We are the products of our past. Thus the understanding of our past, and how it links to our present, is critical to steer ourselves towards the reality that we as Muslims like to see for ourselves and for the future generation.
The Big Bang of the Muslim World:
The Islamic world had a big bang of its own; the event that not only shaped the schism of the Muslim world but also defined what it means to be an orthodox Muslim. That event, aptly called the first fitna (chaos), was the assassination of the third Caliph Uthman ibn Affan by the hands of rebels accusing him of favoritism to the people of his own tribe Banu Umayya. Rebels appointed Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son in law of the Prophet, as the fourth Caliph. Ali accepted the offer but drew sharp criticisms from a number of important figures of the time as Ali refused to prosecute the people involved in Uthman murder, probably for tactical and political reasons. Ali’s seemingly indifferent attitude towards the assassination of Uthman provided the impetus for several bloody civil wars between Ali and Ayesha, the wife of the Prophet and Ali and Muawiya, governor of Syria. When the dust settled, the political world of Muslims had three distinctive factions: the first one that emerged to be politically the weakest was Shiatu Ali (Party of Ali) or simply later known as Shia, who believed that the rights of the Caliphate had been taken away from them. Secondly, the Khawarijis who defected from Ali’s camp when Ali was fighting against Muawaiyah because Ali resorted to consultation on Muawaiyah‘s request despite Ali winning the battle. The Khawarij later assassinated Ali as they declared him kafir (infidel) and thus resulted in Muawaiyah becoming the de facto Caliph. Muawaiyah started the Umayyad dynasty, and thus established Ummayads as the strongest powerful political entity of the time. Although Umayyad had to continuously face and fight with the Khawarijis throughout the time of the existence of their dynasty.
A Brief Introduction to Khawarijis:
Khawarijis though violent in their expressions were not morally devoid or purely barbaric in nature. Khawarijis believed on what Fazlur Rahman called “wa-idism”, a belief that human beings are in a constant threat of hell, and any wrong act or decision can result into condemnation for eternity. The path to the heaven is straight and filled with struggles while all the distractions from that path are the traps for one to fall in the eternal ditch of fire. Faith has to be accompanied with action that may require fight for upholding the truth. That extreme belief resulted in extreme behavioral outlook with demands of extreme ideals in religious and social justice. Their idealism surprisingly was highly universal especially considering the time and space: e.g. they declared that any righteous Muslim is eligible to become the Caliph even if the person is an African slave. Compare this to the Sunni’s stand that Caliph has to be from the tribe of Quraish (an umbrella group of tribes from Makkah) or Shia’s stand of the Caliph or Imam from the bloodline of Ali. The Khwarajis also appointed a woman named Ghazala, mother of a Khawariji Shahid bin Yazid as their Caliph, a step that would still be unthinkable in the Sunni or Shia world. They called their controlled territory; “darul-hijra” (dwellings of immigrants) based on the model of prophet’s migration to Medina and called the rest darul-kufr (dwellings of the infidels). That talk is not much different than what we hear from some of the contemporary Muslim extremists.
Development of the Islamic Theological Schools and the Birth of Sunnism:
The early and medieval Islamic history has two distinctive components: Kalam i.e. providing the philosophical basis for theological principles, and Fiqh i.e. establishing Islamic laws and code of conduct based on theological principles. In the earlier phase of Islamic theological development, these two threads were complementing each other but later by the medieval time they developed into rivalry and formed a competing relationship.
Majority of the Muslims at the early Islamic period were politically neutral and shocked by the violence due to the civil wars among the much respected Islamic personalities that was followed by the continuous rebellion of Khawarijis against anybody who didn’t agree with their political and religious views. The attitude and theology that the silent Muslim majority developed to put the curb on violence and to avoid further schism among the Muslim community provided the baseline on which Islamic mainstream orthodoxy later developed.
The very first theological school that was developed among Muslims in response to Khawarajites was the school of Murjiah. Murjite doctrine holds that only God has the authority to judge so nobody can declare anybody else non-Muslim. They preached about deferring judgment on political and personal conflicts to the Day of Judgment and thus the word Murjiah which in Arabic means to delay. In short, Murjites preached about political pacifism, keeping theological matters a private issue. The school was later on supported by Ummayad as it benefitted them politically. That philosophy provided the ground work for the school of Fiqh to come up with some ingenious principles to hold the Muslim Ummah together that proved to be the foundation of Sunni orthodoxy. First the doctrine of Khilafat Rashida (Rightly Guided Caliphs) which hold that the first four Caliphs including Uthman and Ali had no character faults and were rightly guided by God despite the political discontent and the civil wars during their reigns. Along with the Rightly Guided Caliphs, all the close companions of the Prophet including the ones involved in the conflict also had no faults and are forgiven by God for their services to Islam and thus Muslims are highly discouraged to engage in finding any faults in them. The second critical theological development of the time was the coining of the term “Ahl-e-sunna wa al jama”.The phrase actually meant the people who follow the tradition (or a way) and stick with the consensus of the community in large. Any biddah or innovation was highly prohibited as it would divide the community further.
Thoughts of Murjites provided the evolutionary ground that was rich for two major schools of thoughts that established its roots right away: Islamic Mysticism (Sufis) that stresses on personal purification of heart (or batin) and the theology of predestination that would then be championed by school of Asharite. Alarmed by the thoughts of predestination that some Muslim thinkers like Hasan Al Basri, considered to be damaging to the society, a competitive movements called Qadarite and Mutazillite supporting free will as endowed by God were founded. Qadarites and Mutazillites were disliked by Ummayads as on the basis of Asharite thoughts of predestination, Ummayads declared themselves to be the ordained rulers by God.
By the time Umayyad fall to the revolution of Abbasids, a lot had changed in the Islamic theological landscape. The Islamic world was rich with diversified opinions and thoughts that all considered to be within the mainstream of Islam. Imam Shafii was the first scholar from the school of Fiqh who sensed such a high diversity of religious discourses in the Muslim community as a grave issue and called into the question the validity of “ijama” i.e. the consensus and the living tradition of the Muslim community. He stressed that the Islamic society had grown into a stage that was too diversified and thus hadiths, the oral traditions of the prophet, could be the binding and the unifying element to know what is right or wrong within the Islamic legal framework. But the problem with the hadith was that every decade since the prophet’s death, new crops of hadiths were cultivated in support of myriad schools of thoughts and the politics with in the growing Muslim world.
Muslims entered the era of theological infighting:
Another important voice of that time was Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Although born in Baghdad, he belonged to the Shaybani tribe; the tribe that supported a widespread but unsuccessful Kharajite rebellion against Umayyad Caliph Marwan II. Hanbal entered the circle of “Ahl Sunna wa Al Jammat” with a temper of Khawarijis. He took the voice of Shafii and started the campaign of vehemently enforcing Quran and Hadith to be the only source of law and raised his voice against Kalam. Hanbal not only rejected “ijma” outright but also discouraged commonly accepted principles of Fiqh like “Qyas” and “Ijtiad” as they allow human reasoning that resembles Kalam . Ahmad ibn Hanbal got an opportunity to show his fervent when Abbasid Caliph Mamun attempted to have his own control on the thoughts market and initiated his infamous Mihna; a decree containing a list of doctrines that all the religious scholars had to agree on and one of it was the statement that Quran is a created word of God. That was in fact a stance of Mutazilla School of thoughts and was not popular among scholars from school of Fiqhs. Ibn Hanbal used the Abbasids proclamation of “Quran is a creature” as a rallying point against the rulers and Kalam and probably suffered some hardships due to his opposition but gained significant popularity and “mob power” due to his populist stance. Temper of Hanbal passed on to his students and successors. Famous Muslim scholar and historian Tabari, who was also a student of Hanbal at a time, opinionated that Hanbali school should not be a part of main Sunni jurisprudence. A gang of Hanbalis reacted by stoning Tabari house and inciting violence that Abbasids had to provide security for him. Even when Tabari died, Hanbalis gathered a mob large enough that Abbasids buried Tabari secretly to avoid riots. Tabari was not alone in his opposition to Hanbalis. Another scholar, Ibn Abd al-Barr also rejected Hanbalis thoughts and objected it to be a part of mainstream Islam.
Canonizing of the Hadith:
After Hanbal, there was a huge surge of hadith collection effort that resulted in canonizing the hadith in the form of six books famously known as Kuttub al Sittah (i.e. Bukhari, Muslim, Nasai, Dawood, Tirmidhi and Majah). The most notable point is that not a single one of the hadith collectors was from Hanafi school that contained a majority of the Sunni Muslims at that time and still today, or from Sufi or any other school of thoughts but mainly Shafis and Hanbalis. Hadith collectors though developed some extensive criteria to filter out fabricated or weak hadith from authentic ones to be included in the collection but the process was far from being error proof or neutral to the inherent theological bias of the hadith collectors. Sunnis later on gave high regards and authenticity to the collection of Bukhari and Muslims without considering that obviously invented hadith like “only Qureshi could be a caliph” is included in Bukari collection.
Canonizing of the Hadith proved to be the deciding factor for Shafis and Hanbalis schools to eventually win their arguments and brought hadith in mainstream Islam that in effect replaced sunna or the living tradition for good. The contemporary usage of word sunna among Muslims now is equivalent to the traditions as depicted in the canonical hadith collection.
Death of Kalam from Islamic Theological Discourse:
School of Kalam survived the earlier onslaught of Hanbalis and even from later Abbasids rulers who eventually abandoned Mutazillites for the support of mainstream Islam, but faced its biggest challenge from the 11th century prolific scholar Imam Ghazali. Imam Ghazali, who was well versed in both school of Kalam and Fiqh, faced a spiritual crisis in his midlife and secluded himself in isolation. He came back to public life ten years later proclaiming Sufism to be the only true path for gaining any divine and spiritual knowledge. He had high criticisms for both schools of Fiqh and Kalam although in his arguments in support of Sufism, he heavily relied on techniques he learned from Kalam and Fiqh.
The period probably witnessed the grandest debate the world has ever seen between Al Ghazali and ibn Rushd that had far reaching effects. Al Ghazali wrote his critics on the intellectual establishment of Muatzilites and ahl Kalaam in his famous diatribe called “Tahafut al falasifa” (The Incompetence of Philosophy). Ibn Rushd responded with his own “Tahafut al Tahafut” (The Incompetence of the Incompetence). Unfortunately both of them won the debate. The Muslim world hold close to Al Ghazaali and abandoned causal considerations and inquiries to God while Europe embraced ibn Rushd (known there as Averroes) rationalism to the extent that they started calling themselves Averroan. We all know where each community stands today.
Rise of Sufism
Imam Ghazali’s popularity in support for Sufism paved the way for Ibn Arabi to create his outstanding sufi literary work full with humanistic ideals that directly influenced renowned literary masterpieces of Rumi and Fakhr-al-Din-Iraqi. Sufism, with a message of love and humanistic ideals, carried the banner of Islam right into the hearts of central Asia, India, China and to the Far East. With the fall of Kalam, Sufis not only filled the vacuum in popularity among the Muslim masses but also became the main rival of the Muslims orthodoxy. Ibn Taymiyyah, a Hanbali scholar from that period, wrote several books urging Muslims to stay away from Kalam and Sufism. He also urged Muslims not to follow anybody but the Quran and hadith. To his credit, he did tackle the doctrine of Murjia in the field of politics that was more or less ignored by his Hanbali predecessors. He created a list of responsibilities a ruler must fulfill for a Muslim community to avoid any military resistance against him. Ibn Taymiyyah was largely ignored during the time of his life.
While Sufism excelled in its teachings on the purification of one’s own heart, it lacked in providing any guidance for political growth or fuel innovative ideas in the society. Sufism actually even failed to provide any self-correcting mechanism for its own decay and even exploitations by some Sufi pirs (saints/elders) of their illiterate murids (disciples). By the eighteenth century, Sufism deteriorated into nothing but clustered personality cults around regional Sufi saints around the Muslim world.
Rise of Wahhabis (or Salafis)
By the eighteenth century, Muslim political, economic and military power decayed while Europe rose to glory. Abd-al-Wahhab, again a Hanbali scholar, faulted the decline of Muslims mainly on the un-Islamic Sufi customs and practices and started the movement to revive the original Islamic values. Wahhab claimed that he discovered ibn Taymiyyah and was highly influenced by his writings. But in practice, Wahhab reintroduced the temper of Khawarijis with full force disregarding any mitigating advice to curb violence ibn Taymiyyah had provided while handling the doctrine of Murjia. Wahabi movement not only destroyed all the Sufi shrines from Arabia but also eradicated Islamic monuments and historical landmarks from the Arabian desert.
Current Prognosis
Contemporary popular Islam unfortunately has evolved into nothing but legalism with a temper and fervor of Khawarijis. But the situation is even worse off than what it would be under the original Khawarijis since Khwarij had high universal ideals they were fighting for, but the contemporary jihadist are fighting for the constrained idealism that the earlier mainstream Islam negotiated to keep peace in the Islamic community. What an irony.
The current Muslim generation likes the liberating ideas of reading Quran and Hadith and seeing the right from wrong without fully depending on scholars but they don’t realize that the canonical hadith collection is a very limited sample of the huge amount of theological discourses Muslims had developed in the early and medieval time. Another misconception that Muslims commonly have is the myth that a canonical hadith collection is the only gateway that can bring back the original teachings of Islam in their life. Appeal to originality thus has lured a number of Muslim followers into the narrow minded approach to their Islamic heritage.
It is high time for Muslims to educate themselves and the next generation about their history and revive back the discourses of Kalam to raise the level of intellects, the spirit of Sufism to stir humanistic ideals and the principles of Fiqh that can uplift the society towards peace and justice for all.