Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  And over the centuries, even those cracks grew narrower, because once an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject, his pronouncements also joined the canon. Scholars who came later had to master not just Qur’an, hadith, authentication, qiyas, and ijma, but also this ever-growing corpus of precedents. Only then were they qualified to exercise ijtihad!

  In this way, an architectonic code took shape by the end of the third century AH, a set of proscriptions and prescriptions, obligations, recommendations, and warnings, guidelines, rules, punishments, and rewards covering every aspect of life from the grandest social and political questions to the minutest minutiae of daily life such as personal hygiene, diet, and sexual activity. This bill of particulars marks out the shari’a. The word comes from a cognate meaning “path” or “way,” and shari’a refers to something bigger than “Islamic law.” It is the whole Islamic way of life, which is not something to be developed but something to be discovered, as immutable as any principle of nature. All the specific legal points elaborated by scholars and jurists are markers that reveal this “path to Allah,” the way stones, signs, and guideposts might show a traveler where the path is amid the brambles and brush of a wilderness.

  On the Sunni side, four slightly different versions of this code took shape, and the Shi’i developed yet another one of their own, similar to the Sunni ones in spirit and equally vast in scope. These various codes differ in details, but I doubt that one Muslim in a thousand can name even five such details.

  The four schools of Sunni law are named for the scholars who gave them final shape. Thus, the Hanafi school was founded by Abu Hanifa, from the Afghanistan area (though he taught in Kufa, Iraq); the Maliki school, by the Moroccan jurist Ibn Malik (though he worked and taught in Medina); and the Shafi’i school, by Imam al-Shafi’i of Mecca (though he settled finally in Egypt.) The last to crystallize was the Hanbali school, founded by the rigidly uncompromising Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, about whom I will say more later in this chapter.

  The schools promote slightly different methods of deriving rulings, which has led to minor variations in the details of their laws, but ever since Abbasid times all four have been considered equally orthodox: a Muslim can subscribe to any of them without taint of heresy. Developing and applying this code in all its versions was itself a gigantic social enterprise that spawned and employed an entire social class of scholars known as the ulama—the title is simply the plural of alim, which means “learned one.”

  If you had a reputation for religious scholarship—if you were, that is, a member of the ulama—you might be invited to participate in the administration of a waqf. You might teach students, or even run a school. You might work as a judge, and not just one who heard particular cases, but a judge who issued rulings on broad social issues. In the khalifate, your scholarly status might well lead powerful officials to seek your advice, even though the government and the ulama tended to butt heads, being separate (sometimes even competing) loci of power. The ulama defined the law, controlled the courts, ran the educational system, and permeated Muslim social institutions. They had tremendous social power throughout the civilized world, the power to muster and direct the approval and disapproval of the community against particular people or behaviors. I emphasize social power, because in Muslim society, which is so community oriented, social pressure—the power of shaming—might be the most powerful of all forces, as opposed to political power, which operates through procedural rules, control of money, monopoly control of the instruments of force, and so on.

  Let me emphasize that the ulama were not (and are not) appointed by anyone. Islam has no pope and no official clerical apparatus. How, then, did someone get to be a member of the ulama? By gaining the respect of people who were already established ulama. It was a gradual process. There was no license, no certificate, no “shingle” to hang up to prove that one was an alim. The ulama were (and are) a self-selecting, self-regulating class, bound entirely by the river of established doctrine. No single alim could modify this current or change its course. It was too old, too powerful, too established, and besides, no one could become a member of the ulama until he had absorbed the doctrine so thoroughly that it had become a part of him. By the time a person acquired the status to question the doctrine, he would have no inclination to do so. Incorrigible dissenters who simply would not stop questioning the doctrine probably wouldn’t make it through the process. They would be weeded out early. The process by which the ulama self-generates makes it an inherently conservative class.

  THE PHILOSOPHERS

  The ulama, however, were not the only intellectuals of Islam. While they constructed the edifice of doctrine, another host of thoughtful Muslims were hard at work on another vast project: interpreting all previous philosophies and discoveries in light of the Muslim revelations and integrating them into a single coherent system that made sense of nature, the cosmos, and man’s place in all of it. This project generated another group of thinkers known to the Islamic world as the philosophers.

  The expansion of Islam had brought Arabs into contact with the ideas and achievements of many other peoples including the Hindus of India, the central Asian Buddhists, the Persians, and the Greeks. Rome was virtually dead by this time, and Constantinople (for all its wealth) had degenerated into a wasteland of intellectual mediocrity, so the most original thinkers still writing in Greek were clustered in Alexandria, which fell into Arab hands early on. Alexandria possessed a great library and numerous academies, making it an intellectual capital of the Greco-Roman world.

  Here, the Muslims discovered the works of Plotinus, a philosopher who had said that everything in the universe was connected like the parts of a single organism, and all of it added up to a single mystical One, from which everything had emanated and to which everything would return.

  In this concept of the One, Muslims found a thrilling echo of Prophet Mohammed’s apocalyptic insistence on the oneness of Allah. Better yet, when they looked into Plotinus, they found that he had constructed his system with rigorous logic from a small number of axiomatic principles, which aroused the hope that the revelations of Islam might be provable with logic.

  Further exploration revealed that Plotinus and his peers were merely the latest exponents of a line of thought going back a thousand years to a much greater Athenian philosopher named Plato. And from Plato, the Muslims went on to discover the whole treasury of Greek thought, from the pre-Socratics to Aristotle and beyond.

  The Abbasid aristocracy took great interest in all of these ideas. Anyone who could translate a book from Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Persian into Arabic could get high-paying work. Professional translators flocked to Baghdad. They filled whole libraries in the capital and in other major cities with classic texts translated from other languages. Muslims were the first intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say, Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire universe. One such schema, for example, described the universe as emanating from pure Being in a series of waves that descended to the material facts of immediate daily life—like so:

  Plato had described the material world as an illusory shadow cast by a “real” world that consisted of unchangeable and eternal “forms”: thus, every real chair is but an imperfect copy of some single “ideal” chair that exists only in the realm of universals. Following from Plato, the Muslim philosophers proposed that each human being was a mixture of the real and the illusory. Before birth, they explained, the soul dwelt in a realm of Platonic universals. In life, it got intertwined with body, which was made up of matter. At death, the two separated, the body returning to the world of all matter while the soul returned to Allah, its original home.

  For all
their devotion to Plato, the Muslim philosophers had tremendous admiration for Aristotle, as well: for his logic, his techniques of classification, and his powerful grasp of particularities. Following from Aristotle, the Muslim philosophers categorized and classified with obsessive logic. Just to give you a taste of this attitude: the philosopher al-Kindi described the material universe in terms of five governing principles: matter, form, motion, time, and space. He analyzed each of these into subcategories, dividing motion, for instance, into six types: generation, corruption, increase, decrease, change in quality, and change in position. He went on and on like this, intent on parsing all of reality into discrete, understandable parts.

  The great Muslim philosophers associated spirituality with rationality: our essence, they said, was made up of abstractions and principles, which only reason could access. They taught that the purpose of knowledge was to purify the soul by conducting it from sensory data to abstract principles, from particular facts to universal truths. The philosopher al-Farabi was typical in recommending that students begin with the study of nature, move on to the study of logic, and proceed at last to the most abstract of all the disciplines, mathematics.

  The Greeks invented geometry, Indian mathematicians came up with the brilliant idea of treating zero as a number, the Babylonians discovered the idea of place value, and the Muslims systematized all of these ideas, adding a few of their own, to invent algebra and indeed to lay the foundations of modern mathematics.

  On the other hand, their interests directed the philosophers into practical concerns. By compiling, cataloging, and cross-referencing medical discoveries from many lands, thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna to the Europeans) achieved a near-modern understanding of illness and medical treatments as well as of anatomy—the circulation of blood was known to them, as was the function of the heart and of most other major organs. The Muslim world soon boasted the best hospitals the world had ever seen or was to see for centuries to come: Baghdad alone had some hundred of these facilities.

  These Abbasid-era Muslim philosophers also laid the foundations of chemistry as a discipline and wrote treatises on geology, optics, botany, and virtually all the fields of study now known as science. They didn’t call it by a separate name. As in the West, where science was long called natural philosophy, they saw no need to sort some of their speculations into a separate category and call it by a new name, but early on they recognized quantification as an instrument for studying nature, which is one of the cornerstones of science as a stand-alone endeavor. They also relied on observation for data upon which to base theories, a second cornerstone of science. They never articulated the scientific method per se—the idea of incrementally building knowledge by formulating hypotheses and then setting up experiments to prove or disprove them. Had they bridged that gap, science as we know it might well have sprouted in the Muslim world in Abbasid times, seven centuries before its birth in western Europe.

  It didn’t happen, however, for two reasons, one of which involves the interaction between science and theology. In its early stages, science is inherently difficulty to disentangle from theology. Each seems to have implications for the other, at least to its practitioners. When Galileo promoted the theory that the earth goes around the sun, religious authorities put him on trial for heresy. Even today, even in the West, some Christian conservatives counterpose the biblical narrative of creation to the theory of evolution, as if these two are competing explanations of the same riddle. Science challenges religion because it insists on the reliability and sufficiency of its method for seeking truth: experimentation and reason without recourse to revelation. In the West, for most people, the two fields have reached a compromise by agreeing to distinguish their fields of inquiry: the principles of nature belong to science, the realm of moral and ethical value belongs to religion and philosophy.

  In ninth and tenth century Iraq (as in classical Greece), science as such did not exist to be disentangled from religion. The philosophers were giving birth to it without quite realizing it. They thought of religion as their field of inquiry and theology as their intellectual specialty; they were on a quest to understand the ultimate nature of reality. That (they said) was what both religion and philosophy were about at the highest level. Anything they discovered about botany or optics or disease was a by-product of this core quest, not its central object. As such, philosophers who were making discoveries about botany, optics, or medicine did not hesitate to pronounce on questions we moderns would consider theological and quite outside the purview of, say, a chemist or a veterinarian—questions such as this one:If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he (just) a bad Muslim?

  The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Muslim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world between the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbelievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in the community or outside it.

  Some philosophers who took up this question said Muslims who were grave sinners might belong to a third zone, situated between belief and unbelief. The more rigid, mainstream scholars didn’t like the idea of a third zone, because it suggested that the moral universe wasn’t black-and-white but might have shades of gray.

  Out of this third-zone concept developed a whole school of theologians called the Mu’tazilites, Arabic for “secessionist,” so called because they had seceded from the mainstream of religious thought, at least according to the orthodox ulama. Over time, these theologians formulated a coherent set of religious precepts that appealed to the philosophers. They said the core of Islam was the belief in tawhid: the unity, singleness, and universality of Allah. From this, they argued that the Qur’an could not be eternal and uncreated (as the ulama proclaimed) because if it were, the Qur’an would constitute a second divine entity alongside Allah, and that would be blasphemy. They argued, therefore, that the Qur’an was among Allah’s creations, just like human beings, stars, and oceans. It was a great book, but it was a book. And if it was just a book, the Qur’an could be interpreted and even (gasp) amended.

  Tawhid, they went on to say, prohibited thinking of Allah as having hands, feet, eyes, etc., even though the Qur’an spoke in these terms: all such anthropomorphic references in the Qur’an had to be taken as metaphorical language.

  God, they went on to say, did not have attributes, such as justice, mercy, or power: ascribing attributes to God made Him analyzable into parts, which violated tawhid—unity. God was a single indivisible whole too grand for the human mind to perceive or imagine. What human beings called the attributes of God only named the windows through which humans saw God. The attributes we ascribe to Allah, the Mu’tazilites said, were actually only descriptions of ourselves.

  From their conception of Allah, the Mu’tazilites derived the idea that good and evil, right and wrong, were aspects of the unchanging reality of God, reflecting deep principles that humans could discover in the same way that human beings could discover the principles of nature. In short, this or that behavior wasn’t good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover. Reason, therefore, was itself a valid instrument for discovering ethical, moral, and political truth independently of revelation, according to the Mu’tazilites.

  This is where this quarrel among theologians has implications for the development of science, a mode of inquiry that depends on the application of reason without recourse to revelation. The Mu’tazilites were talking about reason as a way of discovering moral and ethical truths, but in this time and place, the principles of human conduct and the principles of nature all belonged to the same big field of inquiry: the quest for absolute truth.

  The philosopher scientists generally affiliated themselves with the Mu’tazilite school,
no doubt because it validated their mode of inquiry. Some of these philosophers even rated reason above revelation. The philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi blatantly asserted that the miracles ascribed to prophets of the past were legends and that heaven and hell were mental categories, not physical realities.

  You can see how beliefs such as these would put the philosophers and the ulama at odds. For one thing, the precepts of the philosophers implicitly rendered the ulama irrelevant. If any intelligent person could weigh in on whether a law was right or wrong, based on whether it made rational sense, why would anyone need to consult scholars who had memorized every quotation ever ascribed to Prophet Mohammed?

  The ulama were in a good position to fight off such challenges. They controlled the laws, education of the young, social institutions such as marriage, and so on. Most importantly, they had the fealty of the masses. But the Mu’tazilites had advantages too—or rather, they had one advantage: the favor of the court, the imperial family, the aristocrats, and the top officials of the government. In fact, the seventh Abbasid khalifa made Mu’tazilite theology the official doctrine of the land. Judges had to pass philosophy tests and would-be administrators had to swear allegiance to reason, in order to qualify for office.

  Then the Mu’tazilites and their supporters went further: they began using the power of government to persecute people who disagreed with them.

  Which brings me back to Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school of law, the last of the orthodox schools to develop, and the most rigidly conservative of them all. Ibn Hanbal was born in Baghdad in 164 AH, just thirty-six years after the Abbasid dynasty began. He came of age amid the disillusionment that must have permeated certain strata of society when people realized that Abbasids were going to be just as worldly as the Umayyads. He captured the imagination of the crowds by preaching that Islam had gone wrong and that the world was headed to hell unless the community corrected its course. The only hope of salvation, he said, lay in scraping away all innovations and going back to the ways of the first community, the Medina of Prophet Mohammed’s time. Above all, he declared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul’s safety only by following in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation. The other schools of Islamic law gave analogical reasoning (qiyas) a high place as a way to discover how the shari’a applied to new situations, but Ibn Hanbal drastically demoted such methods: rely only on Qur’an and hadith, he said.