Understanding the Four Madhhabs the problem with anti-madhhabism

© Abdal-Hakim Murad

The ummah's greatest achievement over the past millennium has
undoubtedly been its internal intellectual cohesion. From the fifth
century of the Hijra almost to the present day, and despite the
outward drama of the clash of dynasties, the Sunni Muslims have
maintained an almost unfailing attitude of religious respect and
brotherhood among themselves. It is a striking fact that virtually no
religious wars, riots or persecutions divided them during this
extended period, so difficult in other ways.
The history of religious movements suggests that this is an unusual
outcome. The normal sociological view, as expounded by Max Weber and
his disciples, is that religions enjoy an initial period of unity,
and then descend into an increasingly bitter factionalism led by
rival hierarchies. Christianity has furnished the most obvious
example of this; but one could add many others, including secular
faiths such as Marxism. On the face of it, Islam's ability to avoid
this fate is astonishing, and demands careful analysis.
There is, of course, a straightforwardly religious explanation. Islam
is the final religion, the last bus home, and as such has been
divinely secured from the more terminal forms of decay. It is true
that what Abdul Wadod Shalabi has termed spiritual entropy has been
at work ever since Islam's inauguration, a fact which is well-
supported by a number of hadiths. Nonetheless, Providence has not
neglected the ummah. Earlier religions slide gently or painfully into
schism and irrelevance; but Islamic piety, while fading in quality,
has been given mechanisms which allow it to retain much of the sense
of unity emphasised in its glory days. Wherever the antics of the
emirs and politicians might lead, the brotherhood of believers, a
reality in the initial career of Christianity and some other faiths,
continues, fourteen hundred years on, to be a compelling principle
for most members of the final and definitive community of revelation
in Islam. The reason is simple and unarguable: God has given us this
religion as His last word, and it must therefore endure, with its
essentials of tawhid, worship and ethics intact, until the Last Days.
Such an explanation has obvious merit. But we will still need to
explain some painful exceptions to the rule in the earliest phase of
our history. The Prophet himself (pbuh) had told his Companions, in a
hadith narrated by Imam Tirmidhi, that "Whoever among you outlives me
shall see a vast dispute". The initial schisms: the disastrous revolt
against Uthman (r.a.), the clash between Ali (r.a.) and Muawiyah, the
bloody scissions of the Kharijites - all these drove knives of
discord into the Muslim body politic almost from the outset. Only the
inherent sanity and love of unity among scholars of the ummah
assisted, no doubt, by Providence overcame the early spasms of
factionalism, and created a strong and harmonious Sunnism which has,
at least on the purely religious plane, united ninety percent of the
ummah for ninety percent of its history.
It will help us greatly to understand our modern, increasingly
divided situation if we look closely at those forces which divided us
in the distant past. There were many of these, some of them very
eccentric; but only two took the form of mass popular movements,
driven by religious ideology, and in active rebellion against
majoritarian faith and scholarship. For good reasons, these two
acquired the names of Kharijism and Shi'ism. Unlike Sunnism, both
were highly productive of splinter groups and sub-movements; but they
nonetheless remained as recognisable traditions of dissidence because
of their ability to express the two great divergences from mainstream
opinion on the key question of the source of religious authority in
Islam.
Confronted with what they saw as moral slippage among early caliphs,
posthumous partisans of Ali (r.a.) developed a theory of religious
authority which departed from the older egalitarian assumptions by
vesting it in a charismatic succession of Imams. We need not stop
here to investigate the question of whether this idea was influenced
by the Eastern Christian background of some early converts, who had
been nourished on the idea of the mystical apostolic succession to
Christ, a gift which supposedly gave the Church the unique ability to
read his mind for later generations. What needs to be appreciated is
that Shi'ism, in its myriad forms, developed as a response to a
widely-sensed lack of definitive religious authority in early Islamic
society. As the age of the Righteous Caliphs came to a close, and the
Umayyad rulers departed ever more conspicuously from the lifestyle
expected of them as Commanders of the Faithful, the sharply-divergent
and still nascent schools of fiqh seemed inadequate as sources of
strong and unambiguous authority in religious matters. Hence the
often irresistible seductiveness of the idea of an infallible Imam.
This interpretation of the rise of Imamism also helps to explain the
second great phase in Shi'i expansion. After the success of the fifth-
century Sunni revival, when Sunnism seemed at last to have become a
fully coherent system, Shi'ism went into a slow eclipse. Its extreme
wing, as manifested in Ismailism, received a heavy blow at the hands
of Imam al-Ghazali, whose book "Scandals of the Batinites" exposed
and refuted their secret doctrines with devastating force. This
decline in Shi'i fortunes was only arrested after the mid-seventh
century, once the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan had invaded and
obliterated the central lands of Islam. The onslaught was
unimaginably harsh: we are told, for instance, that out of a hundred
thousand former inhabitants of the city of Herat, only forty
survivors crept out of the smoking ruins to survey the devastation.
In the wake of this tidal wave of mayhem, newly-converted Turcoman
nomads moved in, who, with the Sunni ulama of the cities dead, and a
general atmosphere of fear, turbulence, and Messianic expectation in
the air, turned readily to extremist forms of Shi'i belief. The
triumph of Shi'ism in Iran, a country once loyal to Sunnism, dates
back to that painful period.
The other great dissident movement in early Islam was that of the
Kharijites, literally, the seceders, so-called because they seceded
from the army of the Caliph Ali when he agreed to settle his dispute
with Muawiyah through arbitration. Calling out the Quranic
slogan, "Judgement is only Gods", they fought bitterly against Ali
and his army which included many of the leading Companions, until Ali
defeated them at the Battle of Nahrawan, where some ten thousand of
them perished.
Although the first Kharijites were destroyed, Kharijism itself lived
on. As it formulated itself, it turned into the precise opposite of
Shi'ism, rejecting any notion of inherited or charismatic leadership,
and stressing that leadership of the community of believers should be
decided by piety alone. This was assessed by very rudimentary
criteria: the early Kharijites were known for extreme toughness in
their devotions, and for the harsh doctrine that any Muslim who
commits a major sin is an unbeliever. This notion of takfir
(declaring Muslims to be outside Islam), permitted the Kharijite
groups, camping out in remote mountain districts of Khuzestan, to
raid Muslim settlements which had accepted Umayyad authority. Non-
Kharijis were routinely slaughtered in these operations, which
brought merciless reprisals from tough Umayyad generals such as al-
Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. But despite the apparent hopelessness of their
cause, the Kharijite attacks continued. The Caliph Ali (r.a.) was
assassinated by Ibn Muljam, a survivor of Nahrawan, while the hadith
scholar Imam al-Nasai, author of one of the most respected
collections of sunan, was likewise murdered by Kharijite fanatics in
Damascus in 303/915.
Like Shi'ism, Kharijism caused much instability in Iraq and Central
Asia, and on occasion elsewhere, until the fourth and fifth centuries
of Islam. At that point, something of historic moment occurred.
Sunnism managed to unite itself into a detailed system that was now
so well worked-out, and so obviously the way of the great majority of
ulama, that the attraction of the rival movements diminished sharply.
What happened was this. Sunni Islam, occupying the middle ground
between the two extremes of egalitarian Kharijism and hierarchical
Shi'ism, had long been preoccupied with disputes over its own concept
of authority. For the Sunnis, authority was, by definition, vested in
the Quran and Sunnah. But confronted with the enormous body of
hadiths, which had been scattered in various forms and narrations
throughout the length and breadth of the Islamic world following the
migrations of the Companions and Followers, the Sunnah sometimes
proved difficult to interpret. Even when the sound hadiths had been
sifted out from this great body of material, which totalled several
hundred thousand hadith reports, there were some hadiths which
appeared to conflict with each other, or even with verses of the
Quran. It was obvious that simplistic approaches such as that of the
Kharijites, namely, establishing a small corpus of hadiths and
deriving doctrines and law from them directly, was not going to work.
The internal contradictions were too numerous, and the
interpretations placed on them too complex, for the qadis (judges) to
be able to dish out judgements simply by opening the Quran and hadith
collections to an appropriate page.
The reasons underlying cases of apparent conflict between various
revealed texts were scrutinised closely by the early ulama, often
amid sustained debate between brilliant minds backed up with the most
perfect photographic memories. Much of the science of Islamic
jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) was developed in order to provide
consistent mechanisms for resolving such conflicts in a way which
ensured fidelity to the basic ethos of Islam. The term taarud al-
adilla (mutual contradiction of proof-texts) is familiar to all
students of Islamic jurisprudence as one of the most sensitive and
complex of all Muslim legal concepts. Early scholars such as Ibn
Qutayba felt obliged to devote whole books to the subject.
The ulama of usul recognised as their starting assumption that
conflicts between the revealed texts were no more than conflicts of
interpretation, and could not reflect inconsistencies in the
Lawgiver's message as conveyed by the Prophet (pbuh). The message of
Islam had been perfectly conveyed before his demise; and the function
of subsequent scholars was exclusively one of interpretation, not of
amendment.
Armed with this awareness, the Islamic scholar, when examining
problematic texts, begins by attempting a series of preliminary
academic tests and methods of resolution. The system developed by the
early ulama was that if two Quranic or hadith texts appeared to
contradict each other, then the scholar must first analyse the texts
linguistically, to see if the contradiction arises from an error in
interpreting the Arabic. If the contradiction cannot be resolved by
this method, then he must attempt to determine, on the basis of a
range of textual, legal and historiographic techniques, whether one
of them is subject to takhsis, that is, concerns special
circumstances only, and hence forms a specific exception to the more
general principle enunciated in the other text. The jurist must also
assess the textual status of the reports, recalling the principle
that a Quranic verse will overrule a hadith related by only one isnad
(the type of hadith known as ahad), as will a hadith supplied by many
isnads (mutawatir or mashhur). If, after applying all these
mechanisms, the jurist finds that the conflict remains, he must then
investigate the possibility that one of the texts was subject to
formal abrogation (naskh) by the other.
This principle of naskh is an example of how, when dealing with the
delicate matter of taarud al-adilla, the Sunni ulama founded their
approach on textual policies which had already been recognised many
times during the lifetime of the Prophet (pbuh). The Companions knew
by ijma that over the years of the Prophets ministry, as he taught
and nurtured them, and brought them from the wildness of paganism to
the sober and compassionate path of monotheism, his teaching had been
divinely shaped to keep pace with their development. The best-known
instance of this was the progressive prohibition of wine, which had
been discouraged by an early Quranic verse, then condemned, and
finally prohibited. Another example, touching an even more basic
principle, was the canonical prayer, which the early ummah had been
obliged to say only twice daily, but which, following the Miraj, was
increased to five times a day. Mutah (temporary marriage) had been
permitted in the early days of Islam, but was subsequently prohibited
as social conditions developed, respect for women grew, and morals
became firmer. There are several other instances of this, most being
datable to the years immediately following the Hijra, when the
circumstances of the young ummah changed in radical ways.
There are two types of naskh: explicit (sarih) or implicit (dimni).
The former is easily identified, for it involves texts which
themselves specify that an earlier ruling is being changed. For
instance, there is the verse in the Quran (2:142) which commands the
Muslims to turn in prayer to the Kaba rather than to Jerusalem. In
the hadith literature this is even more frequently encountered; for
example, in a hadith narrated by Imam Muslim we read: "I used to
forbid you to visit graves; but you should now visit them."
Commenting on this, the ulama of hadith explain that in early Islam,
when idolatrous practices were still fresh in peoples memories,
visiting graves had been forbidden because of the fear that some new
Muslims might commit shirk. As the Muslims grew stronger in their
monotheism, however, this prohibition was discarded as no longer
necessary, so that today it is a recommended practice for Muslims to
go out to visit graves in order to pray for the dead and to be
reminded of the akhira.
The other type of naskh is more subtle, and often taxed the
brilliance of the early ulama to the limit. It involves texts which
cancel earlier ones, or modify them substantially, but without
actually stating that this has taken place. The ulama have given many
examples of this, including the two verses in Surat al-Baqarah which
give differing instructions as to the period for which widows should
be maintained out of an estate (2:240 and 234). And in the hadith
literature, there is the example of the incident in which the Prophet
(pbuh) once told the Companions that when he prayed sitting because
he was burdened by some illness, they should sit behind him. This
hadith is given by Imam Muslim. And yet we find another hadith, also
narrated by Muslim, which records an incident in which the Companions
prayed standing while the Prophet (pbuh) was sitting. The apparent
contradiction has been resolved by careful chronological analysis,
which shows that the latter incident took place after the former, and
therefore takes precedence over it. This has duly been recorded in
the fiqh of the great scholars.
The techniques of naskh identification have enabled the ulama to
resolve most of the recognised cases of taarud al-adilla. They demand
a rigorous and detailed knowledge not just of the hadith disciplines,
but of history, sirah, and of the views held by the Companions and
other scholars on the circumstances surrounding the genesis and
exegesis of the hadith in question. In some cases, hadith scholars
would travel throughout the Islamic world to locate the required
information pertinent to a single hadith.
In cases where in spite of all efforts, abrogation cannot be proven,
then the ulama of the salaf recognised the need to apply further
tests. Important among these is the analysis of the matn (the
transmitted text rather than the isnad of the hadith). Clear (sarih)
statements are deemed to take precedence over allusive ones
(kinayah), and definite (muhkam) words take precedence over words
falling into more ambiguous categories, such as the interpreted
(mufassar), the obscure (khafi) and the problematic (mushkil). It may
also be necessary to look at the position of the narrators of the
conflicting hadiths, giving precedence to the report issuing from the
individual who was more directly involved. A famous example of this
is the hadith narrated by Maymunah which states that the Prophet
(pbuh) married her when not in a state of consecration (ihram) for
the pilgrimage. Because her report was that of an eyewitness, her
hadith is given precedence over the conflicting report from Ibn
Abbas, related by a similarly sound isnad, which states that the
Prophet was in fact in a state of ihram at the time.
There are many other rules, such as that which states that
prohibition takes precedence over permissibility. Similarly,
conflicting hadiths may be resolved by utilising the fatwa of a
Companion, after taking care that all the relevant fatwa are compared
and assessed. Finally, recourse may be had to qiyas (analogy). An
example of this is the various reports about the solar eclipse prayer
(salat al-kusuf), which specify different numbers of bowings and
prostrations. The ulama, having investigated the reports
meticulously, and having been unable to resolve the contradiction by
any of the mechanisms outlined above, have applied analogical
reasoning by concluding that since the prayer in question is still
called salaat, then the usual form of salaat should be followed,
namely, one bowing and two prostrations. The other hadiths are to be
abandoned.
This careful articulation of the methods of resolving conflicting
source-texts, so vital to the accurate derivation of the Shariah from
the revealed sources, was primarily the work of Imam al-Shafi'i.
Confronted by the confusion and disagreement among the jurists of his
day, and determined to lay down a consistent methodology which would
enable a fiqh to be established in which the possibility of error was
excluded as far as was humanly possible, Shafi'i wrote his brilliant
Risala (Treatise on Islamic jurisprudence). His ideas were soon taken
up, in varying ways, by jurists of the other major traditions of law;
and today they are fundamental to the formal application of the
Shariah.
Shafi'i's system of minimising mistakes in the derivation of Islamic
rulings from the mass of evidence came to be known as usul al-fiqh
(the roots of fiqh). Like most of the other formal academic
disciplines of Islam, this was not an innovation in the negative
sense, but a working-out of principles already discernible in the
time of the earliest Muslims. In time, each of the great
interpretative traditions of Sunni Islam codified its own variation
on these roots, thereby yielding in some cases divergent branches
(i.e. specific rulings on practice). Although the debates generated
by these divergences could sometimes be energetic, nonetheless, they
were insignificant when compared to the great sectarian and legal
disagreements which had arisen during the first two centuries of
Islam before the science of usul al-fiqh had put a stop to such
chaotic discord.
It hardly needs remarking that although the Four Imams, Abu Hanifa,
Malik ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i and Ibn Hanbal, are regarded as the
founders of these four great traditions, which, if we were asked to
define them, we might sum up as sophisticated techniques for avoiding
innovation, their traditions were fully systematised only by later
generations of scholars. The Sunni ulama rapidly recognised the
brilliance of the Four Imams, and after the late third century of
Islam we find that hardly any scholars adhered to any other approach.
The great hadith specialists, including al-Bukhari and Muslim, were
all loyal adherents of one or another of the madhhabs, particularly
that of Imam al-Shafi'i. But within each madhhab, leading scholars
continued to improve and refine the roots and branches of their
school. In some cases, historical conditions made this not only
possible, but necessary. For instance, scholars of the school of Imam
Abu Hanifah, which was built on the foundations of the early legal
schools of Kufa and Basra, were wary of some hadiths in circulation
in Iraq because of the prevalence of forgery engendered by the strong
sectarian influences there. Later, however, once the canonical
collections of Bukhari, Muslim and others became available,
subsequent generations of Hanafi scholars took the entire corpus of
hadiths into account in formulating and revising their madhhab. This
type of process continued for two centuries, until the Schools
reached a condition of maturity in the fourth and fifth centuries of
the Hijra.
It was at that time, too, that the attitude of toleration and good
opinion between the Schools became universally accepted. This was
formulated by Imam al-Ghazali, himself the author of four textbooks
of Shafi'i fiqh, and also of Al-Mustasfa, widely acclaimed as the
most advanced and careful of all works on usul usul al-fiqh fil
madhhab (Ihya Ulum al-Din, III, 65) While it was necessary for the
Muslim to follow a recognised madhhab in order to avert the lethal
danger of misinterpreting the sources, he must never fall into the
trap of considering his own school categorically superior to the
others. With a few insignificant exceptions, the great scholars of
Sunni Islam have followed the ethos outlined by Imam al-Ghazali, and
have been conspicuously respectful of each others madhhab. Anyone who
has studied under traditional ulama will be well-aware of this fact.
The evolution of the Four Schools did not stifle, as some
Orientalists have suggested, the capacity for the refinement or
extension of positive law. On the contrary, sophisticated mechanisms
were available which not only permitted qualified individuals to
derive the Shariah from the Quran and Sunnah on their own authority,
but actually obliged them to do this. According to most scholars, an
expert who has fully mastered the sources and fulfilled a variety of
necessary scholarly conditions is not permitted to follow the
prevalent rulings of his School, but must derive the rulings himself
from the revealed sources. Such an individual is known as a mujtahid,
a term derived from the famous hadith of Muadh ibn Jabal.
Few would seriously deny that for a Muslim to venture beyond
established expert opinion and have recourse directly to the Quran
and Sunnah, he must be a scholar of great eminence. The danger of
less-qualified individuals misunderstanding the sources and hence
damaging the Shariah is a very real one, as was shown by the discord
and strife which afflicted some early Muslims, and even some of the
Companions themselves, in the period which preceded the establishment
of the Orthodox Schools. Prior to Islam, entire religions had been
subverted by inadequate scriptural scholarship, and it was vital that
Islam should be secured from a comparable fate.
In order to protect the Shariah from the danger of innovation and
distortion, the great scholars of usul laid down rigorous conditions
which must be fulfilled by anyone wishing to claim the right of
ijtihad for himself. These conditions include:
(a) mastery of the Arabic language, to minimise the possibility of
misinterpreting Revelation on purely linguistic grounds;
(b) a profound knowledge of the Quran and Sunnah and the
circumstances surrounding the revelation of each verse and hadith,
together with a full knowledge of the Quranic and hadith
commentaries, and a control of all the interpretative techniques
discussed above;
(c) knowledge of the specialised disciplines of hadith, such as the
assessment of narrators and of the matn [text];
(d) knowledge of the views of the Companions, Followers and the great
imams, and of the positions and reasoning expounded in the textbooks
of fiqh, combined with the knowledge of cases where a consensus
(ijma) has been reached;
(e) knowledge of the science of juridical analogy (qiyas), its types
and conditions;
(f) knowledge of ones own society and of public interest (maslahah);
(g) knowing the general objectives (maqasid) of the Shariah;
(h) a high degree of intelligence and personal piety, combined with
the Islamic virtues of compassion, courtesy, and modesty.
A scholar who has fulfilled these conditions can be considered a
mujtahid fil-shar, and is not obliged, or even permitted, to follow
an existing authoritative madhhab. This is what some of the Imams
were saying when they forbade their great disciples from imitating
them uncritically. But for the much greater number of scholars whose
expertise has not reached such dizzying heights, it may be possible
to become a mujtahid fil-madhhab, that is, a scholar who remains
broadly convinced of the doctrines of his school, but is qualified to
differ from received opinion within it. There have been a number of
examples of such men, for instance Imam al-Nawawi among the Shafi'is,
Qadi Ibn Abd al-Barr among the Malikis, Ibn Abidin among the Hanafis,
and Ibn Qudama among the Hanbalis. All of these scholars considered
themselves followers of the fundamental interpretative principles of
their own madhhabs, but are on record as having exercised their own
gifts of scholarship and judgement in reaching many new verdicts
within them. It is to these experts that the Mujtahid Imams directed
their advice concerning ijtihad, such as Imam al-Shafi'i's
instruction that if you find a hadith that contradicts my verdict,
then follow the hadith. It is obvious that whatever some writers
nowadays like to believe, such counsels were never intended for use
by the Islamically-uneducated masses.
Other categories of mujtahids are listed by the usul scholars; but
the distinctions between them are subtle and not relevant to our
theme. The remaining categories can in practice be reduced to two:
the muttabi (follower), who follows his madhhab while being aware of
the Quranic and hadith texts and the reasoning, underlying its
positions, and secondly the muqallid (emulator), who simply conforms
to the madhhab because of his confidence in its scholars, and without
necessarily knowing the detailed reasoning behind all its thousands
of rulings.
Clearly it is recommended for the muqallid to learn as much as he or
she is able of the formal proofs of the madhhab. But it is equally
clear that not every Muslim can be a scholar. Scholarship takes a lot
of time, and for the ummah to function properly most people must have
other employment: as accountants, soldiers, butchers, and so forth.
As such, they cannot reasonably be expected to become great ulama as
well, even if we suppose that all of them have the requisite
intelligence. The Holy Quran itself states that less well-informed
believers should have recourse to qualified experts: So ask the
people of remembrance, if you do not know (16:43). (According to the
tafsir experts, the people of remembrance are the ulama.) And in
another verse, the Muslims are enjoined to create and maintain a
group of specialists who provide authoritative guidance for non-
specialists: A band from each community should stay behind to gain
instruction in religion and to warn the people when they return to
them, so that they may take heed (9:122). Given the depth of
scholarship needed to understand the revealed texts accurately, and
the extreme warnings we have been given against distorting the
Revelation, it is obvious that ordinary Muslims are duty bound to
follow expert opinion, rather than rely on their own reasoning and
limited knowledge. This obvious duty was well-known to the early
Muslims: the Caliph Umar (r.a.) followed certain rulings of Abu Bakr
(r.a.), saying I would be ashamed before God to differ from the view
of Abu Bakr. And Ibn Masud (r.a.), in turn, despite being a mujtahid
in the fullest sense, used in certain issues to follow Umar (r.a.).
According to al-Shabi: Six of the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh)
used to give fatwas to the people: Ibn Masud, Umar ibn al-Khattab,
Ali, Zayd ibn Thabit, Ubayy ibn Kab, and Abu Musa (al-Ashari). And
out of these, three would abandon their own judgements in favour of
the judgements of three others: Abdallah (ibn Masud) would abandon
his own judgement for the judgement of Umar, Abu Musa would abandon
his own judgement for the judgement of Ali, and Zayd would abandon
his own judgement for the judgement of Ubayy ibn Kab.
This verdict, namely that one is well-advised to follow a great Imam
as ones guide to the Sunnah, rather than relying on oneself, is
particularly binding upon Muslims in countries such as Britain, among
whom only a small percentage is even entitled to have a choice in
this matter. This is for the simple reason that unless one knows
Arabic, then even if one wishes to read all the hadith determining a
particular issue, one cannot. For various reasons, including their
great length, no more than ten of the basic hadith collections have
been translated into English. There remain well over three hundred
others, including such seminal works as the Musnad of Imam Ahmad ibn
Hanbal, the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba, the Sahih of Ibn Khuzayma,
the Mustadrak of al-Hakim, and many other multi-volume collections,
which contain large numbers of sound hadiths which cannot be found in
Bukhari, Muslim, and the other works that have so far been
translated. Even if we assume that the existing translations are
entirely accurate, it is obvious that a policy of trying to derive
the Shariah directly from the Book and the Sunnah cannot be attempted
by those who have no access to the Arabic. To attempt to discern the
Shariah merely on the basis of the hadiths which have been translated
will be to ignore and amputate much of the Sunnah, hence leading to
serious distortions.
Let me give just two examples of this. The Sunni Madhhabs, in their
rules for the conduct of legal cases, lay down the principle that the
canonical punishments (hudud) should not be applied in cases where
there is the least ambiguity, and that the qadi should actively
strive to prove that such ambiguities exist. An amateur reading in
the Sound Six collections will find no confirmation of this. But the
madhhab ruling is based on a hadith narrated by a sound chain, and
recorded in theMusannaf of Ibn Abi Shayba, the Musnad of al-Harithi,
and the Musnad of Musaddad ibn Musarhad. The text is: "Ward off the
hudud by means of ambiguities." Imam al-Sanani, in his book Al-Ansab,
narrates the circumstances of this hadith: "A man was found drunk,
and was brought to Umar, who ordered the hadd of eighty lashes to be
applied. When this had been done, the man said: Umar, you have
wronged me! I am a slave! (Slaves receive only half the punishment.)
Umar was grief-stricken at this, and recited the Prophetic hadith,
Ward off the hudud by means of ambiguities."
Another example pertains to the important practice, recognised by the
madhhabs, of performing sunnah prayers as soon as possible after the
end of the Maghrib obligatory prayer. The hadith runs: Make haste to
perform the two rakas after the Maghrib, for they are raised up (to
Heaven) alongside the obligatory prayer. The hadith is narrated by
Imam Razin in his Jami.
Because of the traditional pious fear of distorting the Law of Islam,
the overwhelming majority of the great scholars of the past -
certainly well over ninety-nine percent of them - have adhered
loyally to a madhhab. It is true that in the troubled fourteenth
century a handful of dissenters appeared, such as Ibn Taymiyyah and
Ibn al-Qayyim; but even these individuals never recommended that semi-
educated Muslims should attempt ijtihad without expert help. And in
any case, although these authors have recently been resurrected and
made prominent, their influence on the orthodox scholarship of
classical Islam was negligible, as is suggested by the small number
of manuscripts of their works preserved in the great libraries of the
Islamic world.
Nonetheless, social turbulences have in the past century thrown up a
number of writers who have advocated the abandonment of authoritative
scholarship. The most prominent figures in this campaign were
Muhammad Abduh and his pupil Muhammad Rashid Rida. Dazzled by the
triumph of the West, and informed in subtle ways by their own well-
documented commitment to Freemasonry, these men urged Muslims to
throw off the shackles of taqlid, and to reject the authority of the
Four Schools. Today in some Arab capitals, especially where the
indigenous tradition of orthodox scholarship has been weakened, it is
common to see young Arabs filling their homes with every hadith
collection they can lay their hands upon, and poring over them in the
apparent belief that they are less likely to misinterpret this vast
and complex literature than Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam Ahmad, and the
other great Imams. This irresponsible approach, although still not
widespread, is predictably opening the door to sharply divergent
opinions, which have seriously damaged the unity, credibility and
effectiveness of the Islamic movement, and provoked sharp arguments
over issues settled by the great Imams over a thousand years ago. It
is common now to see young activists prowling the mosques,
criticising other worshippers for what they believe to be defects in
their worship, even when their victims are following the verdicts of
some of the great Imams of Islam. The unpleasant, Pharisaic
atmosphere generated by this activity has the effect of discouraging
many less committed Muslims from attending the mosque at all. No-one
now recalls the view of the early ulama, which was that Muslims
should tolerate divergent interpretations of the Sunnah as long as
these interpretations have been held by reputable scholars. As Sufyan
al-Thawri said: If you see a man doing something over which there is
a debate among the scholars, and which you yourself believe to be
forbidden, you should not forbid him from doing it. The alternative
to this policy is, of course, a disunity and rancour which will
poison and cripple the Muslim community from within.
In a Western-influenced global culture in which people are urged from
early childhood to think for themselves and to challenge established
authority, it can sometimes be difficult to muster enough humility to
recognise ones own limitations. We are all a little like Pharaoh: our
egos are by nature resistant to the idea that anyone else might be
much more intelligent or learned than ourselves. The belief that
ordinary Muslims, even if they know Arabic, are qualified to derive
rulings of the Shariah for themselves, is an example of this egotism
running wild. To young people proud of their own judgement, and
unfamiliar with the complexity of the sources and the brilliance of
authentic scholarship, this can be an effective trap, which ends by
luring them away from the orthodox path of Islam and into an
unintentional agenda of provoking deep divisions among the Muslims.
The fact that all the great scholars of the religion, including the
hadith experts, themselves belonged to madhhabs, and required their
students to belong to madhhabs, seems to have been forgotten. Self-
esteem has won a major victory here over common sense and Islamic
responsibility.
The Holy Quran commands Muslims to use their minds and reflective
capacities; and the issue of following qualified scholarship is an
area in which this faculty must be very carefully deployed. The basic
point should be appreciated that no categoric difference exists
between usul al-fiqh and any other specialised science requiring
lengthy training. Shaykh Said Ramadan al-Buti, who has articulated
the orthodox response to the anti-Madhhab trend in his book: Non-
Madhhabism: The Greatest Bida Threatening the Islamic Sharia, likes
to compare the science of deriving rulings to that of medicine. "If
ones child is seriously ill", he asks, "does one look for oneself in
the medical textbooks for the proper diagnosis and cure, or should
one go to a trained medical practitioner?" Clearly, sanity dictates
the latter option. And so it is in matters of religion, which are in
reality even more important and potentially hazardous: we would be
both foolish and irresponsible to try to look through the sources
ourselves, and become our own muftis. Instead, we should recognise
that those who have spent their entire lives studying the Sunnah and
the principles of law are far less likely to be mistaken than we are.
Another metaphor might be added to this, this time borrowed from
astronomy. We might compare the Quranic verses and the hadiths to the
stars. With the naked eye, we are unable to see many of them clearly;
so we need a telescope. If we are foolish, or proud, we may try to
build one ourselves. If we are sensible and modest, however, we will
be happy to use one built for us by Imam al-Shafi'i or Ibn Hanbal,
and refined, polished and improved by generations of great
astronomers. A madhhab is, after all, nothing more than a piece of
precision equipment enabling us to see Islam with the maximum clarity
possible. If we use our own devices, our amateurish attempts will
inevitably distort our vision.
A third image might also be deployed. An ancient building, for
instance the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, might seem imperfect to some
who worship in it. Young enthusiasts, burning with a desire to make
the building still more exquisite and well-made (and no doubt more in
conformity with their own time-bound preferences), might gain access
to the crypts and basements which lie under the structure, and, on
the basis of their own understanding of the principles of
architecture, try to adjust the foundations and pillars which support
the great edifice above them. They will not, of course, bother to
consult professional architects, except perhaps one or two whose
rhetoric pleases them nor will they be guided by the books and
memoirs of those who have maintained the structure over the
centuries. Their zeal and pride leaves them with no time for that.
Groping through the basements, they bring out their picks and drills,
and set to work with their usual enthusiasm.
There is a real danger that Sunni Islam is being treated in a similar
fashion. The edifice has stood for centuries, withstanding the most
bitter blows of its enemies. Only from within can it be weakened. No
doubt, Islam has its intelligent foes among whom this fact is well-
known. The spectacle of the disunity and fitnas which divided the
early Muslims despite their superior piety, and the solidity and
cohesiveness of Sunnism after the final codification of the Shariah
in the four Schools of the great Imams, must have put ideas into many
a malevolent head. This is not to suggest in any way that those who
attack the great madhhabs are the conscious tools of Islams enemies.
But it may go some way to explaining why they will continue to be
well-publicised and well-funded, while the orthodox alternative is
starved of resources. With every Muslim now a proud mujtahid, and
with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and necessary
virtue, the divergent views which caused such pain in our early
history will surely break surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in
harmony, we will have a billion madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous
conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the destruction of Islam could
ever have been
devised.