We are the products of our past. Thus, understanding our history and how it links to our present is critical to steering ourselves towards the reality we want to see for ourselves and future generations.
The Big Bang of the Muslim World:
The Islamic world has a big bang of its own; the event that not only shaped the schism of the Muslim world but also 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 several important figures of the time as Ali refused to prosecute the people involved in Uthman’s 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, the governor of Syria. When the dust settled, the political world of Muslims had three distinctive factions: the first, which emerged as politically the weakest, was Shiatu Ali (Party of Ali), later known as Shia, who believed that the rights of the Caliphate had been taken away from them. Khawarijis, the ones who defected from Ali’s camp when Ali was fighting against Muawaiyah, because Ali resorted to consultation on Muawaiyah‘s request, although Ali was about to win the battle. Khawarij later assassinated Ali as they declared him kafir (infidel), and thus resulted in Muawaiyah becoming the de facto Caliph. Muawiya founded the Umayyad dynasty and thus established the Umayyads as the strongest political entity of the time. The Umayyads, though, had to continuously face and fight the Khawarijis throughout 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 in 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 in condemnation for eternity. The path to heaven is straight and filled with struggles, while all the distractions from that path are the traps for one to fall into the eternal ditch of fire. Faith has to be accompanied by action that may require fighting to uphold the truth. That extreme belief resulted in an extreme behavioral outlook, demanding extreme ideals in religious and social justice. Their idealism was surprisingly 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 enslaved African. Compare this to the Sunnis’ stand that the Caliph has to be from the tribe of Quraish (an umbrella group of tribes from Makkah) or the Shia’s stand of the Caliph or Imam from the bloodline of Ali. Khwarajis also appointed a woman named Ghazala, the mother of a Khawariji Shahid bin Yazid, as their Caliph, a step that would still be unthinkable in the Sunni or Shia world. Khwarijis divided the community into black and white. They called their controlled territory “darul-hijra” (dwellings of immigrants) based on the model of the 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:
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 those principles. In the earlier phase of Islamic theological development, these two threads complemented each other, but later, by the medieval period, they developed into rivalry and formed a competing relationship.
The majority of the Muslim at the early Islamic period were politically neutral and shocked by the violence due to the civil wars among the much respected Islamic personalities, which 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 developed among Muslims in response to the Khawarajites was the school of the Murjiah. Murjite doctrine holds that only God has the authority to judge, so that nobody can declare anybody else non-Muslim. They preached 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, the very idea of the separation of church and state. The Umayyad later supported the school as it benefited them politically. That philosophy provided the groundwork for the school of Fiqh to develop some ingenious principles to hold the Muslim Ummah together, which proved to be the foundation of Sunni orthodoxy. First, the doctrine of Khilafat Rashida (Rightly Guided Caliphs), which holds that the first four Caliphs, including Uthman and Ali, had no character flaws and were rightly guided by God despite political discontent and 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, had no faults and are forgiven by God for their services to Islam. Thus, Muslims are highly discouraged from engaging 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 adhere to the community’s consensus. Any biddah or innovation was highly prohibited as it would divide the community further.
Thoughts of Murjites provided the evolutionary ground that was fertile for two major schools of thought that established their roots right away: Islamic Mysticism (Sufis), which stresses personal purification of the heart (or batin), and the theology of predestination, which would then be championed by the school of Asharites. Alarmed by the thoughts of predestination that some Muslim thinkers like Hasan Al Basri considered to be damaging to society, a competitive movement called Qadarite and Mutazillite, supporting free will as endowed by God, was founded. Qadarites and Mutazillites were disliked by Ummayads, as based on Asharite thoughts of predestination, Ummayads declared themselves to be the ordained rulers by God.
By the time the Umayyad caliphate fell to the Abbasid revolution, much had changed in the Islamic theological landscape. The Islamic world was rich in diverse opinions and views that were all considered within the mainstream of Islam. Imam Shafii was the first scholar from the school of Fiqh who recognized the high diversity of religious discourses within the Muslim community as a grave issue and questioned the validity of “ijma,” i.e., the consensus and living tradition of the Muslim community. He stressed that the Islamic society had grown into a stage that was too diverse, and thus hadiths, the oral traditions of the prophet, could serve as the binding and unifying element to determine 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 thought and the politics within 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, which supported a widespread but unsuccessful Kharajite rebellion against the Umayyad Caliph Marwan II. Hanbal entered the circle of “Ahl Sunna wa Al Jammat” with a temper of Khawarijis. He took on the voice of Shafii and launched a campaign to vehemently enforce the Quran and Hadith as the only sources of law, and raised his voice against Kalam. Hanbal not only rejected “ijma” outright but also discouraged commonly accepted principles of Fiqh, such as “Qiyas” and “Ijtihaad,” as they allow human reasoning that resembles Kalam. Ahmad ibn Hanbal got an opportunity to show his fervency when Abbasid Caliph Mamun attempted to have his own control on the thought 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 them was the statement that the Quran is a created word of God. That was, in fact, a stance of the Mutazili School of thought and was not popular among scholars from the school of Fiqh. Ibn Hanbal used the Abbasids’ proclamation that “the Quran is a creature” as a rallying point against the rulers and Kalam, and probably suffered some hardships for his opposition, but gained significant popularity and “mob power” through his populist stance. The 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, opined that the Hanbali school should not be a part of the main Sunni jurisprudence. A gang of Hanbali reacted by stoning Tabari’s house and inciting violence, so Abbasids had to provide security for him. Even when Tabari died, Hanbali gathered a mob large enough that Abbasids buried Tabari secretly to avoid riots. Tabari was not alone in his opposition to the Hanbali. Another scholar, Ibn Abd al-Barr, also rejected Hanbali thought and objected to its being part of mainstream Islam.
Canonizing of the Hadith:
After Hanbal, there was a huge surge in the effort to collect hadith, resulting in the canonization of 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 the Hanafi school, which contained the majority of the Sunni Muslims at that time and still today, or from Sufi or any other school of thought, 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. Still, the process was far from being error-proof or neutral to the inherent theological bias of the hadith collectors. Sunnis later gave high regard and authenticity to the collections of Bukhari and Muslims, without considering that obviously invented hadith like “only Qureshi could be a caliph” is included in the Bukhari collection.
Canonizing of the Hadith proved to be the deciding factor for the Shafis and Hanbalis schools to eventually win their arguments and brought hadith into the mainstream Islam, which in effect replaced sunna or the living tradition for good. The contemporary usage of the word sunna among Muslims now is equivalent to the traditions as depicted in the canonical hadith collection.
Death of Kalam from Islamic Theological Discourse:
The School of Kalam survived the earlier onslaught of Hanbali scholars and even later Abbasid rulers who eventually abandoned the Mutazillites in favor of mainstream Islam, but faced its biggest challenge from the 11th-century prolific scholar Imam Ghazali. Imam Ghazali, who was well-versed in both the schools of Kalam and Fiqh, faced a spiritual crisis in his midlife and secluded himself. He returned to public life ten years later, proclaiming Sufism to be the only true path to divine and spiritual knowledge. He was highly critical of both schools of Fiqh and Kalam, though in his arguments in support of Sufism, he relied heavily on techniques he had learned from both schools.
The period witnessed the grandest debate the world has ever seen between Al Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, with far-reaching effects. Al Ghazali wrote his criticisms of the intellectual establishment of the Mu’tazilites and the ahl Kalaam in his famous diatribe, “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 held close to Al Ghazaali and abandoned causal considerations and inquiries to God. At the same time, Europe embraced Ibn Rushd’s (known there as Averroes) rationalism to the extent that they started calling themselves Averroists. We all know where each community stands today.
Rise of Sufism
Imam Ghazali’s popularity in support of Sufism paved the way for Ibn Arabi to create his outstanding Sufi literary work, full of humanistic ideals that directly influenced the renowned literary masterpieces of Rumi and Fakhr-al-Din-Iraqi. Sufism, with the message of love and humanistic ideals, carried the banner of Islam right into the hearts of central Asia, India, China, and 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 the Murji’a in politics, which his Hanbali predecessors largely ignored. He created a list of responsibilities rulers must fulfill for a Muslim community to avoid any military resistance against them. Ibn Taymiyyah was largely ignored during his life.
While Sufism excelled in its teachings on the purification of one’s own heart, it lacked guidance on political growth or on fueling innovative ideas in 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 had deteriorated into little more than a cluster of personality cults around regional Sufi saints in the Muslim world.
Rise of Wahhabis (or Salafis)
By the eighteenth century, Muslim political, economic, and military power had 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 that Ibn Taymiyyah had provided while handling the doctrine of Murjia. The Wahabi movement not only destroyed all the Sufi shrines in 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 the temper and fervor of Khawarijis. But the situation is even worse than it would be under the original Khawarijis, since the Khawarij had high universal ideals they were fighting for. Still, the contemporary Islamists 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 idea of reading the Quran and Hadith and seeing right from wrong without relying fully on scholars. Still, they don’t realize that the canonical hadith collection is a very limited sample of the vast body of theological discourse Muslims developed in the early and medieval periods. Another misconception that Muslims commonly have is the myth that the canonical hadith collection is the only gateway that can bring back the original teachings of Islam in their life. Appeal to originality has thus lured several 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, revive the discourses of Kalam to raise the level of intellect, the spirit of Sufism to stir humanistic ideals, and the principles of Fiqh to uplift society towards peace and justice for all.