Sunnah, Shari ah, Sectarianism & Ijtihad

Sunnah, Shari'ah, Sectarianism & Ijtihad

Understanding Islam Series: Session 2

By Abdal Hakim Murad

Opening

Opening Khutbah

Rather than waiting for a couple of truants, I'll start again on the second half of this cook's tour of the salient landscape of Islam. I've told you about the five pillars, but the outward aspects of the religion of Islam, this first level of the three that are mentioned in the Hadith of Gabriel, are not confined by any means to these five pillars. They overflow famously into every other dimension of the believer's life.

Islam's Comprehensive Nature

One of the great clichés about Islam is that it governs not just one's devotional life or one's moral life, but in fact seeks to influence and guide every other aspect of human existence, individual and collective. Now in a sense, this totalizing aspect of Islam might seem a little odd or paradoxical. I mentioned earlier that Islam does not believe in original sin.

In fact, it takes a fairly optimistic view of human nature and of the human capacity to discern right from wrong without too much external assistance. We are not born into sin, the Quran says. We don't need the intervention of a divine saviour to pull us out of our categoric sinfulness.

So the question arises, if the human nature is essentially decent, why should Islam bother to give such detailed guidance on so many things? What's to stop us from making our own decisions? Well, the answer is actually quite an important one.

The Need for Constant Reminders

Let me give you a concrete example. Muslims are frequently asked why they should submit to a discipline of five daily prayers at set times. Surely one should pray when one really feels like praying. A prayer said in the middle of a busy session in the office, for instance, is hardly likely to be very concentrated or profound. Well, it's a good question and it has a good answer.

Quite simply, when we least feel like praying is often when we most need to pray. Islam sees its practices as divinely tailored to the circumstances of this present age. Part of Islam's self-understanding is that it is the eschatological religion, the one ordained and designed by God for our modern needs.

And this is an age, famously, of haste, deadlines, complexity. So to leave something so important as prayer to the end of the day when one has done everything else, or to attend a place of worship only once or twice a week, is, in the Muslim view, simply not enough to keep the soul on God's frequency. We need reminding and we need reminding constantly.

The reminders don't need to be long. The prayer, as I said, takes perhaps five to ten minutes. In fact, Islam's philosophy seems to be that regular snacks are better than occasional square meals.

And in the light of our generation's steadily deteriorating attention span, I think there's probably a lot of wisdom in that. Everything else in Islam's pattern of practice can be seen with the same insight. We need to be reminded and we need to be reminded all the time.

In fact, it's said that the Arabic word for man, insan, is connected etymologically to the word for forgetfulness, which is nisyan. That's what we do. We forget. That's our defining characteristic. The central fugal forces in today's world are simply too powerful for us to work out our own salvation, for us to be able to rely on our own devices. If we really wish to live our lives focused on God, but don't wish to retire from the world to live in a monastery or an equivalent, we have to have a pattern of guidance to follow.

The Sunnah

So Islam has instituted this thing called the sunnah, which as you'll remember from Dr. Jackson's lecture yesterday, means the normative practice, the blueprint for life, exemplified by the Prophet. Sunnah is a word which means a norm or a won't. Slightly old-fashioned word, but it's the one that comes closest to it, I think.

It denotes, as I said, the norm of practice, exemplified by the Prophet and also by his companions. And rather as medieval Christians often sought to improve themselves by modelling themselves after Christ, the famous principle of imitatio Christi. So also devout Muslims have consciously sought to sculpt not just their souls, but also their outward pattern of behaviour on the model laid down by the Prophet.

Now this thing called the sunnah includes the five pillars, but as I've said, it's not limited to it. They are its backbone. They are the basic warp and woof of the Muslim life, if you like.

But Islam does go much further, and the sunnah provides a complete blueprint for the significant aspects of human life. For instance, there's even a sunnah on how to clean your teeth. This kind of thing often seems strange to people nurtured on Western ideas of religion, which say that there's a secular and a sacred realm, and the sacred doesn't necessarily have much to say on the little mechanics of life.

But we know that the Prophet used a particular type of toothbrush that was made from the araq wood, which has some herbal and antibiotic properties. And very many Muslims nowadays will insist on using a toothbrush made of the same kind of wood, and cleaning their teeth when the Prophet cleaned his teeth, which was after every meal and before every prayer.

General Guidance and Specific Examples

But the sunnah, obviously, given the diversity and unpredictability of human life, cannot always take the form of specific rules. Very often, the Prophet simply issued general patterns, general paradigms of guidance. For instance, there's no immensely detailed body of hadiths on how to bring up children.

Instead, we have global guidance in hadiths, which say, for instance, that there are general moral principles. A famous hadith often cited is that a rough Bedouin from the desert once came to the mosque and saw the Prophet allowing his grandchildren to play on him, to climb on him while he was praying, and when they'd finished and he'd finished, he kissed them, and the Bedouin thought this was ridiculous, and he said, you kiss your children? We never do that in our tribe. And the Prophet just looked at him sadly and said:

"Whoever shows no love and compassion can be shown no love and compassion by God."

So that's a general injunction, and the actual nitty-gritty of how you would extend that to your children is left to individual circumstances. Similarly, there are hadith which commend showing compassion and love to the elderly.

Very often also the Sunnah takes the form of prayers.

Du'a - Informal Prayers

I mentioned this thing called the Salat, conventionally translated as prayer, but really no less importantly for the spiritual economy of the Muslim life, are the optional, more informal prayers, known as Du'a in Arabic, again one of these not quite pronounceable words, Du'a means prayer more in the Western sense, i.e. a petition or improvised prayer for your own circumstances, for your family's health, etc., the usual things people pray for.

Sometimes people will make up their own prayers to suit the moment, very often they will use prayers that have been handed down from the Prophet, or from his companions, or from some of the great saints of the past, and I've included, I think, three or four of them in the handout, just so you can get a brief insight into the kind of prayers that the Prophet gave us.

There are some prayers which one can say at specific occasions, and again it's part of Islam's concern to sanctify every aspect of human life, that there are often prayers from the Prophet for even quite trivial things. For instance, if you drink a glass of milk, the Prophet, we know, said, O Lord, bless us in this and grant us an increase in it, as you drink a glass of milk. And so you'll see past Muslims whispering this as they raise a glass of milk to their lips. There are prayers for all kinds of circumstances, there are even prayers to be said while having sex, for instance.

So the sunnah is often stereotyped as some kind of formalistic grid that reigns people in, that imposes a straight jacket, which cramps the human life. But in fact large areas of human life are subject only to general global injunctions and are not laid down in detail. It is overwhelmingly a voluntary mechanism.

The Shari'ah

The Sunnah forms part of an even larger body of guidance called the Shari'ah. And the Shari'ah is what I'll be talking about for the rest of this lecture. Characteristically, the word Shari'ah is translated by journalists as Islamic law. In fact, it doesn't really mean Islamic law.

There are Islamic laws that are included in it, but it also includes this thing called the Sunnah, which includes systems of worship, which nobody would describe as forms of law. The word Shari'ah means a way or a path. The path of the Prophet, the path to paradise.

As a technical term of the Muslim religion, it means that body of practical assistance revealed by God for individuals and also for social guidance for the shaping of society and its institutions. So in Islam, the religion covers not just methods of worship and systems of personal ethics, but also lifestyle and public law.

Islamic Law - Not a Single Code

Islamic law is a subject very often in the news nowadays and most of what is said about it is seriously misguided. To start off with, we should acknowledge that, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Islamic law in the sense that there is, say, Roman law or English common law or the Code Napoléon. It's not a single codified body of positive legal rulings. What there is instead is an Islamic legal tradition, which includes within it an often very diverse body of interpretations.

So whenever you see a journalist or whoever saying, according to Islamic law... you should immediately get suspicious because the chances are that that's just one interpretation of Islamic law that's being applied there. This can lead often to quite drastic misunderstandings.

Example: Domestic Violence and Different Schools

For instance, a famous case is that of domestic violence. In Islamic law, is domestic violence just cause for the woman to petition for divorce? And journalists will often say, no, it's not, on the basis of what happened in places like Pakistan, where they follow one tradition of Islamic law called the Hanafi school, which says that domestic violence is not grounds for the wife to petition for divorce.

However, there are other schools of Islamic law, like Maliki law, for instance, which prevails in North Africa, the Emirates, and some other countries, which says that, yes, it is legitimate grounds for petitioning for divorce. Also, mental cruelty, according to Maliki law, allows the woman to divorce.

So that's a warning against accepting or making large generalizations about Islamic legal tradition.

The Salman Rushdie Case

I was wondering, what's the case of Salman Rushdie? Is there some contradiction or conflict in opinion regarding his situation vis-à-vis Islamic law? The Quran doesn't lay down any punishment for apostasy or for blasphemy. Medieval Islamic thinkers assumed that apostasy was roughly the equivalent of what we would today refer to as treason, and it carried the death penalty.

In most medieval Muslim thought, that's the case. There are some exceptions, for instance, somebody called al-Baji in medieval Spain said, no, apostasy isn't an offense punishable by law. It's something that's left to God and will be dealt with by a higher court when the culprit dies.

So as usual, there is a diversity of voices. The anger of the Muslim response reflected largely insecurities about the integrity of the community and the fact that somebody from the community was now insulting it, adding his voice to the chorus of denunciations that were already being poured on Muslim values and Muslim life from outside the faith.

But a lot of Muslim authorities never accepted Khomeini's death penalty. I remember when, at the height of the affair, and in England, it was a lot sharper and more worrying than I'm sure it was in the States. I actually telephoned the highest Sunni legal authority, which is the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where I have contacts, spoke to the deputy head and said, what's the Azhar's position? And they said, oh, weeks ago we issued a fatwa saying that Salman Rushdie should not be sentenced to death, and Sunni Muslims distanced themselves from the fatwa and so forth.

Ijtihad - Dynamic Interpretation

So Islamic law is a diverse and complex thing. It's also a dynamic thing. It is not a static system of law. It does have mechanisms for adapting to changed circumstances. These mechanisms lumped together under the general heading of ijtihad, which means the independent exercise of reason to amend the law or to arrive at a law where none hitherto existed.

The broad parameters are still those of the Quran and the Hadith, but very often the Muslims found that circumstances arose in their lives which simply weren't covered by the Quran and the Hadith, particularly as the Muslims burst out of Arabia and came face to face with much more complex, advanced, sophisticated civilizations, legal, financial traditions, and so forth, on which there seemed to be no clear guidance.