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| Nadia Yassine, 2007-04-20 |
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| The Companions who lived close to the Prophet (grace and peace be upon him) preserved for us the spirit of gentleness and compassion, the yusr that had become like a second nature for them. Later, when the political gusts threatened the perpetuity of the Message, an effort to safeguard this spirit began. The deviations of power, which we will examine later in this book, increased the fear of the Muslims for the purity of the Islamic Way that teaches yusr and intelligence. An intense effervescence of reflections began very soon. Its aim was to lay down normative rules and institute a sophisticated methodology based on a rational reading of the Message in order to meet the obligation of preserving its spirit. |
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| Strictly speaking, the science of ijtihād took its full sense only with ash-Shafi ‘ī (1) (God bless him) although the effective contribution of some imams before him is highly commendable. A number of ulemas (scholars of islam) had already laid down a body of precepts that help to achieve better comprehension of Qur’ānic Law. |
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| The diversity, proliferation, and harmonious coexistence of the juridical schools are another proof of the utmost malleability of Islamic Law and its absolutely extraordinary power of adaptation. |
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| Thus we had Abu Hanifa in Kūfa, Mālik in Medina, and many other sage masters. Since the aim of this book is to refute certain received ideas that pass islam off as unspeakable obscurantism—and not to compose an academic treatise—we will not go into detail about an experience that is rich in precise facts and in high performance rational procedures. We will content ourselves to call to mind some broad lines of this epic of knowledge. |
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| The schools of thought represented then a very wide range of the reading of the Islamic Law. Two major trends, however, can be drawn as claiming to represent either of the traditions of these two companions: Abdullah ibn Omar, who opted to refuse any personal interpretation even in the absence of an explicit text, and Abdullah ibn Abbas, who, on the contrary, often had recourse to personal opinion and anticipation. |
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| We will see later that the loss of momentum of islam’s wonderful dynamic took place concurrent to the progressive abandonment of ijtihād. Extremely tempered, the subsequent thinking would only bear the ashes of the intense source of the Qur’ānic Message for want of having in itself the ardor and the willpower to safeguard its flame. By abandoning the virtues instructed by the great masters of ijtihād, we have cut ourselves off from the very essence of our faith. The fl owing source offered by God to humanity by means of His Message has dried up in some minds. |
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| The cancellation of ijtihād under the influence of despotism made of the Islamic Law what it appears to be today in the eyes of the non-informed observers, and gave the occasion to the “well-intentioned” analysts to denounce archaism and nonsense. Through considering the free fall of our thinking ever since it abandoned ijtihād, we can only prove any criticism to be right, however bitter it may be. The community gradually sank into the dark nights of taqlid.(2)There were soon no more exegetes of such scope as the great imams of the first centuries of our history. Had it not been Sufi sm and its great masters, the flame would have gone out forever. |
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| The atrophied way of thinking gave rise to incredible and wild imaginings in the domain of jurisprudence. Coming within the tradition of absolute plagiarism, certain books of fiqh (3) make the informed reader of the sunna utterly perplexed. |
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| Taqlid successfully instituted an imbroglio of rules in which only warped minds can fi nd their way. By reading certain jurisprudential books dating back to this long period of stagnation (1258–1870), we wonder what relationship there is between those unordinary details and the Islamic Law at the time of the Prophet (grace and peace upon him). The Law was clarity itself, civility itself, tolerance itself, greatness itself, malleability itself—in a word, yusr. |
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| Once the mind was put on the back burner, the parrot became the mascot of the team of the doctors of the Law, unwillingly subjugated to serve the regime in power. The practice emanating from their decisions (fatwās) weighed heavily in the balance of the factors that prompted the decline of the Muslim societies. Blind taqlid is high treason perpetrated against the Qur’ānic spirit and the teachings of the Messenger (grace and peace upon him). It is also high treason with respect to those giants of islam who instituted the rules of ijtihād, or who put it into practice from the day following the death of God’s Messenger (grace and peace upon him). |
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| The latter had no intention whatever of creating dogmas, but rather of providing their contemporaries and future generations with methodological tools so that the source would not run dry, and so that the Message might remain accessible to all man kind. |
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| Their profound comprehension of Revelation made them think of Creation as a constant evolution, that the world is new each day. The majority of them trained the students who attended their circle while linking them always to the sources—the Qur’ān and the sunna—aware that these two sources are the generators of sense and life. They sought to establish rules that enable the umma to read in the Book of Creation and to adapt to Destiny, a work of God just as the Qur’ān is the Revelation of God. Mulay ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, the great scholar of islam and fi gurehead recognized as reference by the fuqahā’ (4) as well as by Sufi s, the Saint of the saints in the eyes of the umma, said: “Destiny is obscurity (in the sense of enigma); go forth into it with the torch of the Book and the sunna.” |
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| The rightly guided imams of the fi rst centuries had as a matter of fact the major concern not to create dogmas. They all expressed this clearly, and resorted to the two essential sources (the Qur’ān and the sunna) as safeguards against deviations. |
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| For Imam Mālik, a good disciple of the Message, we fi nd this famous warning in the Muslim milieus: “Every opinion [expressed by a scholar of islam] is susceptible ofbeing accepted or rejected. Only the opinion of the one who lies in this grave counts.” Mālik was seated beside the tomb of the Prophet (grace and peace upon him). |
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| Abu Hanifa, the other fi gurehead of the effort of adaptation, said: “If I have expressed an opinion that contradicts the Book of God or the hadīths of the Messenger, reject my opinion.” (5)Ibn Hanbal, reputed to have a rigorous reading of the Message, said: “Do not blindly follow my opinions, or those of Mālik, ash-Shafi ‘ī, al-Awza‘ī or ath-Thawrī. Draw [your opinion] from where they took their own.” (6) |
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| Alas, exactly the opposite happened. Fratricidal confrontations soon broke out between the disciples of those different schools. They would tear the Muslim world apart—and still do. Rather than being a source of richness, difference soon became a cause of fi ghting or cold war. The fratricidal struggle was to the advantage of an imposed Central Power that fanned the embers of discord to better play the role of the supreme guarantor. |
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| Suffering from total stagnation at the level of the effort of reflection, the Muslim world would make the opinions of these great masters a cause of fixation and intolerance. Muslims to this day remain reliant on the thinking of those who incessantly reminded them of the relative nature of their teaching. We are still adopting practices directed to the jurisprudential law instituted by these venerable imams instead of being directed to the Qur’ān and the sunna, which are ever a source of constant appeal to reason and adaptability. Instead of drawing lessons from their aforementioned recommendations, we have immortalized the relative part of their brilliant work. We kept ruminating over their theses that perfectly met the needs of their time and the inhibitory conditions of the Power of those days with which they were compelled to compromise. |
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| *From the Book "Full Sails Ahead" (available online at www.jspublishing.net). (1). Ash-Shafi ‘ī was born in Arabia in 767 A.H. and died in Cairo in 820. According to the Encyclopedia Universalis, “This theologian played a great part in the formation of Muslim legislation. He traveled across the Arab East, studying in the great centers of jurisprudence and taking particular interest in the Malekite and Hanafi te doctrines. Maintaining his independence from the various masters he met and the schools he attended, he had the great merit of creatinga new synthesis of the different aspects of Muslim jurisprudence. Starting from ideas with which Muslims were familiar, he was able to restructure these aspects in a coherent manner.. . . It was in Cairo that he gathered his theories in his book Rissala [the letter], which has often made him regarded as the father of Muslim Law.”(2). Taqlid means the blind and uncritical imitation of predecessors in the fi eld of law, without making an effort of adaptation.(3). In fact the word fi qh, which Jacques Berque translates as “case law,” refers in the exact sense of the word to deep knowledge of the matters of islam. Taqlid, or the folly of copying from former scholars without any effort of adaptation whatsoever, takes it completely away from its original and noble sense and perfectly meets Jacques Berque’s defi nition.(4). Fuqahas or doctors in case law.(5). Tariq Ramadan, Etre musulman européen: étude des sources islamiques à la lumière du context européen [on being a European Muslim: a study of Islamic sources in light of the European context], Tawhid, Lyon, 1999, p. 105.(6). Idem. |
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