Madhahib

You know,

there is a shared memory, going back to the time of the Messenger,

of something called Shari'a.

The Reading described certain codes of behaviour

which the community had to enforce,

but few of the proscribed acts had any specific punishments,

many were only defined in general terms,

and unless the Messenger said otherwise,

the rest were left up to the understanding,

the conscience and will to surrender

of the individuals in the community.

There was no organised legal system, no police.

Then after the death of the Messenger, for the best part of the century that followed,

the Ummayads gave the impression of caring little for religious laws,

to the extent that their complete disregard for Shari'a

was the source of considerable dissatisfaction in the general population,

finally leading to acceptance of the Abbasid caliphal dynasty.

Well, the Abbasids recognised the need to avoid

making the same mistake as the Umayyads,

and as political power went looking for divine justification for governmental authority,

they set about aligning their legal system with the Shari'a,

or vice versa.

Finally under al-Mansur

they began to bring the two tangibly together,

extrapolating the law from an origin traced to the Messenger,

and giving it a structure,

social and intellectual,

that it had never previously possessed.

Now a wide variety of thought could be found across the muslim empire

relating to what was known as Shari'a,

with a wide range of conflicting opinions,

all claiming validity,

and each tracing roots to the Reading

and memories of the Messenger,

but fortuitously,

out of the hubbub of differing opinions

being declaimed in the marketplace,

the ways of describing the legalities of muslim behaviour began to coalesce.

About that time,

at the start of the second century after the Messenger,

a few charismatic men found ways to draw together

the widely disparate ideas and understandings of muslim legalities ranged across the empire,

But brilliant as they might have been,

they still had differences enough to have their own schools of followers

with recognisable intellectual methods and understandings that bound them together

and separated them from the rest,

though all were trying to extrapolate a broad system of law from a few first sources.

The trouble is

that of the more than 6,000 verses of the Reading,

only about 200 even try to differentiate haram from halal,

and even then the consequences of confusing the two are rarely prescribed.

Punishments are mentioned only for the most basic cases of broken trust,

theft,

as you should be able to trust your neighbour not to steal your goods,

fornication,

the breaking of trust in sexual fidelity and hence parental identity,

false witness,

that you should be able to trust the word of an accuser,

and waging war on Islam,

trust that your neighbour isn't trying to kill you.

Punishment for lesser transgressions

such as drunkenness

are not defined,

and even personal violence was simply dealt with in the community

by the traditional Judaic 'eye for an eye' justice.

it would seem that it was self-reflection and self-transformation

rather than compulsion

to which the Reading was inviting muslims to apply themselves.

But alongside the Reading,

there was the shared memory of the community

of how the Messenger dealt with legal problems that arose,

and for obvious reasons those reports are inevitably much less reliable.

So early understandings of what was and wasn't Shari'a

were very fluid as the muslim world rapidly expanded and became an empire.

But people,

and especially rulers,

like to have clearly defined limits,

and in the search to make sense of it all

certain scholars became known for their use of logic and analogy

to extrapolate new laws from first sources,

much as we might do today.

One of the earliest was Ja'far al-Sadiq,

who became the source of Ja'fari jurisprudence,

leading to the opinion that as God acted for discernible reasons,

rational intellect, 'Aql alone

was itself a source of Shari'a.

This also led to the understanding that the Shari'a could change over time.

Similarly, Abu Hanifa felt that logic and analogy

were sufficient to make possible departure from previous Shari'a understandings

when that seemed just.

But legal assertions had to be debated and argued out to be accepted,

even though it was recognised that such debates could result in a winner

that might be the best at argument

while not necessarily possessing the best judgement.

And the conclusions of arguments could be disturbing,

because logic and analogy, plus a little imagination,

can easily search out loopholes in laws previously constructed.

But if laws have loopholes they are not universal laws,

and authoritarians tend to prefer something more specific

constraints to keep things under control.

Also, some scholars were none too happy

with the variety of opinions that could be formed using analogy.

In Madina, Malik ibn-Anas was one,

and in his Muwatta,

compiled over forty years,

he described the opinions of Madinan scholars

on questions of ritual,

etiquette and civic duty,

introducing the concept of Ijma,

that a consensus of those scholars was more valid as a criterion of validity than legal analogy.

The early Hanafites and Malikites

were known to trade insults with gusto,

but both agreed on the need for a system

based on general rules of law.

However, there was another group ranged across the empire,

Muhadithun,

traditionists, who rejected that need,

saying that what was important was not rules

but clear examples of behaviour from the Messenger's life

that should be followed,

and no invented system was necessary

as the group memory contained a hadith to suit every situation.

And unsurprisingly,

in the century following the death of the Messenger

that opinion could be justified,

with the number of different hadiths exploding wildly,

as they conveniently arose to suit different situations

that happened to need different memories

to provide those behavioural examples.

The reliability of those memories could also be challenged

due to the fact that they weren't written down,

simply passed from memory to memory,

but as a group recollection

they were still to a great extent the main source of popular morality,

so they could not be ignored by the new schools of law,

as can be seen in the Muwatta,

but they did tend to choose those hadith

that agreed with what they thought already,

as might have been expected.

What was needed was a way to bring all these diverse approaches together,

and that came from a man born the year that Abu Hanifa died,

Muhammad al-Shafi'i.

His approach accepted the possibility of reasoning from known rules to general principles,

while also accepting Ijma

but widening its requirements to include all leading scholars,

not just Madinan.

Of course this makes its validity rather hard to pin down,

as for that to be possible there has to be agreement

as to who those scholars are,

as the wider the net the greater the chance of disagreement.

He also argued that a Hadith with a perfect Isnad

could be as authoritative as the Qur'an itself,

and controversially, possibly even more so.

For assigning a tradition the authority of the Reading itself

made possible the abrogation of the Reading by Traditions,

that a Hadith could overrule the Qur'an.

From the body of the traditions themselves

it is clear that those closest to the Messenger studiously avoided

writing down his words and behaviour,

obviously wary of turning what was temporal into something fixed and preserved.

They had concerns enough about fixing the text of the Reading in material form,

rather than the remembered Recitation

preserved by the community in the Sala,

so it is inevitably questionable

when such memories are given equal validity,

suggesting that the Messenger felt free to overrule

the Word of God,

revealed without his intellectual intervention,

and which he formally recalled and recited at length in his daily prayers.

So al-Shafi'i found a way to bring things together,

but the traditionists still represented popular thought,

and differences soon came to a head with the rise of the Mutazilites

and opinions as to the nature of the Qur'an.

The issue was whether the Qur'an was created in time and place,

along with the creation of the Messenger and his community,

or whether it was uncreated,

existing outside of time.

For the Mutazilites the Reading related to a specific time and place,

so it was understood that its meaning was liable to change over time,

and further than that,

they were contemptuous of the notion

that 200 year old tales of the Messenger

might constitute reliable evidence of God's Will.

But that was like a direct challenge to the traditionists,

and when the government attempted

to enforce this way of thinking on the population,

they faced a tremendous backlash

from those Muhadithun who said that the Qur'an is uncreated,

having no beginning or end,

its relevance to all times being in its words promoting good and forbidding evil,

amr bil-maruf wa nahy al-munkar,

stressing individual duty over structured jurisprudence.

They simply believed that muslims were obliged to accept the words

bi-la kayfa,

without knowing "how"

At the forefront of this movement stood 'Ibn Hanbal,

a heroic figure

who despite public flogging to persuade him otherwise,

stood up against the Mutazilite rulers,

and whose ideas over the next couple of centuries

became established as a major alternative approach to Shari'a law.

Ibn Hanbal was also known as having memorised a prodigious number of hadith,

but fifty years after his death

a new technology began to be applied to the memories of the muhadithun

with the introduction of paper manufacture into the muslim world.

For 200 years little had been written down,

vellum being expensive and papyrus extremely fragile,

but now it was cheap and easy to record things,

and in so doing change their nature.

Despite Ibn Hanbal instructing his followers

not to write down his legal opinions,

as it was possible that within a day he might change his mind,

the temptation to do so was overwhelming,

making it possible for such legal ideas to be understood as canon,

something fixed and permanently authoritative.

Pen wielding scholars could now define fluid traditions

and fix them into set commandments.

Thus began the journey of Shari'a from innovative reasoning to specificity,

rigidity and ossification,

with centuries of introspection slowly detaching Shari'a from the world.

At the service of authoritarianism, Shari'a developed a tendency

to condemn anything unfamiliar as haram,

only to eventually be forced to accept

the pragmatic realities of the world in which it existed.

Shari'a lawyers rejected the printing of the Qur'an for 200 years,

rejected photography, cinema and TV,

and today there are still lawyers arguing

as to whether wudhu is a requirement for reading the Qur'an on mobile phones.

Meanwhile,

muslims are using the opinions of Shari'a lawyers to justify acts of appalling cruelty,

butchering muslims and non-muslims alike,

taking pride in the amount of offence they can take at pereceived blasphemy

when non-muslims don't look on the Messenger with their own religious fervour.

Are these muslims so uncertain of their faith

that they need to strike out at those who see it as nonsensical,

or does this spring from a feared inner agreement with that opinion?

Or is it just the result of sense not being part of the taqlid approach to Shari'a,

with obedience being more important than understanding?

Nonetheless, throughout the history of Islam

it is clear that some of the community of muslims felt that they could do as they liked,

and ultimately of course that is true,

as that is the price you pay when there is no compulsion.

Loopholes in law show the voluntary nature of law.

You pay or do because you choose to.

Surely in the modern world,

living as a minority in a non-muslim culture,

Shari'a needs to be seen as something personal.

Others, whatever their legal qualifications, can only give their opinions.

Especially living in a minority situation,

there can be no governmental authority over Islam.

If we accept the words of the Reading,

an Islamic way of life can never be the result of compulsion.

At its heart surrender always has to be an individual, personal choice.

The enforced laws by which states are run

are horses of quite a different colour.

Does a new muslim, surrendering to God,

also need to accept a defined Shari'a in the way of a madhzab to be a muslim?

If they accept there is no god but God

and follow the Ibadat practices of the Messenger,

but refuse to accept submission to a pre-defined Shari'a,

are their prayers to and private speech with God invalid?

Is their turning towards God rejected?

And if it is not necessary for them,

how can it be necessary for anyone else of true faith,

trying like the Messenger

to live the way of life of Abraham?