Faith in the future: Islam after the Enlightenment

First Annual Altaf Gauhar Memorial Lecture
Islamabad, 23 December 2002

Bismi’llahi’r-Rahmani’r-Rahim 

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, may I express my warm gratitude to you all for paying me the compliment of attending today? It is particularly gratifying to me to attend an event in this country, the only state established in recent history specifically as a homeland for Muslims. It is also a privilege to be associated with the name of the late and revered Altaf Gauhar, whose translations from the Qur’an certainly formed, back in the late 1970s, part of my own personal journey towards Islam.

I want to talk about religion – our religion – and address the question of what exactly is going on when we speak about the prospects of a mutually helpful engagement between Islam and Western modernity. I propose to tackle this rather large question by invoking what I take to be the underlying issue in all religious talk, which is its ability both to propose and to resolve paradoxes.

We might begin by saying that theology is the most ambitious and fruitful of disciplines because it is all about the successful squaring of circles. Most obviously, it seeks to capture, in the limited net of human language, something of the mystery of an infinite God. Most taxingly, it seeks to demonstrate that an omnipotent God is also absolutely just, and that an apparently infinite reward or chastisement can attend upon finite human behaviour. Most scandalously, it holds that we are more than natural philosophy can describe or know, and that we can achieve states of being in what we call the soul that are as movingly palpable as they are inexplicable. The Spirit, as the scriptures tell us, ‘is of the command of our Lord, and of knowledge you have been given but little.’ (17:85)

So we have a list of imponderables. But to this list the specifically Islamic form of monotheism adds several additional items. The first of these items is what we call universalism, that is to say, that Islam does not limit itself to the upliftment of any given section of humanity, but rather announces a desire to transform the entire human family. This is, if you like, its Ishmaelite uniqueness: the religions that spring from Isaac (a.s.), are, in our understanding, an extension of Hebrew and Occidental particularity, while Islam is universal. Hagar, unlike Sarah, is half-Egyptian, half-Gentile, and it is she who goes forth into the Gentile world. Rembrandt’s famous picture of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael has Sarah mockingly peering out of a window. She is old, and stays at home; while Hagar is young, and looks, with her son, towards limitless horizons.

In the hadith, we learn that ‘Every prophet was sent to his own people; but I am sent to all mankind’ (bu‘ithtu li’l-nasi kaffa). [1] This will demand the squaring of a circle – in fact of many circles – in a way that is characteristically Islamic. Despite its Arabian origins, Islam is to be not merely for the nations, but of the nations. No pre-modern civilisation embraced more cultures than that of Islam – in fact, it was Muslims who invented globalisation. The many-coloured fabric of the traditional Umma is not merely part of the glory of the Blessed Prophet, of whom it is said: ‘Truly your adversary is the one cut off’. (108:3) It also demonstrates the divine purpose that this Ishmaelite covenant is to bring a monotheism that uplifts, rather than devastates cultures. Islam brought immense fertility to the Indian subcontinent, upgrading architecture, cuisine, music, and languages. Nothing could be more unfair than the Indian chauvinistic thesis, given its most articulate and insidious voice by V.S. Naipaul, that Islam is a travelling parochialism, an ‘Arab imperialism’. [2]

That, then, has been another circle successfully squared – the bringing to the very different genius of the Subcontinent an uncompromising monotheism which fertilised, and brought to the region its highest artistic and literary moments. Mother India was never more fecund than when she welcomed the virility of Islam. Remember the words of Allama Iqbal:

Behold and see! In Ind’s domain

Thou shalt not find the like again,

That, though a Brahman’s son I be,

Tabriz and Rum stand wide to me. [3]

It is our confidence, moreover, that this triumphant demonstration of Islam’s universalism has not come to an end. Perhaps the greatest single issue exercising the world today is the following: is the engagement of Islamic monotheism with the new capitalist global reality a challenge that even Islam, with its proven ability to square circles, cannot manage?

As Muslims, of course, we believe that every culture, including the culture of modern consumer liberalism, stands accountable before the claims of revelation. There must, therefore, be a mode of behaviour that modernity can adopt that can be meaningfully termed Islamic, without entailing its transformation into a monochrome Arabness. This is a consequence of our universalist assumptions, but it is also an extension of our triumphalism, and our belief that the divine purposes can be read in history. Wa-kalimatu’Llahi hiya’l-‘ulya – God’s word is uppermost. (9:40) The current agreement between zealots on both sides – Islamic and unbelieving – that Islam and Western modernity can have no conversation, and cannot inhabit each other, seems difficult given traditional Islamic assurances about the universal potential of revelation. The increasing number of individuals who identify themselves as entirely Western, and entirely Muslim, demonstrate that the arguments against the continued ability of Islam to be inclusively universal are simply false.

Yet the question, the big new Eastern Question, will not go away this easily. Palpably, there are millions of Muslims who are at ease somewhere within the spectrum of the diverse possibilities of Westernness. We need, however, a theory to match this practice. Is the accommodation real? What is the theological or fiqh status of this claim to an overlap? Can Islam really square this biggest of all historical circles, or must it now fail, and retreat into impoverished and hostile marginality, as history passes it by?

Let us refine this question by asking what, exactly, is the case against Islam’s contemporary claim to universal relevance? Some of the most frank arguments have come from right-wing European politicians, as part of their campaign to reduce Muslim immigration to Europe. This has, of course, become a prime political issue in the European Union, a local extension of a currently global argument.

Sometimes one hears the claim that Muslims cannot inhabit the West, or – as successful participants – the Western-dominated global reality, because Islam has not passed through a reformation. This is a tiresome and absent-minded claim that I have heard from senior diplomats who simply cannot be troubled to read their own history, let alone the history of Islam. A reformation, that is to say, a bypass operation which avoids the clogged arteries of medieval history and seeks to refresh us with the lifeblood of the scriptures themselves, is precisely what is today underway among those movements and in those places which the West finds most intimidating. The Islamic world is now in the throes of its own reformation, and our Calvins and Cromwells are proving no more tolerant and flexible than their European predecessors. [4]

A reformation, then, is a bad thing to ask us for, if you would like us to be more pliant. But there is an apparently more intelligible demand, which is that we must pass through an Enlightenment. Take, for instance, the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. In his book Against the Islamisation of our Culture, he writes: ‘Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.’ [5]

Fortuyn is not a marginal voice. His funeral at Rotterdam Cathedral, reverently covered by Dutch television, attracted a vast crowd of mourners. As his coffin passed down the city’s main street, the Coolsingel, so many flowers were thrown that the vehicle itself almost disappeared from sight, recalling, to many, the scenes attending the funeral of Princess Diana. The election performance of his party a week later was a posthumous triumph, as his associate Hilbrand Nawijn was appointed minister for asylum and immigration. Fortuyn’s desire to close all Holland’s mosques was not put into effect, but a number of new, highly-restrictive, policies have been implemented. Asylum seekers now have to pay a seven thousand Euro deposit for compulsory Dutch language and citizenship lessons. A 90 percent cut in the budget of asylum seeker centres has been approved. An official government enquiry into the Dutch Muslim community was ordered by the new parliament in July 2002. [6]

I take the case of the Netherlands because it was, until very recently, a model of liberalism and multiculturalism. Indeed, modern conceptions of religious toleration may be said to have originated among Dutch intellectuals. Without wishing to sound the alarm, it is evident that if Holland can adopt an implicitly inquisitorial attitude to Islam, there is no reason why other states should not do likewise.

But again, the question has not been answered. Fortuyn, a highly-educated and liberal Islamophobe, was convinced that Islam cannot square the circle. He would say that the past genius of Islam in adapting itself to cultures from Senegal to Sumatra cannot be extended into our era, because the rules of that game no longer apply. Success today demands membership of a global reality, which means signing up to the terms of its philosophy. The alternative is poverty, failure, and – just possibly – the B52s.

How should Islam answer this charge? The answer is, of course, that ‘Islam’ can’t. The religion’s strength stems in large degree from its internal diversity. Different readings of the scriptures attract different species of humanity. There will be no unified Islamic voice answering Fortuyn’s interrogation. The more useful question is: who should answer the charge? What sort of Muslim is best equipped to speak for us, and to defeat his logic?

Fortuyn’s error was to impose a Christian squint on Islam. As a practising Catholic, he imported assumptions about the nature of religious authority that ignore the multi-centred reality of Islam. On doctrine, we try to be united – but he is not interested in our doctrine. On fiqh, we are substantially diverse. Even in the medieval period, one of the great moral and methodological triumphs of the Muslim mind was the confidence that a variety of madhhabs could conflict formally, but could all be acceptable to God. In fact, we could propose as the key distinction between a great religion and a sect the ability of the former to accommodate and respect substantial diversity. Fortuyn, and other European politicians, seek to build a new Iron Curtain between Islam and Christendom, on the assumption that Islam is an ideology functionally akin to communism, or to the traditional churches of Europe.

The great tragedy is that some of our brethren would agree with him. There are many Muslims who are happy to describe Islam as an ideology. One suspects that they have not troubled to look the term up, and locate its totalitarian and positivistic undercurrents. It is impossible to deny that certain formulations of Islam in the twentieth century resembled European ideologies, with their obsession with the latest certainties of science, their regimented cellular structure, their utopianism, and their implicit but primary self-definition as advocates of communalism rather than of metaphysical responsibility. The emergence of ‘ideological Islam’ was, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, entirely predictable. Everything at that time was ideology. Spirituality seemed to have ended, and postmodernism was not yet a twinkle in a Parisian eye. In fact, the British historian John Gray goes so far as to describe the process which Washington describes as the ‘war on terror’ as an internal Western argument which has nothing to do with traditional Islam. As he puts it: ‘The ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.’ [7]

There are, of course, significant oversimplications in this analysis. There are some individuals in the new movements who do have a substantial grounding in Islamic studies. And the juxtaposition of ‘political’ and ‘Islam’ will always be redundant, given that the Islamic, Ishmaelite message is inherently liberative, and hence militantly opposed to oppression.

Nonetheless, the irony remains. We are represented by the unrepresentative, and the West sees in us a mirror image of its less attractive potentialities. Western Muslim theologians such as myself frequently point out that the movements which seek to represent Islam globally, or in Western minority situations, are typically movements which arose as reactions against Western political hegemony that themselves internalised substantial aspects of Western political method. In Europe, Muslim community leaders who are called upon to justify Islam in the face of recent terrorist activities are ironically often individuals who subscribe to ideologised forms of Islam which adopt dimensions of Western modernity in order to secure an anti-Western profile. It is no surprise that such leaders arouse the suspicion of the likes of Pim Fortuyn, or, indeed, a remarkably wide spectrum of commentators across the political spectrum.

Islam’s universalism, however, is not well-represented by the advocates of movement Islam. Islamic universalism is represented by the great bulk of ordinary mosque-going Muslims who around the world live out different degrees of accommodation with the local and global reality. One could argue, against Fortuyn, that Muslim communities are far more open to the West than vice-versa, and know far more about it. Muslims return from the mosques in Cairo in time for the latest American soaps. There is no equivalent desire in the West to learn from and integrate into other cultures. On the ground, the West is keener to export than to import, to shape, rather than be shaped. As such, its universalism can seem imperial and hierarchical, driven by corporations and strategic imperatives that owe nothing whatsoever to non-Western cultures, and acknowledge their existence only where they might turn out to be obstacles. Likewise, Westerners, when they settle outside their cultural area, almost never assimilate to the culture which newly surrounds them. Islam, we will therefore insist, is more flexible than the West. Where they are intelligently applied, our laws and customs, mediated through the due instruments of ijtihad, have been reshaped substantially by encounter with the Western juggernaut, through faculties such as the concern for public interest, or urf – customary legislation. Western law and society, by contrast, have not admitted significant emendation at the hands of another culture for many centuries.

From our perspective, then, it can seem that it is the West, not the Islamic world, which stands in need of reform in a more pluralistic direction. It claims to be open, while we are closed, but in reality, on the ground, seems closed, while we have been open.

*          *          *

I think there is force to this defence. But does it help us answer the insistent question of Mr Fortuyn? Do we have to pass through his laundromat to be made internally white, as it were, to have an authentic and honoured place of belonging at the table of the modern reality?

Historians would probably argue that since history cannot repeat itself, the demand that Islam experience an Enlightenment is strange, and that if the task be attempted, it cannot remotely guarantee an outcome analogous to that experienced by Europe. If honest and erudite enough, they may also recognise that the Enlightenment possibilities in Europe were themselves the consequence of a Renaissance humanism which was triggered not by an internal European or Christian logic, but by the encounter with Islamic thought, and particularly the Islamised version of Aristotle which, via Ibn Rushd, took fourteenth-century Italy by storm. The stress on the individual, the reluctance to establish clerical hierarchies which hold sway over earthly kingdoms, the generalised dislike of superstition, the slowness to persecute for the sake of credal difference: all these may well be European transformations that were eased, or even enabled, by the transfusion of a certain kind of Muslim wisdom from Spain.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the Christian and Jewish Enlightenments of the eighteenth century did not move Europe in a religious, still less an Islamic direction. Instead, they moved outside the Moorish paradigm to produce a disenchantment, a desacralising of the world which opened the gates for two enormous transformations in human experience. One of these has been the subjugation of nature to the will (or more usually the lower desires) of man. The consequences for the environment, and even for the sustainable habitability of our planet, are looking increasingly disturbing. There is certainly an oddness about the Western desire to convert the Third World to a high-consumption market economy, when it is certain that if the world were to reach American levels of fossil-fuel consumption, global warming would soon render the planet entirely uninhabitable.

The second dangerous consequence of ‘Enlightenment’, as Muslims see it, is the replacement of religious autocracy and sacred kingship with either a totalitarian political order, or with a democratic liberal arrangement that has no fail-safe resistance to moving in a totalitarian direction. Take, for instance, the American Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs, for whom the Enlightenment did away with Jewish faith in God, while the Holocaust did away with Jewish faith in humanity. As he writes:

They lost faith in a utopian humanism that promised: ‘Give up your superstitions! Abandon the ethnic and religious traditions that separate us one from the other! Subject all aspects of life to rational scrutiny and the disciplines of science! This is how we will be saved.’ It didn’t work. Not that science and rationality are unworthy; what failed was the effort to abstract these from their setting in the ethics and wisdoms of received tradition. [8]

Here is another voice from deep in the American Jewish intellectual tradition that many in the Muslim world assume provides the staunchest advocates of the Enlightenment. This time it is Irving Greenberg:

The humanistic revolt for the ‘liberation’ of humankind from centuries of dependence upon God and nature has been shown to sustain a capacity for demonic evil. Twentieth-century European civilization, in part the product of the Enlightenment and liberal culture, was a Frankenstein that authored the German monster’s being. […] Moreover, the Holocaust and the failure to confront it make a repetition more likely – a limit was broken, a control or awe is gone – and the murder procedure is now better laid out and understood. [9]

The West is loath to refer to this possibility in its makeup, as it urges, in Messianic fashion, its pattern of life upon the world. It believes that Srebrenica, or Mr Fortuyn, are aberrations, not a recurrent possibility. Muslims, however, surely have the right to express deep unease about the demand to submit to an Enlightenment project that seems to have produced so much darkness as well as light. Iqbal, identifying himself with the character Zinda-Rud in his Javid-name, declaims, to consummate the final moment of his own version of the Mi‘raj: Inghelab-i Rus u Alman dide am: ‘I have seen the revolutions of Russia and of Germany!’ [10] This in a great, final crying-out to God.

We European Muslims, born already amid the ambiguities of the Enlightenment, have also wrestled with this legacy. Alija Izetbegovic, the former Bosnian president, has discussed the relationship in his book Between East and West. A lesser-known voice has been that of the Swedish theologian Tage Lindbom, who died three years ago. Lindbom is particularly important to European Muslim thought because of his own personal journey. A founder member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and one of the major theorists of the Swedish welfare state, Lindbom experienced an almost Ghazalian crisis of doubt, and repented of his Enlightenment ideology in favour of a kind of Islamic traditionalism. In 1962 he published his book The Windmills of Sancho Panza, which generated enough of a scandal to force him from his job, and he composed the remainder of his twenty-odd books in retirement. For Lindbom, the liberation promised by the Enlightenment did not only lead to the explicit totalitarianisms which ruined most of Europe for much of the twentieth century, but also to an implicit, hidden totalitarianism, which is hardly less dangerous to human freedom. We are now increasingly slaves to the self, via the market, and the endlessly proliferating desires and lifestyles which we take to be the result of our free choice are in fact designed for us by corporation executives and media moguls.

There can be no brotherhood among human beings, Lindbom insists, unless there is a God under whom we may be brothers. As he writes: ‘The perennial question is always whether we humans are to understand our presence on this earth as a vice-regency or trusteeship under the mandate of Heaven, or whether we must strive to emancipate ourselves from any higher dominion, with human supremacy as our ultimate aim.’ [11]

He goes on as follows:

Secularization increasingly becomes identified with two motives: the reduction of human intelligence to rationalism, and sensual desire; the one is grafted onto the vertebral nervous system, and the other is a function of the involuntary and subconscious elements of man’s composite nature. Rationalism and sensualism will prove to be the mental currents and the two forms of consciousness whereby secularization floods the Western world. Human pride, superbia, the first and greatest of the seven deadly sins, grows unceasingly; and it is during the eighteenth century that man begins to formulate the notion that he is discovering himself as the earthly agent of power. [12]

Lindbom’s works have provoked sharp discussion among Western Muslims in the universities. Enlightenment leads to sensualism and to rationality. Walter Benjamin has already seen that it cannot guarantee that these principles will secure a moral consensus, or protect the weak. It also – and here Lindbom has less to say – yields its own destruction. Western intellectuals now speak of post-modernism as an end of Enlightenment reason. Hence the new Muslim question becomes: why jump into the laundromat if European thinkers have themselves turned it off? Is the Third World to be brought to heel by importing only Europe’s yesterdays? [13]

These are troubled waters, and perhaps will carry us too far from our purpose in this lecture. Let me, however, offer a few reflections on what our prospects might look like if we excuse ourselves the duty of spinning in Mr Fortuyn’s machine.

Islam, as I rather conventionally observed a few minutes ago, speaks with many voices. Fortuyn, and the new groundswell of educated Western Islamophobia, have heard only a few of them, hearkening as they do to the totalitarian and the extreme. Iqbal, I would suggest, and Altaf Gauhar, represent a very different tradition. It is a tradition which insists that Islam is only itself when it recognises that authenticity arises from recognising the versatility of classical Islam, rather than taking any single reading of the scriptures as uniquely true. Ijtihad, after all, is scarcely a modern invention.

Iqbal puts it this way:

The ultimate spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality must reconcile in its life the categories of permanence and change. [14]

In other words, to use my own idiom, it must square the circle to be dynamic. The immutable Law, to be alive, even to be itself, must engage with the mill-wheel of the transient.

One of Altaf Gauhar’s intellectual associates, Allahbakhsh Brohi, used the following metaphor:

We need a bi-focal vision: we must have an eye on the eternal principles sanctioned by the Qur’anic view of man’s place in the scheme of things, and also have the eye firmly fixed on the ever-changing concourse of economic-political situation which confronts man from time to time. [15]

We do indeed need a bi-focal ability. It is, after all, a quality of the Antichrist that he sees with only one eye. An age of decadence, whether or not framed by an Enlightenment, is an age of extremes, and the twentieth century was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, precisely that. Islam has been Westernised enough, it sometimes appears, to have joined that logic. We are either neutralised by a supposedly benign Islamic liberalism that in practice allows nothing distinctively Islamic to leave the home or the mosque – an Enlightenment-style privatisation of religion that abandons the world to the morality of the market leaders and the demagogues. Or we fall back into the sensual embrace of extremism, justifying our refusal to deal with the real world by dismissing it as absolute evil, as kufr, unworthy of serious attention, which will disappear if we curse it enough.

Traditional Islam, as is scripturally evident, cannot sanction either policy. Extremism, however, has been probably the more damaging of the two. Al-Bukhari and Muslim both narrate from A’isha, (r.a.), the hadith that runs: ‘Allah loves kindness is all matters.’ Imam Muslim also narrates from Ibn Mas‘ud, (r.a.), that the Prophet (salla’Llahu ‘alayhi wa-sallam) said: ‘Extremists shall perish’ (halaka’l-mutanatti‘un). Commenting on this, Imam al-Nawawi defines extremists as ‘fanatical zealots’ (al-muta‘ammiqun al-ghalun), who are simply ‘too intense’ (al-mushaddidun).

Revelation, as always, requires the middle way. Extremism, in any case, never succeeds even on its own terms. It usually repels more people from religion than it holds within it. Attempts to reject all of global modernity simply cannot succeed, and have not succeeded anywhere. A more sane policy, albeit a more courageous, complex and nuanced one, has to be the introduction of Islam as a prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality of the modern world.

It should not be hard to see where we naturally fit. The gaping hole in the Enlightenment, pointed out by the postmodern theologians and by more sceptical but still anxious minds, was the Enlightenment’s inability to form a stable and persuasive ground for virtue and hence for what it has called ‘citizenship’. David Hume expressed the problem as follows:

If the reason be asked of that obedience which we are bound to pay to government, I readily answer: Because society could not otherwise subsist; and this answer is clear and intelligible to all mankind. Your answer is, Because we should keep our word. But besides that, nobody, till trained in a philosophical system, can either comprehend or relish this answer; besides this, say, you find yourself embarrassed when it is asked, Why we are bound to keep our word? Nor can you give any answer but what would immediately, without any circuit, have accounted for our obligation to allegiance. [16]

But why are we bound to keep our word? Why need we respect the moral law? Religion seems to answer this far more convincingly than any secular ethic. In spite of all stereotypes, the degree of violence in the Muslim world remains far less than that of Western lands governed by the hope of a persuasive secular social contract. [17] Perhaps this is inevitable: the Enlightenment was, after all, nothing but the end of the Delphic principle that to know the world we must know and refine and uplift ourselves. Before Descartes, Locke and Hume, all the world had taken spirituality to be the precondition of philosophical knowing. Without love, self-discipline, and care for others, that is to say, without a transformation of the human subject, there could be no knowledge at all. The Enlightenment, however, as Descartes foresaw, would propose that the mind is already self-sufficient and that moral and spiritual growth are not preconditions for intellectual eminence, so that they might function to shape the nature of its influence upon society. Not only is the precondition of the transformation of the subject repudiated, but the classical idea, shared by the religions and the Greeks, that access to truth itself brings about a personal transformation, is dethroned just as insistently. [18] Relationality is disposable, and the laundromat turns out to be a centrifuge.

Religion offers a solution to this fatal weakness. Applied with wisdom, it provides a fully adequate reason for virtue and an ability to produce cultural and political leaders who embody it themselves. Of course, it is all too often applied improperly, and there is something of the Promethean arrogance and hubris of the philosophes in the radical insistence that the human subject be enthroned in authority over scriptural interpretation, without a due prelude of initiation, love, and self-naughting. Yet the failure of the Enlightenment paradigm, as invoked by the secular elites in the Muslim world, to deliver moral and efficient government and cultural guidance, indicates that the solution must be religious. Religious aberrations do not discredit the principle they aberrantly affirm.

What manner of Islam may most safely undertake this task? It is no accident that the overwhelming majority of Western Muslim thinkers, including Lindbom himself, have been drawn into the religion by the appeal of Sufism. To us, the ideological redefinitions of Islam are hardly more impressive than they are to the many European xenophobes who take them as normative. We need a form of religion that elegantly and persuasively squares the circle, rather than insisting on a conflictual model that is unlikely to damage the West as much as Islam. A purely non-spiritual reading of Islam, lacking the vertical dimension, tends to produce only liberals or zealots; and both have proved irrelevant to our needs.

*          *          *

The most recurrent theme of Islamic architecture has been the dome surmounting the cube. Between the two there are complex arrangements of arabesques and pendentives. Religion is worth having because, drawing on the infinite and miraculous power of God, it can turn a circle into a square in a way that delights the eye. Through logic and definition the theologian seeks to show how the infinite engages with the finite. Imam al-Ghazali, and our tradition generally, came to the conclusion that the Sufi does the job more elegantly, while not putting the theologian out of a job. But Sufism also, as Iqbal and the consensus of Muslim theologians in the West have seen, demonstrates other virtues. Because it has been the instrument whereby Islam has been embedded in the divergent cultures of the rainbow that is the traditional Islamic world, we may suppose that it represents the best instrument available for attempting a ‘dissenting’ Muslim embedding within today’s inexorable global reality. It insists on the acquisition of compassion and wisdom as a precondition for the exercise of ijtihad, or of any other mode of knowing. Its emphasis on the potential grandeur of man’s condition, of the one who was ‘taught all the Names’, makes it more humane than any secular humanism. In short, its recognition of the limitations of rational attempts to square the circle of speaking of the metaphysical and in justifying virtue, can bring us to real, rather than illusory, enlightenment, to a true ishraq. This is because there is only one ‘Light of the heavens and the earth.’ (24:35) Seeking truth in the many, while ignoring the One, is the cardinal, Luciferian error. Its consequences for recent human history have already been tragic. Its prospects, as it yields more and more methods of destruction, and fewer and fewer arguments for a universal morality, are surely unnerving. Genetic engineering now threatens to redefine our very humanity, precisely that principle which the Enlightenment found to be the basis of truth. In such a world, religion, for all its failings, is likely to be the only force which can genuinely reconnect us with our humanity, and with our fellow men.

Wa’Llahu’l-Musta‘an.

NOTES

1. Bukhari, Tayammum, 1.

2. The view is expounded most forcefully in his recent Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (London, 1998). For a refutation see T.J. Winter, ‘Some thoughts on the formation of British Muslim identity’, Encounters 8:1 (2002), 3-26.

3. Persian Psalms (Zabur-i ‘Ajam), translated into English verse from the Persian of the late Sir Muhammad Iqbal by Arthur J. Arberry. (Lahore, 1948), 8.

4.  The defining demand of the Reformation was the return to the most literal meaning of Scripture. Hence Calvin: ‘Let us know, then, that the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and simple one, and let us embrace and hold it resolutely. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense.’ (John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians (Edinburgh, 1965), 84-5. Is this what the West is demanding of us? That a Muslim state should, in consequence, be a ‘city of glass’, like Calvin’s terrified Geneva?

5.   Cited in Angus Roxburgh, Preachers of Hate: The Rise of the Far Right. (London, 2002), 163.

6.   Roxburgh, 160, 169, 174.

7.   The Independent July 28, 2002.

8.   Peter Ochs, ‘The God of Jews and Christians’, in Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder and Oxford, 2000), 54.

9.   Irving Greenberg, ‘Judaism, Christianity and Partnership after the Twentieth Century’, in Frymer-Kensky, op. cit., 26.

10.  Iqbal, Javid-Nama, translated from the Persian with introduction and notes, by Arthur J. Arberry (London, 1966), 140.

11.  Tage Lindbom, The Myth of Democracy (Grand Rapids, 1996), 18.

12.  Ibid., 22.

13.  The implications of the collapse of Enlightenment reason for theology have been sketched out by George Lindbeck in his The Nature of Doctrine: religion and theology in a postliberal age (London, 1984), and (for a more Islamic turn, because explicitly resistant to those Renaissance-Aristotelian confidences of Suarez which took Thomism so far from kalam) in the several works of Jean-Luc Marion. The Ash‘arite resonances are clear enough: discourse is self-referential unless penetrated by the Word.

14.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, cited in Allahbakhsh Brohi, Iqbal and the Concept of Islamic Socialism (Lahore, 1967), 7.

15.  Brohi, op. cit., 7.

16.  David Hume, Essays (Oxford, 1963), 469.

17.  For example, the 2002 World Health Organisation document World Report on Violence and Health, shows the murder rate in the Eastern Mediterranean region to be less than half the rate for the Americas. See http://www5.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/download.cfm?id=0000000559, page 7.

18.  This has been discussed with particular clarity by Michel Foucault, L’Hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au College de France (1981-2) (Paris, 2001), pp.16-17. Foucault’s pessimism might be further reinforced by considering the corrosive implications of the new biology, with its anti-egalitarian potential, for secular reasons for conviviality and mutual respect. Cf. W.D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. II (Oxford, 2001), for whom evolutionary theories ‘have the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal glue.’

From Drury Lane to Makka

Hedley Churchward the first British Muslim to carry out the rites of Hajj

History has not recorded the name of the first British Muslim to carry out the rites of Hajj.  Rumours abound of converted Crusaders who made the trip in medieval times, and of British Muslims in Ottoman naval service who visited the hallowed precincts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  But the first detailed account of the Hajj by an English Muslim had to wait until the Edwardian era, when the artist Hedley Churchward became the first recorded British ‘Guest of God.’

Like many Anglo-Muslims of his day, Churchward was the conservative, gentlemanly scion of an ancient family; indeed, his ancestors possessed the second oldest house in Britain.  His father ran a successful business in Aldershot, and was well-received in regimental circles, enabling the young Churchward to meet Queen Victoria and the philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts.  Showing an early artistic talent, Churchward studied art and became a recognised painter, specialising in the then highly prestigious field of theatrical scene painting.  A familiar figure in London’s West End in the 1880s, he worked closely with celebrities as varied as Tennyson, Millais, Lord Leighton, and the most famous of all Victorian ‘supermodels’, Lily Langtry.

A leisurely trip through Spain opened the young scene-painter’s eyes to the glories of Moorish architecture, and he was tempted to venture across the Straits to Morocco.  Here, in a world still untouched by Western influence, he quickly fell in love with the gentle and beautiful lifestyle of Islam.  After several visits, he gravely announced to his startled family that he had become a Muslim.

Churchward travelled on to Cairo, where he studied for several years at Al-Azhar, the Muslim world’s highest seat of learning.  His scholarship developed apace, enabling him to preach Friday sermons at a small mosque, and even landing him an appointment to the prestigious post of lecturer in Sira (the Prophet’s biography) at the Qadis’ Academy – no small achievement for a convert.

In need of more lucrative work, Churchward then sailed for South Africa, where his art and his elegant drawing-room manner soon won him the favour of Cecil Rhodes, who made him the gift of a rare pink diamond.  Moving effortlessly between the Muslim community and the Transvaal’s white elite, it was thanks to Churchward’s earnest intercession that President Paul Kruger granted permission for the erection of the first mosque in the Witwatersrand goldfields.

On his return to Cairo, Mahmoud Churchward married the daughter of a prominent Shafi‘i jurist of Al-Azhar, and continued his Arabic lecturing.  But both his head and his heart told him that his Islam was not yet complete: the magnetic pull of the Fifth Pillar was becoming impossible to resist.  As he later recorded: ‘One evening, as I strode along the looming Pyramid in the sunset, and saw the jagged skyline of Cairo behind the dreamy African dusk, I decided to carry through what I had intended to do ever since I turned a Moslem – I would go to the Kaaba at Mecca.’

As an Englishman he realised that this ambition might prove hard to fulfil: there was a danger that the Caliphal authorities at Jeddah might distrust the sincerity of his claims to be a Muslim, and unceremoniously turn him away.  He therefore petitioned the senior Ulema for a letter of recommendation.  In the awe-inspiring presence of the Chief Qadi of Egypt, together with Shaykh al-Islam Mehmet Jemaluddin Efendi (the Ottoman Empire’s highest religious authority, who happened to be on a visit to Cairo), he submitted to a three-hour examination on difficult points of faith.  Passing with flying colours, he received a beautifully-calligraphed testimonial signed by the scholars present.  This religious passport was to serve him well in overcoming the bureaucratic obstacles which lay ahead.

In 1910, after a further year in South Africa, the would-be Hajji packed his trunks and set out from Johannesburg for the Holy Land.  Steamers in those days were slow, and Churchward faced the added impediment of having to travel via Bombay, where he spent weeks in frustrating negotiations with shipping-clerks, officials, and an urbane Lebanese Christian who was the Ottoman consul.  At last he found an elderly pilgrim ship, the SS Islamic, and this vessel, captained by an irascible Scotsman and armed with cannon against the threat of pirates, chugged slowly across the shimmering heat of the Indian Ocean, visiting the poverty-stricken Arabian Gulf before wending its leisurely way up the Red Sea.

The days passed slowly, and the time for Hajj was fast approaching.  Steaming at six knots, halting at small ports to deliver sacks of mail, which had to be handed over with six-foot tongs because of the fear of plague, there was little to do except watch the dolphins, eat curry, and pray on deck with the Indian pilgrims.

Landing briefly at the Sudanese port of Suakin, Churchward dropped in on the British Consul, who airily told him that his plans to visit Makka were doomed.  ‘My dear chap,’ he told him, sipping an iced drink on the Consular veranda, ‘to begin with you will not be allowed to land at Jeddah.’

But two days later, the Islamic steamed into the roadstead of the Arabian port.  ‘On the Indian deck,’ he recorded, ‘there started a great packing of pots, portable stoves, babies and sacks of rice.’  It proved necessary to row ashore in a small dinghy, plunging through the hot spray past a Turkish battleship that had been moored for so long that the coral had grown up around it, immobilising it forever.  Once his little boat was beached on the sands, a short conversation with the Ottoman officials established that all was well, and Churchward went into the town to make contact with the local representative (wakil) of Sharifa Zain Wali, a rich businesswoman of Makka who ran a large organisation of ‘mutawwifs’ – pilgrim guides.  Naturally, she could not attend him here in person – as Churchward later observed: ‘Owing to the immense numbers of pilgrims, hundreds of thousands, who reach Jeddah each year, it is as impossible for these much-respected dignitaries to escort their customers personally as it would be for Mr. Thomas Cook to chaperone every Cockney globe-trotter through Europe.  Like all her colleagues, she employed a considerable staff, who saw that the Hajis carried through the ritual prescribed by the Prophet.’

The Wakil took Churchward to his beautiful Arab house, and explained how to don his Ihram clothing before letting him settle down for the night.  ‘Finding a level place on the irregular stones I lay down anew’, he wrote.  ‘This time a thousand million mosquitoes hovered over me.’  The following day, he telegraphed most of his money through to Makka, and entrusted, as was the custom, the remainder of his funds to the Mutawwif.  That evening, ‘while the lamps of Jeddah glowed in a tropic sunset, two donkeys arrived.’  The road beyond Jeddah was little more than a camel track, but the Wakil confidently led the small party towards the nocturnal east, with Halley’s Comet hanging splendidly among the stars above.  ‘Against the stars I saw rock faces; we seemed to be trotting through a kind of canyon.  Saving the fall of our donkeys’ feet there was nothing to be heard, not even a jackal. … Bang!  Explosions suddenly rang from some place high in the dark hills.  No mistake, those were rifle shots … The growing brightness showed a very picturesque old building, a kind of tower several hundred feet above the road.  From the steep path serving the structure some fez-adorned figures ran down.  They wore uniforms and held guns in their hands.’

An Ottoman officer came up, and politely explained that his men had successfully chased off a band of robbers.  In those days, attacks by desert Arabs on pilgrims were distressingly common; but Churchward and his party rode on, trusting in Allah.  In the oven-like heat of the early afternoon, after several stops at roadside coffee-houses, they passed the stone pillars which indicated the beginning of the sacred territory into which no non-Muslim may intrude.

‘On entering here my guide signed to me that we should say the proper prayer.  Touching his heart and forehead he muttered the Fatiha and held his hands together as if to receive Heaven’s blessing.  Then he said, Hena al-Haram (Here is the Holy Ground).’

‘Some pigeons, wild doves and other birds were the first specimens of desert fauna I came on.  They appeared perfectly tame, and fluttered a few inches from our faces.  Some sat on the hard stones and allowed the donkeys to go right upon them.  Very carefully the Wakeel led his beast around the little creatures, for no man will dare to kill a living thing here.’

In the Holy City at last, after almost two days on the road, Churchward and his companions entered the tall mansion-cum-hotel of the Sharifa.  This pious and aristocratic lady, a direct descendent of the Holy Prophet, had family connections in Cape Town, where her company of pilgrim guides had been recommended to Churchward.  Unpacking his goods, he sent her a gift of a Gouda cheese, which was borne up to her unseen presence by excited servants.  The Sharifa herself shortly called to him from behind a wooden mashrabiya screen: ‘Mubarak!  Welcome to my house.’  ‘I replied that I felt proud to live in her house, whereat she answered that she was proud of me.  ‘The Kafirs make good cheese,’ declared the lady, ‘they must have many cows.’’

The English pilgrim struggled up seven flights of stairs, bathed, and slept on the roof.  He was awoken before dawn by the strange lilting sound of Ottoman bugles, and after prayers and a breakfast of melons he set off behind the Mutawwif towards the Sacred Mosque.  Taking care to scuff their feet disdainfully on some well-worn flagstones, which the Mutawwif declared were some former idols of Quraish which had been cast down there by the Prophet to be humiliated, Churchward and his companion finally entered the House of God.  The first stage of a five-month journey had finally come to an end.

The Great Dive: the unusual life of William Williamson

The Anglo-Muslim community has produced many stormy petrels over the centuries. Religious dissidents, adventurers, romancers, scholar-pilgrims – all have enriched the diverse and colourful story that is British Islam. Peter Lyall, the Scotsman who became an admiral in the Ottoman navy; Abdullah Quilliam, the Liverpool solicitor who founded a mosque and orphanage in which Christian waifs were raised as Muslims; Benjamin Bishop, His Majesty’s consul in Cairo who turned Muslim and mysteriously disappeared; Lord Headley the peer; Lady Evelyn Cobbold the explorer and pilgrim to Mecca; Mubarak Churchward, the stage-painter and friend of Lily Langtry; the anonymous Scotsman who became governor of Madina; and many more. Few, however, lived such adventurous lives as the celebrated Hajji Abdullah Fadhil al-Zubayr, born William Williamson, remembered even today in the Gulf and Iraq, where his many descendants still retell his exploits.

Williamson was born in Bristol in 1872, and when still a boy demonstrated a rebellious nature that sat easily with a passionate hatred of injustice. While a pupil at Clifton School he repeatedly courted both danger and the ire of headmasters by climbing the famous Clifton suspension bridge which soars over the Avon gorge. Beaten regularly by his father, he was overjoyed when an uncle found him a place on a tea-clipper bound for Australia. The family’s hope was that the rigours of shipboard life would soon cause the thirteen-year old to pine for the comparative comforts of a boarding school. But although the new ship’s boy was flogged and regularly ‘mastheaded’ for his lubber’s clumsiness in Biscay gales, he resolved never to return.

The barque landed its cargo in New South Wales, and set course for Bristol via San Diego. Ashore in the Californian port, the ship’s mates scattered in the traditional quest for beer and beauty. Williamson, however, clutching two dollars, took ‘French leave’, and ran inland, praying that he would not be spotted by his shipmates, who were likely to force him back on board. He found work on a farm just south of Los Angeles, and then worked for his Aunt Amy, who had married a local homesteader. A devout Seventh Day Adventist, she would regularly dress in white robes and sing on nearby hilltops; but she came to admire her nephew, who soon mastered all the usual cowboy skills, including gunslinging and bronco-breaking, but refused to accompany the other ranch-hands on their regular ‘busts’ in the vice-dens of neighbouring towns. Receptive to California’s natural beauty, he had developed a strong belief in God, and a dislike for throwing away what slender financial means he possessed.

Although gifted with a natural aptitude for the cowboy life, Williamson’s imagination was soon fired by tales of gold; and once he had acquired an old mule, an even older Mexican shotgun, and a handful of dollars, he joined another cowboy, Jim Cook, and took the gold trail to the Nevadas. They had covered only a hundred miles before they were robbed while sleeping innocently beneath the stars. The silent thieves had taken their mule, the money in their pockets, and even their shoes. Cook turned back, disheartened, but the barefoot Williamson was not beaten so easily. He pressed on, pausing to work for a while as assistant to a quack doctor in a ten-gallon hat. At last he reached the Nevadas, where he staked a claim to a mine which, unlike many of its neighbours, seemed to contain only limestone, quartz, and an inexhaustible supply of Californian mud.

This new setback drove Williamson back to San Francisco, where he enlisted on a cargo ship bound for Bordeaux. A disastrous and near-lethal passage via the Horn did nothing to dampen his love of adventure, and after touching briefly in France, he joined an Irish fire-fighter who planned to work on the construction of the Panama Canal. Fifty men a day were dying of malaria in this first, ill-fated attempt to cut a channel across the Isthmus, and wages were high; but the fire-fighter’s wife was soon convinced that Panama was ‘no country for a white man’, and the threesome, afflicted with the malaria that was to dog Williamson for the rest of his life, travelled on to California. The bankruptcy of the railroad company that took them on left them penniless; but under Williamson’s direction they formed a travelling theatrical troupe, barnstorming out-of-the-way settlements with a vaudeville act whose highlight was Williamson’s unusual gift for juggling. A severe winter trapped the party in the Nevadas, but they reached the coast safely on skis made for them by a sympathetic Swede. Here Williamson struck out alone yet again, this time trying his luck as an amateur boxer. He won his first three bouts in the San Francisco championships, but his career as a pugilist was cut short when he accepted a beer laced with opium in the city’s red light district (the ‘Sodom of the Pacific’, and, in the view of local preachers, the probable cause of the 1906 earthquake). He awoke with a hangover, in the fo’c’sle of a ship, and realised that he had been ‘crimped’ – his senseless form sold to a short-handed and unscrupulous captain.

The Sitka Brave turned out to be a whaler. Crewed mainly by shanghai’d landsmen, the large, square-rigged brig welcomed Williamson as a seasoned mariner, and he soon became fourth mate on a journey which scoured the ironbound coasts of the Bering Straits. While the captain was ashore, wearing a wig to charm the Eskimo ladies of easy virtue who eked out a living in the Alaska settlements, the brig was often left in Williamson’s charge. Eight months later the Sitka Brave returned to ’Frisco for a long-overdue refit, but Williamson chose to remain with her for a second tour of the frozen Northern waters. After this, another visit to inland California ended with a fruitless search for work with his Aunt Amy, who was now somewhere in the high hills, awaiting the Second Coming. He returned to San Francisco, where he signed up with the former captain of the Sitka Brave, now the proud owner of a schooner, for a trading voyage to the South Seas. He was eighteen years old.

Williamson now set up as a small trader in the Caroline Islands, specialising in the sea-cucumbers which are a delicacy for the Chinese palate the world over. He soon acquired considerable expertise in the harvesting and storage of the creatures; but again, as so often before, his fortunes were suddenly overturned. Arrested in his outrigger canoe by the Spanish colonial authorities, he was accused of selling rifles to rebel tribesmen, and thrown into a Manila jail.

Conditions in the prison were appalling, and Williamson later recalled this period behind Spanish bars as the worst in his life. Detainees lived in constant fear of beating, interrogation, or death by garrotting. On one occasion Williamson was punished by being placed in a metal tank which gradually filled with water, and he could only save himself from drowning by desperately working a pump, a torment which was prolonged for several hours. After this ordeal he was forced to work in a chain gang, hobbling to work in the docks each morning holding an iron ball.

Famously, the Englishman’s instinct in a prison is to attempt to escape. Williamson managed to bribe a guard to leave his shackles unlocked, and then, judging his moment, raced past the guards and down an alley. Shots rang out all around him, but he reached his destination, the United States consulate, unharmed. ‘Help me!’ he cried, as he raced in, and the employees rushed to bolt the door behind him. On the other side, the Spanish soldiers were shouting and banging at the door.

The consul who now coolly surveyed the desperate and ragged escapee was Alexander Russell Webb (1846-1916), later to win fame as one of America’s leading converts to Islam. Having heard his story, Webb contacted the British consulate, only to learn that the British authorities were so anxious to avoid association with a possible rebel that they would not lift a finger to help. But a visit by the American consul to the docks turned up the English captain of a tramp steamer. Disguised as a drunken sailor, Williamson lurched down to the docks, and was hidden on board until the ship was warped from the quay, and laid a course for the British colony of Hong Kong.

Williamson’s nautical skills were by now sufficiently developed to land him the position of quartermaster on a crack liner, the SS Chusan, heading for Singapore and India. In Bombay he was paid off, and found work in the P and O offices. His spare time was spent wandering the streets of the Gateway to India, where he contemplated, as thousands of others have done before and since, the extremes of the human condition which the city displays to passers-by. All the religions of the world were present, their conspicuous performers side-by-side with hawkers, beggars, scorpion-eaters, and prostitutes in cages. Temples, churches and mosques offered havens of peace, and everywhere there was the mingling of sanctity, destitution and indulgence for which India is famous. The spiritual yearning kindled during his solitary wanderings in the Californian sierra broke surface again, and he took to wondering when God would send him a sign. He was still a teenager, but he had seen much of the world and of humanity. Which of the many roads should he take? Which would lead him most surely towards the Maker of such marvels?

The sign he was praying for came during his next sea-crossing. On the SS Siam, en route to Aden, Williamson found in the small ship’s library a book by Imam Abdullah Quilliam, then the Shaykh al-Islam of the British Isles. He read it again and again, fascinated. Here, it seemed, was the answer to the questions which had been raised in his mind during years of spectacular experience, energised by the earnestness of which the teenage mind is so often capable. Here was a monotheism far closer to his practical, English outlook than the mysteries of Trinity, reinforced by a no-nonsense set of clear rules for worship and the conduct of his life. This was no religion for dreamers or nancy-boys. It was a faith for tough, single-minded men of independent spirit.

On landing at Aden his luck suddenly began to change. An Arab runner brought him a request to pay a visit to the Assistant Resident. The official turned out to be an old friend of his father, and immediately offered him a position with the Aden Constabulary. Discreetly adding two years to his official age, Williamson accepted with alacrity. Here was a chance to earn good money, which at the same time afforded the opportunity to live among Muslims and to see how their faith worked in practice. The work was dangerous, particularly in the harbour district, but Williamson’s skill with his fists and his Service revolver, acquired in the hard school of the Wild West, soon made him an exemplary policeman in the eyes of the authorities.

Less satisfactory was the youth’s inexplicable desire to associate with the natives. Aden was administered from British India, and a stern social apartheid dictated how burra sahibs might behave in the presence of the local population. Williamson visited the mosque and the tomb of Imam Abu Bakr al-Aydarus, as well as making the acquaintance of the sayyids and other religious notables of the Arabian port. Although the ulema advised him to take his time and not rush into an ill-considered conversion, the colonial authorities came to the opinion that the brawny Bristol policeman was Not Quite The Thing. A crisis flared when another constable who had publicly converted and announced that he had memorised much of the Qur’an even before joining the Faith, was deported to India. Williamson was summoned to the Assistant Resident, and to various Army padres, and was given a good talking-to about the Christian duties of all white servants of the Raj. If he did not pull his socks up, he might be deported like his predecessor.

He paid no attention. After a year of study under the courteous and patient ulema of Aden, Williamson wrote passionate letters to his father and his Aunt Amy, inviting them to the truth of Islam. He then travelled to the court of the Sultan of the neighbouring town of Lahj, where he made his formal shahada, and was circumcised using the wire-and-egg method familiar to many converts of the time. Henceforth he was Abdullah Fadhil, a fact which, on his return to Aden, he lost no time in proclaiming to the local European community.

The reaction of the colonial authorities was swift. The Muslim constable was packed off to India, and it was put about that he was suffering from ‘a touch of the sun’. In Bombay, his request to be released from the police was granted, and he was offered a free passage back to England. This he refused, since his heart was set on returning to the Middle East. However he soon found that invisible hands obstructed his plans. No shipmaster heading for Arabia would take him on, thanks to the determined efficiency of the Raj authorities. Yet he eluded official scrutiny by buying the ticket of a Basra-bound horse-dealer, and soon found himself in the great Ottoman city, exploring its bazaars and mosques, and improving his Arabic with every hour that passed.

At the time, Basra was a centre of Protestant missionary activity. This had made no discernable impression on the Muslim population, but had made significant inroads among the local Ottoman Christians. Abdullah Fadhil soon found himself at the centre of religious controversies, with the local Arabs recognising him as their natural spokesman when confronted with Westerners. One of these debates took place in the house of a Basran notable, who had invited Sunnis, Shi‘a, Jews, Sabians and two American missionaries to celebrate a feast day under his roof. One of the Americans turned out to be Samuel Zwemer, probably the best-known missionary in the Middle East in those days. Zwemer demanded a debate, and although the missionary’s fluent Arabic placed him on the linguistic high ground, Abdullah defended, without much difficulty, the Qur’anic doctrine of the absolute Unity of God against Zwemer’s insistence that within God there are three distinct persons. A further point to which Hajji Abdullah adverted was the unity which characterised the Muslim world. Southern Iraq contained both Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims, who rarely intermarried, but who treated one another as brother Muslims; in stark contrast to the deep divisions separating the Christians of Basra, who were divided between Protestant, Jesuit and Chaldean churches, between whom there lurked a bitter and sometimes fatal rivalry.

The new convert was safe from the Christians religiously, but he soon discovered that the long arm of the Raj could reach him even in Ottoman lands. The British Consul ordered him to report to the consulate, with a view to returning him to England, and even managed to pressurise the Ottoman governor into accepting this situation. But the former cowboy and gold-panner was not so easily corralled. He apologised to his hosts, and vanished into the Arabian night.

For the next two years, Abdullah studied Arabic and Islam under the ulema of Kuweit. He also spent time travelling through the flat immensities of the northern Arabian deserts, where he learned to love the camel and the Arabian horse. Buying and selling these animals brought him a modest income, with which he was able to contemplate the next great turning-point of his life: joining the Hajj caravan of 1894.

The point of departure was to be the walled city of Zubair, from which three thousand pilgrims would set out through the territories of the Rashid family, hereditary rulers of Najd. In the hajjis’ bazaar of Zubair he bought seven pack camels, and loaded them with a tent, rugs, cooking pots, coffee, rice, flour, ghee and sugar, enough, he hoped, for the first weeks of the journey, which would bring him to the city of Hail.

The caravan assembled in the month of Shawwal. Iranian and Indian pilgrims had joined the Arabs of Iraq, following the bayraq (caliphal banner) carried by the Amir al-Hajj. This spectacular flag would accompany them throughout the pilgrimage. By day it took the form of a nine-foot red and green banner adorned with the crescent and star and the Shahada. At night it was topped by a great lantern. So long as this great symbol was visible, those lost in crowds during the Hajj, or in the northern wilderness of Arabia, could always make their way back to the Amir’s side.

Discipline on the caravan was strict and efficient. Outriders went ahead to check the road for obstacles or Bedouin raiders, while a second group followed up the rear to gather any items of value left behind by the great mass of humanity as it lumbered slowly across the dry terrain. In the evening, scholars would preach, recite the Qur’an, and sing the praises of the Blessed Prophet.

Abdullah had bought a delul, a swift riding camel, and would often ride up to the standard bearer and the drummer who headed the procession, to chat with the Amir’s entourage. He would then rest and watch in fascination as, for a whole hour, the great caravan moved past. Different languages, sects, and genders were united in fellowship as they travelled along the ancient Darb Zubayda, the road fortified and supplied with wells by the great and pious Abbasid princess a thousand years before.

In the month of Dhu al-Qa‘da the pilgrims reached Hail. In a customary act of hospitality, the local Amir, Muhammad al-Rashid, slaughtered enough camels to feed every member of the caravan. The English pilgrim watched as entire camels were tipped into great cauldrons, and as vast hills of rice were served out to the hungry guests. An even greater feast ensued the following day when the Baghdad caravan arrived, punctual to the hour.

Two weeks later the united procession sighted the magnificent city walls of Madina. The spectacle of the well-tended market gardens, filled with melons, oranges and date palms, was a delight to the tired eyes of the English pilgrim. He left his camel at the Manakha, the caravan-plaza between the Mosque and the Ottoman barracks at al-Anbariyya, found a small top-floor apartment in an ancient house, and then, having performed wudu from an earthenware jug, entered the Mosque.

Inside, past the Bab al-Salam, all was peace. The Garden of Fatima, the doves, the rows of quiet pillars, each with its name and venerable associations, formed a fitting environment for the rites of visitation to the presence of the Holy Prophet. All around, too, were scholars; for in those times the mosques of Mecca and Madina were great universities, and pilgrims sojourning in the holy cities were able not only to worship, but to attend classes on every subject of law, doctrine, and scriptural interpretation. Few indeed were the ulema who did not hope to retire to Madina; and those who did, including many of the greatest Ottoman scholars, found corners in the capacious mosque where they would expound the classical texts to an immense variety of students and pilgrims who had come from every land of Islam.

The time for Hajj was fast approaching; and the young Abdullah was soon obliged to tear himself away from the solemn, pious circles of sages, in order to learn the secrets of the ihram garment, which was all that would protect him from the blazing sun and bitter nights for the next few weeks. His caravan took the road past Quba’ and Dhu al-Hulayfa, towards the desert city in the south. From the basalt hills that crowded around the Mecca road now resounded the ancient cry, Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!

The suburb of Kudayy, then the City itself. The great mosque of those days had almost no exterior, with houses being built up against its walls, and the effect of entering was that of leaving narrow shaded streets and bazaars suddenly to be dazzled by the sun which blazed down upon the Ka‘ba itself. Marble paths led to the House through the gravel, around which were Sinan’s famous arcades and the ancient ashlar minarets. Following his mutawwif, Abdullah made the seven rounds, and then prayed at the maqams of Ibrahim, Isma‘il, and Muhammad, invoking peace upon all of them. He entered the Pavilion of Zamzam, and watched as amphorae were lowered by ropes into the cool depths by busy attendants. Finally came the rite of Sa‘y, the sevenfold procession along the open street, flanked with clothiers and bookshops, that stretched in a straight line between the little hills of Safa and Marwa.

Abdullah was performing the Qiran type of pilgrimage, and after this first Umra he left with his comrades for Mina, pausing to pay his respects at the tomb of Sayyida Khadija. The Day of Tarwiya was spent in the great city of tents at Mina. Before the advent of motor transport this was a beehive of the recitation of the Qur’an and religious poetry, with each tent resonating with the sonorities proper to some corner of the Islamic domains. But after the Fajr prayer, the multitudes left for Arafat, some with pack-animals, while others struggled along with sacks, babies and other baggage. The traditional Namira sermon was delivered in the Caliph’s name, and the hajjis held out their hands in prayer, until the voice of a cannon and the burst of fireworks overhead announced that the sun had set and the multitudes could make their way towards Muzdalifa. Abdullah himself, with typical tenacity, had insisted on spending the day at the summit of the Mount of Mercy beside the great white pillar, and he spent some anxious minutes trying to locate his Mutawwif’s flag in the huge crowds when he descended once more to the plain, which was packed with praying, weeping, jostling pilgrims. Not far away, equal to the other pilgrims in their white ihram, and seemingly unprotected by guards, rode the Sherif of Mecca and the Turkish governor.

The pebbles of Muzdalifa were flung at the Devil’s Pillars, animals were sacrificed, and another tawaf and procession along the Street of Running brought Abdullah the pilgrim’s crown. Twice again, in 1898 and 1936, would he repeat the rites of Hajj, each visit bringing a new range of experiences and reflections; but it was his first stay in the grand and ancient City which supplied the most profound and extraordinary memories of his life, which he would cherish and revisit in his old age.

Old age lay far ahead, however; and the return to Zubair provided the Hajji with ample time to consider his next move. He realised that his aspirations had been more radically changed by the pilgrimage than by the experience of conversion itself. Before his Hajj he had cherished the hope of returning to America and resuming the cowboy’s life he had once loved so passionately. Grown to man’s estate, he had felt confident that his vigour and independence would allow him to carve out a substantial ranch, where he could employ cowboys of his own. But the visit to the Ka‘ba seemed to have instilled a different set of priorities. He decided to settle down in the East, trusting to Allah to provide. And in due course, He did.

Hajji Abdullah became a trader along the Kuwait coastline, up the mighty Shatt al-Arab and into the Iraqi hinterland. On occasion he would take prime Arab horses to Bombay, to be sold to the British cavalry. His growing business connections allowed him access to European goods never before seen in Iraq. His arrival in the marketplace of Zubair on a penny-farthing provoked a riot, as terrified Arabs prayed for deliverance from the ‘Jinn of the Big and Little Wheel’, while others drew their daggers and attempted to pounce on the young man in Arab robes who was riding about on it, and must certainly be Shaytan himself. On another occasion he brought consternation to a desert encampment when he produced a phonograph and played a Qur’anic recording which he had made with a mullah of Zubair – possibly the first recording ever made in Iraq. An evening’s explanation of the box’s nature and purpose could not persuade the sons of the desert that the box was not filled with jinn, who had been trapped inside by some magical process.

He spent a total of twelve years trading in horses, amassing a small financial competence which allowed him to acquire a medium-sized dhow. Never able to ignore the salt in his veins, he embarked on a series of expeditions ranging from Bushehr to the Trucial Coast (now known as the United Arab Emirates), and, inevitably, he came once again to the attention of the British authorities. An official report described him as ‘one William Richard Williamson professing to be Haji Abdullah Fadhil, a Moslem Arab’. But imperial suspiciousness had faded; and the British Muslim mariner enjoyed generally cordial relations with the British gunboats which periodically stopped and searched local vessels, looking for rifles, slaves, and other contraband.

It was during this period that the Hajji traded in his camelhair tent for a comfortable house in Basra, and his mind slowly turned to thoughts of matrimony. Until that time he had always brushed the subject aside with the laughing observation that ‘a day’s hunting with the hawk is worth many women’, but he now sought out the hand of a young Zubair girl, breaking with local custom by insisting on seeing her face before agreeing to the match. Married life suited him well, and he later acquired a wife in Baghdad as well, together with a large brood of children.

The Gulf was at the time one of the world’s most productive pearl-fisheries. Modern Arabian absentmindedness about pollution, reinforced by the depredations of a giant starfish, have drastically reduced the oyster population of those waters; but in the Hajji’s time it was a perennial temptation for a man blessed with a good dhow and a willing crew to hire a team of divers and head for the pearl banks, hoping and praying for a fortune.

The favoured season was known as al-Ghaws al-Kabir, the ‘Great Dive’, extending from May until mid-September. It is a time of sandy winds and intense heat; indeed, to this day the waters of the Bahr al-Banat off Qatar register the highest sea temperatures recorded anywhere in the world. The pearl banks, which were informally allocated to the tribes of neighbouring coasts, were at their most fruitful off Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial Coast. Halhul Island, sixty miles east of Qatar, is surrounded by beds which, in their heyday, gave birth to pearls which came to adorn the crowns of many Indian and European monarchs.

In Hajji Abdullah’s time the Great Dive would involve approximately four thousand vessels. The excitement was enhanced by the knowledge that the whole enterprise was, in essence, a form of gambling. Many were the ships which returned to port empty-handed; but the discovery of a large pink or white pearl would bring riches to the entire crew, from the nakhooda (captain) to the lowliest cook on board. To Abdullah, it was all reminiscent of his gold-panning days, and he joined in the preparations with relish.

Thus did the English Hajji set sail in his forty-ton dhow, the Fath al-Khayr. He had laid in ample stores, although he knew that the pearling ships could remain at sea indefinitely. Food could be obtained from the sea itself, given that the waters of the Gulf teem with delicious fish; and water could be had by sending divers down to fill skins from the numerous underwater freshwater springs whose locations had been known for generations.

The dive would begin each day at dawn, after prayers. The divers would rhythmically fill and empty their lungs, utter a short prayer, close their noses with ivory pegs, expel their remaining breath, and then, clutching a lead weight and a basket, jump into the sea. The best could work at a depth of twenty fathoms, filling the basket with oysters before being pulled to the surface after a couple of busy minutes beneath the waves, always on the alert for sharks, barracudas, or venomous sea-snakes. The work would continue all day, until, after the Maghrib prayers the crew would eat, and then prise open the oysters in search of the gleaming pearls.

The Hajji never struck it rich on the pearl-beds. Accepting the decree of Allah, he instead travelled to Damascus, where he spent two precious years in the city’s madrasas improving his knowledge of Islam. On his return, he sold his dhow and found work with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which needed qualified guides for its prospecting activities, once it was rumoured that there was some possibility of oil being present in the region. In 1935, he led the company’s negotiations with the ruler of Abu Dhabi, thereby heralding the arrival of the oil industry. His advice was also sought out by Imperial Airways, which needed to survey the coast for emergency landing areas suitable for the flying boats which then plied its England-India route.

The Hajji left the oil business in 1937, and retired to a small house in the village of Kut al-Hajjaj near Basra. Here he raised children and grandchildren, amazing them with tales of his remarkable life. For fifteen years thereafter, until his health failed him, he was a regular sight at the Ashar Mosque in Basra, and seldom missed the opportunity of attending a well-delivered class on religion. Back at home, he would sit with his amber and black prayer beads, his collection of religious books, and – a lifetime indulgence – a set of penny-Westerns with titles like Two-Gun Pete and Mayhem in Dodge City. Nothng could be more remote from the quiet desk-bound career which his father had planned for him on a distant Victorian afternoon; but the Hajji, whose path through life demonstrated so colourfully the universal appeal of Islam and the resilience of his native temper, would not have had it any other way. Loved by his large and vigorous family, he passed into the mercy of his Lord with a heart as serene as it was full of years.

This article also appeared in Seasons, the Zaytuna Journal.  

On Keeping the Beard

Dear Brother Isa Robert Martin:

Thank you for your letter of 10 August 1995 which read, in part:

. . . My question is not regarding the obligation to grow the beard and trim the mustache. This is clear from the statements of the Prophet (may Allah bless him and give him peace), the statements of the great Imams, and the practice of the early Muslims and righteous people up until the present day. My question is regarding the actual length of the beard, in which the beard must be grown. What did the great early Imams say regarding this specific matter? What is the position of the four madhhabs on this specific matter?

Ibn ‘Umar relates from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) that he said: “Do otherwise than those who ascribe partners to Allah (al-mushrikin): leave beards be, and trim mustaches.” And ibn ‘Umar, when he went on hajj or ‘umra, grasped his beard with his hand, and removed what was in excess of it (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d., 7.206: 5892 and Sahih Muslim, 5 vols. Cairo 1376/1956. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1403/1983, 1.222: 259).

In the Hanafi madhhab, there is no harm (la ba’s) in trimming the edges of the beard, though the handful is sunna, for when a narrator (Ibn ‘Umar, in this case), has done something in ostensive contravention to what he has narrated (the words “leave beards be”), Hanafi bases of jurisprudence say this shows that the narrator knows that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has indicated that the original ruling has been superseded (mansukh) by a subsequent one–permitting the beard to be trimmed, in this case. But trimming it when it is already less than a handful is not permissible in the Hanafi school (Ibn ‘Abidin: Radd al-muhtar ‘ala al-durr al-mukhtar. 5 vols. Bulaq 1272/1855. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi, 1407/1987, 2.113).

Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Shaybani reports in Kitab al-athar, from Imam Abu Hanifa, that “the sunna concerning it [the beard] is the handful, and consists in a man grasping his beard with his hand, and whatever exceeds that, he cuts” (ibid, 5.261).

A Hanafi sheikh whom my wife and I study with, has told us (without mentioning a reference) that there is disagreement as to where this “handful” should begin from, some holding that one puts the index finger of it just below the lower lip, while according to others, one puts it below the bottom of the chin. The former will obviously result in a much shorter “handful.”

The Shafi’i scholar Imam Nawawi in his commentary on Sahih Muslim says of the above hadith:

As for trimming the mustache, it is also a sunna. It is praiseworthy to begin from the right side . . . . As for how much should be trimmed, the soundest position is that one trims it until the edge of the lip appears, not trimming it down to the roots. As for the versions of the hadith containing the words crop mustaches, (ihfu al-shawarib) they mean “crop that which grows over the lips,” and Allah knows best.

As for leave beards be, it means “make them ample” (Ar. tawfir, to make much, abundant, copious) and is also the meaning of make beards plenteous (awfu al-liha) in other versions of the hadith. It had been the Persians’ custom to cut their beards, so the Sacred Law forbade that (Sahih Muslim bi Sharh al-Nawawi. 18 vols. Cairo 1349/1930. Reprint (18 vols. in 9). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1401/1981, 3.149).

Imam Baghawi records that “Malik has said, ‘Shaving the mustache is an innovation (bid’a) that has appeared among people'” (Sharh al-sunna. 16 vols. Damascus: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1400/1980, 12.108).

Ibn Daqiq al-‘Eid says: “I do not know anyone who has understood from the command to leave beards be that it is permissible to do them up so that they seem copious, as some people do” (Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani: Fath al-Bari bi sharh Sahih al-Bukhari. 14 vols. Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya, 1390/1970, 10.351).

In his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, the great Hanafi hadith Imam Badr al-Din al-‘Ayni says:

If one objects: “What does ‘leave beards be’ mean, when ‘to leave be’ (al-i’fa’) literally means ‘to make plenteous,’ and there are people, who, if they were to leave their beard, following the outward sense of leave beards be, their beard would become outrageous in length and width, and look disgusting, so that the person would become a topic of conversation, or a proverb”–The reply is that it is established from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) that this hadith is conditioned by a specific context [i.e. the demand to do the contrary to what the Persians and non-Arabs did, established by the first words of the hadith], and that the amount and definition of the beard that is unlawful to leave uncut have been differed upon by the early Muslims . . . . The meaning, in my opinion, is “as long as it does not exceed what is customary among [religious] people.” ‘Ata’ [ibn Abi Rabah, Mufti of Mecca, d. 114/732), has said, “There is no harm in trimming a little from the length and sides of his beard, if it grows large and long, in order to avoid notoriety, or if one risks being made fun of” (‘Umda al-qari sharh Sahih al-Bukhari. 20 vols. Cairo: Mustafa Babi al-Halabi, 1392/1972, 18.76)

Imam Baghawi says: “‘Leaving the beard be’ means ‘making it ample’ (tawfiruha) . . . . It is related from Ibn ‘Umar that he used to grasp his beard with his whole hand, then remove what was in excess of that. This was also related from Abu Hurayra. Ibrahim [al-Nakha’i, d. 108/726] said, ‘They [the Sahaba] used to trim their beards on the sides'” (Sharh al-sunna, 12.1089).

For trimming the beard, one may adduce as evidence the hadith of ‘Umar ibn Harun, from Usama ibn Zayd, from ‘Amr ibn Shu’ayb, from his father, from his grandfather, that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) “used to trim from his beard, from its sides and its length” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi. 5 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-‘Arabi, n.d., 5.94: 2762). The last narrator in the hadith’s chain of transmission, ‘Umar ibn Harun, is agreed-upon among most hadith Imams as being “fatally weak” (matruk) despite (or perhaps because of which) which, Tirmidhi mentions after citing the hadith that his own sheikh, Bukhari, had a good opinion of the narrator. The hadith perhaps remains weak, but Bukhari’s opinion carries its weight. My sheikh in Shafi’i fiqh, ‘Abd al-Wakil Durubi used to cite it, and I have not met a single shafi’i scholar (faqih) who did not trim his beard to considerably less than the-handful-below-the-chin length.

The following points can be inferred from all of the above, in answer to your question:

(1) The hadiths about “Leaving the beard be” are unconditional, that is, can be read to indicate that it is obligatory not to cut the beard at all.

(2) This ruling seems to be conditioned by a number of considerations from the actual practice of the Sahaba, who were trained by the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and intimately familiar with his appearance, such as:

(a) that Ibn ‘Umar, one of the most learned Sahaba and keenest in following the sunna, used to cut his beard when he went on hajj or ‘umra, that is, presumably in anticipation of entering the ihram or “state of pilgrim sanctity” in which it is unlawful for a Muslim to cut or otherwise remove any hairs of his beard, a situation in which a learned person could be expected to trim the maximum allowable, since he would be unable to to so (while in ihram) for some time to come. This shows that the unconditionality of the hadiths was, in Ibn ‘Umar’s view, conditioned by trimming the beard, in all probability by instruction or example of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), since the Sahaba were all legally upright (‘udul) by consensus (ijma’) of Muslim scholars, and it is inconceivable that they would institutionalize and set a precedent that was in direct defiance of a religious obligation.(b) Imam Baghawi reports that trimming the beard was also the practice of Abu Hurayra, another of the foremost scholars of the Sahaba, and Baghawi reports from Ibrahim al-Nakha’i, the sheikh of the early Muslim community in Iraq, that the Sahaba used to trim their beards on the sides.

(c) If the earliest Muslims had all had beards down to their waists or to their knees from never cutting them, this would have been conveyed to us by hadiths, but it has not.

(3) The wisdom of letting beards be, as in the above hadith of Bukhari and Muslim, is doing otherwise than the non-Muslims. Other hadiths, related in the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba and other sources, explicitly state that the Persians used to shave their faces and grow their mustaches long. Distinguishing ourselves from them could be accomplished with considerably less than a long beard.

(4) General Islamic values entail beauty in behavior, manners, and dress. When a man once asked if liking fine clothes and sandals was a form of arrogance, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “Verily, Allah is beautiful and loves beauty” (Sahih Muslim, 1.93: 91).

(5) The general Islamic demand for beauty entails refinement and moderation, at minimum meaning not to deliberately seek notoriety through one’s appearance. The Prophet of Islam (Allah bless him and give him peace) has said, “Whoever dresses in a garment of notoriety in this world, Allah will dress him in a garment of humiliation on Judgement Day” (Musnad al-Imam Ahmad. 6 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d., 2.139), a well authenticated (hasan) hadith. One’s standards for this are not non-Muslims, however, as the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has said, “Whoever imitates a people is one of them” (Sunan Abi Dawud. 4 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint (4 vols. in 2). Istanbul: al-Maktaba al-Islamiyya, n.d. 4.44: 4031). Rather, the standard is that of other religious Muslims.

(6) In consideration of these general values ((4) and (5)), Imam al-‘Ayni above investigates the length that obliges one to cut the beard, though he reports that the earliest authorities did not agree on this.

To summarize, to have a beard is obligatory for the Muslim man. The wording of the above sahih hadith indicates it should be abundant, though this is conditioned by the ‘urf or common acknowledgement for it among religious, practicing Muslims. The early Muslims trimmed their beards, and there is not an unequivocal text (nass) that establishes a fixed legal limit to length and size. While the sunna is considered by many ulama to be “the handful,” my own sheikhs trimmed their beards considerably closer than this, and they were ulama. It is my conviction and the premise of my approach to Islamic law that Allah will not punish the ordinary Muslim for something differed about between traditional ulama.

These considerations are particularly relevant to the circumstance that Islam has now spread to virtually every race on earth, and that genetically, not every man can grow a beard like Ibn ‘Umar’s. In my view, the differing capacities make preferable the more general fiqh criteria of (1) having a beard, (2) “abundance” according to one’s capacity, so it doesn’t look like the shaving of the non-Muslims, (3) and well-keptness that accords with the general Islamic standards of beauty (among people who are practicing Muslims) and avoidance of notoriety–rather than a certain mandatory length. And Allah knows best.

I remain at your service, sincerely,

Nuh Keller
October 1995

Islam and Evolution: a letter to Suleman Ali

In the name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate

14 July 1995

Dear Suleman ‘Ali:

Thank you for your fax of 27 June 1995 which said, in part:

“Recently a pamphlet has been circulated around Oxford saying that evolution is synonymous with kufr and shirk. I myself am a biologist and am convinced by the evidence which supports the theory of evolution. I am writing to ask whether the Quranic account of Creation is incompatible with man having evolved. Are there any books which you would recommend on the subject?”

During my “logic of scientific explanation” period at the University of Chicago, I used to think that scientific theories had to have coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and I was accustomed to examine theory statements by looking at these things in turn. Perhaps they furnish a reasonable point of departure to give your question an answer which, if cursory and somewhat personal, may yet shed some light on the issues you are asking about.

Coherence

It seems to me that the very absoluteness of the theory’s conclusions tends to compromise its “objective” character. It is all very well to speak of the “evidence of evolution,” but if the theory is thorough- going, then human consciousness itself is also governed by evolution. This means that the categories that allow observation statements to arise as “facts”, categories such as number, space, time, event, measurement, logic, causality, and so forth are mere physiological accidents of random mutation and natural selection in a particular species, Homo sapiens. They have not come from any scientific considerations, but rather have arbitrarily arisen in man by blind and fortuitous evolution for the purpose of preserving the species. They need not reflect external reality, “the way nature is”, objectively, but only to the degree useful in preserving the species. That is, nothing guarantees the primacy, the objectivity, of these categories over others that would have presumably have arisen had our consciousness evolved along different lines, such as those of more distant, say, aquatic or subterranean species. The cognitive basis of every statement within the theory thus proceeds from the unreflective, unexamined historical forces that produced “consciousness” in one species, a cognitive basis that the theory nevertheless generalizes to the whole universe of theory statements (the explanation of the origin of species) without explaining what permits this generalization. The pretences of the theory to correspond to an objective order of reality, applicable in an absolute sense to all species, are simply not compatible with the consequences of a thoroughly evolutionary viewpoint, which entails that the human cognitive categories that underpin the theory are purely relative and species-specific. The absolutism of random mutation and natural selection as explanative principles ends in eating the theory. With all its statements simultaneously absolute and relative, objective and subjective, generalizable and ungeneralizable, scientific and species-specific, the theory runs up on a reef of methodological incoherence.

Logicality

Speaking for myself, I was convinced that the evolution of man was an unchallengeable “given” of modern knowledge until I read Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species“. The ninth chapter (The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Ed. J.W. Burrow. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 291-317) made it clear, from what Darwin modestly calls the “great imperfection of the geological record” that the theory was not in principle falsifiable, though the possibility that some kind of evidence or another should be able in principle to disprove a theory is a condition (if we can believe logicians like Karl Popper) for it to be considered scientific. By its nature, fossil evidence of intermediate forms that could prove or disprove the theory remained unfound and unfindable. When I read this, it was not clear to me how such an theory could be called “scientific”.

If evolution is not scientific, then what is it? It seems to me that it is a human interpretation, an endeavor, an industry, a literature, based on what the American philosopher Charles Peirce called abductive reasoning, which functions in the following way:

(1) Suprising fact A.
(2) If theory B were the case, then A would naturally follow.
(3) Therefore B.

Here, (1) alone is certain, (2) is merely probable (as it explains the facts, though does not preclude other possible theories), while (3) has only the same probability as (2). If you want to see how ironclad the case for the evolution of man is, make a list of all the fossils discovered so far that “prove” the evolution of man from lower life forms, date them, and then ask yourself if abductive reasoning is not what urges it, and if it really precludes the possibility of quite a different (2) in place of the theory of evolution.

Applicability

Is the analogy from micro-evolution within a species (which is fairly well-attested to by breeding horses, pigeons, useful plant hybrids, and so on) applicable to macro-evolution, from one species to another? That is, is there a single example of one species actually evolving into another, with the intermediate forms represented in the fossil record?

In the 1970s, Peter Williamson of Harvard University, under the direction of Richard Leakey, examined 3,300 fossils from digs around Lake Turkana, Kenya, spanning several million years of the history of thirteen species of mollusks, that seemed to provide clear evidence of evolution from one species to another. He published his findings five years later in Nature magazine, and Newsweek picked up the story:

“Though their existence provides the basis for paleontology, fossils have always been something of an embarrassment to evolutionists. The problem is one of ‘missing links’: the fossil record is so littered with gaps that it takes a truly expert and imaginative eye to discern how one species could have evolved into another…. But now, for the first time, excavations at Kenya’s Lake Turkana have provided clear fossil evidence of evolution from one species to another. The rock strata there contain a series of fossils that show every small step of an evolutionary journey that seems to have proceeded in fits and starts” (Sharon Begley and John Carey, “Evolution: Change at a Snail’s Pace.” Newsweek, 7 December 1981).

Without dwelling on the facticity of scientific hypotheses raised under logic above, or that 3,300 fossils of thirteen species only “cover” several million years if we already acknowledge that evolution is happening and are merely trying to see where the fossils fit in, or that we are back to Peirce’s abductive reasoning here, although with a more probable minor premise because of the fuller geological record–that is, even if we grant that evolution is the “given” which the fossils prove, an interesting point about the fossils (for a theist) is that the change was much more rapid than the traditional Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection would warrant:

What the record indicated was that the animals stayed much the same for immensely long stretches of time. But twice, about 2 million years ago and and then again 700,000 years ago, the pool of life seemed to explode–set off, apparently, by a drop in the lake’s water level. In an instant of geologic time, as the changing lake environment allowed new types of mollusks to win the race for survival, all of the species evolved into varieties sharply different from their ancestors. Such sudden evolution had been observed before. What made the Lake Turkana fossil record unique, says Williamson, is that “for the first time we see intermediate forms” between the old species and the new.

That intermediate forms appeared so quickly, with new species suddenly evolving in 5,000 to 50,000 years after millions of years of constancy, challenges the traditional theories of Darwin’s disciples. Most scientists describe evolution as a gradual process, in which random genetic mutations slowly produce new species. But the fossils of Lake Turkana don’t record any gradual change; rather, they seem to reflect eons of stasis interrupted by brief evolutionary “revolutions” (ibid.).

Of what significance is this to Muslims? In point of religion, if we put our scientific scruples aside for a moment and grant that evolution is applicable to something in the real world; namely, the mollusks of Lake Turkana, does this constitute unbelief (kufr) by the standards of Islam? I don’t think so. Classic works of Islamic ‘aqida or “tenets of faith” such as al-Matan al-Sanusiyya tell us, “As for what is possible in relation to Allah, it consists of His doing or not doing anything that is possible” (al-Sanusi, Hashiya al-Dasuqi ‘ala Umm al-barahin. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, n.d, 145-46). That is, the omnipotent power of Allah can do anything that is not impossible, meaning either:

(a) intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati), such as–creating a five-sided triangle–which is a mere confusion of words, and not something in any sense possible, such that we could ask whether Allah could do it;(b) or else impossible because of Allah having informed us that it shall not occur (mustahil ‘aradi), whether He does so in the Qur’an, or through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in a mutawatir hadith, meaning one that has reached us through so many means of transmission that it is impossible its transmitters could have all conspired to forge it. This category of the impossible is not impossible to begin with, but becomes so by the revelation from Allah, who is truthful and veracious. For example, it is impossible that Abu Lahab should be of the people of paradise, because the Qur’an tells us he is of the people of hell (Qur’an 111).

With respect to evolution, the knowledge claim that Allah has brought one sort of being out of another is not intrinsically impossible ((a) above) because it is not self-contradictory. And as to whether it is (b), “impossible because of Allah having informed us that it cannot occur”, it would seem to me that we have two different cases, that of man, and that of the rest of creation.

Man

Regarding your question whether the Qur’anic account of creation is incompatible with man having evolved; if evolution entails, as Darwin believed, that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (The Origin of Species, 455), I apprehend that this is incompatible with the Qur’anic account of creation. Our first ancestor was the prophet Adam (upon whom be peace), who was created by Allah in janna, or “paradise” and not on earth, but also created in a particular way that He describes to us:

“And [mention] when your Lord said to the angels, ‘Truly, I will create a man from clay. So when I have completed him, and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down prostrate to him.’ And the angels prostrated, one and all. Save for Satan, who was too proud to, and disbelieved. He said to him, ‘O Satan, what prevented you from prostrating to what I have created with My two hands? Are you arrogant, or too exalted?’ He said,’I am better than he; You created me from fire and created him from clay'” (Qur’an 38:71-76).

Now, the God of Islam is transcendently above any suggestion of anthropomorphism, and Qur’anic exegetes like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi explain the above words created with My two hands as a figurative expression of Allah’s special concern for this particular creation, the first human, since a sovereign of immense majesty does not undertake any work “with his two hands” unless it is of the greatest importance (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi. 32 vols. Beirut 1401/1981. Reprint (32 vols. in 16). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1405/1985, 26.231-32). I say “the first human,” because the Arabic term bashar used in the verse “Truly, I will create a man from clay” means precisely a human being and has no other lexical significance.

The same interpretive considerations (of Allah’s transcendance above the attributes of created things) apply to the words and breathed into him of My spirit. Because the Qur’an unequivocally establishes that Allah is Ahad or “One,” not an entity divisible into parts, exegetes say this “spirit” was a created one, and that its attribution to Allah (“My spirit”) is what is called in Arabic idafat al-tashrif “an attribution of honor,” showing that the ruh or “spirit” within this first human being and his descendants was “a sacred, exalted, and noble substance” (ibid., 228)–not that there was a “part of Allah” such as could enter into Adam’s body, which is unbelief. Similar attributions are not infrequent in Arabic, just as the Kaaba is called bayt Allah, or “the House of Allah,” meaning “Allah’s honored house,” not that it is His address; or such as the she-camel sent to the people of Thamud, which was called naqat Allah, or “the she-camel of Allah,” meaning “Allah’s honored she-camel,” signifying its inviolability in the shari’a of the time, not that He rode it; and so on.

All of which shows that, according to the Qur’an, human beings are intrinsically–by their celestial provenance in janna, by their specially created nature, and by the ruh or soul within them–at a quite different level in Allah’s eyes than other terrestrial life, whether or not their bodies have certain physiological affinities with it, which are the prerogative of their Maker to create. Darwin says:

“I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide” (The Origin of Species, 454-55).

Indeed it may. It is the nature of the place in which Allah has created us, this world (dunya), that the possibility exists to deny the existence of Allah, His angels, His Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and destiny, its good and evil. If these things were not hidden by a veil, there would be no point in Allah’s making us responsible for believing them. Belief would be involuntary, like the belief, say, that France is in Europe.

But what He has made us responsible for is precisely belief in the unseen. Why? In order that the divine names–such as al-Rafi’ or “He Who Raises,” al-Khafidh “He Who Abases,” al-Mu’ti “He Who Gives,” al-Mani’ “He Who Withholds,” al-Rahim “the Merciful,” al-Muntaqim “the Avenger,” al-Latif “the Subtlely Kind,” and so on–may be manifest.

How are they manifest? Only through the levels of human felicity and perdition, of salvation and damnation, by the disparity of human spiritual attainment in all its degrees: from the profound certitude of the prophets (upon whom be peace), to the faith of the ordinary believer, to the doubts of the waverer or hypocrite, to the denials of the damned. Also, the veil for its part has a seamless quality. To some, it is a seamless veil of light manifesting the Divine through the perfection of creation; while to others, it is a seamless veil of darkness, a perfect nexus of interpenetrating causal relations in which there is no place for anything that is not material. Allah says,

“Exalted in Grace is He in whose hand is dominion, and He has power over everything. Who created death and life to try you, as to which of you is better in works, and He is the All-powerful, the Oft-forgiving. And who created the seven heavens in layers; you see no disparity in the creation of the All-merciful. Return your glance: do you see any fissures?” (Qur’an 67:1-3).

The last time I checked, the university scene was an atheistic subculture, of professors and students actively or passively convinced that God was created by man. In bastions of liberalism like the University of California at Berkeley, for example, which still forbids the establishment of a Religions Department, only this attitude will do; anything else is immature, is primitivism. The reduction of human behavior to evolutionary biology is a major journalistic missionary outreach of this movement. I am pleased with this, in as much as Allah has created it to try us, to distinguish the good from the bad, the bad from the worse. But I don’t see why Muslims should accept it as an explanation of the origin of man, especially when it contradicts what we know from the Creator of Man.

Other Species

As for other cases, change from one sort of thing to another does not seem to contradict revelation, for Allah says,

“O people: Fear your Lord, who created you from one soul [Adam, upon whom be peace] and created from it its mate [his wife Hawa], and spread forth from them many men and women” (Qur’an 4:1),

and also says, concerning the metamorphosis of a disobedient group of Bani Isra’il into apes,

“When they were too arrogant to [desist from] what they had been forbidden, We said to them, ‘Be you apes, humiliated'” (Qur’an 7:166).

and in a hadith, “There shall be groups of people from my community who shall consider fornication, silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful: groups shall camp beside a high mountain, whom a shepherd returning to in the evening with one of their herds shall approach for something he needs, and they shall tell him, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ Allah shall destroy them in the night, bringing down the mountain upon them, and transforming others into apes and swine until the Day of Judgement.” (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d., 7.138: 5590). Most Islamic scholars have understood these transformations literally, which shows that Allah’s changing one thing into another (again, in other than the origin of man) has not been traditionally considered to be contrary to the teachings of Islam. Indeed, the daily miracle of nutrition, the sustenance Allah provides for His creatures, in which one creature is transformed into another by being eaten, may be seen in the food chains that make up the economy of our natural world, as well as our own plates.

If, as in the theory of evolution, we conjoin with this possibility the factors of causality, gradualism, mutation, and adaptation, it does not seem to me to add anything radically different to these other forms of change. For Islamic tenets of faith do not deny causal relations as such, but rather that causes have effects in and of themselves, for to believe this is to ascribe a co-sharer to Allah in His actions. Whoever believes in this latter causality (as virtually all evolutionists do) is an unbeliever (kafir) without any doubt, as “whoever denies the existence of ordinary causes has made the Wisdom of Allah Most High inoperative, while whoever attributes effects to them has associated co-sharers (shirk) to Allah Most High” (al-Hashimi: Miftah al-janna fi sharh ‘aqida Ahl al-Sunna. Damascus: Matba’a al-taraqi, 1379/1960, 33). As for Muslims, they believe that Allah alone creates causes, Allah alone creates effects, and Allah alone conjoins the two. In the words of the Qur’an, “Allah is the Creator of everything” (Qur’an 13:16).

A Muslim should pay careful attention to this point, and distance himself from believing either that causes (a) bring about effects in and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and of themselves through a capacity Allah has placed in them. Both of these negate the oneness and soleness (wahdaniyya) of Allah, which entails that Allah has no co-sharer in:

(1) His entity (dhat);
(2) His attributes (sifat);
(3) or in His acts (af’al), which include the creation of the universe and everything in it, including all its cause and effect relationships.

This third point is negated by both (a) and (b) above, and perhaps this is what your pamphleteer at Oxford had in mind when he spoke about the shirk (ascribing a co-sharer to Allah) of evolution.

In this connection, evolution as a knowledge claim about a causal relation does not seem to me intrinsically different from other similar knowledge claims, such as the statement “The president died from an assassin’s bullet.” Here, though in reality Allah alone gives life or makes to die, we find a dispensation in Sacred Law to speak in this way, provided that we know and believe that Allah alone brought about this effect. As for someone who literally believes that the bullet gave the president death, such a person is a kafir. In reality he knows no more about the world than a man taking a bath who, when the water is cut off from the municipality, gets angry at the tap.

To summarize the answer to your question thus far, belief in macro-evolutionary transformation and variation of non-human species does not seem to me to entail kufr (unbelief) or shirk (ascribing co-sharers to Allah) unless one also believes that such transformation came about by random mutation and natural selection, understanding these adjectives as meaning causal independence from the will of Allah. You have to look in your heart and ask yourself what you believe. From the point of view of tawhid, Islamic theism, nothing happens “at random,” there is no “autonomous nature,” and anyone who believes in either of these is necessarily beyond the pale of Islam.

Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what most evolutionists think. In America and England, they are the ones who write the textbooks, which raises weighty moral questions about sending Muslim students to schools to be taught these atheistic premises as if they were “givens of modern science.” Teaching unbelief (kufr) to Muslims as though it were a fact is unquestionably unlawful. Is this unlawfulness mitigated (made legally permissible by shari’a standards) by the need (darura) of upcoming generations of Muslims for scientific education? If so, the absence of textbooks and teachers in most schools who are conversant and concerned enough with the difficulties of the theory of evolution to accurately present its hypothetical character, places a moral obligation upon all Muslim parents. They are obliged to monitor their children’s Islamic beliefs and to explain to them (by means of themselves, or someone else who can) the divine revelation of Islam, together with the difficulties of the theory of evolution that will enable the children to make sense of it from an Islamic perspective and understand which aspects of the theory are rejected by Islamic theism (tawhid) and which are acceptable. The question of the theory’s adequacy, meaning its generalizability to all species, will necessarily be one of the important aspects of this explanation.

Adequacy

Of all the premises of evolution, the two that we have characterized above as unbelief (kufr); namely, random mutation and natural selection, interpreted in a materialistic sense, are what most strongly urge its generalization to man. Why must we accept that man came from a common ancestor with animal primates, particularly since a fossil record of intermediate forms is not there? The answer of our age seems to be: “Where else should he have come from?”

It is only if we accept the premise that there is no God that this answer acquires any cogency. The Qur’an answers this premise in detail and with authority. But evolutionary theory is not only ungeneralizable because of Allah informing us of His own existence and man’s special creation, but because of what we discern in ourselves of the uniqueness of man, as the Qur’an says,

“We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves, until it is plain to them that it is the Truth” (Qur’an 41:53).

Among the greatest of these signs in man’s self is his birthright as Khalifat al-Rahman, “the successor of the All-merciful.” If it be wondered what this successorship consists in, the ulama of tasawwuf, the scholars of Islamic spirituality, have traditionally answered that it is to be looked for in the ma’rifa bi Llah or “knowledge of Allah” that is the prerogative of no other being in creation besides the believer, and which is attained through following the path of inward purification, of strengthening the heart’s attachment to Allah through acts of obedience specified by Sacred Law, particularly that of dhikr.

The locus of this attachment and this knowledge is not the mind, but rather the subtle faculty within one that is sometimes called the heart, sometimes the ruh or spirit. Allah’s special creation of this faculty has been mentioned above in connection with the Qur’anic words and breathed into him of My spirit. According to masters of the spiritual path, this subtle body is knowledgeable, aware, and cognizant, and when fully awakened, capable of transcending the opacity of the created universe to know Allah. The Qur’an says about it, by way of exalting its true nature through its very unfathomability:

“Say: The spirit is of the matter of my Lord” (Qur’an 17:85).

How does it know Allah? I once asked this question of one of the ulama of tasawwuf in Damascus, and recorded his answer in an unpublished manuscript. He told me:

“Beholding the Divine (mushahada) is of two sorts, that of the eye and that of the heart. In this world, the beholding of the heart is had by many of the ‘arifin (knowers of Allah), and consists of looking at contingent things, created beings, that they do not exist through themselves, but rather exist through Allah, and when the greatness of Allah occurs to one, contingent things dwindle to nothing in one’s view, and are erased from one’s thought, and the Real (al-Haqq) dawns upon one’s heart, and it is as if one beholds. This is termed ‘the beholding of the heart.’ The beholding of the eye [in this world] is for the Chosen, the Prophet alone, Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace). As for the next world, it shall be for all believers. Allah Most High says,

‘On that day faces shall be radiant, gazing upon their Lord’ (Qur’an 75:22).”

[I wrote of the above:] If it be observed that the term heart as used above does not seem to conform to its customary usage among speakers of the language, I must grant this. In the context, the term denotes not the mind, but rather the faculty that perceives what is beyond created things, in the world of the spirit, which is a realm unto itself. If one demands that the existence of this faculty be demonstrated, the answer–however legitimate the request–cannot exceed, “Go to masters of the discipline, train, and you will be shown.” Unsatisfying though this reply may be, it does not seem to me to differ in principle from answers that would be given, for example, to a non-specialist regarding the proof for a particular proposition in theoretical physics or symbolic logic. Nor are such answers an objection to the in-principle “publicly observable” character of observation statements in these disciplines, but rather a limitation pertaining to the nature of the case and the questioner, one that he may accept, reject, or do something about (Keller, Interpreter’s Log. Manuscript Draft, 1993, 1-2).

Mere imagination? On the contrary, everything besides this knowledge is imagination, for the object of this knowledge is Allah, true reality, which cannot be transient but is unchanging, while other facts are precisely imaginary. The child you used to be, for example, exists now only in your imagination; the person who ate your breakfast this morning no longer exists except in your imagination; your yesterday, your tomorrow, your today (except, perhaps, for the moment you are presently in, which has now fled): all is imaginary, and only hypostatized as phenomenal reality, as unity, as facticity, as real–through imagination. Every moment that comes is different, winking in and out of existence, preserved in its relational continuum by pure imagination, which constitutes it as “world.” What we notice of this world is thus imaginary, like what a sleeper sees. In this connection, Ali ibn Abi Talib (Allah ennoble his countenance) has said, “People are asleep, and when they die, they awaken” (al-Sakhawi, al-Maqasid al-hasana. Cairo 1375/1956. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, 1399/1979, 442: 1240).

This is not to denigrate the power of imagination; indeed, if not for imagination, we could not believe in the truths of the afterlife, paradise, hell, and everything that our eternal salvation depends upon. Rather, I mention this in the context of the question of evolution as a cautionary note against a sort of “fallacy of misplaced concrescence,” an unwarranted epistemological overconfidence, that exists in many people who work in what they term “the hard sciences.”

As someone from the West, I was raised from early school years as a believer not only in science, the practical project of discovery that aims at exploiting more and more of the universe by identification, classification, and description of micro- and macro-causal relations; but also in scientism, the belief that this enterprise constitutes absolute knowledge. As one philosopher whom I read at the University of Chicago put it,

Scientism is science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science” (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. Tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, 4).

It seems to me that this view, in respect to evolution but also in respect to the nature of science as a contemporary religion, represents a sort of defeat of knowledge by an absolutism of pure methodology. As I mentioned at the outset, the categories of understanding that underly every observation statement in the theory of evolution arise from human consciousness, and as such cannot be distinguished by the theory from other transient survival devices: its explanative method, from first to last, is necessarily only another survival mechanism that has evolved in the animal kingdom. By its own measure, it is not necessary that it be true, but only necessary that it be powerful in the struggle for survival. Presumably, any other theory–even if illusory–that had better implications for survival could displace evolution as a mode of explanation. Or perhaps the theory itself is an illusion.

These considerations went through my mind at the University of Chicago during my “logic of scientific explanation” days. They made me realize that my faith in scientism and evolutionism had something magical as its basis, the magic of an influential interpretation supported by a vast human enterprise. I do not propose that science should seriously try to comprehend itself, which it is not equipped to do anyway, but I have come to think that, for the sake of its consumers, it might have the epistemological modesty to “get back,” from its current scientistic pretentions to its true nature, as one area of human interpretation among others. From being the “grand balance scale” on which one may weigh and judge the “reality” of all matters, large and small–subsuming “the concept of God,” for example, under the study of religions, religions under anthropology, anthropology under human behavioral institutions, human behavioral institutions under evolutionary biology, evolutionary biology under organic chemistry, organic chemistry (ultimately) under cosmology, cosmology under chaos theory, and so on–I have hopes that science will someday get back to its true role, the production of technically exploitable knowledge for human life. That is, from pretentions to ‘ilm or “knowledge,” to its true role as “fann” or “technique.”

In view of the above considerations of its coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, the theory of the evolution of man from lower forms does not seem to show enough scientific rigor to raise it from being merely an influential interpretation. To show the evolution’s adequacy, for everything it is trying to explain would be to give valid grounds to generalize it to man. In this respect, it is a little like Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in which he describes examples of dreams that are wish fulfillments, and then concludes that “all dreams are wish fulfillments.” We still wait to be convinced.

Summary of Islamic Conclusions

Allah alone is Master of Existence. He alone causes all that is to be and not to be. Causes are without effect in themselves, but rather both cause and effect are created by Him. The causes and the effects of all processes, including those through which plant and animal species are individuated, are His work alone. To ascribe efficacy to anything but His action, whether believing that causes (a) bring about effects in and of themselves; or (b) bring about effects in and of themselves through a capacity Allah has placed in them, is to ascribe associates to Allah (shirk). Such beliefs seem to be entailed in the literal understanding of “natural selection” and “random mutation,” and other evolutionary concepts, unless we understand these processes as figurative causes, while realizing that Allah alone is the agent. This is apart from the consideration of whether they are true or not.

As for claim that man has evolved from a non-human species, this is unbelief (kufr) no matter if we ascribe the process to Allah or to “nature,” because it negates the truth of Adam’s special creation that Allah has revealed in the Qur’an. Man is of special origin, attested to not only by revelation, but also by the divine secret within him, the capacity for ma’rifa or knowledge of the Divine that he alone of all things possesses. By his God-given nature, man stands before a door opening onto infinitude that no other creature in the universe can aspire to. Man is something else.

Books

I realized after writing the above that I had not talked much about the literature on the theory of evolution. Books that have been recommended to me are:

1. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Michael Denton. Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler Publishers, 1986. Originally published in Great Britain by Burnett Books Ltd. This would probably be the most interesting to you as a biologist, as it discusses molecular genetics and other scientific aspects not examined above.
2. Enclyclopedia of Ignorance. Ed. Duncan Roland. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1978.
3. Thinking About God (Exact title?). Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood. Bloomington, Indiana. American Trust Publications.

Thank you for asking me this question, which made me think about my own beliefs. I remain at your service,

Nuh Ha Mim Keller.

On the validity of all religions in the thought of ibn Al-‘Arabi and Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir: a letter to `Abd al-Matin

Dear `Abd al-Matin,

In the name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate 

as-Salaamu ‘alaykum wa rahmatu Llahi wa barakatuh.

Thank you for your question about the notion of the “universal validity” of all religions and its relation to the Sufism of Sheikh Muhyiddin Ibn al-`Arabi and Emir `Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri. I do not have all the English books you mentioned that ascribe this notion to them, but I believe that some kind of an answer can be given on the basis of the books I have seen in English, and traditional Islam as I have taken it from my shiekhs in fiqh and Sufism.

I will try to touch on some general considerations about the universality of the message of the prophets (on whom be peace), the finality of Islam, the validity of non-Islamic religions, and the positions of Ibn al-`Arabi and Emir `Abd al-Qadir versus that of some of their modern interpreters. Some of the material included has been drawn from Tariqa Notes, and some from a letter last year to Christians in the Ukraine.

1. The Universality of Religions and Finality of Islam.

Allah sent mankind and jinn His prophetic messengers (upon whom be peace), who were trustworthy, intelligent, truthful, and fully conveyed their messages. He protected them from sin, and from every physical trait unbecoming to them, though as human beings, they ate, drank, slept, and married. They were the best of all created beings; and the highest of them was him whom Allah chose to be the final seal of prophethood, our prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace).

Though the Sacred Law of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) superseded all previously valid religious laws, it was identical with them in beliefs, such as tawhid or “oneness of God”, and so on, a fact that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) emphasized by saying, “Let none of you say I am superior to [the prophet] Jonah,” (Bukhari, 4.193: 3412), for the illumination of Jonah’s tawhid (upon him be peace)–under the darkness of the storm, the darkness of the sea, and the darkness of the belly of the fish–was not less than the illumination of the Prophet’s tawhid at the zenith of his success as the spiritual leader of all Arabia (Allah bless him and give him peace). The light of their message was one, in which sense the Qur’an says, “We do not differentiate between any of His messengers” (Qur’an 2:285), showing that previous religions were the same in beliefs, and though differing in provisions of works, and now abrogated by the final religion, were valid in their own times.

As for today, only Islam is valid or acceptable now that Allah has sent it to all men, for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has said,

“By Him in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, any person of this Community, any Jew, or any Christian who hears of me and dies without believing in what I have been sent with will be an inhabitant of hell” (al-Baghawi: Sharh al-sunna 1.104).

This hadith was also reported by Muslim in his Sahih by `Abd al-Razzaq in his Musannaf, and others. It is a rigorously authenticated (sahih) evidence that clarifies the word of Allah in surat Al ‘Imran

“Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam will never have it accepted from him, and shall be of those who have truly failed in the next life” (Qur’an 3:85)

and many other verses and hadiths. That Islam is the only remaining valid or acceptable religion is necessarily known as part of our religion, and to believe anything other than this is unbelief (kufr) that places a person outside of Islam, as Imam Nawawi notes:

“Someone who does not believe that whoever follows another religion besides Islam is an unbeliever (like Christians), or doubts that such a person is an unbeliever, or considers their sect to be valid, is himself an unbeliever (kafir) even if he manifests Islam and believes in it” (Rawda al-talibin, 10.70).

This is not only the position of the Shafi’i school of jurisprudence represented by Nawawi, but is also the recorded position of all three other Sunni schools: Hanafi (Ibn ‘Abidin: Radd al-muhtar 3.287), Maliki (al-Dardir: al-Sharh al-saghir, 4.435), and Hanbali (al-Bahuti: Kashshaf al-qina’, 6.170). Those who know fiqh literature will note that each of these works is the foremost fatwa resource in its school. The scholars of Sacred Law are unanimous about the abrogation of all other religions by Islam because it is the position of Islam itself. It only remains for the sincere Muslim to submit to, in which connection Ibn al-`Arabi has said:

“Beware lest you ever say anything that does not conform to the pure Sacred Law. Know that the highest stage of the perfected ones (rijal) is the Sacred Law of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace). And know that the esoteric that contravenes the exoteric is a fraud” (al-Burhani: al-Hall al-sadid, 32).

2. Ibn al-`Arabi and Contemporary Non-Islamic Religions

As for the abrogation of all religions by Islam, many of us know Muslims who believe the opposite of orthodox Islam, perhaps due to a literary and intellectual environment in which any and every notion about this world and the next can be expressed, in which novelty is highly valued, and in which tradition has little authority. Many have even sought backing for their emotive preference for the validity of other religions from the books of famous Sufis who are far from such a beliefs, such as Ibn al-`Arabi or `Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri. In a recent work for example entitled “Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-`Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity”, Professor William Chittick says:

“The Shaykh [Muhyiddin Ibn al-`Arabi] sometimes criticizes specific distortions or misunderstandings in the Qur’anic vein, but he does not draw the conclusion that many Muslims have drawn–that the coming of Islam abrogated (naskh) previous revealed religions. Rather, he says, Islam is like the sun and other religions like the stars. Just as the stars remain when the sun rises, so also the other religions remain valid when Islam appears. One can add a point that perhaps Ibn al-`Arabi would also accept: What appears as a sun from one point of view may be seen as a star from another point of view. Concerning abrogation, the Shaykh writes,

“‘All the revealed religions (shara’i’) are lights. Among these religions, the revealed religion of Muhammad is like the light of the sun among the lights of the stars. When the sun appears, the lights of the stars are hidden, and their lights are included in the light of the sun. Their being hidden is like the abrogation of the other revealed religions that takes place through Muhammad’s revealed religion. Nevertheless, they do in fact exist, just as the existence of the light of the stars is actualized. This explains why we have been required in our all-inclusive religon to have faith in the truth of all messengers and all the revealed religions. They are not rendered null (batil) by abrogation–that is the opinion of the ignorant.’([al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya,] III 153.12[16])

“If the Shaykh’s pronouncements on other religions sometimes fail to recognize their validity in his own time, one reason may be that, like most other Muslims living in the western Islamic lands, he had little real contact with the Christians or Jews in his environment, not to speak of followers of religions farther afield. He had probably never met a saintly representative of either of these traditions, and he almost certainly had never read anything about these two religions except what was written in Islamic sources. Hence there is no reason that he should have accepted the validity of these religions except in principle. But this is an important qualification. To maintain the particular excellence of the Qur’an and the superiority of Muhammad over all other prophets is not to deny the universal validity of revelation nor the necessity of revelations appearing in particularized expressions” (Religious Diversity, 12526).

Chittick’s claim above that Ibn al-`Arabi “does not draw the conclusion that many Muslims have drawn–that the coming of Islam abrogated (naskh) previously revealed religions” is false, and could have been corrected by a fuller translation of the passage he has quoted from the Futuhat:

“The religious laws (shara’i’) are all lights, and the law of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace) among these lights is as the sun’s light among the light of the stars: if the sun comes out, the lights of the stars are no longer seen and their lights are absorbed into the light of the sun: the disappearance of their lights resembles what, of the religious laws, has been abrogated (nusikha) by his law (Allah bless him and give him peace) despite their existence, just as the lights of the stars still exist. This is why we are required by our universal law to believe in all prophetic messengers (rusul) and to believe that all their laws are truth, and did not turn into falsehood by being abrogated: that is the imagination of the ignorant. So all paths return to look to the Prophet’s path (Allah bless him and give him peace): if the prophetic messengers had been alive in his time, they would have followed him just as their religious laws have followed his law. “For he was given Comprehensiveness of Word (Jawami’ al-Kalim), and given [the Qur’anic verse] ‘Allah shall give you an invincible victory‘ (Qur’an 48:3), ‘the invincible’ [al-‘aziz, also meaning rare, dear, precious, unattainable] being he who is sought but cannot be reached. When the prophetic messengers sought to reach him, he proved impossible for them to attain to–because of his [being favored above them by] being sent to the entire world (bi’thatihi al-‘amma), and Allah giving him Comprehensiveness of Word (Jawami al-Kalim), and the supreme rank of possessing the Praiseworthy Station (al-Maqam al-Mahmud) in the next world, and Allah having made his Nation (Umma) ‘the best Nation ever brought forth for people‘ (Qur’an 3:110). The Nation of every messenger is commensurate with the station of their prophet, so realize this” (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, III 153.1220).

The passage, when read carefully, is merely an affirmation that Allah’s messengers (upon whom be peace) were true, and everything they brought was true, which is believed by every Muslim. It further suggests that everything their laws (shara’i’ means nothing else) contained has not only been abrogated, but is thereby implicitly contained in the new revelation, in which sense “their religious laws have followed his law.” A familiar example cited by ulama is the law of talion, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, which was obligatory in the religious law of Moses (upon whom be peace), subsequently forbidden by the religious law of Jesus (upon whom be peace) in which “turning the other cheek” was obligatory; and finally both were superseded by the law of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), which permits victims to take retaliation (qisas) for purely intentional physical injuries, but in which it is religiously superior not to retaliate but forgive. This is the absorption of the stars’ lights into that of the sun, of “what, of the religious laws, has been abrogated by his law (Allah bless him and give him peace) despite their existence, just as the lights of the stars still exist.” This is the sense in which Ibn al-`Arabi is interpreting Comprehensiveness of Word (Jawami’ al-Kalim) here.

What the passage does not say is that non-Islamic religions are valid now that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has been sent with Islam. Professor Chittick’s omission of the second half of the passage (which is plainly punctuated in finish by the words “so know this”) is puzzling, for it is highly material to the topic, and in spirit and in letter (“because of his being sent to the entire world (bi’thatihi al-‘amma)”) plainly contradicts the professor’s suggestion that Ibn al-`Arabi does not believe that the coming of Islam abrogated (naskh) previously revealed religions. The wrongness of this notion is clear to anyone who reads the second half and knows what the expression bi’thatihi al-‘amma means from having read it in similar contexts from other works of the traditional Islamic sciences that formed Ibn al-`Arabi’s education.

In fact, one looks in vain in the works of Ibn al-`Arabi for the belief of the validity of currently existing non-Islamic religions, for this is kufr, as Imam Nawawi and the other Imams mentioned above unanimously concur. Traditional Islam certainly does not accept the suggestion that

“it is true that many Muslims believe that the universality of guidance pertains only to pre-Qur’anic times, but others disagree; there is no ‘orthodox’ interpretation here that Muslims must accept” (Religious Diversity, 124).

Orthodoxy exists, it is unanimously agreed upon by the scholars of Muslims, and we have conveyed in Nawawi’s words above that to believe anything else is unbelief. As for “others disagree,” it is true, but is something that has waited for fourteen centuries of Islamic scholarship down to the present century to be first promulgated in Cairo in the 1930s by the French convert to Islam Rene Gunon, and later by his student Frithjof Schuon and writers under him. Who else said it before? And if no one did, and everyone else considers it kufr, on what basis should it be accepted?

3. Emir `Abd al-Qadir and Christianity

My point is that it would have been one thing to say it under their own auspices, but to project their views onto great Muslims of the past is a mistake that should be corrected. Another example is found in Islam and the Destiny of Man, in which Charles le Gai Eaton (omissions are his) says:

“According to the great mujahid (the ‘warrior in the path of Allah’), the Emir `Abdu’l-Qadir, our God and the God of all the communities opposed to ours are in truth One God . . . despite the variety of His manifestations . . . He has manifested Himself to Muhammad’s people beyond every form while manifesting Himself in every form . . . To Christians He has manifested Himself in the form of Christ . . . and to the worshippers of whatever form it may be . . . in the very form of this thing; for no worshipper of a finite object worships it for its own sake. What he worships is the epiphany in the form of the attributes of the true God . . . Yet that which all the worshippers worship is one and the same. Their error consists only in the act of determining it in a limitative manner. [Quoted from Mawqif 236 in the Mawaqif of `Abdul-Qadir (French translation by M. Chodkiewicz published by Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1982).] `Abdul-Qadir fought the Christians who invaded his land, Algeria, because he was a Muslim. Exiled in Damascus, he protected the Christians against massacre by taking them into his own home because he understood. Those who would challenge him or accuse him of heresy should be prepared to face his sword and accept death from its blade since small men risk their necks when they challenge great ones”(Islam and the Destiny of Man, 53).

The passage quoted from the Mawaqif is interesting, not only because scissors seem to have been harder at work on it than sword, but because the reference suggests it has been translated from Arabic to French to English, something of a journey from the original words of the author. I don’t know who arranged the French original, but the above passage has not been quoted from Mawqif 236 of the Arabic Mawaqif that I have, which was printed in 1329/1911 in Damascus from the copy of Sheikh `Abd al-Razzaq al-Bitar, a manuscript read by `Abd al-Qadir himself, with emendations in his own handwriting in the margins.

The idea, however, is familiar, and is mentioned in a number of places in the Mawaqif, and is also mentioned in the Chapter of Hajj toward the end of the first volume of the Futuhat of Ibn al-`Arabi, whom `Abd al-Qadir follows closely. Ibn al-`Arabi feels that while God consigns idolaters to hell eternally (if a prophetic warner has been sent to them, for otherwise they are not responsible to do or refrain from anything), their worship is not completely amiss, in that everyone, whether Christian, Jew, fire-worshipper, or idolator, consider what they worship to be the Divine (Ar. al-Ilah, “the Deity”), and do not worship what they worship except for this reason, in which sense “your Lord has ruled that you shall worship none except Him” (Qur’an 17:23), in which “ruled”, according to `Abd al-Qadir, means “brought about”; namely, that Allah, in virtue of this motive and this name (al-Ilah) and His jealousy for its prerogative, often answers the supplications of such worshippers and fulfills their needs; though as said before, their worship is not valid, for “Allah does not forgive that any should be associated with Him, but forgives what is other than that to whomever He wills” (Qur’an 4:48): From one side they do worship the God, but from another they have associated with Him the specific objects that they believe He inheres in, so their worship is invalid, because it does not conform to the absolute tawhid brought by the prophets, upon whom be peace, who taught that Allah is absolute in manifestation, not bound by any created form.

No matter what the religion, then, for Emir `Abd al-Qadir, Allah cannot not be “worshipped” in the limitary sense of the basic impetus of the worshipper towards the Divine. But this does not mean it is acceptable or valid in Allah’s eyes. Whoever confuses these two things, as the above passage does, has done violence to `Abd al-Qadir. He says:

“Since the manifestings of Him Meant by Worship are manifold, so are sects and creeds. For the aim of worship is to exalt with reverence, and the lowliness and humility of every worshipper is only rendered to someone able to harm or benefit, give or withhold, to give sustenance, to lower or raiseand these attributes are not in fact, those of anyone except one alone, who is Allah Most High, and He is absolutely beyond perception (ghayb mutlaq). “So every worshipper of a form, be it sun, star, fire, light, darkness, nature, idol, phantasm, jinn, or other, maintains that the form he worships is of Him Meant by Worship, and he ascribes the attributes of the Diety (al-Ilah) to it, of harm, benefit, and so on. Such a person would be right, in a way, if only he had not made Him finite and conditional. For no worshipper intends by adoring the form he worships anything except the Reality Deserving Worship, which is Allah Most High, and this is what Allah has ruled (Qur’an 17:23) and brought about. But they have proved ignorant of this Reality’s absolute manifestation, unsullied by conditionality or limitariness, and have proved ignorant of the Reality in point of fact, though they do know it in general terms, this being innately possessed knowledge” (al-Mawaqif, 1.33:8).

What is the consequence of their proving “ignorant of the Reality in point of fact?” Does it mean that every worshipper, whether he associates others with Allah or not, is acceptable to Allah? `Abd al-Qadir answers this question in another section of the Mawaqif in his exegesis of the words of the Meccan idolators quoted by Allah in surat al-An`am, “Had Allah not wanted, we would not have associated anything with Him, nor our fathers, nor would we have prohibited anything” (Qur’an 6:148):

“This is truth intended as falsehood, that is: ‘If Allah had willed us not to associate others with Him, we wouldn’t have associated them with Him; and if Allah had not willed that we prohibited anything, we wouldn’t have done so, for nothing we do occurs except what He wills.‘ And it is true; but the way this truth is intended as a falsehood is that they claim that everything Allah has willed for His servants is acceptable and liked by Him. “And this is a falsehood, for Allah Most High wills for His servants whatever He knows from them pre-eternally. And that which He knows from them pre-eternally is whatever is entailed by what they most truly are, which they seek through their primal disposition, be it good or evil, pure monotheism (tawhid) or unbelief (kufr). For His will is subject to His knowledge, and His knowledge is subject to what He knows, and what He knows includes both the guided person and the lost, the affirmer of pure monotheism (muwahhid) and the associater of others with Him (mushrik), the damned and the saved, the truthful and the liar. The beings that He Most High has created are the sites of manifestation (madhahir) of His names, and there are those of His names which entail beauty and mercy, this being the share of those who are saved, the ‘People of the Right Handful‘; and there are others of them that entail rigor and subjugation, this being the share of those who are damned, the ‘People of the Left Handful.‘ 

“So Allah’s willing something is not the sign of His love for it and acceptance of it, for ‘He does not accept unbelief for His servants‘ (Qur’an 39:7), though He has willed the unbelief of many of them. His will is only a sign of His beginningless eternal knowledge of that which He would will for endless eternity. If everything He willed for His servants were goodness, it would entail that His sending the prophetic messengers and appointing their laws was futile. For they came with commands and prohibitions, and explained the Right Handful and the Left Handful, as He says: ‘Of them [humanity], there are the damned and the saved‘” (Qur’an 11:105) (al-Mawaqif, 1.46970: 236).

So at the level of creation and destiny, everything is the will of God, and in a sense, all religions, according to `Abd al-Qadir’s viewpoint, are “worship” of the Deity. But at the level of validity and salvation, only the worship that conforms to what the prophets (upon whom be peace) have brought is acceptable to Allah.

4. Divine Will Versus Divine Acceptance

In the first passage I have translated above from the Mawaqif, `Abd al-Qadir explains that the mushrik who associates others with Allah is in a sense “worshipping” God by the fact that he ascribes attributes of the Deity to the object of his worship, which he only worships for their sake, though he has proved “ignorant of the Reality [Deserving Worship] in point of fact” (al-Mawaqif, 1.33: 8). And in the second passage quoted, `Abd al-Qadir contrasts the will of God in creating the mushrik and his “worship”, from the acceptance of Allah, which applies to neither, for he mentions “both the guided person and the lost, the affirmer of pure monotheism (muwahhid) and the associater of others with Him (mushrik), the damned and the saved, the truthful and the liar” (al-Mawaqif, 1.469: 236). There is little doubt here as to who is who: the muwahhid is saved, the mushrik is lost. Whatever exception may be taken at the above use of “worship”, one thing that it certainly does not entail is the validity and acceptance of God for all forms of this worship. In the whole discussion, Emir `Abd al-Qadir closely follows Ibn al-`Arabi, who says,

“Allah says, ‘Your Lord has ruled that you shall worship none except Him‘ (Qur’an 17:23), that is, has determined, and for His sake have the gods been worshipped, for no one is intended by the worship of any worshipper except God, since nothing is worshipped for its own sake but Allah. The associator of others with Allah (mushrik) but makes the mistake of setting up for himself a worship in a particular way not given to him by God, and so is damned for that (fa shaqiya li dhalik). For they say of those they associate with Him, ‘We but worship them that they may bring us closer to Allah‘ (Qur’an 39:3), thus acknowledging Him” (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, I 405.3133)

It is difficult to agree completely with Ibn al-`Arabi and `Abd al-Qadir’s interpretation of “Your Lord has ruled” (qada Rabbuka) as meaning “Your Lord has determined” (hakama, i.e. brought about), as opposed to meaning “amara” or “commanded”, the interpretation of other exegetes, for the latter is attested to by the remainder of the verse:

“[Your Lord has ruled that you shall worship none except Him,] and show goodness to parents” (Qur’an 7:23),

where if “ruled” (qada) meant “determined” (hakama), it would entail that every behavior in the created world towards parents may be termed “goodness”, which is not the case.

Ibn al-`Arabi ascribes his interpretation to “kashf” or “spiritual intuition” (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, III 117.8) rather than linguistic or other conventional exegetical evidence–a private understanding that few ordinary readers can follow him in–but in any case his explicit words “and so is damned for that (fa shaqiya li dhalik)” leave little doubt about the acceptability of such worship in his eyes. If there were doubt, the same thought can be found many other passages of the Futuhat such as his description of the four groups who shall never leave the hellfire, the second of whom is those who associate others with Allah (al-mushrikun), a mushrik being someone who “affirms the existence of Allah, being unable to deny it, but Satan makes him associate others besides Allah in His divinity” (ibid., I 302.9), a sin which he notes in another section is “among those enormities that are never forgiven” (ibid., 749.16).

The upshot of these texts is that Ibn al-`Arabi, like `Abd al-Qadir (and virtually every other Muslim), clearly distinguishes between the divine will, which pertains to every created thing, and the divine acceptance, which only pertains to things the Sacred Law deems good. This brings us back to our starting point, the word of Allah in surat Al ‘Imran that

“whoever seeks a religion other than Islam will never have it accepted from him, and shall be of those who have truly failed in the next life” (Qur’an 3:85).

5. The Fate of Non-Muslims in the Afterlife

The reason that contemporary writers affected by the writings of Gunon and Schuon, such as Chittick and Gai Eaton (or such as Martin Lings, Titus Burckhardt etc.), seem to want the universal validity of all religions at any price, even to the extent of attributing it to masters like Muhyiddin ibn al-`Arabi (“in principle“) or Emir `Abd al-Qadir (“he protected the Christians against massacre by taking them into his own home because he understood” [as if other scholars considered massacring them halal]) would seem to be the emotive impalatability of followers of other religions going to hell. Where is the mercy? Would Allah put someone in the hellfire merely for worshipping in another religion besides Islam? This question is answered by traditional Islam according to two possibilities:

(1) There are some peoples who have not been reached by the message of the Prophet of Islam (Allah bless him and give him peace) that we must worship the One God alone, associating nothing else with Him. Such people are innocent, and will not be punished no matter what they do. Allah says in surat al-Isra’,

“We do not punish until We send a Messenger” (Qur’an 17:15).

These include, for example, Christians and others who lived in the period after the spread of the myth of Jesus godhood, until the time of the prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), who renewed the call to pure monotheism.

The great Muslim scholar, Imam Ghazali, includes in this category those who have only been reached with a distorted picture of the Messenger of Islam (Allah bless him and give him peace), presumably including many people in the West today who know nothing about Allah’s religion but newspaper stories about Ayatollahs and mad Muslim bombers. Is it within such people’s capacity to believe? In Ghazali’s view, such people are excused until after they have had an opportunity to learn the undistorted truth about Islam (Ghazali: “Faysal al-tafriqa,” Majmu’a rasa’il al-Imam al-Ghazali, 3.96). This of course does not alter our own obligation as Muslims to reach them with the da’wa.

(2) A second group of people consists of those who turn away from God’s divine message of Islam, rejecting the command to make their worship God’s alone; whether because of blindly imitating the religion of their ancestors, or for some other reason. These are people to whom God has sent a prophetic messenger and reached with His message, and to whom He has given hearing and an intellect with which to grasp it but after all this, persist in associating others with Allah, either by actually worshipping another, or by rejecting the laws brought by His messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace), which associates their own customs with His prerogative to be worshipped as He directs. Such people have violated God’s rights, and have accepted to go to hell, which is precisely what His messengers have warned them of, so they have no excuse:

“Truly, Allah does not forgive that any be associated with Him; but He forgives what is less than that to whomever He wills” (Qur’an 4:48).

In either case, Allah’s mercy exists, though for non-Muslims unreached by the message, it is a question of divine amnesty for their ignorance, not a confirmation of their religions validity. It is worth knowing the difference between these two things, for one’s eternal fate depends on it.

6. The Absolute and Relative

A final question arises here; namely, that since Allah alone is absolute, and all forms (presumably including religious ones) are relative, why could He not transcend the forms given in the Islamic Revelation; that is, if He can do anything, why should it be impossible for Him to simply “forgive everyone”?

The answer involves the concept of al-wajib al-‘aradi or “the contingently necessary,” which is part of traditional Islamic aqida (tenets of faith), and hence well known to scholars like Ibn al-`Arabi and Abd al-Qadir, but perhaps not familiar to many contemporary Muslims. It is arguably among the most important points one can learn from classical works of aqida.

The possible or impossible for Allah Most High involves the divine attribute of qudra or omnipotence, “what He can do”. This attribute in turn relates exclusively to the intrinsically possible, not to what is intrinsically impossible, as Allah says, “Verily Allah has power over every thing” (Qur’an 20:29), “thing” being something that in principle can exist. For example, if one asks “Can Allah create square circle?” the answer is that His omnipotence does not relate to it, for a square circle does not refer to anything that in principle could exist: the speaker does not have a distinct idea of what he means, but is merely using a jumble of words.

Similarly, if one were to ask, “Can Allah terminate His own existence?” the answer is that the divine omnipotence does not relate to this; it is intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati), for the divine nature necessarily entails the divine perfections, of which Being is one. It is impossible that Allah could cease to have this perfection or any other, for otherwise He would not be God.

There are thus things that are necessarily true of God (that He cannot not be); and their opposites, things which are necessarily impossible of God. In terms of the question above, the choice to forgive everyone, that is, to simply suspend the implications of the Qur’anic verses and hadiths that indicate that some classes of people will never leave hell, is not intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati) for Allah, in that it does not involve something inherently impossible as does the square circle, or negate something inherently true by the very nature of the Divine. Then why didn’t any scholar ever think of it? Because for Islamic orthodoxy, there is another class of both the necessary and the impossible that the divine attribute of omnipotence (qudra) has no relation to; namely, that which is necessary or impossible because, although not so a priori, it has become necessary or impossible by being connected with the knowledge (‘ilm) of Allah and His beginninglessly eternal attribute of speech, in His informing us of it.

For example, Abu Lahab was born with apparently the same chance as anyone to hear the Prophet’s message (Allah bless him and give him peace), enter Islam, and reach paradise. But when he persecuted the Muslims, and surat al-Masad (Qur’an 111) was subsequently revealed, and Allah manifested His beginninglessly eternal knowledge that Abu Lahab was of the people of hell. Although initially this outcome was merely contingent and possible, when the eternal Word of Allah connected with it, it became necessary, final, and inabrogable, for Allah only informs of what is in His knowledge, and His knowledge only conforms to what truly is, which is why no one alters the words of Allah (Qur’an 6:34), for otherwise His words would express ignorance, an attribute impossible for God, or lies, which equally contradict the nature of the Divine.

Abu Lahab is thus necessarily of the people of hell, necessary not logically or inherently, but contingently necessary, because of the contingent event of Allah having informed us of it. Everything that Allah has informed us of is of this class of thing, and divine omnipotence (qudra) does not relate to their contrary, for His Word shall be realized exactly as He has said, and it is impossible that any of it be nullified.

This is why for Sufis like Ibn al-`Arabi and Emir `Abd al-Qadir, the revealed law in a sense partakes of the Divine, for it returns to Allah’s attribute of speech, in the Qur’an, and to the unrecited revelation of the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) which is Allah’s act of inspiration-both of which are inseparable in principle from Allah’s entity. For such Sufis, the sharia is the haqiqa, and this is, after all, the position of Islam itself. To answer our question above, the first premise that Allah alone is absolute, and all forms are relative, is plainly wrong, and contradicted by the manifold existence of Allah’s determinations, which, though contingently necessary (wajib aradi) rather than inherently so, are no less absolute than the Divine itself.

I remain your brother,

[signature]

Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Was-Salamu alaykum wa rahmatu Llahi wa barakatuh.

7. Works Cited

• al-Baghawi, al-Husayn. Sharh al-sunna. Ed. Shuayb al-Arnaut. 16 vols. Damascus: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1400/1980.
• al-Bahuti, Mansur. Kashshaf al-qina an matn al-Iqna. 6 vols. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1402/1982.
• al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d.
• Chittick, William C. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-`Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
• al-Dardir, Ahmad. al-Sharh al-saghir ala Aqrab al-masalik ila madhhab al-Imam Malik. 4 vols. Cairo: Dar al-Maarif, 1394/1974.
• Gai Eaton, Charles le. Islam and the Destiny of Man. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1994
• al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid. Faysal al-tafriqa, Majmua rasail al-Imam al-Ghazali. 7 vols. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 1409/1988.
• al-Hashimi, Muhammad. al-Hall al-sadid li ma astashkalahu al-murid. Ed. with appendices by Muhammad Said al-Burhani. Damascus: Muhammad Said al-Burhani, 1383/1963
• al-Hashimi, Muhammad. Sharh Shitranj al-arifin. Ed. with appendices by Muhammad Said al-Burhani. Damascus: Muhammad Said al-Burhani, n.d.
• al-Haythami, Nur al-Din. Majma al-zawaid wa manba al-fawaid. 10 vols. N.p. n.d. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-`Arabi, 1402/1982.
• Ibn ‘Abidin, Muhammad Amin. Radd al-muhtar ala al-durr al-mukhtar. 5 vols. Bulaq 1272/1855. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-`Arabi, 1407/1987.
• Ibn al-`Arabi, Muhyiddin. al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya. 4 vols. Cairo, 1329/1911. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, n.d.
• al-Jaza’iri, `Abd al-Qadir. Kitab al-mawaqif fi al-wadh wa al-irshad. 3 vols. Damascus: Matbaa al-Shabab, 1329/1911.
• al-Nawawi, Yahya. Rawda al-talibin wa umda al-muftin. 12 vols. Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islami, 1412/1991.

9/11: Thoughts & Emotions

In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate

The following are some of my thoughts and emotions about what we have experienced in recent months. My aim is to help Muslims articulate their feelings (even through disagreement) and to help non-Muslims understand where some of us are coming from.

In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as to the significance of the impressions which press in upon us and as to the value of the judgements which we form.

Sigmund Freud [1]

“The events of September 11.” “What happened on September 11.” Such is the perceived enormity of that day that we cannot even categorise it; it remains beyond categorisation. The sheer violence of the initial impact followed by the heart-crushing collapse of the twin towers was more than this soul could bear, and I began to turn my face away as the TV editors repeatedly showed the images of death. For that’s what they were, images of death, moments when hundreds if not thousands [2] died. I could not look on in awed fascination, as some have described.

Yet, I did feel some selfish concern at this moment. I thought: “I hope some Muslims didn’t do this, otherwise we’re in trouble.” And so at the moment when thousands were dying, I was worrying about me. I am ashamed by my own selfishness and lack of humanity; and perhaps this leads on to my next question, for surely the events of September 11 did nothing more than throw up a thousand questions summed up in the words, “What have we become?” Perhaps the saddest point to note in the aftermath is that instead of awakening everyone’s heart to suffering, this event may have sent us further into our trenches from which we fire accusations at each other. It should have been a day when all self-critical souls looked into their own hearts and wondered whether they helped to bring this about. It should have been a day when suffering, by being brought right up to our faces, should have pulled humanity by the hand of humility from its present abyss.

O you who believe, stand up for justice, even if it is against yourselves.

(Qur’an, Sura Ma’ida, verse 8)

I felt guilty. I felt responsible, even though I have no connection to Usama bin Laden and the ‘Jihad’ group. The first time I ventured out after the attacks, I remember feeling more paranoid than normal. Looking intensely at others, with the thought that perhaps they were looking at me, holding me to account. I felt like approaching them and shaking them and shouting: “But I don’t agree with what was done! I was not involved!” And then, not for the first time in my life, and probably not for the last either, the way things are going, I realised what Durkheim meant when he said that collective representations are social and coercive.

I have lived through the Rushdie affair when we were the vanguard of religious fascism. I have lived through the Gulf war when we were the fifth column. And perhaps most traumatically, I have lived through the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, when we were passive onlookers to the murder of 200,000. I used to read newspapers, but stopped during the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. I couldn’t read anymore. Rape after rape. Murder after murder. I still vividly remember walking past the Evening Standard hoardings next to the newsstands at London tube stations before and after the fall of Srebenica. I remember the day before it fell, the adverts announced: “Srebenica About to Fall!” Similarly, on the day itself, “Serb Troops Enter Srebenica!” A few days later: “Thousands of Men and Boys ‘Missing’ in Srebenica!” All the while, the commuters flowed back and forth, striding past the news, too busy, too tired and probably not deeply bothered [3]. Those days were maddening for me. As was the Gulf war, at the beginning of which George Bush proclaimed: ‘Our quarrel is not with the people of Iraq’, which was before a million (half of them children) were killed through US-led sanctions. How I maintained my sanity, I don’t know. In fact I remember on September 10, thinking to myself, that bearing in mind the number of Muslims who have died in the last few decades (several million), the Muslims generally have been very patient. But that was before the towers fell. Perhaps what was so maddening was the absence of argument and voice. I couldn’t speak. If I did, no one listened. I was the wrong colour for a start, and I come from ‘Paki’-land.

There is an underlying religious feeling to this conflict, even if it may ultimately not be about Christianity and Islam. The Twin Towers fell, and religious people believe that God permitted it to happen as He can permit all human actions, good and bad, ours and theirs. The Taliban similarly withdrew from the cities and the Northern Alliance took over. God similarly permitted this to happen. The nervous post-hoc interpretation of both actions as either signifying God’s pleasure or displeasure reminds me of Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic, and how success in capitalist activity was the mark of God’s pleasure in this life and success in the Next. It is as if the unfolding events are somehow indicative of who has the Truth, and whom it is that God is ultimately pleased with.

So why are we where we are today? I remember attending a conference in London in 1993 at which Ernest Gellner and François Burgat spoke [4]. Gellner said that the two main events of the twentieth century were the fall of Marxism and the rise of Islam. No doubt Islam has confounded key sociological thinkers such as Durkheim, Marx and Weber who argued that as secularisation and its engine of modernity progress, religion must go into decline. Islam’s answer to that has been “Count us out.” When I asked Giddens in an interview why this was so, his reply was, “Well the theorists were wrong about it, weren’t they?” So religion is here to stay. The question then is, how to deal with it. More specifically, for those whose moral order is based upon liberalism, how to deal with political Islam. There is no doubt that there has been an awakening within Muslim countries in the last few decades, and Islamic movements have achieved varying degrees of success. The example that is closest to the point that I wish to make here is that of Algeria. After the FIS had walked through the first round of elections with a victory that would make Tony Blair jealous, the army stepped in and cancelled the elections. (Note a liberal paradox: the right of the individual Rushdie must be upheld, but the right of the nation Algeria can be ignored.) The apology of Western writers stated that Islam was simply anti-liberal, women being oppressed, hands being chopped off, and the rest. So even if the people want Islam, they must not be allowed it. And so democracy works to a lesser extent in most of the Muslim world with the aid of Western intelligence agencies. (Whence the disingenuous claim of Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East. First of all, democracy is not allowed in most of the Muslim world, thanks to the Western governments. Secondly, what is the point of being a democracy if one cannot treat other human beings with respect?) At the same conference, François Burgat [5] spoke of bilateral radicalisation. This is the idea that the moderates would attempt to work through the political process, be prevented by the respective governments’ imaginative use of law (cf. Turkey and Egypt), so that sections of the movement would become radicalised and move outside the political process. This historically has lead to the formation of the Jihad movement of which Usama bin Laden is a charismatic leader. Calling for the overthrow of corrupt governments, the Jihad movement has grown over the last few years as injustice after injustice has been piled upon the Muslim world. (The second area of activity for the Jihad movement has been in Muslim minority situations such as Kashmir, Palestine and the Caucasus.) But effectively what has happened is that sections of political Islam have been radicalised towards extra-judicial violence, and the relative rise of the jihad group has meant, in one sense, that oppression in Muslim lands has been successful. I am reminded of that game I used to play without much success in Blackpool. A twopenny piece had to be inserted through a slot at the top of a machine and the coin fell down onto or alongside a pile of coins. A machine moved the pile along as the coins hung on one side over a ledge. If my coin could move the pile along, five coins might fall. Maybe (and usually) not. The coins falling from the top of the machine are the numerous injustices heaped upon the Muslim world, and the coins that fall over the edge are the terrorists.

We have all been radicalised over the last decade or so, at least discursively. Who could not have been, after the Gulf war, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and now Afghanistan, etc. etc. For how long can we bear the etcs? [6] But – and this is where most media commentators miss the point – Islam is not a religion of violence. It teaches us to control our anger, to withhold it, to be patient through prayer. Because if Islam was a religion of violence and advocated insurrection, then I and many, many others would have become violent by now. Because the pain has been maddening. 5000 children in Iraq every month. There have been times when I could not sleep because of this number. The disgust and shame that this number brought upon me has impelled me into great anger. But I have controlled myself, as have the millions of practising, angry Muslim youth over the world. Why? Because my religion has told me to control myself, and what my religion teaches me is sacred, full stop.

The play Iranian nights written by Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton and performed in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair suggested that the refugee turns to religion because he feels rejected:

Now I live in Notting Hill, with my mum. She is not well. The terror, the fear have broken her. Who can understand the fate of the prisoner and the poor who have fled from hate to a nowhere in the West, a nowhere in the rain? Who can understand our pain? Why does the West think it can do no wrong and expect the refugee to be superhumanly strong, more tolerant, more wise than any human being can be? It’s a miracle that so many of us do have the strength to bear the abuse, bear the blind ignorance of what we are and where we come from. A miracle! That only a few have gone fanatic! That only a few rave about the satanic! Therefore, the more who speak out, the better. The more! The more! The better! About the profound matter of the nature of God and man, speak out as best you can! What finer sound is there than a human being singing against cruelty! Against hate! [7]

It is not a miracle that we have not become terrorists, it is more simple than that. Islam prevents us from doing so.

The argument that has been proposed post-September 11 suggests that Islam is inherently violent, and that this is why these Muslims committed such acts of violence: they were acting on Islamic teachings. There is justification within Islam for these acts – that is the claim being made. If we are to play in an equal field, then does this mean that Christianity can justify the IMF or the sanctions against Iraq? Or Judaism justify Israel’s militarism? Let’s not let the secularists get away with this. Would the religion of the selfish gene justify sanctions against Iraq? The fact of the matter is that if there are one billion Muslims, at least a hundred million take Islam seriously, 1 in 10, and violence is not the norm in Muslim society. The twentieth century’s violence was mainly European, not Islamic. We have not responded to the numerous events of the last decade with acts of violence. In fact our response has always been one of restraint, and, unbelievably, dialogue.

The issue of sleepers is an interesting one. I would suggest that instead of sleepers being conscious, recruited members of a secret network, we could do ourselves a favour by examining the social nature of this phenomenon. I would suggest that a total climate of oppression has led to a situation in which there are millions of sleepers all over the planet. They are not members of al-Qaida. They are ordinary practising Muslims. They become activated once they cannot take it any more  and they lose touch with fiqh. The American government is chasing a mirage if it thinks that al-Qaida is as organised as it suggests. This is the real problem for the American government: how to deal with a massive social phenomenon. (To be anti-hegemony is not in itself a bad thing; Foucault felt able to applaud Khomeini for being anti-hegemony.) If I was an anthropologist wandering around Washington at the moment, I would suggest that the bureaucrats of government agencies such as the State Department, the FBI and the CIA have a fetish for organisation. They need to construct the mirage of an organised body so that they can investigate it.

“Are you with the civilised world or with the naan-civilised world?” These words of James Rubin, the former US assistant secretary of state, still ring clear in my mind. He said these words, echoing Ehud Barak’s, across the discussion floor on the day of the attack. (How strange that Barak happened to be in the BBC offices at the time of the attack, as was reported. What was he doing there: congratulating the BBC for its objective coverage of the Middle East? And how strange, that Colin Powell echoed the same words in interviews following the attack. This was spin too well spun.) So suddenly civilisation was on the agenda. “Are you civilised or uncivilised?” Why the resurrection of pre-colonial justificatory discourse? [8] What irritated me most about Rubin was that this was the same man who was paid to justify the sanctions against Iraq. This is civilisation. The hijacking of language to cover mass murder. Call me uncivilised.

Well, I can’t let this discussion on civilisation pass without mentioning Lord Douglas Hurd, former Secretary of State for the Home Office and then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. During the Rushdie affair, he said to Muslims gathered at Birmingham Central Mosque: “You clearly feel as if the most sacred things of your faith have been insulted and wounded. You feel shocked and you feel angry. But to turn such protests towards violence as has been suggested, not, I agree, in this country but elsewhere, or the threat of violence, I must say, is wholly unacceptable. Talks of death, talks of arrows being directed at hearts, such talk is vicious, it’s repugnant to civilised men or women.” [9] It was Douglas Hurd who was influential as one of the politicians who argued that the Bosnian Muslims must be refused the right to arm themselves. That would lead to an escalation in the war, he argued (his term was “a level killing field”). Meanwhile, many died. Imagine my feelings when I read Francis Wheen’s article in the Guardian (November 5 1997) which related how the same Hurd became deputy chairman of the National Westminster Bank. Markets which early in 1996 “concluded a deal with Milosevic to privatise Serbia’s post and telecommunication system and manage the country’s national debt. NatWest’s fee was said to be in the region of $10 million”. Call me uncivilised.

Terrorism. Global political structures use words like ‘terrorism’ so much that their semantic utility tends to decline sharply.  The popular usage would mean “the use of violence by madmen to secure anti-democratic ends”. Of course, terrorism is directly and inversely related to democracy, at least rhetorically. Hence the frequent sloganeering about  “democracy and freedom” (a friend of mine said recently that he gets worried whenever they start talking abut democracy and freedom, because it means that they are about to bomb a third world country. He was right). The terrorists are against democracy and freedom. Our right to be free. Superficially, this may ring true. But how about changing ‘free’ to ‘rich’? “These terrorists hate our freedom (wealth)! They don’t want us to be free (rich). We must fight those who are willing to attack us just because we want to be free (rich)”. Make any more sense?

Those persons who talk most about human freedom are those who are actually most blindly subject to social determination, inasmuch as they do not in most cases suspect the profound degree to which their conduct is determined by their interests.

Karl Mannheim  [10]

“The horror. The horror.” Colonel Kurtz’s last words. I wonder sometimes about their meaning. Is this the horror of the civilised man grown savage, or the horror of the corrupting influence of power? Or both? As we journey through the labyrinth of political error that has led us where we are, the question to be asked is: is the horror on our side or theirs? The answer, of course, is that the horror is on their side. Have we become savage in the pursuit of civilisation? Has power corrupted us in our pursuit of egalitarianism? The practical answer to this question lies in the machination of modernity. I would suggest that as knowledge and power are two sides of the same coin according to Foucault, in the same way, violence and distance are also two sides of the same coin in the discussion on terrorism and modernity. The terrorist terrorises us because he bridges this gap in the late modern era, whereas the objective of modernity is to make the equation of violence over distance tend as much towards zero as possible. The violent act committed by the state has to be out of sight, out of mind and out of discourse (hence the present discussions about press access to casualties in Afghanistan, and the resentment against Al-Jazirah). The sanctions against Iraq work so well because the distance between the act of violence and the actor is so great that the thread linking the two is too tenuous for the frail democratic sense. The “terrorist” act decreases this distance almost to zero. Suffering, of course, does not look to the name of the sender. But for some strange reason, we are today living in times when the “terrorist” form of violence exacts more horror. The drama of the moment holds our attention.

Here the word “terrorism” requires some comment. It is a word that, like its twin “fundamentalist”, doesn’t really mean much. Ask someone what they mean when they use the word and present different scenarios to question their definition and you’ll get the picture. “Terrorism” according to the lay definition means “the use of violence by madmen to secure anti-democratic ends.” I use the term “madmen” specifically. The suggestion according to this essentially right-wing definition is that “terrorists” are those people who are responsible for their actions because they have decided through rationalisation to commit acts of violence. The simultaneous description of them as “madmen” confounds their ambivalent reception, for “madness” limits the agency of the individual (as in the case of the assassination of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia) and renders them free of law. Perversely, madness can be a route to freedom. A more left-wing definition of “terrorism” would be “politics by desperate means” – the desperate under total political and military oppression resort to acts of individual and extreme violence. It is an attempt to take violence back into the court of the initiator state. Blair has entered this debate (and hence tacitly admitted the problem of defining terrorism) by offering the following definition in his answer to a question about the war in Afghanistan at Prime Minister’s Question Time (November 7): “Terrorism maximises loss of civilian life, we minimise loss of civilian life.” Netanyahu had offered the same definition on BBC2’s Newsnight a week earlier (October 31).

The use of the word “terrorism” by subaltern agents is a valiant attempt to re-focus concern towards universal suffering but the word has meaning only in reference to the powerful. There’s a word that we don’t hear much of. Power. Why? An open discussion on the nature of the relationship of terrorism to power would of course lead to the subaltern victory. Hence, the absence of discussion. For “terrorism” is the violence of the powerless, while “militarism” is the violence of the powerful. And since anything that can establish a relation to the nation state can automatically assume authority, the “militarism” approach reflects the order of things, while “terrorism” reflects disorder. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the use of violence and intimidation for political purposes.” Interestingly, this definition does not introduce the question of level of violence.

Recent reports suggest that the American intelligence agencies are re-considering the employment of torture as a tool to extract information. Simultaneously, the newly introduced human rights act in Britain is being set aside so that suspects can be imprisoned forever without trial. Well, this at least confirms to Muslims (for whom this act is primarily intended) what they have always thought, that they are insufficiently human to be warranted human rights. Both are examples of extremes of policies that are practised in the Middle East on a regular basis. It seems that the policies have come home. Is this reverse globalisation or the boomerang effect?

Ichheiser [11] has written about the difference between ideology in principle and ideology in practice in American culture. Ideology in principle is democracy. Ideology in practice is nationalism. [12] These past few months have thrown up this distinction to a remarkably clear degree. The talk has been of democracy, but the symbolism has been that of nationalism. The American flag out-selling the Afghani flag. And it is this distinction between rhetoric and practice that allowed the bombing to begin and continue. “You killed American citizens, we must kill you.” This base nationalist feeling is perhaps the most dangerous idea roaming the planet and it is this same feeling that punctures any attempt to achieve humanitarian sensitivity. Ultimately, history and geography decide who can be a human being in practice. In rhetoric, we are all human beings, as human rights discourse usurps the old-fashioned democracy slogans; but in practice, human beings are unequal. There are currency rates for human lives. And I think recent events have shaken these markets. So exactly how many Afghans are equal to one American?

“Not one American or British soldier has been killed so far,” crow the hawks. If the Americans had sent their soldiers into battle, it might have been a different story. Instead, they used the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban, Afghan against Afghan, because Americans are worth more. We do value certain lives more than others, and this is because of the way that we interpret individualism. The ideology of human rights being derivative of Kantian rationalism assumes individuals are mutually replaceable, all equal in front of the UN. But in reality, human psychology does not work like this. We may say that all humans are equal, but in reality, humans are different, and it is culture that determines the ascription of value. Culture strikes through human rights discourse. That is why the deaths of New Yorkers mean more so much more to viewers than the deaths of Afghani villagers or Iraqi children (those alert to media imagery will have noticed that after the angry, shouting crowd of Muslim youth and the wailing, pleading hijabi, has come a third image, that of children training for warfare, the implicit question following on from Israeli spin being “What kind of people train children to kill?”, thus implicitly justifying the murder of Muslim children). But New York is the home to global culture. “Friends” and “Sex and the City” both have a New York-style backdrop to their narratives of life. Superman, Spiderman and Batman were all New Yorkers. We share, or aspire to, that culture. We can relate to them because they invade our TV screens regularly. We live and make sense of our lives through their stories. And now we feel their suffering, because we can relate to them. More, certainly, than we can relate to a third-worlder. It is this social psychological reality that punctures the ascending balloon of human rights discourse. Culture brings people together, and forces people apart. (Kant is important as an ancestor because he has been described as the founder of the modern concept of race). [13]

Compare what the Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Palestinians, the Kashmiris and the Chechens have received and one begins to realise that there are decreasing levels of justice in this world. I suggest that “justice” (minus the infinite) needs to be heard of a bit more. This word doesn’t really match well with human rights discourse, mainly because human rights discourse is so frequently useful in serving hegemonic powers. Human rights activists say that you can have economic or political justice only if you agree with our way of doing things, that is to say, you can’t have your cake, even if you want to eat it. [14] An attempt to universalise human rights discourse is essentially an attempt to globalise the Enlightenment project, especially in the notion that there are only rights for individuals; and this is highly problematic.

For those who wish to discuss the real nature of things, a knowledge of economics is necessary. Oil money, the WTO, the IMF, the numerous trade agreements, rapid liberalisation of third world markets at the expense of local business: who is the thief? One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to recognise that economic globalisation is proceeding in an unbalanced manner. The ideology in practice means that the South Carolina farmer is rich because the African or the Indian farmer is poor. For those who remain unconvinced, I direct them to the writings of Susan George and Vandana Shiva. [15] The US’s approach to globalisation has simultaneously included the retreat from the Kyoto protocol (on the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions), the retreat from the anti-biological warfare treaty, the retreat from the anti-racism conference and the retreat from the anti-ballistic weapons treaty. So the US is interested in economic globalisation, but not, it seems, in other forms. John Locke wrote: “In the beginning, all the world was America” [16] (referring, ironically, to the then relative insignificance of the accumulation of wealth), today perhaps it would be: “The whole world is becoming America”, and tomorrow: “America is the world”. This does not mean that the US is unified on these matters. It is just that big business decides in Washington. It is the study of the interaction between democracy and economics that I wish to encourage here; but what should we call it? How about demonomics?

You may accuse me here of being anti-American. I would be disappointed. Much of what I wish to say about America is already an intrinsic part of American discourse, whether it be in relation to anti-globalisation, democracy, war or Muslims. Sayyid points out in his book: “There is a convergence between ‘internal’ critics of the West and the Islamist critique of Western hegemony”. [17] This is an internal dispute whose ramifications are played out amongst innocents living in other parts of the world. This leads on to two interconnected points. First of all, the idea of the US being isolationist. So what exactly does the CIA do? How can true democrats tolerate the existence of an organisation whose central purpose is interference in the affairs of other countries? How many CIA agents are currently aiding the numerous Muslim governments against their own populations? Why do no political observers and analysts talk about the influence of the intelligence services? It is of course politically impolite to ask such questions, but I only do so for the interests of the political rights of other countries.

The second issue is of the nature of politics in the US and the UK. One of the more depressing sights over the last few weeks has been the closing of political ranks. Perhaps there are no greater political issues in our times. However the three main British political parties have virtually fallen over each other in agreement post-September 11. The same is true for America. Only last year, the world witnessed an intense polarisation in the political sphere as Democrats and Republicans bickered about the Florida recount. But today they are united in the “war against terror.” Giddens’ notion of political debate in the late modern era as being beyond left and right proved true for much of the last parliament. [18] Tony Blair’s Labour Party managed to walk over and occupy the centre ground. The Tories, in their perplexity, shifted to the right. The debates on key issues such as public services became a real bore. Arguing over fine details and intricate numbers, both Blair and Hague defied the common man in PMQ after PMQ to understand what exactly it was that they were disagreeing about.

But recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new political space, one outside the normal consensus. This is represented by the anti-globalisation movement. It takes seriously the effects of one political nation upon the rest of the world, and it calls on citizens of one particular country to audit their effect, primarily economic, on other human beings, which means that it takes the language of human rights seriously, and it disregards in one clean sweep the nationalist agenda. One cannot help but think, while listening to the political rhetoric coming out of Washington and London, that we are hearing the last cries of nationalism before we approach the post-nationalist era. I think this political space has arrived and needs to be articulated and expanded. The Blair government is attempting to carve out a new political space for itself and in doing so it wishes to afford morality, an ideology in principle. But there are at least two obstacles. Firstly, the ethical foreign policy was one attempt at this, but once Robin Cook discovered the price of human rights, little more was heard of the phrase. Secondly, the government has released information on policy shifts in regard to nuclear processing, Railtrack, tuition fees and asylum vouchers in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, highlighting the interaction between policy and manipulation. The government, it seems, does not have the necessary moral courage, though it has a huge democratic mandate. If within the modern democratic framework a strong government cannot afford morality, then who can?

A noticeable characteristic on the part of Jim Liberal is the refusal to engage with detail, especially in relation to international issues. A friend of mine was once talking to a non-Muslim friend of his who was slightly upset with Muslims. After my friend managed to give his side of the story, the non-Muslim’s response was “We should blow the whole world up and start again.” The refusal to deal with detail as in the case of much Middle Eastern politics may be a source of much humour for people like me, but ultimately, it remains as a tragic wall that bars political progress. “Both sides are at fault.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” As if all wrongs are equivalent.

This myopic interpretation is common in international debate. But closer examination reveals that such platitudes are irrelevant at least. For example, let us take two forms of violence and murder. The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and the sanctions against Iraq. Both required planning and execution. An attention to detail is necessary. But here the similarities end. One act of violence ended in a moment. The other has lasted for ten years. One act of violence has the backing of a government which is democratically elected. The other has the backing of a small and freakish network. And this is where the strange nature of social attribution reveals itself. Governments representing nations (i.e. the majority) are not accountable according to the press, but Muslims and Islam are accountable for the actions of a small religious minority (even though the media is doing much to counterbalance this effect). So responsibility is differentially distributed. Strange, but true. In fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury, representing the majority of British Christians, supported the bombing of Afghanistan, whereas violence has only ever been advocated by minority Muslim spokesmen. Perhaps stereotyping is only against the weak, that is, it lies in the hands of the powerful and the majoritarian, the hegemonic? Of course, one could be cynical, and read political actors through the reverse of their professed statements. So Tony Blair appeals to the middle classes although he is the leader of the Labour party. Similarly, John Major celebrated his Brixton beginnings, though he was Conservative Prime Minister. So what does this say about Tony Blair’s religion and the current government? (Note how Blair began by using the anti-drugs argument as a pretext for war in Afghanistan, later permitting his Home Secretary to decriminalise cannabis).

The argument regarding the Holocaust as a supreme evil because it employed the machinations of modernity towards suffering is, I believe, a strong one; although I do have a problem with the implicit valorisation of rationality, as if it could, if left alone, never lead to evil. The sanctions against Iraq have killed at least 1 million – that’s a sixth of the Holocaust – and I think that as such the sanctions qualify to join the Evil Hall of Fame. The machinations of modernity have been used here as well, including the proper functioning of democracy. How many times have the sanctions been raised in the Commons, and how many times have MPs ignored them while eyeing Front Bench positions? Democracy can walk shoulder to shoulder with mass murder if the thinking masses and the chattering classes are drunk on the wine of banality.

There is a problem with commenting on recent events, and it is to do with the interaction between media studies and international relations. The Glasgow University Media Group has conducted some research on the reporting of war, but to my knowledge (and I would love to know of instances that prove otherwise) there has been no major piece of work on the relation between information dissemination and time after a major event. One opportunity is provided by the recent publication of a book on the conflict in Bosnia by Brendan Simms, a Cambridge historian, examining the nature of political decision making that permitted so much mayhem. [19] One could compare the content and style of discourse within this book with the newspaper coverage at the time, and see what differences, if any, emerge. Similarly one could compare a recent article detailing US political decision-making in relation to Rwanda in the Atlantic Monthly (September 2001) entitled “Bystanders to Genocide” by Power (a professor at Harvard University) with US newspaper coverage of the genocide at the time.

We all know that the first casualty of war is truth. However what I am wishing to suggest here is that the type of discourse changes dramatically as one moves further and further away from the source event as truth begins to appear without disguise. Secret files are released, ex-ministers are more open, shocked bureaucrats leak sensitive information, international friendships fall apart. And the truth begins to appear. The huge wave of news information post-September 11 is enough to drown one under detail after detail. However, for those who are interested in the real nature of things, the best thing to do is to stand back, treat media speculation for what it is, and to buy a few books on the history of politics in the Middle East and American foreign policy.

I remember once having a discussion with one of my teachers about the nature of reality in our times. He was working on the social psychology of globalisation and implicit to his work is the principle that the picture of the Earth from the moon is enough to convince people that the Earth is round. (Like millions of others I have received the e-mail which tries to convince me that NASA faked it, but let’s leave that issue aside – I am not a flat-earther). I remember discussing the efficacy of imagery as proof with him. I was suggesting that as computer imaging develops, it will become more difficult to distinguish between true images and false images. The Gulf War made this issue real and perhaps this is what Baudrillard meant by his essay The Gulf War did not take place [20]: he was satirising the postmodern contempt for suffering. Of course, the events of September 11 have turned this issue on its head. Many people will have seen the films that can be related symbolically to the planes crashing into the twin towers. “The Towering Inferno” has a burning building about to collapse. “Independence Day” has scenes in which buildings representing American nationalism are blown up. “The Siege” has a secret enemy cell plotting to kill innocent civilians in New York. “Executive Decision” has Muslim terrorists (sic) hijacking a plane.

On September 11, all the story lines merged into one in a single dramatic moment. “It was just like a movie!” This was heard often in the aftermath of the attacks. The reality wasn’t, it was worse, much worse, because not only did the hijackers manage to combine the worst aspects of each film narrative, they also managed to kill thousands. That doesn’t happen in the movies. And now films are being shelved because the weak distinction between fact and fiction isn’t standing up under so much scrutiny. There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy about this. For years, Muslims had complained of negative representation. There were no major terrorist acts. Now, of course, some people will say, “You see, we were right!”. But they are wrong. Allport [21] has written of the self-fulfilling nature of representation (though it may be mediated by ambivalence) and it seems that this repeated representation of Muslims as terrorists has become a reality. The distinction between representation and reality has been further blurred by references to Bin Laden’s similarity to Blofeld – the arch-enemy of James Bond – in the Sunday Times (October 7). Even a Downing Street source said after the Northern Alliance went into Kabul: “Things are going to be a bit messy. This was never going to unfold like a Steven Spielberg movie” (Independent on Sunday, 18 November).

One obvious winner in the past months has been the media. No doubt much will be written in the years to come about the media and September 11. There are many areas for analysis: the overlap between fact and fiction, the effects of the repetitive display of images of extreme violence, the symbolism of the attack, the representation of otherness, the challenge of language, and the totalisation of discourse. Of these, it is the latter that most interests me. This was probably the first time since the globalisation of the media post-internet and satellite TV that discourse was total. Meaning that there was no space for difference. Poor Pakistan! The whole world was staring at Pakistan with accusative eyes on the Thursday after the Tuesday. “Either you are with us or against us!” And who could disagree in the face of such total carnage, the destruction of two buildings that championed America like no other? Or was it the number of lives that were lost that constituted the real disaster? I can’t help feeling that the destruction of the two buildings means more to some than the three thousand lives. How could there be disagreement after such total mayhem? And total mayhem means total discourse. We could only think through the words and the images that we were seeing.

The media, which usually struggles to capture major audiences, suddenly found itself serving captive audiences. There was no other topic of conversation (whence the British government’s timed press releases). The language devoured us all. Muslims were objectified as a global Other at that moment, through the image of Usama bin Laden. Muslims generally have no problem opposing the hegemony, in fact we quite enjoy it, but at that time, the horror did not escape us. We felt also. But the bombings on Afghanistan (which were presumably ordered to meet public opinion before the month ran out) changed the moral landscape again and the total language no longer exerted its hold over us. I think that Western governments lost the one opportunity they had to make serious headway towards conflict resolution.

The acceptance of Islam can only come about after Western agencies cease to caricaturise Islam and the sharia. (See Euben’s “Enemy in the Mirror” [22] for a grown-up discussion on comparative political theory in which she examines the similarities between Islamist political discourse and the writings of Arendt, Bell, Bellah and Taylor.) Cultural theorists would say that I am being too optimistic. The increase in stereotyping and caricaturing is related to the increasing threat of a certain sort of ‘political Islam’. That is, as this Islam advances on the public scene, stereotypes will be constructed in order to make it seem threatening, different, alter to our ego. The Taliban were used precisely for this reason. Story after story hit the papers emphasising their complete otherness to the idyllic, Surrey middle-class lifestyle. How representative were the Taliban of the world’s one billion Muslims? Or the numerous expressions of political Islam? And how representative were the media stories about the Taliban of the Taliban themselves? I’ll return to this later. I remember a series on BBC2 last year called “Behind the Lines” in which Sean Langan, a journalist, visited Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Palestine, interviewing a series of Others. The argument being put forward was that here is a line which divides us from a fascistic Them (in almost every programme Langan spoke about how he could not say what he wanted, or about how he was being followed, Orwellian style), and hence we have two blocs. The democratic, secular West and the fascist Islamic East. Of course, had he visited Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and the like, the argument of freedom (political) and Islam would have been turned on its head. The line is not so clear anymore. The convenient story not so believable. He did, as it happens, visit Egypt, but according to inside sources the BBC pulled the programme for “technical reasons.” I am no great defender of political Islam, the Islamist cake will most probably be a modernist cake in postmodernist times [23] (with an Islamic cherry on top), but surely other nations have rights to representative government? The Western media’s support for what in many cases are appallingly tyrannical regimes belies their commitment to freedom.

But this is not the end of it. The above position is justified by suggesting that Muslims are actually against freedom, and especially the freedom of women. This is another area requiring grown-up discussion. Feminists who rage against Muslim treatment of women monopolise the banner of freedom (so that the girl who wears hijab is oppressed but the girl who wears a miniskirt is free) while concurrently failing to recognise the involvement of women in the Muslim resurgence. Instead, desperate lists are produced and fake scenarios rehearsed (men throwing acid on the faces of women) detailing oppression after oppression. The arguments that such feminists propose assume an individualism that is crude and rooted deeply in Protestant culture valuing the public role and work ethic of the self-sufficient male. And all must converge on this model. The grown-up discussion on individualism versus communitarianism and gender relations allows for a bit more flexibility. Crude individualisms advanced as enlightenment positive truths are not the answer. Two questions to be asked here are: is it necessary for one discourse which is culturally specific to one society and historical experience to be universalised? The feminists would surely reply by pointing out that this is exactly what religion assumes. So feminism (a crude version) is now a religion? Secondly: can feminists be racists as well? Well, the feminist community has been there before and the answer is yes. Feminism does inform the present debate and it seems that it legitimates the bombing, such that, “Because the Taliban oppress their women, we can bomb them.” Is it any wonder that the papers took issue with Question Time immediately after September 11 by printing a large picture of the sister in hijab who spoke assertively against American foreign policy? What could they not tolerate: her opinion or her challenge to their stereotype of Muslim women?

And blessed are they who in the main

This faith, even now, do entertain.

Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’

A fairer representation of an assertive Islam is a huge problem, and I am not sure that enough in the West have a sufficient sense of fair play for this to happen. So perhaps there is another way. Let us recognise that we do accept the sharia when money (or oil) is involved as in the case of Saudi Arabia, and so it is possible when it suits our interests. Perhaps, I am simplifying the matter. An ideological analysis would suggest that the two master signifiers in the Muslim world are Israel and oil. The value of any country and its applicant leader depends on their answers to these two questions. So a Muslim leader can be good if he accepts the Oslo peace process, even if he is bad for his own population. A Muslim leader can similarly be good if he is co-operative towards our oil needs, even if he is corrupt. The Muslim masses know this, and they know that they are on the receiving end of both policies. The caricaturing of Islamic law is merely one of several ideological strategies aimed at maintaining the position of the master signifiers. The right of any Muslim country to self-determination is easily brushed aside. Recent events show that attempts to maintain this hegemony have lead to increasing radicalisation and therefore more violence. I would suggest that an accommodation with political Islam in fact serves the long-term interests of Western stability. Otherwise, radicalisation and the cycle of violence will continue.

Cycle of violence. Now there’s an interesting phrase, used repeatedly by the US State Department over the last year in regard to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “We urge both sides to show restraint.” “We call on both sides to cease this cycle of violence.” No right, no wrong. No strong, no weak. Only a “cycle of violence.” There has been a cycle of violence in the Middle East for the past three decades. The US and other Western governments built up Saddam Hussein and his army in order to fight Iran in the Eighties, and then spent the nineties bombing them down again. They simultaneously trained Usama bin Laden and friends, [24] and are now currently bombing them. Who will we train now in order to bomb them in 2012? The American foreign policywonks are probably repeating the Hardy line to each other: “That’s another fine mess you got me into!” Which way to turn? So much danger around. If I was scared of nature, I would use the analogy of dropping someone into the middle of the Amazon forest and asking them to make their way to the sea.

“Give me your hand!”

“I can’t!”

“If we live, we live together, if we die, we die together!”

“I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“Of you.”

”You don’t know me.”

“I know about you.”

“Give me your hand!”

It has been open season against Islam. Writers who normally struggle to put a few hundred words together and labour to find an issue of sufficient importance, have been presented with an opportunity to provide their analysis of a world event. Except that most of them don’t have a clue. Especially in relation to the issue that supposedly lies at the heart of this crisis: Islam and the West. Assumptions, stereotypes, even ignorance become acceptable replacements for informed opinion. For example, Peter Beaumont in the Observer (October 14) writes of Bin Laden sharing Khomeini’s conception of Islamic revolution (e.g. the vilayet-e faqih) when most people who know a thing or two about both the Iranian revolution and the Jihad movement know that they don’t agree at all. Salafism and Shi‘ism have different notions of authority. But the trajectory of radicalism is too good a narrative to ignore, as Khomeini passes the baton relay-style to Bin Laden. (Interestingly Rashid Rida becomes a co-radical in the same article!) Similarly, Salman Rushdie, that great expert on Islam [25], wrote in the Guardian (October 6) like a Tory proselyte, erupting with right-wing discourse all the way through his article. Not that I am a leftie. But correct me if I am wrong; wasn’t Rushdie a leftie in a previous decade? Note, then, the shift to the right-wing talk of “Let’s smoke ’em out!” It seems that the terrorists are not the only desperate people. Well, one interesting point to note from Rushdie’s essay is his list that proves that “fundamentalists” (sic) are tyrants. Leaving aside the confusing terminology (since it is the norm), he suggests in this list that Muslims are against accountable government. He is obviously ignorant of the Islamist claims of non-accountability against the Saudi the Egyptian regimes. In fact, accountability is one of the most recurrent arguments of Islamists. (Other members of the list included beardlessness and sex. I can reassure Mr Rushdie that we are innocent on both accounts. On the first, women don’t have to wear beards, and on the second, the Prophet encouraged sex as a charitable act.) One should take note of how Rushdie’s writing supports the hegemonic rationale for numerous corrupt Muslim governments. Thirdly, Henry Porter in the Observer (October 14) argues the Eurocentric view (great timing!) that Islam needs to experience a reformation. If he knew more about Islam then he would know that the closest thing that Islam has had to a reformation has led to the problems that he is trying to explain. But he doesn’t.

The Observer and the Guardian would no doubt be upset. Why don’t I criticise the real ignoramuses of other papers [26] for their jingoistic, half-baked diatribes? Exactly. I think I can get a conversation with the Observer and the Guardian, and their coverage on the whole has to be commended as brave and important. The secularists, much to my non-surprise, have managed to use these events to play their favourite game, “Who can bash religion the most?” Of course, Dawkins, a professor of the Public Understanding of Science (irony of ironies) at Oxford, always wins hands down. Religion, Mr Dawkins, is keeping the peace at the moment. The day we all follow his selfish gene hypothesis, much in the style of American foreign policy, will be the day that this world lurches much closer towards anarchy. But Mr Dawkins has not been alone. There have been numerous Muslim-bashers out roaming the pages, and I play a game with myself while reading their pieces. Two questions are to be asked of each: “How many Muslim friends have they got?” and “How many books on Islam have they read?”. Of course, two ducks makes them expertly qualified. It is more amusing on TV, watching them mispronounce names, get their history wrong, their facts wrong, and stumble over the geography, but hey, here come the experts. If it wasn’t so serious, but it is serious. Two and a half cheers for Fred Halliday (no Islamophile) for at least being an expert.

Thinking about the recent Islam week on BBC2, I remember the extent to which Islam and being Muslim oversignifies all other categories. Islam is a total discourse. [27] All actions have to be related back to God, and hence the futile attempt to philosophically (as opposed to politically, which is less of a problem) marry Islam with freedom, since ultimately all actions have to become subservient to God, if not now, then on the Day of Judgement. The human imperative is to reconcile free will with the Will of God. So for a Muslim, Islam is totalising, and if you ask me of the phenomenology of it, in a liberating sort of way. Yet, what is strange about the non-Muslim observation of Muslims is the extent to which Islam is so significant as the key source of categorisation. “Do you do that because of your religion?” How often are we asked this? How often are we explained away because of some crude caricature of our faith? And how little are we actually heard? As national conversation on the television or in the newspapers seeks access into the phenomenology of so much that represents the alternative, there remains still an absence: “What are Muslims like?”

Muslims may wonder what non-Muslims think about them. Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” provides an answer, albeit fictional. Joyce, a woolly middle-class do-gooder, decides to take in Millat, an angry, confused, young Muslim, for tutoring. She comes to the conclusion through the aid of her doctor friend Marjorie, that Millat suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder: ADD. Joyce and Irie, a friend of  Millat’s, discuss how best to deal with Millat:

“Because if Marjorie’s right, and it is ADD, he really needs to get to a doctor and some methylphenidate. It’s a very debilitative condition”.

“Joyce, he hasn’t got a disorder, he’s just a Muslim. There are one billion of them. They can’t all have ADD”.

Joyce took a little gasp of air. “I think you’re being very cruel. That’s exactly the kind of comment that isn’t helpful”. [28]

I don’t think that British or Western people are ignorant of Islam. It is not that they don’t know, it is mostly that what they know is factually incorrect or unrepresentative. [29] They know, for example, about the fatwa, the book burning in Bradford, hands being chopped off, the stoning of adulterers and forced marriages. (They also know about the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, zakat and hajj but the scales are tipped heavily on one side.) There is enough mistrust of Islam for accusations to stick without checking as Islam occupies the space of feared, threatening, mistrusted Other. Said’s book Covering Islam [30] provides some of the reasons for why this is the case. These examples occupy the fore of Western imagination as it interacts with Muslims, such that as soon as a Muslim opens his mouth, the retort comes back “But what about the fatwa?”. Trapped is he who doesn’t have his answers already prepared. What is the point of dialogue beyond such retorts? Excusing, explaining, apologising: “But you don’t understand …”

Voltaire and Montesquieu differed in their understandings of the Ottoman Empire. For Montesquieu, the Ottoman empire represented a phantasmic, despotic Other whereas Voltaire was more cautious.

There is plainly no question here of splitting Voltaire and Montesquieu. On the level of evidence, Voltaire is right, and without doubt the analysis of the Asiatic regimes developed by Montesquieu – be it the Ottoman, Persian, Mogul or Chinese empires – rests on partial information and partial interpretation. Correct though these criticisms may be, however, it seems to us none the less that they in no way detract from the force of the concept of despotism as elaborated and deployed by Montesquieu.

Alain Grosrichard[31]

There was a force to the false narrative which, it seems, is being replicated today. We live in a society in which visual culture dominates oral culture. Ichheiser has said: “Looking at each other is the most primary form of conversation”. [32] Our eyes have taken over from our ears. The distance that separates us can be maintained by looking but not by hearing. Much of what we find out about others is through reading. It’s so much easier than listening to someone, especially someone we might know. People don’t talk to each other, they find out about each other through newspapers and books, and so misinformation is crucial towards maintaining separation. I remember sitting across from a lady on a train in London. She was reading White Teeth. She might have been reading about Millat Iqbal, the young lad who gets wrapped up in a fundamentalist group called KEVIN (were they too illiterate to realise?), and through Smith’s novel maybe she could have begun to understand why young Muslims become radicalised, like the young Muslim sitting opposite her? I doubt it. If modern cultures allowed for more open conversation, then maybe people would talk to each other on trains, even across differences. Who knows, we might even begin to understand each other a bit more.

Is there a fear of the Muslim voice? I remember watching Question Time after the attacks. I noticed the trepidation before a Muslim spoke. “What will they say this time?” “Will they be reasonable?” The silence before the storm. Except that usually there wasn’t a storm. He/she would generally sound quite reasonable. But I remember the fear, I felt it myself, “I hope they don’t say anything stupid.” There is a fear of the Muslim voice, perhaps we are scared to hear criticism, perhaps we are afraid of their anger, perhaps they don’t make sense. One point, though, to note about Usama bin Laden is that that old dictum has been proved true: “If you say something often enough, people will learn how to pronounce it.”

The release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon last year was met with public acclaim. The critics were pleased that a non-English language film had done so well. A film that was at ease in another culture was celebrated as marking the beginnings of Western openness. But just as the huge wooden doors of tolerance were being pushed open, along came the Taliban. The Taliban, of course, don’t employ spin doctors. But this doesn’t mean that media personnel don’t make money from them. The Taliban have the unfortunate accolade of being the indirect employers of reverse-spin doctors. These are those who spin the message away from the desired result, and there’s plenty of them. Their spinning has justified Western prejudices against other-worlders, and huge gates of tolerance have been shut again for another few years. The repetitive showing of images of violence and the easy stereotyping of “bearded fanatics” and “oppressed Muslim women” has reassured liberals that they are in fact right. This is not the only moral Other. One section of the liberal-left adopted the Taliban as their supreme moral Other. Another section has opted for the US as their supreme moral Other. Superficially, these two groups may seem similar except that their intended targets are poles apart. But I think further analysis will find that though both groups aim to occupy the same political space, their analyses are in fact diametrically opposed in terms of basic concepts, the most crucial being power.

The presence of Muslims in Britain has been raised again as questions are asked about our loyalty to the Queen. I look at this issue from a slightly different perspective. Imagine, in an ideal liberal world, there would be no Muslims in Britain. Instead, they would all live far away in distant countries which we could visit if we wanted to. We would not have to hear their constant complaining about rights, local and international, we would only have to endure their company at global conferences which only last for a few days. Things would be so much easier. I disagree. The most important contribution that the Muslim community makes to this country at present is not cultural (meaning the restaurants – why is it that multicultural events are always about pakoras and bhangra?) but political, though it should be spiritual. Our strong-mindedness may be irritating, but it serves to hold up the political parties, lobbies and commentators to their claims. We constantly remind politicians of the universal applicability of their pious hopes. We refuse to let easy answers slip away, we inform the debate with knowledge and experience, we place Britain (as a country that is still struggling with these debates) at the centre of the world discussion on Islam, indeed we improve the quality of the debate. This is without extensive participation in the media: look at the number of writers in the press who have written about Islam and Muslims and check to see how many of them are actually Muslim. Is this why Edward Said chose to begin his influential  “Orientalism” with Karl Marx’s: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”? [33]

What about those British Muslims that are fighting with the Taliban? Déjà vu? The same questions were asked during the Gulf War when some British Muslims were interrogated about their loyalties. I would agree with the mainstream, “If you’re going to go, then don’t come back.” The stories, true or false, raise the spectre of the enemy within and it are a powerful narrative to argue against. In fact, there isn’t much anyone can do, once the label has been fixed. If I deny, then I am told that I am lying, and to accept is become a traitor. Maybe this is about a drowning nationalism holding on to the nearest scapegoat? As it drowns, it points to the treacherous Muslims: “Can you not see why you need me?” I am using here Sayyid’s argument from his book A Fundamental Fear. He suggests that the decentring of Europe permits Islamism to emerge.  Taken from the vantage-point of the dominant discourse, Islam can be seen as justification for various discourses that are past their sell-by date. I would suggest that we have witnessed several discourses utilising recent events as opportunities to prop themselves up, even though they are either suffering severe wounds or critical, internal fractures. These include (all in a very general but absolutely necessary way): liberalism, feminism, materialism, and nationalism. Since the voice of Islam is either unheard or unintelligible, these discourses are able to prolong their shelf-life for perhaps a few more years by holding up a lazy caricature and then shooting it down.

Madness. Civilisation. These words are used to frame our moral discourse because we don’t at present have an understanding of the word “wrong”. The hijackers were mad. What kind of madness was it? Schizophrenia? I think not. When we say mad, we actually mean that we don’t know what to say, we don’t understand, we cannot categorise them. [34] So they must be mad. To guess at their mind set, I don’t think that they were mad. I think that they had become in true twentieth-century fashion numb to suffering. They could see their own death and the death of thousands of others ahead of them, but they had become numb to suffering, perhaps numb to moral discourse. They had heard Western political leaders sidestep the murder of tens/hundreds/thousands of Muslims one too many times and they had moved from the stage of intense pain to numbness. This is the point at which Islamic law steps in, and holds us back, for I too am numb to suffering. If Muslims are to be critical of themselves, and indeed now they need to be so, they should ask about what has happened to Islamic law that can abandon its traditional self so completely to permit some acts which are so obviously forbidden. I leave this question to those who are more knowledgeable on this than I, but I urge the average Muslim like myself to think about their relationship with the law, because the law is a blessing, it protects us even from our own selves. We are living in times when laws and rules, rights and wrongs, don’t mean much. One million people use cannabis every week against the law in Britain and the argument for legalisation is “Well, so many people break the law, so let’s change it”. Muslims have to be careful that they don’t join in. The law is sacred in Islam, as the expression of a divinely-guided consensus. As soon as this is challenged and doors are opened for furious men to re-read the scriptures themselves and ignore the scholars, then we will begin to arrive at destinations that we did not intend.

We are passing through a weak phase in our history and we should not feel the need to defend every Muslim for any action. Unfortunately, some Muslims can do certain things which are not only forbidden in themselves, but can also lead to the dishonouring of Islam and threaten the safety of other Muslims. We cannot say on these occasions that we must defend our co-religionists at all costs. We have to have some moral standards which do not reflect a base nationalism; our ethics have to override our sense of community. In fact, this is what is needed for the whole of mankind. The ulema have all condemned the actions of September 11, and it needs to be understood that if there is a particular way of thinking through Islamic law that can lead to this, then we have to understand it, analyse it and then condemn it also. Akbar Ahmed’s book on Postmodernism and Islam is one of the lesser attempts at tackling one of the key issues of the modern age. Sayyid and Sardar are better. [35] However, Ahmed does say one thing which I believe is pertinent to the current Muslim predicament. He says that the media may succeed in changing Muslim character. I believe that they have, to our detriment. Angry, suspicious, closed-hearted, fearful, narrow-minded, ignorant (frankly), impatient. I know and understand why we have become like this, but I, all praise be to Allah, have moved on, and I urge others to do so. The Muslim scholar and mystic Ibn Ata’illah says in his Hikam: “The source of every single disobedience is being pleased with oneself.” It is time that we recognised our own faults.

The media not only distort character, they also distort our analysis of the situation. Can there be any doubt that our proposed solutions to the Muslim predicament are determined heavily by the media focus upon crisis events, victims and violence? Does this not valorise a political/military solution (hence the rapid rise of such groups during the nineties)? Instead, the Quran says: “Verily, Allah does not change a situation of a people until they change what is in themselves”. Perhaps the media makes us conveniently shift the focus away from our own selves, for indeed are we not responsible for our situation? Iqbal’s Jawab-i Shikwa, written almost a hundred years ago, is perhaps as relevant today as then: “If you are faithful to Muhammad, then I am yours. This world is nothing, the tablet and the pen will become yours.”

I fear that as the situation progresses, we will let the media decide our agenda for us. A similar thing happened during the Rushdie affair. Muslims began to support Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa even though Sunni Islam had a different fatwa. Because the media were asking “Whose side are you on?”, many Muslims by jumping quickly through a few logical hoops decided that they were for Khomeini. Similarly, we have to be careful that the media do not push us to argue for positions that are simply forbidden – haram. That is, that in order to defend Islam from the accusations of non-Muslims, we decide to take up positions which distort the Islamic perspective.

The last decade or so has seen the increasing radicalisation of the Muslim position, especially within the British national public sphere. This can be demonstrated by referring to the choice representative of national newspapers of “Islamic fundamentalism”. The first such representative was Kalim Siddiqui who was probably the most radical and strong-minded defender of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa during the Rushdie affair. The second choice representative was Omar Bakri Mohammed, a former leader of Hizb ut-Tehrir and now leader of the al-Muhajiroun faction, who is more assertive in his pronouncements but generally against the use of violence. The third is Abu Hamza al Masri, a spokesman for the Salafi Jihad movement, who is more assertive still and believes in the use of violence. Kalim Siddiqui was popular in the early nineties, though he gave way to Omar Bakri Muhammad in approximately 1993-1994, while Omar Bakri Muhammad gave way to Abu Hamza in the late nineties. All three represent small minority affiliations in the Muslim community. This progressive radicalisation of the Muslim representative was paralleled by the accompany radicalisation of Muslim youth after the Gulf war, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine. The events of September 11 reversed this process. The death and destruction seemed to be at the hands of Muslims. There was now a tendency towards moderation as many Muslims began to decry the radicalised alternative, “We must stop this madness!” But the bombing of Afghanistan put a stop to that too.

Reading the media over the last two months or so has made me realise how much the radicals and the Islamophobes need each other. One such Islamophobe, Kilroy-Silk, had decided to focus one of his complex television discussion programmes on the issue of Muslims in Britain fighting against the British alongside the Taliban. Omar Bakri Mohamed had been invited to join the discussion. A campaign (mainly by Muslims) began to e-mail, phone and fax those involved with the production of the programme in order to persuade them to prevent Omar Bakri Mohamed from participating. Eventually the campaigners succeeded, but Kilroy-Silk was furious (cf. his article in the Express on Sunday, 11 November). I felt while reading his article that perhaps there is a symbiotic relationship between Islamophobes and extremists. They need each other.

There are calls for a Muslim reformation. What do they mean? Where is the Islamic Catholic church whose authority should be challenged? Is it not the absence of religious authority that has brought us to where we are? So what is meant, demanded, by this call? The last person on earth whom Muslims would be prepared to listen to on such issues is Salman Rushdie, a Pip to modernity’s Miss Haversham (“I would do anything to please you, Madam”). Yet he wrote in the Guardian (3 November) “Let’s start calling a spade a spade…”, meaning that this is indeed a war against Islam, and “the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.” Perhaps this is what is meant by a Muslim reformation: secularism, not scripturalism. But then to what extent should Islam be modified for it to be deemed acceptable? Could somebody please provide a list of all appropriate changes that we should make in order to become worthy citizens of this new moral order? Of course, I jest. Let’s call a spade a spade. Islam doesn’t need to take on board secularist-humanist principles, this would never be sufficient, for secularist-humanists have problems with basic religious beliefs such as God and accountability in the Hereafter. It is not the legal periphery of Islam that is the problem, it is its spiritual centre. As we have seen in Britain, the adoption of such an approach has led to the demise of religion itself.

The call for a Muslim reformation is in one sense a call for a liberal Islam. The subjugation of Islam to the heart’s command may provide opportunities for the emergence of liberal Islam, but it is the same hermeneutic that leads to an Islam that advocates violence. Rendering the interpretation of law to the heart’s desire may not lead to the desired outcome. In fact, the present political climate tilts the balance heavily away from any conciliatory interpretation of Islam, quite the opposite. But the line that establishes the Western moral position (if there is such a thing) is in a perpetual state of motion. Are all others condemned to play catch up from now on? Or will they be permitted to establish themselves as alternatives? If others are to play catch up, then maybe one way that they could try to break ahead is by asking what is post post-modernism and making sure they get there first? Ultimately though, Islam has a stronger historical claim than liberalism, having lasted longer while establishing itself across a wider spectrum of cultures. Islam doesn’t require a reformation; liberalism needs to de-centre itself.

The cinematographic power of the images of September 11 could perhaps be explained as modernity’s hara-kiri. The world watches two planes fly into the Twin Towers on TV through satellite communication. Is this the end of modernity? Is this what is meant by the numerous references to “the challenge to our whole way of life”? Were the events of September 11 the result of modernity’s disregarded children returning to their homes? Or perversely, were they the championing of modernity? That modernity could only be attacked through modernity itself – thus establishing it as the sole surviving grand narrative? That in its moment of supreme weakness, modernity established its universal strength? Or is it all about postmodernism and Islam? How strange that the images on our TVs fluctuate between the city that symbolises postmodernism unlike any other, New York, and the villages of Afghanistan that symbolise the most pre-modern of eras. It is as if the trajectory of progress is being narrated visually. I wonder if bombing Afghanistan would have been so easy if it had been a modern or postmodern country? Or does it make it more difficult? Do their traditionalism and clear Otherness facilitate our bombing? Or does their poverty make us gulp out of shame? Probably both.

About the Taliban themselves and the numerous stories concerning their ultra-Otherness, I am sceptical. Remember the “babies-in-incubator” story that was employed prior to the Gulf war to demonstrate Iraqi barbarism, and which later turned about to be false? Politics and the media, already as siamese twins, tend to merge into one body during war efforts. I remember Malcolm X’s comment about the Japanese (or the Germans?) and the Russians, and how the American media so swiftly switched public opinion pre-1945 and post-1945, and wonder whether the same is not happening now. Were the Taliban not welcomed a few years ago by the US embassy in Islamabad as a stabilising force? The numerous photographs, TV footage and eyewitness accounts are to be taken with a pinch of salt. I am not saying that the media lie, they only strategically misrepresent.

Strategic misrepresentation? Let me give you an example. The Ouseley Report [36] published in Bradford in the aftermath of this year’s riots was extensively covered in the media. A salient claim was that religious schools in Bradford have led to segregation and in fact are implicitly the cause of the race riots (see The Observer, September 30). This point has been repeated again and again, especially as evidence against the government’s proposed scheme to expand the number of faith schools, and became a sub-narrative to the September 11 attacks. The report, however, also includes the following points: there is a white flight from ‘Asian inner city’ areas towards the suburbs (point 2.5.1), Islamophobia is regarded as prevalent in the schools and community (point 2.5.5) and the police “collude with non-intervention” in the drugs problem (point 2.5.10). These points are never mentioned, even in the liberal press. Instead, the blame is laid at the door of the sole Muslim school in Bradford which is supposed to have caused the riots. It is a girl’s school. Correct me if I am wrong, but I didn’t see any girls rioting. The mass of non-Muslim readers, not knowing any better, would have been content with the story of religion yet again dividing and disrupting society. The truth of the matter is far more complicated, and much less gratifying. The point about Algeria mentioned earlier is relevant here. The denial of freedom in the name of freedom through the distortion of facts is happening in front of our very eyes.

So the Afghanis can taste freedom now. Cinemas, pop music, how could anybody tolerate life with such huge absences? A question that I ask myself is to what extent Afghanistan should approximate to Western cultural practice for the various Western lobbies to be satisfied?. (I know, I’m homogenising Western culture.) Polly Toynbee’s article “Behind the burka” in the Guardian (28 September) was an angry critique of the treatment of women in Afghanistan. Reading the article again, it is obvious that her ink must have burnt from the intensity of her hatred. It couldn’t have taken her long to write it. Anyway, that evening the television schedule offered the following choices at approximately 11 pm. BBC1: Jo Brand. ITV1: Lily Savage. CH4: Graham Norton. What does this say about gender in Western culture, except that it is somewhere between swings and roundabouts. Perhaps, that’s what irks some intolerant feminists so much, that Islam provides a reasonable, working model for gender. [37] Holding up the burka in order to shoot it down helps the intolerant feminist avoid facing the consequences of gender disruption (which have yet to be assessed).

If the key question is: How do we make the world safer, then immediate and obvious answers are: American troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, a ceasing of intelligence agency interference in Muslim countries especially in relation to the move towards representative and accountable government, a return of Israel to pre-1967 borders at least, secure environmental protocols, and fairer global economic trade agreements. Long term answers relate to shifts in industries reliant upon oil and warfare. Can the world’s brains not think up alternative ways of making money? Those who read books know this. But the game of modern-day politics is to avoid the obvious and excuse the inexcusable. I ask myself two questions as I listen to the experts: “How close do they get?” and “What excuses will they offer?” The second question is the linguistic equivalent of hide and seek. Self-explanatory? Perhaps these two strategies could be called the strategies of prevarication and containment. A third question that I ask myself is, “Do they know any better?”

Terrorism is inherently related to fear. The fear of disruption, disorder, chaos. The violation of our structured world, our life, our concerns, our … Where does this “our” end? It ends probably where the threat of terrorism begins. A fear of disorder that was realised so spectacularly on September 11. “Things have changed forever.” Have they? If the US had not bombed Afghanistan, then maybe. But they did. And at that moment Usama bin Laden won the war. A rich man who lives as if he is poor won the war when the richest nation on earth began to bomb one of the poorest nations on earth. So things have not changed. Well, not for the rest of the world, and for the short term anyway. Long term, things may have changed. And I think the greatest effect of the events of September 11 on the US has been and will be symbolic. A confident and secure nation will never feel the same way again. The worrying thing is that in post-moral times, the events of September 11 do provide a strong moral basis for action. But that is all that Western leaders have. And they will need much more if they wish to move beyond rhetoric. I fear as I type that I am typing in vain. Albert Camus said “If our speech has no meaning, nothing has meaning”. [38] Make no mistake about it folks, this ain’t a crusade. It’s only an escalation in the cycle of violence. Is losing language worse than losing life?

The heart ordered the voice:

“Hold yourself, until I say”,

And the cynic ran away.

Any correspondence to smaimtiaz@yahoo.com

© S. M. Atif Imtiaz

NOTES

(1)               Freud, S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. J. Strachey) 14:275. London: Hogarth. 1953-1974.

(2)               There is some disagreement as to the exact number of victims. The BBC in the immediate aftermath suggested that up to 50,000 could have died. However, Michael Ellison writing in the Guardian (October 28) quoted New York City officials as putting the figure at 4,964. The New York Times suggested 2,950, the USA Today proposed  2,680, the Associated Press 2,625 and the American Red Cross which had received $500 million in donations towards supporting the families of the deceased suggested 2,563. Why is it that if I were to say that there is no independent confirmation of these figures, replicating the BBC’s response to casualty figures from Afghanistan, I feel that I am somehow less of a human being?

(3)               In attempting to explain how the Holocaust could have happened, social psychological studies into the nature of fascism suggested that the authoritarian personality forced the silent masses into submission (cf. Adorno, T. W. et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row. 1950). Any such examination today would have to include the role of the media as an agent for comatisation.

(4)               Both papers can be found in: Tamimi, A. Power-sharing Islam? London: Liberty for Muslim World Publications. 1993.

(5)               For further reading: Burgat, F. and Dowell, W. The Islamic Movement in North Africa. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1993.

(6)               But what about Kosova? How can a Muslim explain the recent bombing of Yugoslavia by the US and Britain in order to protect a Muslim population? It certainly confounded expectations, and experience, and that is why Islamists remain mute on this issue. It remains as one example against a whole list of counter-examples. International politics and Popperian falsificationism simply don’t add up.

(7)               Ali, T. and Brenton, H. Iranian Nights. 1989. Aired on Channel 4: 20 May, 10.25 pm.

(8)               The consequence of a denotation of barbarism is the civilising process which requires political control and military action.

(9)               Quoted on The Late Show aired on BBC2, 8 May 1989, 11.15 pm.

(10)           Mannheim, K. Ideology and Utopia (Trans. E. Shils) p. 43. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1972.

(11)           Ichheiser, G. ‘Misunderstandings in Human Relations: A Study in False Social Perception‘. American Journal of Sociology, 55 (suppl.). 1949.

(12)           For examples of how seemingly liberal ideas can be used towards illiberal ends see: Parekh, B. ‘Decolonising liberalism‘, in Pieterse, J. N. and Parekh, B. (eds.). Decolonising the Imagination. London: Zed Press. 1993. Said, E. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. 1993. Wetherell, M.  and Potter, J. Mapping the Language of Racism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 1992.

(13)           Pieterse, J. N. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. London: Yale University Press. 1992.

(14)           For further reading: Pereira, W. Inhuman Rights: The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse. New York: Apex Press. 1997.

(15)           George, S. Feeding the Few. Washington: Institute for Policy Studies. 1979. George, S. A Fate Worse than Debt. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1988. Shiva, V. Biopiracy. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 1997. Shiva, V. Stolen Harvest. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. 1999.

(16)           Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government , p.140. London: J. M. Dent and Sons. 1989/1690.

(17)           Sayyid, B. S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, p.118. London: Zed Books. 1997. See also a Jewish attempt to provide common ground between internal critics of the West and religious faith: Sacks, J. The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 1991.

(18)           Giddens, A. Beyond Left and Right. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1994.

(19)           Simms, B. Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia. London: Penguin Press. 2001.

(20)           Baudrillard, J. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Sydney: Power Publications. 1995.

(21)           Allport, G. W. The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Doubleday Anchor. 1954.

(22)           Euben, R. L. Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999.

(23)           “Sociology suggests that you cannot have modernisation, technology, urbanisation and bureacratisation without the cultural baggage that goes with it and this baggage is essentially a post-Enlightenment system of thought”. Turner, B. S. Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, p.8. London: Routledge. 1994.

(24)           For further reading: Johnson, C. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 2000.

(25)           See Sardar, Z. and Davies, M. Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair. London: Grey Seal. 1990.

(26)           The Telegraph published an Islam supplement on Thursday 15 November presumably to counter the misconceptions that other papers were spreading.

(27)           Sayyid, B. S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books. 1997.

(28)           Smith, Z. White Teeth, p. 434. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2000.

(29)           Minorities have been found to appear in the news as individuals in stereotypical roles (criminals, rioters) or as members of controversial organisations ; see Van Dijk, T. Racism and the Press, p.85. London: Routledge. 1991.

(30)           Said, E. W. Covering Islam. London: Vintage. 1997.

(31)           Grosrichard. A. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, p. 34-35. London: Verso. 1998.

(32)           Ichheiser, G. ‘Sociopsychological and Cultural Factors in Race Relations’. American Journal of Sociology, 54, 395-399. 1949.

(33)           Said, E. W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1995.

(34)           Rose, D. ‘Representations of Madness on British Television: A Social Psychological Analysis’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, United Kingdom. 1996.

(35)           Ahmed, A. S. Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise. London: Routledge. 1992. Sardar, Z. Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture. London: Pluto Press. 1998. Sayyid, B. S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books. 1997.

(36)           Ouseley, H. Community Pride not Prejudice: Making Diversity Work in Bradford. Bradford: Bradford Race Review. 2001.

(37)           “…the logic of Islamism is threatening because it fails to recognise the universalism of the western project”. Sayyid, B. S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, p. 129. London: Zed Books. 1997.

(38)           Camus, A. Notebooks 1942-1951 (trans. J. O’Brien) p. 23. New York: Modern Library. 1965.

The Language of Islamophobia

Paper presented at the “Exploring Islamophobia” Conference jointly organised by FAIR (Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism), City Circle, and Ar-Rum at The University of Westminster School of Law, London, on 29 September 2001.

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

There is a proverb “The pen is mightier than the sword” which expresses well the idea of the power, if not the sacredness, of the word, and perhaps there was an echo of this idea in President Bush’s recent statement that the “war against terrorism” had begun with a “stroke of the pen.” There was a television programme recently about the ten hardest men in Britain, and I assumed it was going to be another of those offerings glorifying brute strength or glamourising vicious gangsters. Well yes, there were some tough nuts in there, pretty well all of them hard men in television serials, but the hardest ones were judged to be not those who used their fists but those who used words, and rated top of this class, the prizefighter, was Jeremy Paxman, the presenter of Newsnight on BBC2.

So we understand the immense power of words. But with that power comes a truly awesome  responsibility. In speaking of the language of Islamophobia, it would be a very simple matter to give examples over the last two weeks of the abuse of that power, what William Dalrymple castigates in a recent article in The Independent as the “ludicrously unbalanced, inaccurate and one-sided” images of Islam perpetrated by what he calls the “scribes of the new racism” even in our quality broadsheets. This is not, of course, a new phenomenon.  In 1997 The Runnymede Report had described Islamophobia  as marked by “brazen hostility, bordering on contempt, for the most cherished principles of  Islamic life and thought, reaching an apoplexy of hate in the modern Western media who represent Islam as intolerant of diversity, monolithic and war-mongering.” As Dalrymple says, “such prejudices against Muslims – and the spread of idiotic stereotypes of Muslim behaviour and beliefs – have been developing at a frightening rate in the last decade” and “Anti-Muslim racism now seems in many ways to be replacing anti-Semitism as the principal Western expression of bigotry against “the other”.

What is so much more encouraging is the fact that politicians and writers of this quality, insight, intelligence and humanity are increasingly speaking out against this pernicious, corrosive and virulent  form of bigotry and it would be a simple matter too to refer to a great many articles I have seen like Dalrymple’s which are truly civilised and humane and do not bandy about words like “civilisation” and “humanity” as mere rhetorical incantations or militant banners to promote the poisonous and ignorant doctrine of the clash of civilisations.

Let Western civilisation always hold fast to one of its founding principles in the Platonic vision which places reason and dialogue above rhetoric and emotional manipulation.  And all those voices  in political life and the media who have upheld this vision deserve our profound thanks, for what they are writing and saying is completely in accordance with the universal spirit of Islam and the many sayings of the Prophet (saws) which teach us to use words as well as actions in such a way that we become, in his words, “a refuge for humankind, their lives and their properties.” – a refuge forall of humankind, not for any single group or vested interest.   Said the Prophet, “The true Muslim does not defame or abuse others” and “the perfect Muslim is he from whose tongue and hands mankind is safe.”

Now, I’ve said that it would be a very simple matter to give examples of Islamophobic language, but I want to go deeper than simply dredge up old clichés. We’ve all heard again and again the tired old clichés which stigmatise the whole of Islam as fundamentalist, ideological, monolithic, static, unidimensional, implacably opposed to modernity, incapable of integration or assimilation, impervious to new ideas, retrogressive, retrograde, backward, archaic, primaeval, medieval, uncivilised, hostile, violent, terrorist, alien, fanatical, barbaric, militant, oppressive, harsh, threatening, confrontational, extremist, authoritarian, totalitarian, patriarchal, misogynist, negatively exotic, and bent on imposing on the whole world a rigid theocratic system of government which would radically overturn every principle of freedom and liberal democracy cherished by the Western world. I have to say that I don’t know a single Muslim who embodies even one of these characteristics, and I have Muslim friends and colleagues in all walks of life and from many cultures all over the globe.

There is one possible exception, and that is the first one, the most overused of all:  “fundamentalist”.  If this means certain fundamental beliefs such as belief in a supremely merciful God and in a divine purpose for mankind and all creation; belief that only God can dispense infinite justice although we must strive to embody some measure of justice and the other divine attributes in the conduct of our own lives; belief in a fair and inclusive society which balances rights and responsibilities, which values all people equally irrespective of their race, gender and religion, and which gives equality of opportunity to all men, women and children  to realize their God-given potential; and belief in freedom from tyranny and oppression – well then, yes, I am a fundamentalist, and my fundamental beliefs will be shared by many people of all faiths.

But if to be a fundamentalist is to engage in any kind of cruelty in the name of any doctrine or ideology, whether religious or secular, including the murder of innocent people either by terrorists or governments, wherever they may be, then I am most certainly not a fundamentalist.

This defamatory list is a very obvious manifestations of what Francis Bacon, one of the founders of  Western empiricism and modern science , called the “Idols of the Mind”,  those crippling conditioned beliefs and prejudices which prevent us from learning by critical enquiry, observation and experience, and those who perpetrate them would do well to return to some of the hallowed principles of objectivity which supposedly underpin Western civilisation.

But there is a deeper dimension to these prejudices. Behind them is the  demonisation of what is perceived to be a dark and dangerous manifestation of the “other”, the singling out of the most extreme position which can be imagined as somehow representative of the totality of Islam, as if there is one absolutely monolithic, cohesive and uniform Muslim mindset, a kind of immutable, undifferentiated abstraction.  In view of the extraordinary size and diversity of the Islamic world, this fantasy about a monolithic and aggressive Islam is not merely the outcome of ignorance. It goes deeper than that. It is quite simply a psychological phenomenon, a pathological state. The very vehemence of the language with its absurdly simplified polarisation of reality into competing and mutually exclusive positions is itself symptomatic of deeply unconscious projections. That is what is so intractable about this pathology. The people who think like this are deeply unconscious of their own psychic processes, or, even more dangerously, they are people who are intentionally exploiting this tendency in the human being to dichotomise, to split reality into polar opposites, to see only black or white, and hence to foster division and confrontation.

In addition to the obvious stigmatisation of Islam through unanalysed clichés stereotypes and labels, we have to contend with grotesquely naïve and childish misrepresentations of what Muslims believe and how they behave, including articles by eminent university dons printed in tabloid newspapers which show an ignorance and intolerance of  Islam as profound as that shown in much more lightweight material. That is what is extraordinary about Islamophobic ranting. We can find the same kind of hyperbole, distortions, inaccuracies and unsubstantiated generalisations coming from intellectuals and from the liberal establishment (though with longer words) as we do from empty-headed commentators whose only claim to having their comments on Islam published is that they are (or were) talk-show hosts.

Recent examples in national newspapers in the wake of the atrocities include such utter nonsense as the claim that  “the Christian concept of forgiveness is absent in Islam”, or that “the concepts of debate and individual freedom are alien in Moslem cultures”, or that Islam is, uniquely, a “religion that sanctions all forms of violence”, or that the Taliban “desire to return Afghanistan to the mores of Arabia in the time of the Prophet”, or that Islamic law permits a Muslim man to divorce his wife immediately by sending a text message saying “I divorce you”, or that only Islam sanctions “suicide as a path to Paradise”,  or, indeed,  that the fanatical Muslim hordes are “already there in their thousands. And they are not going to respect weaknesses any more than Lenin did.”

And let us not forget the Internet as a  source of  Islamophobic utterances. If you have the stomach to trawl through and sift out some of the most obnoxious material you are likely to find on the planet, much of it written by native-speakers of English whose cultural illiteracy is only matched by their inability to construct an intelligible sentence in the English language,  you may, if you are lucky,  turn up  sites which are capable of  coherent syntax, if not coherent thought.

For instance, you might find the one  set up by an organisation which  supports, in its own words, “liberal-democratic pluralism and modernism as opposed to fundamentalism” and which maintains that “Islam was spread by the sword and has been maintained by the sword throughout its history” and that ”the myth of Islamic tolerance was largely invented by Jews and Western freethinkers as a stick to beat the Catholic Church”, or  that there is “no way that Islam can ever be made  compatible with pluralism, free speech, critical thought and democracy”. If you disagree with this, then, according to these people, you are, of course,  an “apologist”.

I was shocked to read the headline of a broadsheet on Wednesday which proclaimed “No refuge for Islamic Terrorists”. Did this newspaper proclaim that there would be no refuge for Christian Mass Murderers after the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia? Thank you, Mr. Blair, for your statement on Thursday that the atrocities in America were not the work of “Muslim terrorists” but of “terrorists”. On the same front page there is an article about the execution of Islamic “militants” in China, several dozen Muslim men who had been fed alcohol with their last meal and then, stupefied by drink, driven to their deaths on an open lorry past laughing crowds. But is there any leading article or other comment which demands sanctions against China for such gross and barbaric abuses of human rights?  Is there likely to be in the current climate which rewards Chinese and Russian support for an international coalition by turning a blind eye to the inevitable increase in the  oppression of their own Muslim minorities?  Will the Italian Prime Minister stand by his statement that human rights are one of the reasons why, in his view, the West is superior to Islam? Will he announce that the West is superior to China and superior to all those regimes, including those supported by Western powers, which abuse human rights?  Will he speak out against those Italian cardinalswhose anti-Muslim statements have reinforced xenophobia in Italy and therefore threaten to undermine the rights and freedoms of Muslims?

On Thursday, the first thing I heard in the morning was a discussion about different types of terrorism, and the extraordinary suggestion that the real threat is not so much “ordinary” terrorism as terrorism motivated by “doctrine” and “ideology” (no rewards for guessing here which “doctrine” is referred to) as if we are supposed to believe that it is only the “others” who have any kind of  belief-system.

And behind this is also the entrenched view that it is religion which must take the blame for so much violence in the world. In other words, the “doctrine” which feeds the worst kind of terrorism is necessarily religious doctrine. This  unquestioned association between religion and war  has been wheeled out time and time again in the media with almost no attempt to question it. Having heard this for the umpteenth time last week, I looked into it, and discovered some interesting facts. About 250 million people have been killed in the ten worst wars, massacres and atrocities in the history of the world. Of these, only 2% were killed in religiously motivated conflicts, in this case the Thirty Years War in Europe, which figures as number 10 in the list, and even then this 2% is based on what many scholars believe to be a grossly exaggerated death toll. The vast majority of deaths were the result of secular wars and exterminations, largely based on atheistic doctrines and ideologies. It is truly extraordinary how facts can be ignored in the need to confirm and strengthen cherished illusions.

I clearly haven’t the time today to unpick every example of Islamophobic discourse. This is an ongoing struggle being undertaken systematically and with increasing effectiveness and influence by the Media and Popular Culture Watch Project which is one of the major initiatives of FAIR.

But what I can do is draw your attention to some of the underlying characteristics of the way that political and social power abuse,  dominance and inequality are enacted in the kind of discourse  of which Islamophobia is currently a prime example. We need to understand the characteristics of such discourse, wherever it appears; we need to rigorously unpick and expose its deficiencies with the best analytical tools, to bring to light and make conscious its manipulations, because although we can of course do our own shouting in response to it,  it is through the light of knowledge and understanding that we can most effectively counter it. And as the Prophet made it very clear, the “ignorant theologian” is equally damaging to Islam as the “ill-tempered scholar” or the “tyrannical leader.”

Now there is already an established academic tradition of unpicking such discourse in what is called Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA developed by such influential discourse analysts  as Teun van Dijk, Professor of Discourse Studies  at the University of Amsterdam.

According to Van Dijk,  “much of racism is ‘learned’ by text and talk”.

CDA upholds that power relations are discursive, that is, that discourse is an instrument of ideology and is a means of perpetuating social and political inequality. Discourse analysis which unpicks the way such language works therefore has great explanatory power and is also a form of social action, because the discourse itself constitutes the society and the culture from which it emerges. I am reminded here of the words of the Prophet, who said: “Anyone of you who sees wrong, let him undo it with his hand; and if he cannot, then let him speak against it with his tongue, and if he cannot do this either, then let him abhor it with his heart, and this is the least of faith.” Critical Discourse Analysis, as a form of social action, is both undoing with the hand and speaking with the tongue.

There is an excellent survey of CDA by van Dijk with an exhaustive bibliography which is easily accessible on the following website. This article contains a rigorous exposure of the way discourse promotes and sustains racism, by promoting prejudiced social representations shared by dominant groups (usually white, European) and based on ideologies of superiority and difference. This is done by analysing some fragments of a book misleadingly entitled The End of Racismby Dinesh D’Souza (1995), a book which embodies many of the dominant Eurocentric supremacist ideologies in the USA, and which specifically targets one minority group in the USA:  African Americans.  This book is one of the main documents of conservative ideology in the US and has had considerable influence on the debates on affirmative action, welfare, multiculturalism, and immigration, and on the formulation of policy to restrict the rights of minority groups and immigrants.

I emphasise here that the discursive moves and ploys used in this book are the same moves and ploys that are used in all such discourse, including Islamophobia, and I hasten to add that we should also be very clear that the same tools of analysis need equally to be brought to bear on “Westophobic” discourse and all forms of discourse which seek to foment strife, division, hatred and confrontation. If I make a strong case against Islamophobia today, this does not mean that I do not value the strengths of  Western civilisation.

Here are  some of these discursive moves and ploys , as identified in van Dijk’s analysis of just a few fragments of D’Souza’s book. I’ll point up as far as I can the way in which these ploys are also used in Islamophobic discourse, but I hope you will make your own connections too.

Denial, mitigation, euphemization,  and explaining away

By denying, mitigating, euphemising  or explaining away your own defects you make them invisible or harmless. A characteristic ploy here is to generalise or universalisethem or make them seem natural. Thus, we are told that racism is “a rational and scientific response” to primitive peoples and was in any case “widespread among other peoples”. Thus, racism is an ‘all too human’ characteristic of ethnocentricism. It is simply ‘caring for one’s own’. In this way,  generalisation is made to appear as explanation. Van Dijk claims that this is “one of the most common moves of ideological legitimation: abuse of power is not a self-serving, negative characteristic of dominant groups” but is innate, “genetically pre-programmed” and “biologically inevitable”, so there is nothing we can do about it.

“The Greeks were ethnocentric, they showed a preference for their own. Such tribalism they would have regarded as natural, and indeed we now know that it is universal.” (533)

Notice the use of positive-sounding words like “human”, “natural” and “universal” to give respectability, even nobility, to tribalism. And how often have we been told in recent days how “natural” revenge is, and how “universal” and “humane” are the principles enshrined in the self-image of the West and supported by the whole “international community”, whatever that is.

Mitigation and denial is also accomplished through the use of euphemisms, that is the substitution of mild, polite, saccharine, evasive or roundabout words for more direct and honest ones. We have become more familiar with this ploy, and the related one of omission of key words, through the honesty and integrity of those journalists who are trying to use words to tell the truth.

Here are some familiar examples, with thanks to Brian Whitaker, among  others:

targeted killing  (assassination/murder by death squads/extra-judicial killing/execution)

collateral damage  (civilian casualties)

killed in crossfire (shot by soldiers or snipers)

respond  (attack)

settler (illegal settler)

areas (communities/neighbourhoods) – the implication here is that people who live in “areas” are less civilised than those who live in communities or neighbourhoods.

suburbs (illegal settlements)

the international community (the West?)

a divided city (a city with 99.8% Arabs)

disputed territory (illegally occupied territory)

provocative act   (criminal act according to international law)

There is a novel justification for euphemisms which I have recently heard from journalists. Apparently, column inches dictate that shorter terms have to be used to save space. “Settler” is only two syllables, whereas “illegal settler” is five, so the use of “settler” saves space. If so, why are the long words “neighbourhoods” and “communities” used to describe where the in-group lives , whereas  “areas” is used for the out-group?  Why, indeed, are the six syllables of  “Islamic Terrorists” used in a headline on Thursday when space would have been saved by using only the three syllables of “Terrorists”?

And why is the mouthful “international community” used in cases where it clearly refers to “The West”?

Another well-known argumentative ploy is to invoke ignorance.

“It is impossible to answer the question of how much racism exists in the United States because nobody knows how to measure racism and no unit exists for calibrating such measurements.” (276)

Notice the use of academic jargon, and the appeal to scientific credibility. This is a clever ploy because, in a culture mesmerised by the supposed omniscience of scientists, most people dare not question “lack of scientific evidence”. By the same token, we can pretend to ignore the existence of all manner of self-evident and awkward truths, including the very existence of Islamophobia, under the banner of scientific respectability.

Positive Self-Presentation

Self-glorification is one of the most obvious and characteristic way to promote a positive self-image, and D’Souza’s book is full of  glowing admiration for Western culture and accomplishments.

“What distinguished Western colonialism was neither occupation nor brutality but a countervailing philosophy of rights that is unique in human history” (354) – and by the way, colonialism is also legitimated in terms of scientific curiosity.

We are entitled to say in response to this that the supposedly unique philosophy of rights so selflessly propagated by Western colonialism was in fact prefigured and surpassed in the first truly pluralistic society established by the Prophet in  7^th century Medinah, a vision  which nurtured those splendid multicultural and multi-faith civilisations in Islamic Spain, Sicily, the Levant, and in the Mughul and Ottoman Empires.

“”Abolition [of slavery] constitutes one of the greatest moral achievements of Western civilisation” (112) – notice here this extraordinary reversal used to enhance the positive characteristics of European civilisation, which sits oddly with the justification and mitigation of racism as a natural and all too human inclination.

We are all familiar now with the vocabulary of self-glorification, first in the recent debates about multiculturalism which have included explicit assertions of the superiority of the supposedly mono-cultural virtues of “Englishness”, and more recently in reactions to the atrocities in America, which have included insistent repetition of  words like “civilised”, “freedom”,   “humanity” and of “good” versus “evil”. And on Thursday, we heard the Italian Prime Minister explicitly ascribe “superiority” and “supremacy” to the West over Islam. It has been encouraging to see that there is not a single political leader who has supported his completely out-of-tune remarks, and it was good to hear British government ministers, including David Blunkett and Claire Short, repudiate them yesterday as “offensive, inaccurate and unhelpful”. But  it has raised a new discussion in the media about the differences between Islam and the West and once again all kinds of colourful figures are wheeled out to give their opinions on Islam. I heard one such figure on the Today programme yesterday, having flippantly admitted that he knew very little either about women or Islam, proclaim that the main difference between Islam and the West was the fact that women in Islam were  3^rd class citizens. The implication was quite clear: the West is superior to Islam for this reason. Notice the appeal to the moral high ground in this kind of self-referential and self-congratulatory superiority.

To bring some light into this discussion, I recommend a look at the website of the Australian Psychological Society, particularly the section on Language, Social Representations and the media (www.aps.psychsociety.com.au/member/racism/sec3.html)  which makes a very clear statement of the way in which “the media are cultural products central to the construction of social realities and to communication between groups and across cultures…..Media coverage of group differences, and often group conflicts, tend to highlight and exaggerate, oversimplify and caricaturise such differences”. A classic study from 1961 of this phenomenon is on cross-national images of the ‘enemy’ which showed that the cold-war images US citizens had of Russia were virtually identical, or the ‘mirror image’ of the views that the Russians had of the US.

The same source makes an important statement about “political correctness”. It can be anticipated that some commentators will suggest that the reluctance of other political leaders to endorse the Italian Prime Minister’s remarks is merely a matter of “political correctness”.  It is important to realise that “while genuine political correctness can be a strong force in encouraging more humane reasonable and human behaviour, it is invariably  represented by opponents as undermining free speech in the service of minority group interests….Dismissals of genuine and effective anti-racism initiatives as ‘merely’ politically correct thus legitimises racial intolerance….”.

Derogation and Demonisation of  the Others

Now, van Dijk pointedly remarks that “it is only one step from an assertion of national or cultural pride and self-glorification to feelings of superiority, derogation and finally the marginalisation and exclusion of the Others”. And indeed, I would add not only marginalisation and exclusion, but ultimately persecution and genocide. We can go directly here to Islamophobic discourse without referring to van Dijk’s analysis.

A classic example is the shaping by Serbian orientalists of a “stereotypical image of Muslims as alien, inferior and threatening” which “helped to create a condition of virtual paranoia among the Serbs”². As I have said, this is a pathological condition, and its pathology is absolutely transparent in its good vs. evil, “us and them” language. And language which uses the rhetoric of “either you’re with us or against us” partakes of the same psychically fragmented condition. It has been extraordinary to see the hatred which has been aroused by those who have refused to submit to this oppressive, self-righteous and divided mentality and have been courageous and clear-thinking enough to say so. Tony Benn is an example, and the furore he caused on Newsnight on Thursday night, while always retaining his own dignity,  could not even be contained by the No. 1 hard man, Jeremy Paxman.

As is true of virtually all of the people of Europe, including the English, today’s Bosnian Muslims are an amalgam of various ethnic origins. Yet what the Serbs did was to differentiate and isolate the Muslim community “by creating “a straw-man Islam and Muslim stereotype” and “setting and emphasising cultural markers” which focused on Islam and the Muslims as alien, culturally and morally inferior, threatening and, of course, exotic, but in a perverse, negative way. The Serbs applied the label “Islamic fundamentalist” freely to all Muslims, who were seen as reflections of the “darkness of the past”. They claimed that “in Islamic teaching, no woman has a soul”; that  “the tone of the Qur’an is openly authoritarian, uncompromising and menacing”;  that the reading of  the traditional tales in A Thousand and One Nights  predisposed Muslims (in their words gave “subliminal direction” to the Muslims) to torture and kill Christians;  that the destruction of places of worship belonging to other faiths is an obligation on all Muslims; that the “banning of tourism and sports” in Islam inevitably led to “xenophobia” and “segregation”, and so on.

It is quite clear that these Serbian orientalists, “ by bending scholarship and blending it with political rhetoric….defined Islam and the local Muslim community in such a way as to contribute significantly to…. making genocide acceptable”. And what allowed them to play such a role? It was “the extensive media exposure they enjoyed in Serbia”, as much as “their participation in official propaganda campaigns abroad”.

At this point, I will not trouble to examine the profusion of derogatory statements which have been made against Islam and Muslims not only in the last two weeks, but over the last ten years. I will only point to the evidence of how the distorted analysis of Islam by the Serbs, played out in the media, made the transition from pseudo-scholarly anlaysis to advocacy of  violence and ultimately to genocide.  Such is the outcome of words used without truth or responsibility. To see so many stereotypes in the Western press so similar to those invented by the Serbs is quite chilling.

Other discursive structures, strategies and moves I can only touch on these here. They include:

• The rhetoric of repetition, emphatic hyperbole (exaggeration), ridicule, metaphor, association and blaming the victim.
• Repetition:  An American politician referred to the attack on America as an attack on the “civilised world”, “civilised countries” and “civilised peoples”, all in one sentence.
• Hyperbole: A common one is that Muslims want to rule the world (warnings like this are regularly broadcast in national newspapers in Germany by Dr. Peter Frisch, head of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Pretection of the Constitution).
• Ridicule: “Islam Week brought us the wonders of mosques and Mecca…. taking in – ho, ho, ho! – a Muslim football team….” (Julie Birchill, Guardian Weekend, 18 August, 2001)
• Metaphor: “While the history of other religions is one of moving forward out of oppressive darkness and into tolerance, Islam is doing it the other way around.” (Birchill, op. cit.). Notice here the characteristic “darkness” metaphor, one of those favoured by the Serbs.
• Association: (referring to Jools Holland’s Rhythms of Islam in the BBC’s Islam UK Week):  “Mind you, I did briefly start to feel sorry for them here: any espousal of one’s cause by the terminally naff Holland must surely kill its cred stone dead.” (Birchill, op. cit.)
• Blaming the Victim: even in such atrocious acts as those committed in Molln and Solingen where Turkish people were burnt alive (Europe’s Islamophobia by Sameera Mian in Muslim News, 28 November, 1997).

The well-known argumentative ploy of casual reference to “scholarly” studies so as to give weight and authority to fallacious arguments.

The use of presuppositions and premises which are taken to be held by everybody: “We all know that….”, “The reality is….”, “The truth is….”,

The familiar disclaimer of the apparent concession: “Of course there is some prejudice, but….”

The number game of comparative statistics – always used in favour of the dominant group.

After this focused linguistic analysis , I would like to finish by affirming the  wider spiritual perspective which must inform this discussion. Years ago, when I was lecturing in Psycholinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, I had a strong academic interest in the relationship between language and mind, language and attitude, and language and prejudice, but it is only in recent years in my engagement with the faith, knowledge and civilisation of Islam that I have begun to understand how vital it is to understand the nature of language from a spiritual perspective and how sacred is that trust borne by all of us who use language to inform, educate, influence and persuade others.

And to use words like “spiritual” and “sacred” in relation to the use of language is simply another way of saying that to use language wisely and well is the mark of the fully human being.

The Greeks also understood well the responsibility imposed on mankind  by the gift of language and the fierce debates about the role of rhetoric were most notably expressed and distilled in Plato’s affirmation that philosophical dialectic (that is the testing process of critical enquiry through discussion) is utterly distinct from and immeasurably superior to rhetoric, which, if not firmly subordinated to knowledge and reason, is roundly condemned as nakedly exploitative emotional manipulation.

It is this legacy which has ultimately ensured that “in the contemporary usage of all modern European languages….the word rhetorical  is unfailingly pejorative [i.e. disparaging, negative]. It implies “ dissembling, manipulative abuse of linguistic resources for self-serving ends, usually in the political context…”¹   How often have we heard in recent weeks from intelligent commentators of the dangers of “cranking up” the rhetoric and the need to “tone it down” in the interests of reason, restraint and proportionality.  And, sad to say, how often have we heard too a new version of Orwellian Newspeak which admits only one version of reality, only one interpretation of events, and which discredits all alternative perspectives as evidence of complicity with terrorists.

And let us  not forget the use and abuse of images as well as words in our increasingly visual culture.  By “language” I mean both the verbal and the visual vocabulary and syntax. We are entitled to ask what on earth is implied by the juxtaposition of  a picture of Muslim women  praying  next to an article entitled “Cradles of Fanaticism”.  This speaks for itself.  The intention is very clear.  In this equation, to pray is to be fanatical. Elementary logic tells me that this must mean that all people from all religious traditions who pray are fanatics. This is the kind of shameful material I would have used when as a teacher of English I taught young people how to recognise the way they were manipulated by  propaganda in the media. I wanted them to gain the essential critical thinking skills, as well as the  qualities of empathy, tolerance and respect for diversity, which are presumably valued by civilised, humane and freedom-loving peoples.

But it is important to realise that from an Islamic perspective language is not just a tool of critical enquiry, rational debate and discussion which advances human knowledge, important as this is, but is a divine gift to mankind, a mark of his special  status in the divine order.

The Qur’an says that God “imparted unto Adam the names of all things” (2:31). On one level this can be interpreted as the capacity for conceptual thought which is empowered through the definition and distinction inherent in naming, a capacity not shared even by the angels, who are commanded to prostrate themselves before Adam in recognition of his status as Khalïfah, or vicegerent, a term denoting man’s stewardship of the earth as a consequence of his being made in the image of God.

In another sense, the names are the letters from which all words are constructed (notice how we name the letters – we say alif, ba, alpha, beta, and so on). The proportioned script of Arabic lettering has the remarkable property that the shapes of all the other letters are generated in strict geometric proportionality by the alif (or more correctly from the dot, which defines the length and surface area of the alif).  This is what gives Arabic calligraphy its sublime visual harmony. Alif is the first letter, the upright stroke, symbolic of our erect, Adamic, human nature orientated vertically towards remembrance of our divine origin.

We have heard much in recent days from politicians, military strategists, commentators and the general public about the need for a “proportional response”.  Everyone with humanity feels this instinctively, because it part of the innate disposition (fitra) of the human being who is created, as the Qur’an says, “in due measure and proportion”. But proportionality in Islam is not just a quantitative and material matter, a question of deployment of forces. It is a qualitative matter, a defining marker of human character and spirituality, which in its primordial condition  is in a state of balance and equilibrium.

So the “names” are not simply tools for logical thinking, for making fine distinctions. From an Islamic perspective, letters and words are the very substance of the created universe, emanating from the Divine Word which is the origin of all creation and in which all concepts find unity and reconciliation. It is therefore a sacred trust to use words which are fair, fitting, balanced, equitable and just, words which are in “due measure and proportion.”

In this conception of  language, the letter is not an inanimate component of an abstract concept, but is a living entity, and the words which are formed from these letters, the phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs have the power to diminish or enhance our humanity. The word is in fact a deed, an act in itself, which carries the same responsibility as that taken in doing and acting. We have the expression “in word and in deed” and this encapsulates this wisdom, this convergence between speech and action.

“Art thou not aware how God sets forth the parable of the good word? [It is] like a good tree, firmly rooted, [reaching out] with its branches towards the sky, yielding its fruit at all times by its Sustainer’s leave. And [thus it is that] God propounds parables unit men, so that they might bethink themselves [of the truth]. And the parable of the corrupt word is that of a corrupt tree, torn up [from its roots] onto the face of the earth, wholly unable to endure.” (Qur’an 14:24-26).

Correctives must always be applied to what is out of balance. Islamophobia is a reality and it needs to be corrected, not by using the word itself as a label to stifle just criticism, not by defensive hostility, and not by shouting louder, but by knowledge, by reason, by  detailed work, and above all by the example  of our own humanity.

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
Bath
28 September 2001

Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas served as the first Chair of the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR) and the Executive Director of the Book Foundation. He has worked in education for many years, having taught at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, both in the U.K. and overseas. Most recently he has held a lectureship in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and the post of Director of Studies at an UK independent school.

1.  Robert Wardy, Chapter on Rhetoric (page 465) in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.

2. Norman Cigar, The Role of Serbian Orientalists  in Justification of Genocide Against Muslims of the Balkans, Islamic Quarterly: Review of Islamic Culture, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3, 1994.

9/11: Recapturing Islam From the Terrorists

As New York turns its gap-toothed face to the sky, wondering if the worst is yet to come, Muslims, largely unheeded by the wider world, are counting the cost of the suicide bombings. The backlash against mosques and hijabs has been met by statements from Muslim communities around the globe, some stilted, but others which have clearly found an articulate and passionate voice for the first time. In comparison with the pathetic near-silence that hovered around mosques and major organisations during the Rushdie and Gulf War debacles, the communities now seem alert to their cultural situation and its potential precariousness. Many of the condemnations have been more impressive than those of the American President, who seems unable to rise above clichés.

The motives are twofold. Firstly, and most patently, Sunni Muslims have been brought up in a universe of faith that renders the taking of innocent lives unimaginable. By condemning the attacks, we know that we defend the indispensable essence of Islam. Secondly, Muslims as well as others have died in large numbers. The Friday Prayers in the World Trade Centre always attracted more than 1,500 worshippers from the office community, many of whom have now surely died. The tourists, who spent their last moments choking on the observation deck, waiting for the helicopters that never came, no doubt included many Muslim parents and their children.

But the Western powers and their fearful Muslim minorities, both battered so grievously by recent events, now need to think beyond press-releases and ritual cursings. We need to recognise, firstly, that there has been a steady ‘mission-creep’ in terrorist attacks over the past twenty years. Hijackings for ransom money gave way to parcel bombs, then to suicide bombs, and now to kiloton-range urban mayhem. It is not at all clear that this escalation will be terminated by further anti-terrorist legislation, further billions for the FBI, or retina scans at Terminal Three. America’s tendency to assume that money can buy or destroy any possible obstacle to its will now stands under a dark shadow. Far from being a climax and the catalyst for a hi-tech military solution, the attacks may be of more historical significance as an announcement to the militant subculture that a Star-Wars superpower is utterly vulnerable to a handful of lightly-armed young men. There could well be more and worse to come.

Sobered by this, the State Department is likely to come under pressure from business interests to ask the question it never seems to notice. Why is there so much hatred of the United States, and so much yearning to poke it in the eye? Are the architects of policy sane in their certainty that America can enrage large numbers of people, but contain that rage forever through satellite technology and intrepid double-agents? Businessmen and bankers will now start to read carefully enough to discern that it is not US national interest, but the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, that tends to drive Washington’s policy in the world’s greatest troublespot. Threatened with disaster, corporate America may just prove powerful enough to face AIPAC down, and suggest, firmly, that the next time Israel asks Washington to veto the UN’s desire to send observers to Hebron, it pauses to consider where its own interests might lie.

Among Muslims, the longer-term aftershock will surely take the form of a crisis among ‘moderate Wahhabis’. Even if a Middle-Eastern connection is somehow disproved, they cannot deny forever that doctrinal extremism can lead to political extremism. They must realise that it is traditional Islam, the only possible alternative to their position, which owns rich resources for the respectful acknowledgement of difference within itself, and with unbelievers. The lava-stream that flows from Ibn Taymiyya, whose fierce xenophobia mirrored his sense of the imminent Mongol threat to Islam, has a habit of closing minds and hardening hearts. It is true that not every committed Wahhabi is willing to kill civilians to make a political point. However it is also true that no orthodox Sunni has ever been willing to do so. One of the unseen, unsung triumphs of true Islam in the modern world is its complete freedom from any terroristic involvement. Maliki ulama do not become suicide-bombers. No-one has ever heard of Sufi terrorism. Everyone, enemies included, knows that the very idea is absurd.

Two years ago, Shaykh Hisham Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, warned of the dangers of mass terrorism to American cities; and he was brushed aside as a dangerous alarmist. Muslim organisations are no doubt beginning to regret their treatment of him. The movement for traditional Islam will, we hope, become enormously strengthened in the aftermath of the recent events, accompanied by a mass exodus from Wahhabism, leaving behind only a merciless hardcore of well-financed zealots. Those who have tried to take over the controls of Islam, after reading books from we-know-where, will have to relinquish them, because we now know their destination.

When that happens, or perhaps even sooner, mainstream Islam will be able to make the loud declaration in public that it already feels in its heart: that terrorists are not Muslims. Targeting civilians is a negation of every possible school of Sunni Islam. Suicide bombing is so foreign to the Quranic ethos that the Prophet Samson is entirely absent from our scriptures. Islam is a great world religion that has produced much of the world’s most sensitive art, architecture and literature, and has a rich life of ethics, missionary work, and spirituality. Such are the real, and historically-successful, weapons of Islam, because they are the instruments that make friends of our neighbours, instead of enemies fit for burning alive. Those that refuse them, out of cultural impotence or impatience, will in the longer term be perceived as so radical in their denial of what is necessarily known to be part of Islam, that the authorities of the religion are likely to declare them to be beyond its reach. If that takes place, then future catastrophes by Wahhabi ultras will have little impact on the image of communities, whose spokesmen can simply say that Muslims were not implicated. This is the approach taken by Christian churches when confronted by, say, the Reverend Jim Jones’s suicide cult, or the Branch Davidians at Waco. Only a radical amputation of this kind will save Islam’s name, and the physical safety of Muslims, particularly women, as they live and work in Western cities.

To conclude: there is much despair, but there are also grounds for hope. The controls of two great vehicles, the State Department, and Islam, need to be reclaimed in the name of sanity and humanity. It is always hard to accept that good might come out of evil; but perhaps only a catastrophe on this scale, so desolating, and so seemingly hopeless, could provide the motive and the space for such a reclamation.

Addendum

Although the response from Muslims in the UK seems to have been very favourable to my essay, with one or two requests that it be sent to national newspapers for reprinting on their pages, it is inevitable that under pressure from real or potential rioters and cross-burners, some Muslims consider premature any attempt to begin a debate among ourselves about the cultural and doctrinal foundations of extremism.

It is true that no convictions have been secured, and that in the Shari’a suspects are innocent until proven guilty. However it is also regrettably the case that these suspects will not be tried under Shari’a law, and that we need, in the absence of a traditional framework of accusation and assessment, to hold our own discussions. This is particularly urgent in this case, since the damage to the honour of Islam, and the physical safety of innocent Muslims, in the West and in Central Asia and elsewhere, is very considerable. We Muslims are now at ‘ground zero’. As such, we cannot simply ignore the duty to ask each other what has caused the attitudes that probably, but not indisputably, lie at the root of these events.

My essay, which endeavoured to kick-start this debate, takes its cue primarily from the UK situation, which is no doubt less intense than in the US, but is nonetheless serious. In particular I am concerned to insist that Muslims distance themselves from, for instance, the janaza prayer for the hijackers that was held two days ago at a London Wahhabi mosque (the term Wahhabi is more useful, since ‘Salafi’ can also refer to the Abduh-Rida reformism and is hence confusing). Having spoken to the editor of one of this country’s major Muslim magazines, it is clear that the small minority of voices which have been raised in support of the terrorist act were in every case of the Wahhabi persuasion. Clearly, we cannot simply ignore this on grounds of ‘Muslim unity’, since those people appear so determined to destroy Muslim unity, and endanger the security of our community.

I hope that the recent events will spur Muslims to consider the implications for the wider ethos in which we understand our religion of the shift which we have witnessed over the past twenty years or so away from accommodationist and tolerant forms of Islam, and towards narrowmindedness. Al-Ghazali recommends a tolerant view of non-Muslims, and is prepared to grant that many of them may be saved in the next world; Ibn Taymiya, as Muhammad Memon has shown in his book on him, is vehement and adversarial. In our communities in the West, and indeed worldwide, we surely need the Ghazalian approach, not the rigorism of Ibn Taymiya. Not just because we need to reassure our neighbours, but also because we need to reassure those very many born Muslims who are made unsure about their attachment to Islam by events such as this that they can belong to the religion without being harsh and narrow-minded. Extremism can drive people right out of Islam. In 1999 the Conference of French Catholic bishops announced that 300 Algerians were among the year’s Easter baptisms. Noting that ten years earlier Muslims never converted at all, they reported that the change was the result of the spread of extreme forms of Islam in Algeria.

In Afghanistan, too, there are now Christians for the first time ever, and I have heard from one ex-Taliban member that this is because of the extremism with which Islam is imposed on the people. The shift away from traditional Islam, and towards Ibn Taymiya’s position, has been widely documented, for instance by Ahmad Rashid, in his chapter ‘Challenging Islam’, in his book on the Taliban. The Saudi-Wahhabi connection has been very conspicuous.

We must ask Allah to open the hearts of the Muslims everywhere to recognise that narrow mindedness and mutual anathema will lead us nowhere, and that only through spirituality, toleration and wisdom will we be granted success.

The most appropriate du’a’ for our situation would seem to be: ‘Ya Hayyu Ya Qayyum, bi-rahmatika astaghiith’, which is recommended in a hadith in cases of fear and misfortune. It means: ‘O Living, O Self-Subsistent; by Your mercy I seek help.’

The Place of Tasawwuf in Traditional Islamic Sciences

Perhaps the biggest challenge in learning Islam correctly today is the scarcity of traditional ‘ulama. In this meaning, Bukhari relates the sahih, rigorously authenticated hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“Truly, Allah does not remove Sacred Knowedge by taking it out of servants, but rather by taking back the souls of Islamic scholars [in death], until, when He has not left a single scholar, the people take the ignorant as leaders, who are asked for and who give Islamic legal opinion without knowledge, misguided and misguiding” (Fath al-Bari, 1.194, hadith 100).

The process described by the hadith is not yet completed, but has certainly begun, and in our times, the lack of traditional scholars—whether in Islamic law, in hadith, in tafsir ‘Qur’anic exegesis’—has given rise to an understanding of the religion that is far from scholarly, and sometimes far from the truth. For example, in the course of my own studies in Islamic law, my first impression from orientalist and Muslim-reformer literature, was that the Imams of the madhhabs or ‘schools of jurisprudence’ had brought a set of rules from completely outside the Islamic tradition and somehow imposed them upon the Muslims. But when I sat with traditional scholars in the Middle East and asked them about the details, I came away with a different point of view, having learned the bases for deriving the law from the Qur’an and sunna.

And similarly with Tasawwuf—which is the word I will use tonight for the English Sufism, since our context is traditional Islam—quite a different picture emerged from talking with scholars of Tasawwuf than what I had been exposed to in the West. My talk tonight, In Sha’ Allah, will present knowledge taken from the Qur’an and sahih hadith, and from actual teachers of Tasawwuf in Syria and Jordan, in view of the need for all of us to get beyond clichés, the need for factual information from Islamic sources, the need to answer such questions as: Where did Tasawwuf come from? What role does it play in the din or religion of Islam? and most importantly, What is the command of Allah about it?

As for the origin of the term Tasawwuf, like many other Islamic discliplines, its name was not known to the first generation of Muslims. The historian Ibn Khaldun notes in his Muqaddima:

This knowledge is a branch of the sciences of Sacred Law that originated within the Umma. From the first, the way of such people had also been considered the path of truth and guidance by the early Muslim community and its notables, of the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), those who were taught by them, and those who came after them.

It basically consists of dedication to worship, total dedication to Allah Most High, disregard for the finery and ornament of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, wealth, and prestige sought by most men, and retiring from others to worship alone. This was the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims, but when involvement in this-worldly things became widespread from the second Islamic century onwards and people became absorbed in worldliness, those devoted to worship came to be called Sufiyya or People of Tasawwuf (Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima [N.d. Reprint. Mecca: Dar al-Baz, 1397/1978], 467).

In Ibn Khaldun’s words, the content of Tasawwuf, “total dedication to Allah Most High,” was, “the general rule among the Companions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims.” So if the word did not exist in earliest times, we should not forget that this is also the case with many other Islamic disciplines, such as tafsir, ‘Qur’anic exegesis,’ or ‘ilm al-jarh wa ta‘dil, ‘the science of the positive and negative factors that affect hadith narrators acceptability,’ or ‘ilm al-tawhid, the science of belief in Islamic tenets of faith,’ all of which proved to be of the utmost importance to the correct preservation and transmission of the religion.

As for the origin of the word Tasawwuf, it may well be from Sufi, the person who does Tasawwuf, which seems to be etymologically prior to it, for the earliest mention of either term was by Hasan al-Basri who died 110 years after the Hijra, and is reported to have said, “I saw a Sufi circumambulating the Kaaba, and offered him a dirham, but he would not accept it.” It therefore seems better to understand Tasawwuf by first asking what a Sufi is; and perhaps the best definition of both the Sufi and his way, certainly one of the most frequently quoted by masters of the discipline, is from the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) who said:

Allah Most High says: “He who is hostile to a friend of Mine I declare war against. My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My slave keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks. If he asks me, I will surely give to him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him” (Fath al-Bari, 11.340–41, hadith 6502);

This hadith was related by Imam Bukhari, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Bayhaqi, and others with multiple contiguous chains of transmission, and is sahih. It discloses the central reality of Tasawwuf, which is precisely change, while describing the path to this change, in conformity with a traditional definition used by masters in the Middle East, who define a Sufi as Faqihun ‘amila bi ‘ilmihi fa awrathahu Llahu ‘ilma ma lam ya‘lam,‘A man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know.’

To clarify, a Sufi is a man of religious learning,because the hadith says, “My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him,” and only through learning can the Sufi know the command of Allah, or what has been made obligatory for him. He hasapplied what he knew, because the hadith says he not only approaches Allah with the obligatory, but “keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him.” And in turn, Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know, because the hadith says, “And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks,” which is a metaphor for the consummate awareness of tawhid, or the ‘unity of Allah,’ which in the context of human actions such as hearing, sight, seizing, and walking, consists of realizing the words of the Qur’an about Allah that,

“It is He who created you and what you do” (Qur’an 37:96).

The origin of the way of the Sufi thus lies in the prophetic sunna. The sincerity to Allah that it entails was the rule among the earliest Muslims, to whom this was simply a state of being without a name, while it only became a distinct discipline when the majority of the Community had drifted away and changed from this state. Muslims of subsequent generations required systematic effort to attain it, and it was because of the change in the Islamic environment after the earliest generations, that a discipline by the name of Tasawwuf came to exist.

But if this is true of origins, the more significant question is: How central is Tasawwuf to the religion, and: Where does it fit into Islam as a whole? Perhaps the best answer is the hadith of Muslim, that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said:

As we sat one day with the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), a man in pure white clothing and jet black hair came to us, without a trace of travelling upon him, though none of us knew him.

He sat down before the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) bracing his knees against his, resting his hands on his legs, and said: “Muhammad, tell me about Islam.” The Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: “Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and to perform the prayer, give zakat, fast in Ramadan, and perform the pilgrimage to the House if you can find a way.”

He said: “You have spoken the truth,” and we were surprised that he should ask and then confirm the answer. Then he said:

“Tell me about true faith (iman),” and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: “It is to believe in Allah, His angels, His inspired Books, His messengers, the Last Day, and in destiny, its good and evil.”

“You have spoken the truth,” he said, “Now tell me about the perfection of faith (ihsan),” and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) answered: “It is to worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you see Him not, He nevertheless sees you.”

The hadith continues to where ‘Umar said:

Then the visitor left. I waited a long while, and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to me, “Do you know, ‘Umar, who was the questioner?” and I replied, “Allah and His messenger know best.” He said,

“It was Gabriel, who came to you to teach you your religion” (Sahih Muslim, 1.37: hadith 8).

This is a sahih hadith, described by Imam Nawawi as one of the hadiths upon which the Islamic religion turns. The use of din in the last words of it,Atakum yu‘allimukum dinakum, “came to you to teach you your religion” entails that the religion of Islam is composed of the three fundamentals mentioned in the hadith: Islam, or external compliance with what Allah asks of us; Iman, or the belief in the unseen that the prophets have informed us of; and Ihsan, or to worship Allah as though one sees Him. The Qur’an says, in Surat Maryam,

“Surely We have revealed the Remembrance, and surely We shall preserve it” (Qur’an 15:9),

and if we reflect how Allah, in His wisdom, has accomplished this, we see that it is by human beings, the traditional scholars He has sent at each level of the religion. The level of Islam has been preserved and conveyed to us by the Imams of Shari‘a or ‘Sacred Law’ and its ancillary disciplines; the level of Iman, by the Imams of ‘Aqida or ‘tenets of faith’; and the level of Ihsan, “to worship Allah as though you see Him,” by the Imams of Tasawwuf.

The hadith’s very words “to worship Allah” show us the interrelation of these three fundamentals, for the how of “worship” is only known through the external prescriptions of Islam, while the validity of this worship in turn presupposes Iman or faith in Allah and the Islamic revelation, without which worship would be but empty motions; while the words, “as if you see Him,” show that Ihsan implies a human change, for it entails the experience of what, for most of us, is not experienced. So to understand Tasawwuf, we must look at the nature of this change in relation to both Islam and Iman, and this is the main focus of my talk tonight.

At the level of Islam, we said that Tasawwuf requires Islam,through ‘submission to the rules of Sacred Law.’ But Islam, for its part, equally requires Tasawwuf. Why? For the very good reason that the sunna which Muslims have been commanded to follow is not just the words and actions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), but also his states, states of the heart such as taqwa ‘godfearingness,’ ikhlas ‘sincerity,’ tawakkul‘reliance on Allah,’ rahma ‘mercy,’ tawadu‘ ‘humility,’ and so on.

Now, it is characteristic of the Islamic ethic that human actions are not simply divided into two shades of morality, right or wrong; but rather five, arranged in order of their consequences in the next world. The obligatory (wajib) is that whose performance is rewarded by Allah in the next life and whose nonperformance is punished. The recommended (mandub) is that whose performance is rewarded, but whose nonperformance is not punished. The permissible (mubah) is indifferent, unconnected with either reward or punishment. The offensive (makruh) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded but whose performance is not punished. The unlawful (haram) is that whose nonperformance is rewarded and whose performance is punished, if one dies unrepentant.

Human states of the heart, the Qur’an and sunna make plain to us, come under each of these headings. Yet they are not dealt with in books of fiqh or ‘Islamic jurisprudence,’ because unlike the prayer, zakat, or fasting, they are not quantifiable in terms of the specific amount of them that must be done. But though they are not countable, they are of the utmost importance to every Muslim. Let’s look at a few examples.

(1) Love of Allah. In Surat al-Baqara of the Qur’an, Allah blames those who ascribe associates to Allah whom they love as much as they love Allah. Then He says,

“And those who believe are greater in love for Allah” (Qur’an 2:165), making being a believer conditional upon having greater love for Allah than any other.

(2) Mercy. Bukhari and Muslim relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “Whomever is not merciful to people, Allah will show no mercy” (Sahih Muslim, 4.1809: hadith 2319), and Tirmidhi relates the well authenticated (hasan) hadith “Mercy is not taken out of anyone except the damned” (al-Jami‘ al-sahih, 4.323: hadith 1923).

(3) Love of each other. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “By Him in whose hand is my soul, none of you shall enter paradise until you believe, and none of you shall believe until you love one another . . . .” (Sahih Muslim, 1.74: hadith 54).

(4) Presence of mind in the prayer (salat). Abu Dawud relates in his Sunan that ‘Ammar ibn Yasir heard the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) say, “Truly, a man leaves, and none of his prayer has been recorded for him except a tenth of it, a ninth of it, eighth of it, seventh of it, sixth of it, fifth of it, fourth of it, third of it, a half of it” (Sunan Abi Dawud, 1.211: hadith 796)—meaning that none of a person’s prayer counts for him except that in which he is present in his heart with Allah.

(5) Love of the Prophet. Bukhari relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “None of you believes until I am more beloved to him than his father, his son, and all people” (Fath al-Bari, 1.58, hadith 15).

It is plain from these texts that none of the states mentioned—whether mercy, love, or presence of heart—are quantifiable, for the Shari‘a cannot specify that one must “do two units of mercy” or “have three units of presence of mind” in the way that the number of rak‘as of prayer can be specified, yet each of them is personally obligatory for the Muslim. Let us complete the picture by looking at a few examples of states that are haramor ‘strictly unlawful’:

(1) Fear of anyone besides Allah. Allah Most High says in Surat al-Baqara of the Qur’an,

“And fulfill My covenant: I will fulfill your covenant—And fear Me alone” (Qur’an 2:40), the last phrase of which, according to Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, “establishes that a human being is obliged to fear no one besides Allah Most High” (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi, 3.42).

(2) Despair. Allah Most High says,

“None despairs of Allah’s mercy except the people who disbelieve” (Qur’an 12:87), indicating the unlawfulness of this inward state by coupling it with the worst human condition possible, that of unbelief.

(3) Arrogance. Muslim relates in his Sahih that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“No one shall enter paradise who has a particle of arrogance in his heart” (Sahih Muslim, 1.93: hadith 91).

(4) Envy,meaning to wish for another to lose the blessings he enjoys. Abu Dawud relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“Beware of envy, for envy consumes good works as flames consume firewood” (Sunan Abi Dawud, 4.276: hadith 4903).

(5) Showing off in acts of worship. Al-Hakim relates with a sahih chain of transmission that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah . . . .” (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.4).

These and similar haram inward states are not found in books of fiqh or ‘jurisprudence,’ because fiqh can only deal with quantifiable descriptions of rulings. Rather, they are examined in their causes and remedies by the scholars of the ‘inner fiqh’ of Tasawwuf, men such as Imam al-Ghazali in hisIhya’ ‘ulum al-din [The reviving of the religious sciences], Imam al-Rabbani in his Maktubat [Letters], al-Suhrawardi in his ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif [The knowledges of the illuminates], Abu Talib al-Makki in Qut al-qulub [The sustenance of hearts], and similar classic works, which discuss and solve hundreds of ethical questions about the inner life. These are books of Shari‘a and their questions are questions of Sacred Law, of how it is lawful or unlawful for a Muslim to be; and they preserve the part of the prophetic sunna dealing with states.

Who needs such information? All Muslims, for the Qur’anic verses and authenticated hadiths all point to the fact that a Muslim must not only do certain things and say certain things, but also must be something, must attain certain states of the heart and eliminate others. Do we ever fear someone besides Allah? Do we have a particle of arrogance in our hearts? Is our love for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) greater than our love for any other human being? Is there the slightest bit of showing off in our good works?

Half a minute’s reflection will show the Muslim where he stands on these aspects of his din, and why in classical times, helping Muslims to attain these states was not left to amateurs, but rather delegated to ‘ulama of the heart, the scholars of Islamic Tasawwuf. For most people, these are not easy transformations to make, because of the force of habit, because of the subtlety with which we can deceive ourselves, but most of all because each of us has an ego, the self, the Me, which is called in Arabic al-nafs, about which Allah testifies in Surat Yusuf:

“Verily the self ever commands to do evil” (Qur’an 12:53).

If you do not believe it, consider the hadith related by Muslim in his Sahih, that:

The first person judged on Resurrection Day will be a man martyred in battle.

He will be brought forth, Allah will reacquaint him with His blessings upon him and the man will acknowledge them, whereupon Allah will say, “What have you done with them?” to which the man will respond, “I fought to the death for You.”

Allah will reply, “You lie. You fought in order to be called a hero, and it has already been said.” Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face and flung into the fire.

Then a man will be brought forward who learned Sacred Knowledge, taught it to others, and who recited the Qur’an. Allah will remind him of His gifts to him and the man will acknowledge them, and then Allah will say, “What have you done with them?” The man will answer, “I acquired Sacred Knowledge, taught it, and recited the Qur’an, for Your sake.”

Allah will say, “You lie. You learned so as to be called a scholar, and read the Qur’an so as to be called a reciter, and it has already been said.” Then the man will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire.

Then a man will be brought forward whom Allah generously provided for, giving him various kinds of wealth, and Allah will recall to him the benefits given, and the man will acknowledge them, to which Allah will say, “And what have you done with them?” The man will answer, “I have not left a single kind of expenditure You love to see made, except that I have spent on it for Your sake.”

Allah will say, “You lie. You did it so as to be called generous, and it has already been said.” Then he will be sentenced and dragged away on his face to be flung into the fire (Sahih Muslim, 3.1514: hadith 1905).

We should not fool ourselves about this, because our fate depends on it: in our childhood, our parents taught us how to behave through praise or blame, and for most of us, this permeated and colored our whole motivation for doing things. But when childhood ends, and we come of age in Islam, the religion makes it clear to us, both by the above hadith and by the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) “The slightest bit of showing off in good works is as if worshipping others with Allah” that being motivated by what others think is no longer good enough, and that we must change our motives entirely, and henceforth be motivated by nothing but desire for Allah Himself. The Islamic revelation thus tells the Muslim that it is obligatory to break his habits of thinking and motivation, but it does not tell him how. For that, he must go to the scholars of these states, in accordance with the Qur’anic imperative,

“Ask those who know if you know not” (Qur’an 16:43),

There is no doubt that bringing about this change, purifying the Muslims by bringing them to spiritual sincerity, was one of the central duties of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), for Allah says in the Surat Al ‘Imran of the Qur’an,

“Allah has truly blessed the believers, for He has sent them a messenger of themselves, who recites His signs to them and purifies them, and teaches them the Book and the Wisdom” (Qur’an 3:164),

which explicitly lists four tasks of the prophetic mission, the second of which, yuzakkihim means precisely to ‘purify them’ and has no other lexical sense. Now, it is plain that this teaching function cannot, as part of an eternal revelation, have ended with the passing of the first generation, a fact that Allah explictly confirms in His injunction in Surat Luqman,

“And follow the path of him who turns unto Me” (Qur’an 31:15).

These verses indicate the teaching and transformative role of those who convey the Islamic revelation to Muslims, and the choice of the word ittiba‘ in the second verse, which is more general, implies both keeping the company of and following the example of a teacher. This is why in the history of Tasawwuf, we find that though there were many methods and schools of thought, these two things never changed: keeping the company of a teacher, and following his example—in exactly the same way that the Sahaba were uplifted and purified by keeping the company of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and following his example.

And this is why the discipline of Tasawwuf has been preserved and transmitted by Tariqas or groups of students under a particular master. First, because this was the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in his purifying function described by the Qur’an. Secondly, Islamic knowledge has never been transmitted by writings alone, but rather from ‘ulama to students. Thirdly, the nature of the knowledge in question is ofhal or ‘state of being,’ not just knowing, and hence requires it be taken from a succession of living masters back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), for the sheer range and number of the states of heart required by the revelation effectively make imitation of the personal example of a teacher the only effective means of transmission.

So far we have spoken about Tasawwuf in respect to Islam, as a Shari‘a science necessary to fully realize the Sacred Law in one’s life, to attain the states of the heart demanded by the Qur’an and hadith. This close connection between Shari‘a and Tasawwuf is expressed by the statement of Imam Malik, founder of the Maliki school, that “he who practices Tasawwuf without learning Sacred Law corrupts his faith, while he who learns Sacred Law without practicing Tasawwuf corrupts himself. Only he who combines the two proves true.” This is why Tasawwuf was taught as part of the traditional curriculum in madrasas across the Muslim world from Malaysia to Morocco, why many of the greatest Shari‘a scholars of this Umma have been Sufis, and why until the end of the Islamic caliphate at the beginning of this century and the subsequent Western control and cultural dominance of Muslim lands, there were teachers of Tasawwuf in Islamic institutions of higher learning from Lucknow to Istanbul to Cairo.

But there is a second aspect of Tasawwuf that we have not yet talked about; namely, its relation to Iman or ‘True Faith,’ the second pillar of the Islamic religion, which in the context of the Islamic sciences consists of ‘Aqida or ‘orthodox belief.’

All Muslims believe in Allah, and that He is transcendently beyond anything conceivable to the minds of men, for the human intellect is imprisoned within its own sense impressions and the categories of thought derived from them, such as number, directionality, spatial extention, place, time, and so forth. Allah is beyond all of that; in His own words,

“There is nothing whatesover like unto Him” (Qur’an 42:11)

If we reflect for a moment on this verse, in the light of the hadith of Muslim about Ihsan that “it is to worship Allah as though you see Him,” we realize that the means of seeing here is not the eye, which can only behold physical things like itself; nor yet the mind, which cannot transcend its own impressions to reach the Divine, but rather certitude, the light of Iman, whose locus is not the eye or the brain, but rather the ruh, a subtle faculty Allah has created within each of us called the soul, whose knowledge is unobstructed by the bounds of the created universe. Allah Most High says, by way of exalting the nature of this faculty by leaving it a mystery,

“Say: ‘The soul is of the affair of my Lord’” (Qur’an 17:85).

The food of this ruh is dhikr or the ‘remembrance of Allah.’ Why? Because acts of obedience increase the light of certainty and Iman in the soul, and dhikr is among the greatest of them, as is attested to by the sahih hadith related by al-Hakim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“Shall I not tell you of the best of your works, the purest of them in the eyes of your Master, the highest in raising your rank, better than giving gold and silver, and better for you than to meet your enemy and smite their necks, and they smite yours?” They said, “This—what is it, O Messenger of Allah?” and he said: Dhikru Llahi ‘azza wa jall, “The remembrance of Allah Mighty and Majestic.” (al-Mustadrak ‘ala al-Sahihayn, 1.496).

Increasing the strength of Iman through good actions, and particularly through the medium of dhikr has tremendous implications for the Islamic religion and traditional spirituality. A non-Muslim once asked me, “If God exists, then why all this beating around the bush? Why doesn’t He just come out and say so?”

The answer is that taklif or ‘moral responsibility’ in this life is not only concerned with outward actions, but with what we believe, our ‘Aqida—and the strength with which we believe it. If belief in God and other eternal truths were effortless in this world, there would be no point in Allah making us responsible for it, it would be automatic, involuntary, like our belief, say, that London is in England. There would no point in making someone responsible for something impossible not to believe.

But the responsibility Allah has place upon us is belief in the Unseen, as a test for us in this world to choose between kufr and Iman, to distinguish believer from unbeliever, and some believers above others.

This why strengthening Iman through dhikr is of such methodological importance for Tasawwuf: we have not only been commanded as Muslims to believe in certain things, but have been commanded to have absolute certainty in them. The world we see around us is composed of veils of light and darkness: events come that knock the Iman out of some of us, and Allah tests each of us as to the degree of certainty with which we believe the eternal truths of the religion. It was in this sense that ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said, “If the Iman of Abu Bakr were weighed against the Iman of the entire Umma, it would outweigh it.”

Now, in traditional ‘Aqida one of the most important tenets is the wahdaniyya or ‘oneness and uniqueness’ of Allah Most High. This means He is without any sharik or associate in His being, in His attributes, or in His acts. But the ability to hold this insight in mind in the rough and tumble of daily life is a function of the strength of certainty (yaqin) in one’s heart. Allah tells the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in Surat al-A‘raf of the Qur’an,

“Say: ‘I do not possess benefit for myself or harm, except as Allah wills’” (Qur’an 7:188),

yet we tend to rely on ourselves and our plans, in obliviousness to the facts of ‘Aqida that ourselves and our plans have no effect, that Allah alone brings about effects.

If you want to test yourself on this, the next time you contact someone with good connections whose help is critical to you, take a look at your heart at the moment you ask him to put in a good word for you with someone, and see whom you are relying upon. If you are like most of us, Allah is not at the forefront of your thoughts, despite the fact that He alone is controlling the outcome. Isn’t this a lapse in your ‘Aqida, or, at the very least, in your certainty?

Tasawwuf corrects such shortcomings by step-by-step increasing the Muslim’s certainty in Allah. The two central means of Tasawwuf in attaining theconviction demanded by ‘Aqida are mudhakara, or learning the traditional tenets of Islamic faith, and dhikr, deepening one’s certainty in them by remembrance of Allah. It is part of our faith that, in the words of the Qur’an in Surat al-Saffat,

“Allah has created you and what you do” (Qur’an 37:96);

yet for how many of us is this day to day experience? Because Tasawwuf remedies this and other shortcomings of Iman, by increasing the Muslim’s certainty through a systematic way of teaching and dhikr, it has traditionally been regarded as personally obligatory to this pillar of the religion also, and from the earliest centuries of Islam, has proved its worth.

The last question we will deal with tonight is: What about the bad Sufis we read about, who contravene the teachings of Islam?

The answer is that there are two meanings of Sufi: the first is “Anyone who considers himself a Sufi,” which is the rule of thumb of orientalist historians of Sufism and popular writers, who would oppose the “Sufis” to the “Ulama.” I think the Qur’anic verses and hadiths we have mentioned tonight about the scope and method of true Tasawwuf show why we must insist on the primacy of the definition of a Sufi as “a man of religious learning who applied what he knew, so Allah bequeathed him knowledge of what he did not know.”

The very first thing a Sufi, as a man of religious learning knows is that the Shari‘a and ‘Aqida of Islam are above every human being. Whoever does not know this will never be a Sufi, except in the orientalist sense of the word—like someone standing in front of the stock exchange in an expensive suit with a briefcase to convince people he is a stockbroker. A real stockbroker is something else.

Because this distinction is ignored today by otherwise well-meaning Muslims, it is often forgotten that the ‘ulama who have criticized Sufis, such as Ibn al-Jawzi in his Talbis Iblis [The Devil’s deception], or Ibn Taymiya in places in his Fatawa, or Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, were not criticizing Tasawwuf as an ancillary discipline to the Shari‘a. The proof of this is Ibn al-Jawzi’s five-volume Sifat al-safwa, which contains the biographies of the very same Sufis mentioned in al-Qushayri’s famous Tasawwuf manual al-Risala al-Qushayriyya. Ibn Taymiya considered himself a Sufi of the Qadiri order, and volumes ten and eleven of his thirty-seven-volume Majmu‘ al-fatawa are devoted to Tasawwuf. And Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote his three-volume Madarij al-salikin, a detailed commentary on ‘Abdullah al-Ansari al-Harawi’s tract on the spiritual stations of the Sufi path, Manazil al-sa’irin. These works show that their authors’ criticisms were not directed at Tasawwuf as such, but rather at specific groups of their times, and they should be understood for what they are.

As in other Islamic sciences, mistakes historically did occur in Tasawwuf, most of them stemming from not recognizing the primacy of Shari‘a and ‘Aqida above all else. But these mistakes were not different in principle from, for example, the Isra’iliyyat (baseless tales of Bani Isra’il) that crept into tafsir literature, or the mawdu‘at (hadith forgeries) that crept into the hadith. These were not taken as proof that tafsir was bad, or hadith was deviance, but rather, in each discipline, the errors were identified and warned against by Imams of the field, because the Umma needed the rest. And such corrections are precisely what we find in books like Qushayri’s Risala,Ghazali’s Ihya’ and other works of Sufism.

For all of the reasons we have mentioned, Tasawwuf was accepted as an essential part of the Islamic religion by the ‘ulama of this Umma. The proof of this is all the famous scholars of Shari‘a sciences who had the higher education of Tasawwuf, among them Ibn ‘Abidin, al-Razi, Ahmad Sirhindi, Zakariyya al-Ansari, al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, Ibn Daqiq al-‘Eid, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Shah Wali Allah, Ahmad Dardir, Ibrahim al-Bajuri, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Imam al-Nawawi, Taqi al-Din al-Subki, and al-Suyuti.

Among the Sufis who aided Islam with the sword as well as the pen, to quote Reliance of the Traveller, were:

such men as the Naqshbandi sheikh Shamil al-Daghestani, who fought a prolonged war against the Russians in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century; Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdullah al-Somali, a sheikh of the Salihiyya order who led Muslims against the British and Italians in Somalia from 1899 to 1920; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Uthman ibn Fodi, who led jihad in Northern Nigeria from 1804 to 1808 to establish Islamic rule; the Qadiri sheikh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, who led the Algerians against the French from 1832 to 1847; the Darqawi faqir al-Hajj Muhammad al-Ahrash, who fought the French in Egypt in 1799; the Tijani sheikh al-Hajj ‘Umar Tal, who led Islamic Jihad in Guinea, Senegal, and Mali from 1852 to 1864; and the Qadiri sheikh Ma’ al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami, who helped marshal Muslim resistance to the French in northern Mauritania and southern Morocco from 1905 to 1909.

Among the Sufis whose missionary work Islamized entire regions are such men as the founder of the Sanusiyya order, Muhammad ‘Ali Sanusi, whose efforts and jihad from 1807 to 1859 consolidated Islam as the religion of peoples from the Libyan Desert to sub-Saharan Africa; [and] the Shadhili sheikh Muhammad Ma‘ruf and Qadiri sheikh Uways al-Barawi, whose efforts spread Islam westward and inland from the East African Coast . . . . (Reliance of the Traveller,863).

It is plain from the examples of such men what kind of Muslims have been Sufis; namely, all kinds, right across the board—and that Tasawwuf did not prevent them from serving Islam in any way they could.

To summarize everything I have said tonight: In looking first at Tasawwuf and Shari‘a, we found that many Qur’anic verses and sahih hadiths oblige the Muslim to eliminate haram inner states as arrogance, envy, and fear of anyone besides Allah; and on the other hand, to acquire such obligatory inner states as mercy, love of one’s fellow Muslims, presence of mind in prayer, and love of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). We found that these inward states could not be dealt with in books of fiqh, whose purpose is to specify the outward, quantifiable aspects of the Shari‘a. The knowledge of these states is nevertheless of the utmost importance to every Muslim, and this is why it was studied under the ‘ulama of Ihsan, the teachers of Tasawwuf, in all periods of Islamic history until the beginning of the present century.

We then turned to the level of Iman, and found that though the ‘Aqida of Muslims is that Allah alone has any effect in this world, keeping this in mind in everhday life is not a given of human consciousness, but rather a function of a Muslim’s yaqin, his certainty. And we found that Tasawwuf, as an ancillary discipline to ‘Aqida, emphasizes the systematic increase of this certainty through both mudhakara, ‘teaching tenets of faith’ and dhikr, ‘the remembrance of Allah,’ in accordance with the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) about Ihsan that “it is worship Allah as though you see Him.”

Lastly, we found that accusations against Tasawwuf made by scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi, and Ibn Taymiya were not directed against Tasawwuf in principle, but to specific groups and individuals in the times of these authors, the proof for which is the other books by the same authors that showed their understanding of Tasawwuf as a Shari‘a science.

To return to the starting point of my talk this evening, with the disappearance of traditional Islamic scholars from the Umma, two very different pictures of Tasawwuf emerge today. If we read books written after the dismantling of the traditional fabric of Islam by colonial powers in the last century, we find the big hoax: Islam without spirituality and Shari‘a without Tasawwuf. But if we read the classical works of Islamic scholarship, we learn that Tasawwuf has been a Shari‘a science like tafsir, hadith, or any other, throughout the history of Islam. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

“Truly, Allah does not look at your outward forms and wealth, but rather at your hearts and your works” (Sahih Muslim, 4.1389: hadith 2564).

And this is the brightest hope that Islam can offer a modern world darkened by materialism and nihilism: Islam as it truly is; the hope of eternal salvation through a religion of brotherhood and social and economic justice outwardly, and the direct experience of divine love and illumination inwardly.

© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995

This the text of a lecture give at Islamic Foundation (Markfield Center, Leicester) January 1995 and Croydon Mosque 30th January 1995.

Why Muslims Follow Madhhabs?

 The work of the mujtahid Imams of Sacred Law, those who deduce shari‘a rulings from Qur’an and hadith, has been the object of my research for some years now, during which I have sometimes heard the question: “Who needs the Imams of Sacred Law when we have the Qur’an and hadith? Why can’t we take our Islam from the word of Allah and His Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace), which are divinely protected from error, instead of taking it from the madhhabs or “schools of jurisprudence” of the mujtahid Imams such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi‘i, and Ahmad, which are not?”

It cannot be hidden from any of you how urgent this issue is, or that many of the disagreements we see and hear in our mosques these days are due to lack of knowledge of fiqh or “Islamic jurisprudence” and its relation to Islam as a whole. Now, perhaps more than ever before, it is time for us to get back to basics and ask ourselves how we understand and carry out the commands of Allah.

We will first discuss the knowledge of Islam that all of us possess, and then show where fiqh enters into it. We will look at the qualifications mentioned in the Qur’an and sunna for those who do fiqh, the mujtahid scholars. We will focus first on the extent of the mujtahid scholar’s knowledge—how many hadiths he has to know, and so on—and then we will look at the depth of his knowledge, through actual examples of dalils or “legal proofs” that demonstrate how scholars join between different and even contradictory hadiths to produce a unified and consistent legal ruling.

We will close by discussing the mujtahid’s relation to the science of hadith authentication, and the conditions by which a scholar knows that a given hadith is sahih or “rigorously authenticated,” so that he can accept and follow it.

Qur’an and Hadith. The knowledge that you and I take from the Qur’an and the hadith is of several types: the first and most important concerns ourfaith, and is the knowledge of Allah and His attributes, and the other basic tenets of Islamic belief such as the messengerhood of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), the Last Day, and so on. Every Muslim can and must acquire this knowledge from the Book of Allah and the sunna.

This is also the case with a second type of general knowledge, which does not concern faith, however, but rather works: the general laws of Islam to do good, to avoid evil, to perform the prayer, pay zakat, fast Ramadan, to cooperate with others in good works, and so forth. Anyone can learn and understand these general rules, which summarize the sirat al-mustaqim or “straight path” of our religion.

Fiqh. A third type of knowledge is of the specific details of Islamic practice. Whereas anyone can understand the first two types of knowledge from the Qur’an and hadith, the understanding of this third type has a special name, fiqh, meaning literally “understanding.” And people differ in their capacity to do it.

I had a visitor one day in Jordan, for example, who, when we talked about why he hadn’t yet gone on hajj, mentioned the hadith of Anas ibn Malik that

the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “Whoever prays the dawn prayer (fajr) in a group and then sits and does dhikr until the sun rises, then prays two rak‘as, shall have the like of the reward of a hajj and an ‘umra.” Anas said, “The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: ‘Completely, completely, completely’” (Tirmidhi, 2.481).

My visitor had done just that this very morning, and he now believed that he had fulfilled his obligation to perform the hajj, and had no need to go to Mecca. The hadith was well authenticated (hasan). I distinguished for my visitor between having the reward of something, and lifting the obligation of Islam by actually doing it, and he saw my point.

But there is a larger lesson here, that while the Qur’an and the sunna are ma‘sum or “divinely protected from error,” the understanding of them is not. And someone who derives rulings from the Qur’an and hadith without training in ijtihad or “deduction from primary texts” as my visitor did, will be responsible for it on the Day of Judgment, just as an amateur doctor who had never been to medical school would be responsible if he performed an operation and somebody died under his knife.

Why? Because Allah has explained in the Qur’an that fiqh, the detailed understanding of the divine command, requires specially trained members of the Muslim community to learn and teach it. Allah says in surat al-Tawba:

“Not all of the believers should go to fight. Of every section of them, why does not one part alone go forth, that the rest may gain understanding of the religion, and to admonish their people when they return, that perhaps they may take warning” (Qur’an 9:122)

—where the expression li yatafaqqahu fi al-din, “to gain understanding of the religion,” is derived from precisely the same root (f-q-h) as the wordfiqh or “jurisprudence,” and is what Western students of Arabic would call a “fifth-form verb” (tafa‘‘ala), which indicates that the meaning contained in the root, understanding, is accomplished through careful, sustained effort.

This Qur’anic verse establishes that there should be a category of people who have learned the religion so as to be qualified in turn to teach it. And Allah has commanded those who do not know a ruling in Sacred Law to ask those who do, by saying in surat al-Nahl,

“Ask those who recall if you know not” (Qur’an 16:43),

in which the words “those who recall,” ahl al-dhikri, indicate those with knowledge of the Qur’an and sunna, at their forefront the mujtahid Imams of this Umma. Why? Because, first of all, the Qur’an and hadith are in Arabic, and as a translator, I can assure you that it is not just any Arabic.

To understand the Qur’an and sunna, the mujtahid must have complete knowledge of the Arabic language in the same capacity as the early Arabs themselves had before the language came to be used by non-native speakers. This qualification, which almost no one in our time has, is not the main subject of my essay, but even if we did have it, what if you or I, though not trained specialists, wanted to deduce details of Islamic practice directly from the sources? After all, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) has said, in the hadith of Bukhari and Muslim: “When a judge gives judgement and strives to know a ruling (ijtahada) and is correct, he has two rewards. If he gives judgement and strives to know a ruling, but is wrong, he has one reward” (Bukhari, 9.133).

The answer is that the term ijtihad or “striving to know a ruling” in this hadith does not mean just any person’s efforts to understand and operationalize an Islamic ruling, but rather the person with sound knowledge of everything the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) taught that relates to the question. Whoever makes ijtihad without this qualification is a criminal. The proof of this is the hadith that the Companion Jabir ibn ‘Abdullah said:

We went on a journey, and a stone struck one of us and opened a gash in his head. When he later had a wet-dream in his sleep, he then asked his companions, “Do you find any dispensation for me to perform dry ablution (tayammum)?” [Meaning instead of a full purificatory bath (ghusl).] They told him, “We don’t find any dispensation for you if you can use water.”

So he performed the purificatory bath and his wound opened and he died. When we came to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), he was told of this and he said: “They have killed him, may Allah kill them. Why did they not ask?—for they didn’t know. The only cure for someone who does not know what to say is to ask” (Abu Dawud, 1.93).

This hadith, which was related by Abu Dawud, is well authenticated (hasan), and every Muslim who has any taqwa should reflect on it carefully, for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) indicated in it—in the strongest language possible—that to judge on a rule of Islam on the basis of insufficient knowledge is a crime. And like it is the well authenticated hadith “Whoever is given a legal opinion (fatwa) without knowledge, his sin is but upon the person who gave him the opinion” (Abu Dawud, 3.321).

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) also said:

Judges are three: two of them in hell, and one in paradise. A man who knows the truth and judges accordingly, he shall go to paradise. A man who judges for people while ignorant, he shall go to hell. And a man who knows the truth but rules unjustly, he shall go to hell (Sharh al-sunna, 10.94).

This hadith, which was related by Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Ibn Majah, and others, is rigorously authenticated (sahih), and any Muslim who would like to avoid the hellfire should soberly consider the fate of whoever, in the words of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), “judges for people while ignorant.”

Yet we all have our Yusuf ‘Ali Qur’ans, and our Sahih al-Bukhari translations. Aren’t these adequate scholarly resources?

These are valuable books, and do convey perhaps the largest and most important part of our din: the basic Islamic beliefs, and general laws of the religion. Our discussion here is not about these broad principles, but rather about understanding specific details of Islamic practice, which is called precisely fiqh. For this, I think any honest investigator who studies the issues will agree that the English translations are not enough. They are not enough because understanding the total Qur’an and hadith textual corpus, which comprises what we call the din, requires two dimensions in a scholar: a dimension of breadth, the substantive knowledge of all the texts; and a dimension of depth, the methodological tools needed to join between all the Qur’anic verses and hadiths, even those that ostensibly contradict one another.

Knowledge of Primary Texts. As for the breadth of a mujtahid’s knowledge, it is recorded that Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s student Muhammad ibn ‘Ubaydullah ibn al-Munadi heard a man ask him [Imam Ahmad]: “When a man has memorized 100,000 hadiths, is he a scholar of Sacred Law, a faqih?” And he said, “No.” The man asked, “200,000 then?” And he said, “No.” The man asked, “Then 300,000?” And he said, “No.” The man asked, “400,000?” And Ahmad gestured with his hand to signify “about that many” (Ibn al-Qayyim: I‘lam al-muwaqqi‘in, 4.205).

In truth, by the term “hadith” here Imam Ahmad meant the hadiths of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) in all their various chains of transmission, counting each chain of transmission as a separate hadith, and perhaps also counting the statements of the Sahaba. But the larger point here is that even if we eliminate the different chains, and speak only about the hadiths from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) that are plainly acceptable as evidence, whether sahih, “rigorously authenticated” or hasan “well authenticated” (which for purposes of ijtihad, may be assimilated to the sahih), we are still speaking of well over 10,000 hadiths, and they are not contained in Bukhari alone, or in Bukhari and Muslim alone, nor yet in any six books, or even in any nine. Yet whoever wants to give a fatwa or “formal legal opinion” and judge for people that something is lawful or unlawful, obligatory or sunna, must know all the primary texts that relate to it. For the perhaps 10,000 hadiths that are sahih are, for the mujtahid, as one single hadith, and he must first know them in order to join between them to explain the unified command of Allah.

I say “join between” because most of you must be aware that some sahih hadiths seem to controvert other equally sahih hadiths. What does a mujtahid do in such an instance?

Ijtihad. Let’s look at some examples. Most of us know the hadiths about fasting on the Day of ‘Arafa for the non-pilgrim, that “it expiates [the sins of] the year before and the year after” (Muslim, 2.819). But another rigorously authenticated hadith prohibits fasting on Friday alone (Bukhari, 3.54), and a well authenticated hadith prohibits fasting on Saturday alone (Tirmidhi, 3.120), of which Tirmidhi explains, “The meaning of the ‘offensiveness’ in this is when a man singles out Saturday to fast on, since the Jews venerate Saturdays” (ibid.). Some scholars hold Sundays offensive to fast on for the same reason, that they are venerated by non-Muslims. (Other hadiths permit fasting one of these days together with the day before or the day after it, perhaps because no religion venerates two of the days in a row.) The question arises: What does one do when ‘Arafa falls on a Friday, a Saturday, or a Sunday? The general demand for fasting on the Day of ‘Arafa might well be qualified by the specific prohibition of fasting on just one of these days. But a mujtahid aware of the whole hadith corpus would certainly know a third hadith related by Muslim that is even more specific, and says: “Do not single out Friday from among other days to fast on, unless it coincides with a fast one of you performs” (Muslim, 2.801).

The latter hadith establishes for the mujtahid the general principle that the ruling for fasting on a day normally prohibited to fast on changes when it “coincides with a fast one of you performs”—and so there is no problem with fasting whether the Day of Arafa falls on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

Here as elsewhere, whoever wants to understand the ruling of doing something in Islam must know all the texts connected with it. Because as ordinary Muslims, you and I are not only responsible for obeying the Qur’anic verses and hadiths we are familiar with. We are responsible for obeyingall of them, the whole shari‘a. And if we are not personally qualified to join between all of its texts—and we have heard Ahmad ibn Hanbal discuss how much knowledge this takes—we must follow someone who can, which is why Allah tells us, “Ask those who recall if you know not.”

The size and nature of this knowledge necessitate that the non-specialist use adab or “proper respect” towards the scholars of fiqh when he finds a hadith, whether in Bukhari or elsewhere, that ostensibly contradicts the schools of fiqh. A non-scholar, for example, reading through Sahih al-Bukhariwill find the hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) bared a thigh on the ride back from Khaybar (Bukhari, 1.103–4). And he might imagine that the four madhhabs or “legal schools”—Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali—were mistaken in their judgment that the thigh is ‘awraor “nakedness that must be covered.”

But in fact there are a number of other hadiths, all of them well authenticated (hasan) or rigorously authenticated (sahih) that prove that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) explicitly commanded various Sahaba to cover the thigh because it was nakedness. Hakim reports that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) saw Jarhad in the mosque wearing a mantle, and his thigh became uncovered, so the Prophet told him, “The thigh is part of one’s nakedness” (al-Mustadrak), of which Hakim said, “This is a hadith whose chain of transmission is rigorously authenticated (sahih),” which Imam Dhahabi confirmed (ibid.). Imam al-Baghawi records the sahih hadith that “the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) passed by Ma‘mar, whose two thighs were exposed, and told him, ‘O Ma‘mar, cover your two thighs, for the two thighs are nakedness’” (Sharh al-sunna 9.21). And Ahmad ibn Hanbal records that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “When one of you marries [someone to] his servant or hired man, let him not look at his nakedness, for what is below his navel to his two knees is nakedness” (Ahmad, 2.187), a hadith with a well authenticated (hasan) chain of transmission. The mujtahid Imams of the four schools knew these hadiths, and joined between them and the Khaybar hadith in Bukhari by the methodological principle that: “An explicit command in words from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) is given precedence over an action of his.” Why?

Among other reasons, because certain laws of the shari‘a applied to the Prophet alone (Allah bless him and give him peace). Such as the fact that when he went into battle, he was not permitted to retreat, no matter how outnumbered. Or such as the obligatoriness for him alone of praying tahajjud or “night vigil prayer” after rising from sleep before dawn, which is merely sunna for the rest of us. Or such as the permissibility for him alone of not breaking his fast at night between fast-days. Or such as the permissibility for him alone of having more than four wives—the means through which Allah, in His wisdom, preserved for us the minutest details of the Prophet’s day-to-day sunna (Allah bless him and give him peace), which a larger number of wives would be far abler to observe and remember.

Because certain laws of the shari‘a applied to him alone, the scholars of ijtihad have established the principle that in many cases, when an act was done by the Prophet personally (Allah bless him and give him peace), such as bearing the thigh after Khaybar, and when he gave an explicit command to us to do something else, in this case, to cover the thigh because it is nakedness, then the command is adopted for us, and the act is considered to pertain to him alone (Allah bless him and give him peace).

We can see from this example the kind of scholarship it takes to seriously comprehend the whole body of hadith, both in breadth of knowledge, and depth of interpretive understanding or fiqh, and that anyone who would give a fatwa, on the basis of the Khaybar hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, that “the scholars are wrong and the hadith is right” would be guilty of criminal negligence for his ignorance.

When one does not have substantive knowledge of the Qur’an and hadith corpus, and lacks the fiqh methodology to comprehensively join between it, the hadiths one has read are not enough. To take another example, there is a well authenticated (hasan) hadith that “the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) cursed women who visit graves” (Tirmidhi, 3.371). But scholars say that the prohibition of women visiting graves was abrogated (mansukh) by the rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadith “I had forbidden you to visit graves, but now visit them” (Muslim, 2.672).

Here, although the expression “now visit them” (fa zuruha) is an imperative to men (or to a group of whom at least some are men), the fact that the hadith permits women as well as men to now visit graves is shown by another hadith related by Muslim in his Sahih that when ‘A’isha asked the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) what she should say if she visited graves, he told her, “Say: ‘Peace be upon the believers and Muslims of the folk of these abodes: May Allah have mercy on those of us who have gone ahead and those who have stayed behind: Allah willing, we shall certainly be joining you’” (Muslim, 2.671), which plainly entails the permissibility of her visiting graves in order to say this, for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) would never have taught her these words if visiting the graves to say them had been disobedience. In other words, knowing all these hadiths, together with the methodological principle of naskh or “abrogation,” is essential to drawing the valid fiqh conclusion that the first hadith in which “the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) cursed women who visit graves”—was abrogated by the second hadith, as is attested to by the third.

Or consider the Qur’anic text in surat al-Ma’ida:

“The food of those who have been given the Book is lawful for you, and your food is lawful for them” (Qur’an 5:5).

This is a general ruling ostensibly pertaining to all their food. Yet this ruling is subject to takhsis, or “restriction” by more specific rulings that prove that certain foods of Ahl al-Kitab, “those who have been given the Book,” such as pork, or animals not properly slaughtered, are not lawful for us.

Ignorance of this principle of takhsis or restriction seems to be especially common among would-be mujtahids of our times, from whom we often hear the more general ruling in the words “But the Qur’an says,” or “But the hadith says,” without any mention of the more particular ruling from a different hadith or Qur’anic versethat restricts it. The reply can only be “Yes, brother, the Qur’an does say, ‘The food of those who have been given the Book is lawful for you,’ But what else does it say?” or “Yes, the hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari says the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) bared his thigh on the return from Khaybar. But what else do the hadiths say, and more importantly, are you sure you know it?”

The above examples illustrate only a few of the methodological rules needed by the mujtahid to understand and operationalize Islam by joining between all the evidence. Firstly, we saw the principle of takhsis or “restriction” of general rules by more specific ones, both in the example of fasting on the Day of ‘Arafa when it falls on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and the example of the food of Ahl al-Kitab. Secondly, in the Khaybar hadith inSahih al-Bukhari about baring the thigh and the hadiths commanding that the thigh be covered, we saw the principle of how an explicit propheticcommand in words is given precedence over a mere action when there is a contradiction. Thirdly, we saw the principle of nasikh wa mansukh, of “an earlier ruling being abrogated by a later one,” in the example of the initial prohibition of women visiting graves, and their subsequently being permitted to.

These are only three of the ways that two or more texts of the Qur’an and hadith may enter into and qualify one another, rules that someone who derives the shari‘a from them must know. In other words, they are but three tools of a whole methodological toolbox. We do not have the time tonight to go through all these tools in detail, although we can mention some in passing, giving first their Arabic names, such as:

—The ‘amm, a text of general applicability to many legal rulings, and its opposite:

—The khass, that which is applicable to only one ruling or type of ruling.

—The mujmal, that which requires other texts to be fully understood, and its opposite:

—The mubayyan, that which is plain without other texts.

—The mutlaq, that which is applicable without restriction, and its opposite:

—The muqayyad, that which has restrictions given in other texts.

—The nasikh, that which supersedes previous revealed rulings, and its opposite:

—The mansukh: that which is superseded.

—The nass: that which unequivocally decides a particular legal question, and its opposite:

—The dhahir: that which can bear more than one interpretation.

My point in mentioning what a mujtahid is, what fiqh is, and the types of texts that embody Allah’s commands, with the examples that illustrate them, is to answer our original question: “Why can’t we take our Islamic practice from the word of Allah and His messenger, which are divinely protected, instead of taking it from mujtahid Imams, who are not?” The answer, we have seen, is that revelation cannot be acted upon without understanding, and understanding requires firstly that one have the breadth of mastery of the whole, and secondly, the knowledge of how the parts relate to each other. Whoever joins between these two dimensions of the revelation is taking his Islamic practice from the word of Allah and His messenger, whether he does so personally, by being a mujtahid Imam, or whether by a means of another, by following one.

Following Scholars (Taqlid). The Qur’an clearly distinguishes between these two levels—the nonspecialists whose way is taqlid or “following the results of scholar without knowing the detailed evidence”; and those whose task is to know and evaluate the evidence—by Allah Most High saying in surat al-Nisa’:

“If they had referred it to the Messenger and to those of authority among them, then those of them whose task it is to find it out would have known the matter” (Qur’an 4:83)

—where alladhina yastanbitunahu minhum, “those of them whose task it is to find it out,” refers to those possessing the capacity to infer legal rulings directly from evidence, which is called in Arabic precisely istinbat, showing, as Qur’anic exegete al-Razi says, that “Allah has commanded those morally responsible to refer actual facts to someone who can infer (yastanbitu) the legal ruling concerning them” (Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi, 10.205).

A person who has reached this level can and indeed must draw his inferences directly from evidence, and may not merely follow another scholar’s conclusions without examining the evidence (taqlid), a rule expressed in books of methodological principles of fiqh as: Laysa li al-‘alim an yuqallida, “The alim [i.e. the mujtahid at the level of instinbat referred to by the above Qur’anic verse] may not merely follow another scholar” (al-Juwayni:Sharh al-Waraqat, 75), meaning it is not legally permissible for one mujtahid to follow another mujtahid unless he knows and agrees with his evidences.

The mujtahid Imams trained a number of scholars who were at this level. Imam Shafi‘i had al-Muzani, and Imam Abu Hanifa had Abu Yusuf and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani. It was to such students that Abu Hanifa addressed his words: “It is unlawful for whoever does not know my evidence to give my position as a fatwa” (al-Hamid: Luzum ittiba‘ madhahib al-a’imma, 6), and, “It is not lawful for anyone to give our position as a fatwa until he knows where we have taken it from” (ibid.).

It is one of the howlers of our times that these words are sometimes quoted as though they were addressed to ordinary Muslims. If it were unlawful for the carpenter, the sailor, the computer programmer, the doctor, to do any act of worship before he had mastered the entire textual corpus of the Qur’an and thousands of hadiths, together with all the methodological principles needed to weigh the evidence and comprehensively join between it, he would either have to give up his profession or give up his religion. A lifetime of study would hardly be enough for this, a fact that Abu Hanifa knew better than anyone else, and it was to scholars of istinbat, the mujtahids, that he addressed his remarks. Whoever quotes these words to non-scholars to try to suggest that Abu Hanifa meant that it is wrong for ordinary Muslims to accept the work of scholars, should stop for a moment to reflect how insane this is, particularly in view of the life work of Abu Hanifa from beginning to end, which consisted precisely in summarizing the fiqh rulings of the religion for ordinary people to follow and benefit from.

Imam Shafi‘i was also addressing this top level of scholars when he said: “When a hadith is sahih, it is my school (madhhab)”—which has been misunderstood by some to mean that if one finds a hadith, for example, in Sahih al-Bukhari that is inconsistent with a position of Shafi‘i’s, one should presume that he was ignorant of it, drop the fiqh, and accept the hadith.

I think the examples we have heard tonight of joining between several hadiths for a single ruling are too clear to misunderstand Shafi‘i in this way. Shafi‘i is referring to hadiths that he was previously unaware of and that mujtahid scholars know him to have been unaware of when he gave a particular ruling. And this, as Imam Nawawi has said, “is very difficult,” for Shafi‘i was aware of a great deal. We have heard the opinion of Shafi‘i’s student Ahmad ibn Hanbal about how many hadiths a faqih must know, and he unquestionably considered Shafi‘i to be such a scholar, for Shafi‘i was his sheikh in fiqh. Ibn Khuzayma, known as “the Imam of Imams” in hadith memorization, was once asked, “Do you know of any rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadith that Shafi‘i did not place in his books?” And he said “No” (Nawawi: al-Majmu‘, 1.10). And Imam Dhahabi has said, “Shafi‘i did not make a single mistake about a hadith” (Ibn Subki: Tabaqat al-Shafi‘iyya, 9.114). It is clear from all of this that Imam Shafi‘i’s statement “When a hadith is sahih, it is my position” only makes sense—and could result in meaningful corrections—if addressed to scholars at a level of hadith mastery comparable to his own.

Hadith Authentication. The last point raises another issue that few people are aware of today, and I shall devote the final part of my speech to it. Just as the mujtahid Imam is not like us in his command of the Qur’an and hadith evidence and the principles needed to join between it and infer rulings from it, so too he is not like us in the way he judges the authenticity of hadiths. If a person who is not a hadith specialist needs to rate a hadith, he will usually want to know if it appears, for example, in Sahih al-Bukhari, or Sahih Muslim, or if some hadith scholar has declared it to be sahih or hasan. A mujtahid does not do this.

Rather, he reaches an independent judgment as to whether a particular hadith is truly from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) through his own knowledge of hadith narrators and the sciences of hadith, and not from taqlid or “following the opinion of another hadith scholar.”

It is thus not necessarily an evidence against the positions of a mujtahid that Bukhari, or Muslim, or whoever, has accepted a hadith that contradicts the mujtahid’s evidence. Why? Because among hadith scholars, the reliability rating of individual narrators in hadith chains of transmission are disagreed about and therefore hadiths are disagreed about in the same manner that particular questions of fiqh are disagreed about among the scholars of fiqh. Like the schools of fiqh, the extent of this disagreement is relatively small in relation to the whole, but one should remember that it does exist.

Because a mujtahid scholar is not bound to accept another scholar’s ijtihad regarding a particular hadith, the ijtihad of a hadith specialist of our own time that, for example, a hadith is weak (da‘if), is not necessarily an evidence against the ijtihad of a previous mujtahid that the hadith is acceptable. This is particularly true in the present day, when specialists in hadith are not at the level of their predecessors in either knowledge of hadith sciences, or memorization of hadiths.

We should also remember what sahih means. I shall conclude my essay with the five conditions that have to be met for a hadith to be consideredsahih, and we shall see, in sha’ Allah, how the scholars of hadith have differed about them, a discussion drawn in its outlines from contemporary Syrian hadith scholar Muhammad ‘Awwama’s Athar al-hadith al-sharif fi ikhtilaf al-A’imma al-fuqaha [The effect of hadith on the differences of the Imams of fiqh] (21–23):

(a) The first condition is that a hadith must go back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) by a continuous chain of narrators. There is a difference of opinion here between Bukhari and Muslim, in that Bukhari held that for any two adjacent narrators in a chain of transmission, it must be historically established that the two actually met, whereas Muslim and others stipulated only that their meeting have been possible, such as by one having lived in a particular city that the other is known to have visited at least once in his life. So some hadiths will be acceptable to Muslim that will not be acceptable to Bukhari and those of the mujtahid imams who adopt his criterion.

(b) The second condition for a sahih hadith is that the narrators be morally upright. The scholars have disagreed about the definition of this, some accepting that it is enough that a narrator be a Muslim who is not proven to have been unacceptable. Others stipulate that he be outwardly established as having been morally upright, while other scholars stipulate that this be established inwardly as well. These different criteria are naturally reasons why two mujtahids may differ about the authenticity of a single hadith.

(c) The third condition is that the narrators must be known to have had accurate memories. The verification of this is similarly subject to some disagreement between the Imams of hadith, resulting in differences about reliability ratings of particular narrators, and therefore of particular hadiths.

(d) The fourth condition for a sahih hadith is that the text and transmission of the hadith must be free of shudhudh, or “variance from established standard narrations of it.” An example is when a hadith is related by five different narrators who are contemporaries of one another, all of whom relate the same hadith from the same sheikh through his chain of transmission back to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). Here, if we find that four of the hadiths have the same wording but one of them has a variant wording, the hadith with the variant wording is called shadhdh or “deviant,” and it is not accepted, because the difference is naturally assumed to be the mistake of the one narrator, since all of the narrators heard the hadith from the same sheikh.

There is a hadith (to take an example researched by our hadith teacher, sheikh Shu‘ayb al-Arna’ut) related by Ahmad (4.318), Bayhaqi (2.132), Ibn Khuzayma (1.354), and Ibn Hibban, with a reliable chain of narrators (thiqat)—except for Kulayb ibn Hisham, who is a merely “acceptable” (saduq), not “reliable” (thiqa)—that the Companion Wa’il ibn Hujr al-Hadrami said that when he watched the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) kneeling in the Tashahhud or “Testification of Faith” of his prayer, the Prophet

lifted his [index] finger, and I saw him move it, supplicating with it. I came [some time] after that and saw people in [winter] over-cloaks, their hands moving under the cloaks (Ibn Hibban, 5.170–71).

Now, all of the versions of the hadith mentioning that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) moved his finger have been related to us by way of Za’ida ibn Qudama al-Thaqafi, a narrator who is considered reliable, and who transmitted it from the hadith sheikh ‘Asim ibn Kulayb, who related it from his father Kulayb ibn Shihab, from Wa’il ibn Hujr al-Hadrami. But we find that this version of “moving the finger” contradicts versions of the hadith transmitted from the same sheikh, ‘Asim ibn Kulayb, by no less than ten of ‘Asim’s other students, all of them reliable, who heard ‘Asim report that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) did not move but rather pointed (ashara) with his index finger (towards the qibla or “direction of prayer”).

These companions of ‘Asim (with their hadiths, which are well authenticated (hasan)) are: Sufyan al-Thawri: “then he pointed with his index finger, putting the thumb to the middle finger to make a ring with them” (al-Musannaf 2.68–69); Sufyan ibn ‘Uyayna: “he joined his thumb and middle finger to make a ring, and pointed with his index finger” (Ahmad, 4.318); Shu‘ba ibn al-Hajjaj: “he pointed with his index finger, and formed a ring with the middle one” (Ahmad, 4.319); Qays ibn al-Rabi‘: “then he joined his thumb and middle finger to make a ring, and pointed with his index finger” (Tabarani, 22.33–34); ‘Abd al-Wahid ibn Ziyad al-‘Abdi: “he made a ring with a finger, and pointed with his index finger” (Ahmad, 4.316); ‘Abdullah ibn Idris al-Awdi: “he had joined his thumb and middle finger to make a ring, and raised the finger between them to make du‘a(supplication) in the Testification of Faith” (Ibn Majah, 1.295); Zuhayr ibn Mu‘awiya: “and I saw him [‘Asim] say, ‘Like this,’—and Zuhayr pointed with his first index finger, holding two fingers in, and made a ring with his thumb and second index [middle] finger” (Ahmad, 4.318–19); Abu al-Ahwas Sallam ibn Sulaym: “he began making du‘a like this—meaning with his index finger, pointing with it—” (Musnad al-Tayalisi, 137); Bishr ibn al-Mufaddal: “and I saw him [‘Asim] say, ‘Like this,’—and Bishr joined his thumb and middle finger to make a ring, and pointed with his index finger” (Abi Dawud, 1.251); and Khalid ibn Abdullah al-Wasiti: “then he joined his thumb and middle finger to make a ring, and pointed with his index finger” (Bayhaqi, 2.131).

All of these narrators are reliable (thiqat), and all heard ‘Asim ibn Kulayb relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) “pointed with(ashara bi) his index finger” during the Testimony of Faith in his prayer. There are many other narrations of “pointing with the index finger” transmitted through sheikhs other than ‘Asim, omitted here for brevity—four of them, for example, in Sahih Muslim, 1.408–9). The point is, for illustrating the meaning of a shadhdh or “deviant hadith,” that the version of moving the finger was conveyed only by Za’ida ibn Qudama from ‘Asim. Ibn Khuzayma says: “There is not a single hadith containing yuharrikuha (‘he moved it’) except this hadith mentioned by Za’ida” (Ibn Khuzayma, 1.354).

So we know that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to point with his index finger, and that the version of “moving his finger” isshadhdh or “deviant,” and represents a slip of the narrator, for the word ishara in the majority’s version means only “to point or gesture at,” or “to indicate with the hand,” and has no recorded lexical sense of wiggling or shaking the finger (Lisan al-‘Arab, 4.437 and al-Qamus al-muhit (540). This interpretation is explicitly borne out by well authenticated hadiths related from the Companion Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr that “the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to point with his index finger when making supplication [in the Testification of Faith], and did not move it” (Abi Dawud, 1.260) and that he “used to point with his index finger when making supplication, without moving it” (Bayhaqi, 2.131–32).

Finally, we may note that Imam Bayhaqi has joined between the Za’ida ibn Qudama hadith and the many hadiths that apparently contradict it by suggesting that moving the finger in the Za’ida hadith may mean simply lifting it (rafa‘a), a wording explicitly mentioned in one version recorded by Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) “raised the right finger that is next to the thumb, and supplicated with it” (Muslim, 1.408). So according to Bayhaqi, the contradiction is only apparent, and raising the finger is the “movement” that Wa’il saw from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the people’s hands under their cloaks, according to Za’ida’s version, which remains, however, shadhdh or “deviant” from a hadith point of view, unless understood in this limitary sense.

(e) The fifth and final condition for a sahih hadith is that both the text and chain of transmission must be without ‘illa or “hidden flaw” that alerts experts to expect inauthenticity in it. We will dwell for a moment on this point not only because it helps illustrate the processes of ijtihad, but because in-depth expertise in this condition was not common even among top hadith Imams. The greatest name in the field was ‘Ali al-Madini, one of the sheikhs of Bukhari, though his major work about it is now unfortunately lost. Daraqutni is perhaps the most famous specialist in the field whose works exist. In the words of Ibn al-Salah, a hafiz or “hadith master” (someone with at least 100,000 hadiths by memory), the knowledge of the ‘illa or “hidden flaw” is:

among the greatest of the sciences of hadith, the most exacting, and highest: only scholars of great memorization, hadith expertise, and penetrating understanding have a thorough knowledge of it. It refers to obscure, hidden flaws that vitiate hadiths, “flawed” meaning that a defect is discovered that negates the authenticity of a hadith that is outwardly “rigorously authenticated” (sahih). It affects hadiths with reliable chains of narrators that outwardly appear to fulfill all the conditions of a sahihhadith (‘Ulum al-hadith).

It may surprise some people to learn that one example often cited in hadith textbooks of such a hidden flaw (‘illa) is from Sahih Muslim, all of whose hadiths are rigorously authenticated (sahih), as Ibn al-Salah has said, “except for a very small number of words, which hadith masters of textual evaluation (naqd) such as Daraqutni and others have critiqued, and which are known to scholars of this level” (‘Ulum al-hadith). The hadith of the present example was related by Muslim from the Companion Anas ibn Malik in several versions, which might convince those unaware of its flaw to believe that someone at prayer should omit the Basmala or “Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim” at the beginning of the Fatiha. According to the hadith, Anas ibn Malik (Allah be well pleased with him) said,

I prayed with the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, and ‘Uthman, and they opened with “al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin,”not mentioning “Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim” at the first of the recital or the last of it [and in another version, “I didn’t hear any of them recite ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim’”] (Muslim, 1.299).

Scholars say the hadith’s flaw lies in the negation of the Basmala at the end, which is not the words of Anas, but rather one of the subnarrators explaining what he thought Anas meant. Ibn al-Salah says: “Its subnarrator related it with the above-mentioned wording in accordance with his own understanding of it” (Muqaddima Ibn al-Salah (b01), 99). This hadith is given as an example of a “hidden flaw” in a number of manuals of hadith terminology such as hadith master (hafiz) Suyuti’s Tadrib al-rawi (1.254–57); hadith master Ibn al-Salah’s Ulum al-hadith; hadith master Zayn al-Din al-‘Iraqi’s al-Taqyid wa al-idah (98–103); and others. Al-‘Iraqi says, “A number of hadith masters (huffaz) have judged it to be flawed, including Shafi‘i, Daraqutni, Bayhaqi, and Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr” (ibid., 98).

Now, Bukhari has related the hadith up to the words “and they opened with ‘al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin’”; without mentioning omitting the Basmala (Bukhari, 1.189), and Tirmidhi and Abu Dawud relate no other version. Scholars point out, in this connection, that the words “al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin” were in fact the name of the Fatiha, for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and his Companions often used the opening words of suras as names for them; for example, in the hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari of Abu Sa‘id ibn al-Mu‘alla, who relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“I will teach you a sura that is the greatest sura of the Qur’an before you leave the mosque.” Then he took my hand, and when he was going out, I said to him, “Didn’t you say, ‘I will teach you a sura that is the greatest sura of the Qur’an before you leave the mosque’?” And he said: “‘Al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin’: it is the Seven Oft-Recited [Verses] (al-Sab‘ al-Mathani) and the Tremendous Recital (al-Qur’an al-‘Adhim) that I have been given” (ibid., 6.20–21).

In this hadith, “Al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin” is plainly the name of the Fatiha, and means nothing besides, for otherwise, it is one verse, not seven. ‘A’isha, who was one of the ulama of the Sahaba, also referred to names of suras in this way, as in the hadith of Bukhari that

the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), when he went to bed each night, joined his hands together, blew a light spray of saliva upon them, and read over them “Qul huwa Llahu Ahad,” “Qul a‘udhu bi Rabbi l-Falaq,” and “Qul a‘udhu bi Rabbi n-Nas”; then wiped every part of his body he could with them (ibid., 233–34),

which clearly shows that she named the suras by their opening words (after the Basmala), as did other early Muslims (such as Bukhari in his chapter headings in the section of his Sahih on the Virtues of the Qur’an, for example). So there is no indication, in the portion of the Anas hadith’s wording that is agreed upon by both Bukhari and Muslim; namely, “I prayed with the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, and ‘Uthman, and they opened with ‘al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin,’” that the Basmala was not recited aloud. Says Tirmidhi: “Imam Shafi‘i has said, ‘Its meaning is that they used to begin with the Fatiha before the sura, not that they did not recite “Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim.”’ And Shafi‘i held that the prayer was begun with ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim,’ and that it was recited aloud in prayers recited aloud” (Tirmidhi, 2.16).

Hadith scholars who are masters of textual critique, like Daraqutni and others, consider the words of the Anas hadith”not mentioning ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim,’” which outwardly seem to suggest omitting the Basmala, to be vitiated by an ‘illa or “hidden flaw” for many reasons, a few of which are:

—It is established by numerous intersubstantiative channels of transmission (tawatur), that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “There is no prayer for whoever does not recite the Fatiha” (Bukhari, 1.192). That the Basmala is the Fatiha’s first verse is shown by several facts:

First, the Sahaba affirmed nothing in the collation of the Qur’an (mushaf) of ‘Uthman’s time except what was Qur’an, and they unanimously placed the Basmala at the beginning of every sura except surat al-Tawba.

Second, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “When you recite ‘al-Hamdu li Llah,’ recite ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim,’ for it is the Sum of the Qur’an (Umm al-Qur’an), and the Compriser of the Scripture (Umm al-Kitab), and the Seven Oft-Repeated [Verses] (al-Sab‘ al-Mathani)—and ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim’ is one of its verses” (Bayhaqi, 2.45; and Daraqutni, 1.312), a hadith related with a rigorously authenticated (sahih) channel of transmission to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), and through another chain to Abu Hurayra alone (Allah be well pleased with him).

Third, Umm Salama relates: “The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to recite: ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim. al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin,’ separating each phrase”; a hadith which Hakim said was rigorously authenticated (sahih) according to the conditions of Bukhari and Muslim, which Imam Dhahabi corroborated (al-Mustadrak, 1.232). Daraqutni also relates from Umm Salama that “the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) when he used to recite the Qur’an would pause in his recital verse by verse: ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim: al-Hamdu li Llahi Rabbi l-‘Alamin: ar-Rahmani r-Rahim: Maliki yawmi d-din.’” Daraqutni said, “Its ascription is rigorously authenticated (sahih); all of its narrators are reliable” (Daraqutni, 1.312–13). These hadiths show that the Basmala was recited aloud by the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) as part of the Fatiha.

Fourth, Bukhari relates in his Sahih that when Anas was asked how the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to recite, “he answered: ‘By prolonging [the vowels]’—and then he [Anas] recited ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim,’ prolonging the Bismi Llah, prolonging the r-Rahman, and prolonging the r-Rahim” (Bukhari, 6.241), indicating that Anas regarded this as part of the Prophet’s Qur’an recital and that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) recited it aloud.

Fifth, Daraqutni has recorded two hadiths, both from Ibn ‘Abbas, and has said about each of them, “This is a rigorously authenticated (sahih) chain of transmission, there is not a weak narrator in it,” of which the first is: “The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to recite ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim,’ aloud”; and the second is: “The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) used to begin the prayer with ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim’” (al-Nawawi: al-Majmu‘, 3.347).

—Imam al-Mawardi summarizes: “Because it is established that it is obligatory to recite the Fatiha in the prayer, and that the Basmala is part of it, the ruling for reciting the Basmala aloud or to oneself must be the same as that of reciting the Fatiha aloud or to oneself” (al-Hawi al-kabir, 2.139).

—Imam Nawawi says: “Concerning reciting ‘Bismi Llahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim’ aloud, we have mentioned that our position is that it is praiseworthy to do so. Wherever one recites the Fatiha and sura aloud, the ruling for reciting the Basmala aloud is the same as reciting the rest of the Fatiha and sura aloud. This is the position of the majority of the ulama of the Sahaba and those who were taught by them (Tabi‘in) and those after them. As for the Sahaba who held the Basmala is recited aloud at prayer, the hadith master (hafiz) Abu Bakr al-Khatib reports that they included Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, ‘Ali, ‘Ammar ibn Yasir, Ubayy ibn Ka‘b, Ibn ‘Umar, Ibn ‘Abbas, Abu Qatada, Abu Sa‘id, Qays ibn Malik, Abu Hurayra, ‘Abdullah ibn Abi Awfa, Shaddad ibn Aws, ‘Abdullah ibn Ja‘far, Husayn ibn ‘Ali, Mu‘awiya, and the congregation of Emigrants (Muhajirin) and Helpers (Ansar) who were present with Mu‘awiya when he prayed in Medina but did not say the Basmala aloud, and they censured him, so he returned to saying it aloud” (al-Majmu‘, 3.341).

These are some reasons why scholars regard the Anas hadith in Sahih Muslim to be mu‘all or “flawed.” We cannot here discuss other aspects of the hadith such as the flaws in its chain of narrators, which are explained in detail in Zayn al-Din ‘Iraqi’s al-Taqyid wa al-idah (100–101), though the foregoing may give a general idea why it has been considered flawed by hadith masters (huffaz) such as Suyuti, ‘Iraqi, Ibn Salah, Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr, Daraqutni, and Bayhaqi—and why the shari‘a ruling apparently deducible from the end of the hadith; namely, omitting the Basmala when reciting the Fatiha at prayer, has been rejected by al-Shafi‘i, Nawawi, and others, who hold that the Basmala is recited aloud whenever the Fatiha is. (The position of Abu Hanifa and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, it may be noted, is that one recites the Basmala to oneself before the Fatiha, thus joining between hadiths on both sides by interpreting the “omitting” in the Anas hadith in other than its apparent sense, to mean merely “reciting to oneself.”) In any case, it is clearly not a story of “the hadith in Sahih Muslim that the Imams didn’t know about,” as some of the unlearned seriously suggest today, but rather a difference of opinion in hadith authentication involving the highest levels of shari‘a scholarship.

Studying the five conditions above for a sahih hadith and the differences about them among specialists shows us why the mujtahid Imams of the schools sometimes differ with one another about whether a particular hadith is really from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). Whoever believes that a single scholar, whether Bukhari, Muslim, or a contemporary sheikh, can finish off all differences of opinion about the acceptability of particular hadiths, should correct his impressions by going and studying the sciences of hadith. What we can realize from this is that when we find a hadith in Sahih Bukhari that one school of fiqh seems to follow and another does not, it may well be that differences in fiqh methodology, hadith methodology, or both, play a role.

Conclusions. Let me summarize everything I have said tonight. I first pointed out that the knowledge you and I learn from the Qur’an and hadith may be divided into three categories. The first is the knowledge of Allah and His attributes, and the basic truths of Islamic belief such as the messengerhood of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), the belief in the Last Day, and so on. Every Muslim can and must learn this knowledge from the Book of Allah and the sunna, which is also the case for the second kind of knowledge: that of general Islamic laws to do good, to avoid evil, to perform the prayer, pay zakat, fast Ramadan, to cooperate with others in good works, and so on. Anyone can and must learn these general prescriptions for him or herself.

Then we discussed a third category of knowledge, which consists of fiqh or “understanding” of specific details of Islamic practice. We found in the Qur’an and sahih hadiths that people are of two types respecting this knowledge, those qualified to do ijtihad and those who are not. We mentioned the sahih hadith about “a man who judges for people while ignorant: he shall go to hell,” showing that would-be mujtahids are criminals when they operate without training.

We heard the Qur’anic verse that established that a certain group of the Muslim community must learn and be able to teach others the specific details of their religion. We heard the Qur’anic verse that those who do not know must ask those who do, as well as the verse about referring matters to “those whose task it is to find it out.”

We talked about these scholars, the mujtahid Imams, firstly, in terms of their comprehensive knowledge of the whole Qur’an and hadith textual corpus, and secondly, in terms of their depth of interpretation, and here we mentioned Qur’an and hadith examples that illustrate the processes by which mujtahid Imams join between multiple texts, and give precedence when there is ostensive conflict. Our concrete examples of ijtihad enabled us in turn to understand to whom the Imams addressed their famous remarks not to follow their positions without knowing the proofs. They addressed them to the first rank scholars they had trained and who were capable of grasping and evaluating the issues involved in these particular proofs.

We then saw that the Imams were also mujtahids in the matter of judging hadiths to be sahih or otherwise, and noted that, just as it is unlawful for a mujtahid Imam to do taqlid or “follow another mujtahid without knowing his evidence” in a question of fiqh, neither does he do so in the question of accepting particular hadiths. Finally, we noted that the differences in reliability ratings of hadiths among qualified scholars were parallel to the differences among scholars about the details of Islamic practice: a relatively small amount of difference in relation to the whole.

The main point of all of this is that while every Muslim can take the foundation of his Islam directly from the Qur’an and hadith; namely, the main beliefs and general ethical principles he has to follow—for the specific details of fiqh of Islamic practice, knowing a Qur’anic verse or hadith may be worlds apart from knowing the shari‘a ruling, unless one is a qualified mujtahid or is citing one.

As for would-be mujtahids who know some Arabic and are armed with books of hadith, they are like the would-be doctor we mentioned earlier: if his only qualification were that he could read English and owned some medical books, we would certainly object to his practicing medicine, even if it were no more than operating on someone’s little finger. So what should be said of someone who knows only Arabic and has some books of hadith, and wants to operate on your akhira?

To understand why Muslims follow madhhabs, we have to go beyond simplistic slogans about “the divinely-protected versus the non-divinely-protected,” and appreciate the Imams of fiqh who have operationalized the Qur’an and sunna to apply in our lives as shari‘a, and we must ask ourselves if we really “hear and obey” when Allah tells us

“Ask those who know if you know not” (Qur’an 16:43).

©Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995

This is the text of a lecture given at Islamic Cultural Centre (Regents Park Mosque) January 1995, Bradford University 27th January 1995, Birmingham Central Mosque 29th January 1995.

This essay developed from a lecture given in the United States, Canada, and England in 1994 and 1995.

How would you respond to the Claim that Sufism is bid’a?

I would respond by looking to see how traditional ulama or Islamic scholars have viewed it. For the longest period of Islamic history–from Umayyad times to Abbasid, to Mameluke, to the end of the six-hundred-year Ottoman period–Sufism has been taught and understood as an Islamic discipline, like Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), hadith, Qur’an recital (tajwid), tenets of faith (ilm al-tawhid) or any other, each of which preserved some particular aspect of the din or religion of Islam. While the details and terminology of these shari’a disciplines were unknown to the first generation of Muslims, when they did come into being, they were not considered bid’a or “reprehensible innovation” by theulema of shari’a because for them, bid’a did not pertain to means, but rather to ends, or more specifically, those ends that nothing in Islam attested to the validity of.

To illustrate this point, we may note that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) never in his life prayed in a mosque built of reinforced concrete, with a carpeted floor, glass windows, and so on, yet these are not considered bid’a, because we Muslims have been commanded to come together in mosques to perform the prayer, and large new buildings for this are merely a means to carry out the command.

In the realm of knowledge, books of detailed interpretation of the Qur’an, verse by verse and sura by sura, were not known to the first generation of Islam, nor was the term tafsir current among them, yet because of its benefit in preserving a vital aspect of the revelation, the understanding of the Qur’an, when the tafsir literature came into being, it was acknowledged to serve an end endorsed by the shari’a and was not condemned as bid’a. The same is true of most of the Islamic sciences, such as ilm al-jarh wa tadil or “the science of weighing positive and negative factors for evaluating the reliability of hadith narrators”, or ilm al-tawhid, “the science of tenets of Islamic faith”, and other disciplines essential to the shari’a. In this connection, Imam Shafi’i (d. 204/820) has said, “Anything which has a support (mustanad) from the shari’a is not bid’a, even if the early Muslims did not do it” (Ahmad al-Ghimari, Tashnif al-adhan, Cairo: Maktaba al-Khanji, n.d., 133).

Similarly ilm al-tasawwuf, “the science of Sufism” came into being to preserve and transmit a particular aspect of the shari’a, that of ikhlas or sincerity. It was recognized that the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) was not only words and actions, but also states of being: that a Muslim must not only say certain things and do certain things, but must also be something. The shari’a commands one, for example, in many Qur’anic verses and prophetic hadiths, to fear Allah, to have sincerity toward Him, to be so certain in ones knowledge of Allah that one worships Him as if one sees Him, to love the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) more than any other human being, to show love and respect to all fellow Muslims, to show mercy, and to have many other states of the heart. It likewise forbids us such inward states as envy, malice, pride, arrogance, love of this world, anger for the sake of one’s ego, and so on. Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi relates, for example, with a chain of transmission judged rigorously authenticated (sahih) by Ibn Main, the hadith “Anger spoils faith (iman) as [the bitterness of] aloes sap spoils honey” (Nawadir al-usul. Istanbul 1294/1877. Reprint. Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d., 6).

If we reflect upon these states, obligatory to attain or to eliminate, we notice that they proceed from dispositions, dispositions not only lacking in the unregenerate human heart, but acquired only with some effort, resulting in a human change so profound that the Qur’an in many verses terms it purification, as when Allah says in surat al-Ala, for example, “He has succeeded who purifies himself” (Qur’an 87:14). Bringing about this change is the aim of the Islamic science of Sufism, and it cannot be termed bid’a, because the shari’a commands us to accomplish the change.

At the practical level, the nature of this science of purifying the heart (like virtually all other traditional Islamic disciplines) requires that the knowledge be taken from those who possess it. This is why historically we find that groups of students gathered around particular sheikhs to learn the discipline of Sufism from. While such tariqas or groups, past and present, have emphasized different ways to realize the attachment of the heart to Allah commanded by the Islamic revelation, some features are found in all of them, such as learning knowledge from a teacher by precept and example, and then methodically increasing ones iman or faith by applying this knowledge through performing obligatory and supererogatory works of worship, among the greatest of latter being dhikr or the remembrance of Allah. There is much in the Qur’an and sunna that attests to the validity of this approach, such as the hadith related by al-Bukhari that:

Allah Most High says: “. . . . My slave approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My slave keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks. If he asks me, I will surely give to him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him (Sahih al-Bukhari. 9 vols. Cairo 1313/1895. Reprint (9 vols. in 3). Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d., 5.131: 6502)

–which is a way of expressing that such a person has realized the consummate awareness of tawhid or “unity of Allah” demanded by the shari’a, which entails total sincerity to Allah in all one’s actions. Because of this hadith, and others, traditional ulama have long acknowledged that ilm or “Sacred Knowledge” is not sufficient in itself, but also entails amal or “applying what one knows”–as well as the resultant hal or “praiseworthy spiritual state” mentioned in the hadith.

It was perceived in all Islamic times that when a scholar joins between these aspects, his words mirror his humility and sincerity, and for that reason enter the hearts of listeners. This is why we find that so many of the Islamic scholars to whom Allah gave tawfiq or success in their work were Sufis. Indeed, to throw away every traditional work of the Islamic sciences authored by those educated by Sufis would be to discard 75 percent or more of the books of Islam. These men included such scholars as the Hanafi Imam Muhammad Amin Ibn Abidin, Sheikh al-Islam Zakaria al-Ansari, Imam Ibn Daqiq al-Eid, Imam al-Izz Ibn Abd al-Salam, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Sheikh Ahmad al-Sirhindi, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Bajuri, Imam al-Ghazali, Shah Wali Allah al-Dahlawi, Imam al-Nawawi, the hadith master (hafiz, someone with 100,000 hadiths by memory) Abd al-Adhim al-Mundhiri, the hadith master Murtada al-Zabidi, the hadith master Abd al-Rauf al-Manawi, the hadith master Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, the hadith master Taqi al-Din al-Subki, Imam al-Rafii, Imam Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, Zayn al-Din al-Mallibari, Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, and many many others.

Imam al-Nawawi’s attitude towards Sufism is plain from his work Bustan al-arifin [The grove of the knowers of Allah] on the subject, as well as his references to al-Qushayri’s famous Sufi manual al-Risala al-Qushayriyya throughout his own Kitab al-adhkar [Book of the remembrances of Allah], and the fact that fifteen out of seventeen quotations about sincerity (ikhlas) and being true (sidq) in an introductory section of his largest legal work (al-Majmu: sharh al-Muhadhdhab. 20 vols. Cairo n.d. Reprint. Medina: al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya, n.d., 1.1718) are from Sufis who appear by name in al-Sulami’s Tabaqat al-Sufiyya [The successive generations of Sufis]. Even Ibn Taymiyya (whose views on Sufism remain strangely unfamiliar even to those for whom he is their “Sheikh of Islam”) devoted volumes ten and eleven of his Majmu al-fatawa to Sufism, while his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote his three-volume Madarij al-salikin as a detailedcommentary on Abdullah al-Ansaris Manazil al-sairin, a guide to the maqamat or “spiritual stations” of the Sufi path. These and many other Muslim scholars knew firsthand the value of Sufism as an ancillary shari’adiscipline needed to purify the heart, and this was the reason that the Umma as a whole did not judge Sufism to be a bid’a down through the ages of Islamic civilization, but rather recognized it as the science of ikhlas or sincerity, so urgently needed by every Muslim on “a day when wealth will not avail, nor sons, but only him who brings Allah a sound heart” (Qur’an 26:88).

And Allah alone gives success.

©Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995

Who or what is a Salafi? Is their approach valid?

The word salafi or “early Muslim” in traditional Islamic scholarship means someone who died within the first four hundred years after the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), including scholars such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi’i, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Anyone who died after this is one of the khalaf or “latter-day Muslims”.

The term “Salafi” was revived as a slogan and movement, among latter-day Muslims, by the followers of Muhammad Abduh (the student of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani) some thirteen centuries after the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), approximately a hundred years ago. Like similar movements that have historically appeared in Islam, its basic claim was that the religion had not been properly understood by anyone since the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and the early Muslims–and themselves.

In terms of ideals, the movement advocated a return to a shari’a-minded orthodoxy that would purify Islam from unwarranted accretions, the criteria for judging which would be the Qur’an and hadith. Now, these ideals are noble, and I don’t think anyone would disagree with their importance. The only points of disagreement are how these objectives are to be defined, and how the program is to be carried out. It is difficult in a few words to properly deal with all the aspects of the movement and the issues involved, but I hope to publish a fuller treatment later this year, insha’Allah, in a collection of essays called “The Re-Formers of Islam“.

As for its validity, one may note that the Salafi approach is an interpretation of the texts of the Qur’an and sunna, or rather a body of interpretation, and as such, those who advance its claims are subject to the same rigorous criteria of the Islamic sciences as anyone else who makes interpretive claims about the Qur’an and sunna; namely, they must show:

1. that their interpretations are acceptable in terms of Arabic language;

2. that they have exhaustive mastery of all the primary texts that relate to each question, and

3. that they have full familiarity of the methodology of usul al-fiqh or “fundamentals of jurisprudence” needed to comprehensively join between all the primary texts.

Only when one has these qualifications can one legitimately produce a valid interpretive claim about the texts, which is called ijtihad or “deduction of shari’a” from the primary sources. Without these qualifications, the most one can legitimately claim is to reproduce such an interpretive claim from someone who definitely has these qualifications; namely, one of those unanimously recognized by the Umma as such since the times of the true salaf, at their forefront the mujtahid Imams of the four madhhabs or “schools of jurisprudence”.

As for scholars today who do not have the qualifications of a mujtahid, it is not clear to me why they should be considered mujtahids by default, such as when it is said that someone is “the greatest living scholar of the sunna” any more than we could qualify a school-child on the playground as a physicist by saying, “He is the greatest physicist on the playground”. Claims to Islamic knowledge do not come about by default. Slogans about “following the Qur’an and sunna” sound good in theory, but in practice it comes down to a question of scholarship, and who will sort out for the Muslim the thousands of shari’a questions that arise in his life. One eventually realizes that one has to choose between following the ijtihad of a real mujtahid, or the ijtihad of some or another “movement leader”, whose qualifications may simply be a matter of reputation, something which is often made and circulated among people without a grasp of the issues.

What comes to many peoples minds these days when one says “Salafis” is bearded young men arguing about din. The basic hope of these youthful reformers seems to be that argument and conflict will eventually wear down any resistance or disagreement to their positions, which will thus result in purifying Islam. Here, I think education, on all sides, could do much to improve the situation.

The reality of the case is that the mujtahid Imams, those whose task it was to deduce the Islamic shari’a from the Qur’an and hadith, were in agreement about most rulings; while those they disagreed about, they had good reason to, whether because the Arabic could be understood in more than one way, or because the particular Qur’an or hadith text admitted of qualifications given in other texts (some of them acceptable for reasons of legal methodology to one mujtahid but not another), and so forth.

Because of the lack of hard information in English, the legitimacy of scholarly difference on shari’a rulings is often lost sight of among Muslims in the West. For example, the work Fiqh al-sunna by the author Sayyid Sabiq, recently translated into English, presents hadith evidences for rulings corresponding to about 95 percent of those of the Shafi’i school. Which is a welcome contribution, but by no means a “final word” about these rulings, for each of the four schools has a large literature of hadith evidences, and not just the Shafi’i school reflected by Sabiq’s work. The Maliki school has the Mudawwana of Imam Malik, for example, and the Hanafi school has the Sharh ma’ani al-athar [Explanation of meanings of hadith] and Sharh mushkil al-athar [Explanation of problematic hadiths], both by the great hadith Imam Abu Jafar al-Tahawi, the latter work of which has recently been published in sixteen volumes by Mu’assasa al-Risala in Beirut. Whoever has not read these and does not know what is in them is condemned to be ignorant of the hadith evidence for a great many Hanafi positions.

What I am trying to say is that there is a large fictional element involved when someone comes to the Muslims and says, “No one has understood Islam properly except the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and early Muslims, and our sheikh”. This is not valid, for the enduring works of first-rank Imams of hadith, jurisprudence, Qur’anic exegesis, and other shari’a disciplines impose upon Muslims the obligation to know and understand their work, in the same way that serious comprehension of any other scholarly field obliges one to have studied the works of its major scholars who have dealt with its issues and solved its questions. Without such study, one is doomed to repeat mistakes already made and rebutted in the past.

Most of us have acquaintances among this Umma who hardly acknowledge another scholar on the face of the earth besides the Imam of their madhhab, the Sheikh of their Islam, or some contemporary scholar or other. And this sort of enthusiasm is understandable, even acceptable (at a human level) in a non-scholar. But only to the degree that it does not become ta’assub or bigotry, meaning that one believes one may put down Muslims who follow other qualified scholars. At that point it is haram, because it is part of the sectarianism (tafarruq) among Muslims that Islam condemns.

When one gains Islamic knowledge and puts fiction aside, one sees that superlatives about particular scholars such as “the greatest” are untenable; that each of the four schools of classical Islamic jurisprudence has had many many luminaries. To imagine that all preceding scholarship should be evaluated in terms of this or that “Great Reformer” is to ready oneself for a big letdown, because intellectually it cannot be supported. I remember once hearing a law student at the University of Chicago say: “I’m not saying that Chicago has everything. Its just that no place else has anything.” Nothing justifies transposing this kind of attitude onto our scholarly resources in Islam, whether it is called “Islamic Movement”, “Salafism”, or something else, and the sooner we leave it behind, the better it will be for our Islamic scholarship, our sense of reality, and for our din.

©Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995

What is a Madhhab? Why is it necessary to follow one?

What is a Madhhab? Why is it necessary to follow one?

The word madhhab is derived from an Arabic word meaning “to go” or “to take as a way”, and refers to a mujtahid‘s choice in regard to a number of interpretive possibilities in deriving the rule of Allah from the primary texts of the Qur’an and hadith on a particular question. In a larger sense, a madhhab represents the entire school of thought of a particular mujtahid Imam, such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi’i, or Ahmad–together with many first-rank scholars that came after each of these in their respective schools, who checked their evidences and refined and upgraded their work. The mujtahid Imams were thus explainers, who operationalized the Qur’an and sunna in the specific shari’a rulings in our lives that are collectively known as fiqh or “jurisprudence”. In relation to our din or “religion”, this fiqh is only part of it, for the religious knowledge each of us possesses is of three types. The first type is the general knowledge of tenets of Islamic belief in the oneness of Allah, in His angels, Books, messengers, the prophethood of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), and so on. All of us may derive this knowledge directly from the Qur’an and hadith, as is also the case with a second type of knowledge, that of general Islamic ethical principles to do good, avoid evil, cooperate with others in good works, and so forth. Every Muslim can take these general principles, which form the largest and most important part of his religion, from the Qur’an and hadith.

The third type of knowledge is that of the specific understanding of particular divine commands and prohibitions that make up the shari’a. Here, because of both the nature and the sheer number of the Qur’an and hadith texts involved, people differ in the scholarly capacity to understand and deduce rulings from them. But all of us have been commanded to live them in our lives, in obedience to Allah, and so Muslims are of two types, those who can do this by themselves, and they are the mujtahid Imams; and those who must do so by means of another, that is, by following a mujtahidImam, in accordance with Allah’s word in Surat al-Nahl,

“ Ask those who recall, if you know not ” (Qur’an 16:43),

and in Surat al-Nisa,

“ If they had referred it to the Messenger and to those of authority among them, then those of them whose task it is to find it out would have known the matter ” (Qur’an 4:83),

in which the phrase those of them whose task it is to find it out, expresses the words “alladhina yastanbitunahu minhum“, referring to those possessing the capacity to draw inferences directly from the evidence, which is called in Arabic istinbat.

These and other verses and hadiths oblige the believer who is not at the level of istinbat or directly deriving rulings from the Qur’an and hadith to ask and follow someone in such rulings who is at this level. It is not difficult to see why Allah has obliged us to ask experts, for if each of us were personally responsible for evaluating all the primary texts relating to each question, a lifetime of study would hardly be enough for it, and one would either have to give up earning a living or give up ones din, which is why Allah says in surat al-Tawba, in the context of jihad:

“ Not all of the believers should go to fight. Of every section of them, why does not one part alone go forth, that the rest may gain knowledge of the religion and admonish their people when they return, that perhaps they may take warning ” (Qur’an 9:122).

The slogans we hear today about “following the Qur’an and sunna instead of following the madhhabs” are wide of the mark, for everyone agrees that we must follow the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). The point is that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) is no longer alive to personally teach us, and everything we have from him, whether the hadith or the Qur’an, has been conveyed to us through Islamic scholars. So it is not a question of whether or not to take our din from scholars, but rather, from which scholars. And this is the reason we have madhhabs in Islam: because the excellence and superiority of the scholarship of the mujtahid Imams–together with the traditional scholars who followed in each of their schools and evaluated and upgraded their work after them–have met the test of scholarly investigation and won the confidence of thinking and practicing Muslims for all the centuries of Islamic greatness. The reason why madhhabs exist, the benefit of them, past, present, and future, is that they furnish thousands of sound, knowledge-based answers to Muslims questions on how to obey Allah. Muslims have realized that to follow a madhhab means to follow a super scholar who not only had a comprehensive knowledge of the Qur’an and hadith texts relating to each issue he gave judgements on, but also lived in an age a millennium closer to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and his Companions, when taqwa or “godfearingness” was the norm–both of which conditions are in striking contrast to the scholarship available today.

While the call for a return to the Qur’an and sunna is an attractive slogan, in reality it is a great leap backward, a call to abandon centuries of detailed, case-by-case Islamic scholarship in finding and spelling out the commands of the Qur’an and sunna, a highly sophisticated, interdisciplinary effort by mujtahids, hadith specialists, Qur’anic exegetes, lexicographers, and other masters of the Islamic legal sciences. To abandon the fruits of this research, the Islamic shari’a, for the following of contemporary sheikhs who, despite the claims, are not at the level of their predecessors, is a replacement of something tried and proven for something at best tentative.

The rhetoric of following the shari’a without following a particular madhhab is like a person going down to a car dealer to buy a car, but insisting it not be any known make–neither a Volkswagen nor Rolls-Royce nor Chevrolet–but rather “a car, pure and simple”. Such a person does not really know what he wants; the cars on the lot do not come like that, but only in kinds. The salesman may be forgiven a slight smile, and can only point out that sophisticated products come from sophisticated means of production, from factories with a division of labor among those who test, produce, and assemble the many parts of the finished product. It is the nature of such collective human efforts to produce something far better than any of us alone could produce from scratch, even if given a forge and tools, and fifty years, or even a thousand. And so it is with the shari’a, which is more complex than any car because it deals with the universe of human actions and a wide interpretative range of sacred texts. This is why discarding the monumental scholarship of the madhhabs in operationalizing the Qur’an and sunna in order to adopt the understanding of a contemporary sheikh is not just a mistaken opinion. It is scrapping a Mercedes for a go-cart.

© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 2000

Re-Forming Classical Texts

Question 3

Re-Forming Classical Texts

As far as Wahhabi tamperings with classical texts goes, how widespread is this heinous crime? Can you give some serious examples of this?

Answer
I do not know how widespread it is, but it certainly does exist. Of hard evidence that I have personally seen, there is the work that I am currently translating, Kitab al-adhkar [The book of remembrances of Allah] by Imam Nawawi. The text that Nawawi wrote in the Book of Hajj of the Adhkar reads:

“Section: The Visit to the Tomb of the Messenger of Allah (Allah Bless Him and Give Him Peace), and the Remembrances of Allah Made There”Know that everyone who performs the hajj should set out to visit the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), whether it is on one’s way or not, for visiting him (Allah bless him and give him peace) is one of the most important acts of worship, the most rewarded of efforts, and best of goals.

When one sets out to perform the visit, one should do much of the blessings and peace upon him (Allah bless him and give him peace) on the way. And when one’s eye falls on the trees of Medina, and its sanctum and landmarks, one should increase saying the blessings and peace upon the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), asking Allah Most High to benefit one by one’s visit to him (Allah bless him and give him peace), and grant one felicity in this world and the next through it. One should say, “O Allah, open for me the doors of Your mercy, and bestow upon me, through the visit to the tomb of Your prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), that which You have bestowed upon Your friends, those who obey You. Forgive me and show me mercy, O Best of Those Asked” (al-Adhkar al-Nawawiyya, 283–84).

In the 1409/1988 printing of this work, published by Dar al-Huda in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, under the inspection and approval of the Riyasa Idara al-Buhuth al-‘Ilmiyya wa al-Ifta’ or “Presidency of Supervision of Scholarly Studies and Islamic Legal Opinion,” the same section has been changed to agree with Ibn Taymiya’s view that setting out to visit the Prophet’s tomb (Allah bless him and give him peace) is disobedience. (It only becomes permissible, according to this point of view, if one intends visiting the mosque of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace).) The re-formed version reads as follows, italics showing the alterations made to Nawawi’s text:

“Section: The Visit to the Mosque of the Messenger of Allah (Allah Bless Him and Give Him Peace) [deletion]”

Know that it is preferable, for whoever wants to visit the Mosque of the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace), [deletion] to make much of the blessings and peace upon him (Allah bless him and give him peace) on the way. And when one’s eye falls on the trees of Medina, and its sanctum and landmarks, to increase saying the blessings and peace upon the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), asking Allah Most High to benefit one by one’s visit to his mosque(Allah bless him and give him peace), and grant one felicity in this world and the next through it. One should say: “O Allah, open for me the doors of Your mercy, and bestow upon me, through the visit to the mosque of Your prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), that which You have bestowed upon Your friends, those who obey You. Forgive me and show me mercy, O Best of Those Asked” (al-Adhkar, 295).

The same printing has completely dropped nearly a half page of the section of tawassul (supplicating Allah through the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)) when visiting the Prophet’s tomb—apparently to promote the Wahhabi doctrine that this is shirk or “assigning co-sharers to Allah.”

They have attributed the above words to Imam Nawawi without mentioning that it has been altered in any way.

This should not surprise Westerners, who have had before them Muhammad Muhsin Khan’s translation of Sahih al-Bukhari for some years now. In it, we find Bukhari’s heading about the effects of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace): “and of his hair, his sandals, and his vessels, of that which his Companions and others used to obtain blessings through after his death (yatabarraka bihi As-habuhu wa ghayruhum ba‘da wafatihi),” in which the words yatabarraka bihi have been rendered as “were considered as blessed things” in the English (Khan, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4.218). The Arabic verb tabarraka bihi signifies “He had a blessing; and he was, or became, blest; by means of him, or it” (Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, 1.193), or often, “he looked for a blessing by means of,” or “regarded as a means of obtaining a blessing from,” him or it (ibid.)—in either case actually obtaining, or hoping to obtain, a blessing by means of these things, a nuance quite different from the passive “were considered as blessed,” which does not entail any special benefit from them.

Or consider the seventy-three-page “introduction” to volume one of this same translation, a tract that explains the Muslim Trinity: Tawhid al-Rububuyya, Tawhid al-Uluhiyya, and Tawhid al-Asma wa al-Sifat—the (1) Tawhid of Lordship, (2) Tawhid of Godhood, and (3) Tawhid of Names and Attributes. By way of preface to it, Dr. Khan notes that many Western converts enter Islam without knowing what belief in the Oneness of Allah really means. He clarifies that tawhid is not one; namely, to say and believe the shahada of Islam with complete conviction—as it was from the time of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) until the advent of Ibn Taymiya seven centuries later—as new converts might imagine, but must now be three in order to be one, and cannot be one without being three. While such logic may be already familiar to converts from Christianity, Imam Bukhari (d. 256/870) certainly never knew anything of it, and its being printed as an “introduction” to his work seems to me to qualify as “tampering with classical texts”—aside from being a re-form of traditional ‘aqida, in which Islam, in the words of the Prophet of Islam (Allah bless him and give him peace), “is to testify that there is no god except Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah . . .” (Sahih Muslim, 1.37: 8).

Another example is found in the commentary of the famous Maliki scholar Ahmad Sawi (d. 1241/1825) on the Qur’anic exegesis Tafsir al-Jalalaynof Jalal al-Din Mahalli and Jalal al-Din Suyuti, in which he says of the verse “Truly, the Devil is an enemy to you, so take him as an enemy: he only calls his party to become of the inhabitants of the blaze” (Qur’an 35:6): It is said this verse was revealed about the Kharijites [foretelling their appearance], who altered the interpretation of the Qur’an and sunna, on the strength of which they declared it lawful to kill and take the property of Muslims—as may now be seen in their modern counterparts; namely, a sect in the Hijaz called “Wahhabis,” who “think they are on something, truly they are the liars. Satan has gained mastery over them and made them forget Allah’s remembrance. Those are Satan’s party, truly Satan’s party, they are the losers” (Qur’an 58:18–19). We ask Allah Most Generous to extirpate them completely (Sawi: Hashiya al-Sawi ‘ala al-Jalalayn, 3.255). This passage is quoted from the ‘Isa al-Babi al-Halabi edition published in Cairo around the 1930s. It was also printed in its entirety in the Maktaba al-Mashhad al-Husayni edition (3.307–8) published in Cairo in 1939, which was reproduced by offset by Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-‘Arabi (3.307–8) in Beirut in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, the Salafi movement, or oil money, or some combination of the two, had generated enough of a market to tempt Dar al-Fikr in Beirut to offset the same old printing, but with a surreptitious change. In the third volume, part of the bottom line of page 307 and the top line of 308 have been whited out, eliminating the words “namely, a sect in the Hijaz called ‘Wahhabis,’” venally bowdlerizing the whole point of what the author is trying to say about the modern counterparts of the Kharijites in order to sell it to them. The deletion was virtually indistinguishable from an ordinary spacing mistake, coming as it does at the ends of the two pages, though Dar al-Fikr made up for any technical shortcomings in this respect in 1993 with a newly typeset four-volume version of Hashiya al-Sawi ‘ala al-Jalalayn, which its title page declares to be “a new and corrected (munaqqaha) printing.” The above passage appears on page 379 of the third volume with the same wording as the previous coverup, but this time in a continuous text, so no one would ever guess that Sawi’s words had been removed.

Or consider the example from the two-volume Qur’anic exegesis of Abu Hayyan al-Nahwi (d. 754/1353), Tafsir al-nahr al-madd [The exegesis of the far-stretching river] condensed mainly from his own previous eight-volume exegesis al-Bahr al-muhit [The encompassing sea], arguably the finest tafsir ever written based primarily on Arabic grammar. Abu Hayyan, of Andalusion origin, settled in Damascus, knew Ibn Taymiya personally, and held him in great esteem, until the day that Barinbari (d. 717/1317) brought him a work by Ibn Taymiya called Kitab al-‘arsh [The book of the Throne]. There they found, in Ibn Taymiya’s own handwriting (which was familiar to Abu Hayyan), anthropomorphic suggestions about the Deity that made Abu Hayyan curse Ibn Taymiya until the day he died. This was mentioned by the hadith master (hafiz) Taqi al-Din Subki in hisal-Sayf al-saqil (85). Abu Hayyan, in his own Qur’anic exegesis of Ayat al-Kursi (Qur’an 2:258) in surat al-Baqara, recorded something of what so completely changed his mind: I have read in the book of Ahmad ibn Taymiya, this individual whom we are the contemporary of, and the book is in his own handwriting, and he has named it Kitab al-‘arsh [The book of the Throne], that “Allah Most High is sitting (yajlisu) on the Kursi but has left a place of it unoccupied, in which to seat the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace)” [italics mine]. Al-Taj Muhammad ibn ‘Ali ibn ‘Abd al-Haqq Barinbari fooled him [Ibn Taymiya] by pretending to be a supporter of his so that he could get it from him, and this is what we read in it (al-Nahwi, Tafsir al-nahr al-madd, 1.254). This is of interest not only because it documents (at the pen of one of Islam’s greatest scholars) that Ibn Taymiya had a “double ‘aqida,” one for the public, and a separate anthropomorphic one for an inner circle of initiates—but also because when Abu Hayyan’s work was first printed on the margin of his longer exegesis al-Bahr al-muhit in Cairo by Matba‘a al-Sa‘ada in 1910, the whole passage was deleted—intentionally, as the guilty party later confessed to Muhammad Zahid Kawthari, who quotes the above passage in a footnote toal-Sayf al-saqil and then says:

This sentence is not in the printed exegesis al-Bahr [al-muhit], for the copy editor at Matba‘a al-Sa‘ada told me he found it so extremely revolting that he deemed it too enormous to ascribe to a Muslim, so he deleted it, so it would not be exploited by the enemies of the religion. He asked me to record that here by way of making up for what he had done, and as a counsel (nasiha) to Muslims (al-Sayf al-saqil, 85).

The deception was perpetrated anew when Abu Hayyan’s Tafsir al-nahr al-madd was printed on its own in Beirut with the same deletion by Dar al-Fikr in 1983, and was not rectified until Dar al-Janan and Mu’assasa al-Kutub al-Thaqafiyya in Beirut brought it out using original manuscripts of the work in 1987.

I think these examples are sufficient to give a general idea of the process, though the motives may differ from case to case. And Allah knows best.

© Nuh Ha Mim Keller 1995