to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee, “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.”
³⁷
In the book, Ibn Khaldun developed, among other things, a theory of economic liberalism that advised governments to minimize taxes, secure private property, support free markets, and avoid budget deficits.
³⁸
The World Bank has recently referred to him as “the first advocate of privatization.”
³⁹

In short, the idea of freedom—in the theological, political, or economic sense—was not unknown in classical Islamdom, as some have claimed. The People of Reason clearly aspired to it, and they may have been headed toward establishing a genuinely Islamic liberalism.

Yet they were not the only folks around. There also were, as we have seen, despotic caliphs who despised such wayward liberals, and, even more important, an opposing and steadily growing camp called the People of Tradition.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Medieval
War of Ideas (II)

The sinners among the People of Tradition are God’s friends. But the pious ones among the People of Innovation are God’s enemies.

— Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal,
founder of the Hanbali school of Islam

Two decades into the ninth century, a scholar appeared in Baghdad who would today be called “a radical cleric.” A Baghdad native, he had left the city at the age of sixteen to spend time in other parts of Islamdom, and especially the Hejaz region, the western part of the Arabian Peninsula. The scholars there, and particularly those in Medina, believed that the Iraqis had gone too far in their rationalism in matters of religion. Some even thought that giving any role to human reason in religious matters was a dangerous innovation (
bid’a
), a term that would soon become the Muslim equivalent of the Christian heresy.

Soon after his arrival in Baghdad, our “radical cleric,” Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, quickly became the most zealous champion of this antirationalist view, starting a popular campaign against the People of Reason. The city was accustomed to intellectual debates, but Hanbal and his nascent group of followers were there not to debate but to denounce. In his sermons, Hanbal fiercely condemned all the rationalist schools mentioned in the previous chapter: the pluralist Murjiites, who preferred to “postpone” to the afterlife the who-is-right-and-who-is-wrong discussion; the Qadaris, who defended man’s free will and opposed predestination; the Jahmiya, a variant of the Mutazilites; and the Hanafis, the followers of Abu Hanifa, who founded a rationalistic and flexible type of jurisprudence. According to Hanbal, all these people had to be banned and their books had to be buried.
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