DEVELOPMENT OF

MUSLIM THEOLOGY,
JURISPRUDENCE
AND
CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY

BY
DUNCAN B. MACDONALD

1903
Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory by Duncan B. MacDonald.

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CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
PART 1. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
PART 2. DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
PART 3. THEOLOGY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
APPENDIX 1. ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS
1. Ash-Shahrastani On The Classification Of Muslim Sects
2. The Prophet In A Tradition
3. A Short Creed By Al-Ash‘Ari
4. A Short Creed By Al-Ghazzali
5. Articles Of Belief Of Najm Ad-Din Abu Hafs An-Nasafi
6. The Creed Called The Sufficiency Of The Commonalty In The Science Of
Scholastic Theology, By Muhammad Al-Fudali
7. Analysis Of The Taqrib Of Abu Shuja Al-Ispahani
APPENDIX 2: BIBLIOGRAPHY
 1. Books And Articles, General And Fundamental, For The Study Of Islam
2. On Muslim History And On Present Condition Of Muslim World
3. On Muslim Traditions And Law
4. On Muslim Theology, Philosophy And Mysticism
APPENDIX 3
Chronological Table
 1

PREFACE

IT is with very great diffidence that I send out this book. Of the lack and
need of some text-book of the kind there can be little doubt. From the
educated man who wishes to read with intelligence his "Arabian Nights" to
the student of history or of law or of theology who wishes to know how it
has gone in such matters with the great Muslim world, there is demand
enough and to spare. Still graver is the difficulty for the growing body of
young men who are taking up the study of Arabic. In English or German or
French there is no book to which a teacher may send his pupils for brief
guidance on the development of these institutions; on the development of
law there are only scattered and fragmentary papers, and on the
development of theology there is practically nothing. But of the difficulty of
supplying this need there can be even less doubt. Goldziher could do it fully
and completely; no other Arabist alive could approach the task other than
with trepidation. The following pages therefore form a kind of forlorn
attempt, a rushing in on the part of one who is sure he is not an angel and is
in grave doubt on the question of folly, but who also sees a gap and no
great alacrity on the part of his betters toward filling it. One thing, however,
I would premise with emphasis. All the results given here have been reached
or verified from the Arabic sources. These sources are seldom stated either
in the text or in the bibliography, as the book is intended to be useful to
non-Arabists, but, throughout, they lie behind it and are its basis. By this it is
not meant that the results of this book are claimed as original. Every Arabist
will recognize at once from whose wells I have drawn and who have been
my masters. Among these I would do homage in the first instance to
Goldziher; what Arabist is not deep in his debt? With Goldziher's influence
through books I would join the kindred influence of the living voice of my
teacher Sachau. To him I render thanks and reverence now for his kindly
sympathy and guidance. Others in whose debt I am are Nöldeke, Snouck
Hurgronje, von Kremer, Lane--many more. Those who are left of these will
know their own in my pages and will be merciful to my attempts to tread in
their steps and to develop their results. What is my own, too, they will know;
 2

into questions of priority I have no desire to enter. Foot-notes which might

have given to each scholar his due have been left unwritten. For the readers
of this book such references in so vast a subject would be use., less. Such
references, too, would have in the end be made to Arabic sources.

More direct help I have to acknowledge on several sides. To the atmosphere

and scholarly ideals of Hartford Seminary I am indebted for the possibility of
writing such a book as this, so far from the ordinary theological ruts. Among
my colleagues Professor Gillett has especially aided me with criticism and
suggestions on the terminology of scholastic theology. Dr. Talcott Williams,
of Philadelphia, illumined for me the Idrisid movement in North Africa. One
complete sentence on p. 85 I have conveyed from a kindly notice in The
Nation of my inaugural lecture on the development of Muslim
Jurisprudence. Finally, and above all, I am indebted to my wife for much
patient labor in copying and for keen and luminous criticism in planning and
correcting. With thanks to her this preface may fitly close.

DUNCAN B. MACDONALD.

HARTFORD, December, 1902.

* *
* As it has proved impracticable to give in the body of the book a full
transliteration of names and technical terms, the learner is referred for such
exact forms to the chronological table and the index. In
these hamza and ayn, the long vowels and the emphatic consonants are
uniformly represented, the last by italic.
 3

INTRODUCTION

IN human progress unity and complexity are the two correlatives forming
together the great paradox. Life is manifold, but it is also one. So it is seldom
possible, and still more seldom advisable, to divide a civilization into
departments and to attempt to trace their separate developments; life
nowhere can be cut in two with a hatchet. And this is emphatically true of
the civilization of Islam. Its intellectual unity, for good and for evil, is its
outstanding quality. It may have solved the problem of faith and science, as
some hold; it may have crushed all thought which is not of faith, as many
others hold. However that may be, its life and thought are a unity.

So, also, with its institutions. It might be possible to trace the developments
of the European states out of the dying Roman Empire, even to watch the
patrimony of the Church grow and again vanish, and yet take but little if any
account of the Catholic theology. It might be possible to deal adequately
with the growth of that system of theology and yet never touch either the
Roman or the civil law, even to leave out of our view the canon law itself. In
Europe the State may rule the Church, or the Church may rule the State; or
they may stand side by side in somewhat dubious amity, supposedly taking
no account each of the other. But in Muslim countries, Church and State are
one indissolubly, and until the very essence of Islam passes away, that unity
cannot be relaxed. The law of the land, too, is, in theory, the law of the
Church. In the earlier days at least, canon and civil law were one. Thus we
can never say in Islam, "he is a great lawyer; he, a great theologian; he, a
great statesman." One man may be all three, almost he must be all three, if
he is to be any one. The statesman may not practice theology or law, but his
training, in great part, will be that of a theologian and a legist. The
theologian-legist may not be a man of action, but he will be a court of
ultimate appeal on the theory of the state. He will pass upon treaties; decide
disputed successions; assign to each his due rank and title. He will tell the
Commander of the Faithful himself what he may do and what, by law, lies
beyond his reach.
 4

It was, then, under the pressure of necessity only that the following sketch
of the development of Muslim thought was divided into three parts. By no
possible arrangement did it seem feasible to treat .the whole at once.
Intolerable confusions and unintelligible complications would, to all
appearance, be the result. As the most concrete and simple side, the
development of the state is taken first. Second, on account of the shortness
of the course which it ran, comes the development of the legal ideas and
schools. Third comes the long and thrice complicated thread of theological
thought. It is for the student to hold firmly in mind that this division is purely
mechanical and for convenience only; that it corresponds to little or nothing
in the real nature of the case. This will undoubtedly become clear to him as
he proceeds. He will meet with the same names in all three divisions; he will
meet with the same technicalities and the same scholastic system. A treatise
on canon law is certainly different from one on theology, but each touches
the other at innumerable points; their authors may easily be the same; each
will be in great part unintelligible without the other. He must then labor to
merge these three sections again into one another. His principal helps in
this, along with diligent parallel reading, will be the chronological table and
the index. In the table he will watch the succession of men and events
grouped from all the three sections; from the index he will trace the
activities of each man in these different spheres. The index, too, will give
him the technical terms and he will observe their recurrence in historical,
legal, and theological theory. Further, it will serve him as a vocabulary when
he comes to read technical texts.

But, again, another warning is necessary. The sketch given here is

incomplete, not only in details but in the ground that it covers. Important
phases of Muslim law, theology, and state theory are of necessity passed
over entirely. Thus Babism is not touched at all and the Shi‘ite theology and
law hardly at all. The Ibadite systems have the merest mention and Turkish
and Persian mysticism are equally neglected. For such weighty organizations
the Darwish Fraternities are most inadequately dealt with, and Muslim
missionary enterprise might well be treated at length. Guidance on these
and other points the student will seek in the bibliography. It, too, makes no
pretence to completeness and consists of selected titles only. But it will
serve at least as an introduction and clew to an exceedingly wide field. And
 5

it may be well to state here, in so many words, that no work can be done in
this field without a reading knowledge of French and German, and no
satisfactory work without some knowledge of Arabic.

And, again, this sketch is incomplete because the development of Islam is

not yet over. If, as some say, the faith of Muhammad is a cul-de-sac, it is
certainly a very long one; off it many courts and doors open; down it many
peoples are still wandering. It is a faith, too, which brings us into touching
distance with the great controversies of our own day. We see in it, as in a
somewhat distorted mirror, the history of our own past. But we do not yet
see its end, even as the end of Christianity is not yet in sight. It is for the
student, then, to remember that Islam is a present reality and the Muslim
faith a living organism, a knowledge of whose laws may be of life or death
for us who are in another camp. For there can be little doubt that the three
antagonistic and militant civilizations of the world are those of Christendom,
Islam, and China. When these are unified, or come to a mutual
understanding, then, and only then, will the cause of civilization be secure.
To aid some little to the understanding of Islam among us is the object of
this book.
 6

PART 1. CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 7

CHAPTER 1

The death of Muhammad and the problem of the succession; the parties; families of
Hashimids, Umayyads and Abbasids; election of Abu Bakr; nomination of Umar; his
constitution; election of Uthman; Umayyads in power; murder of Uthman; origin of Shi‘ites;
election of Ali; civil war; Mu‘awiya first Umayyad; origin of Kharijites; their revolts; Ibadites;
development of Shi‘ites; al-Husayn at Karbala; different Shi‘ite constitutional theories;
doctrine of the hidden Imam; revolts against Umayyads; rise of Abbasids; Umayyads of
Cordova.

WITH the death of Muhammad at al-Madina in the year 11 of the Hijra (A.D.
632), the community of Islam stood face to face with three great questions.
Of the existence of one they were conscious, at least in its immediate form;
the others lay still for their consciousness in the future. The necessity was
upon them to choose a leader to take the place of the Prophet of God, and
thus to fix for all time what was to be the nature of the Muslim state.
Muhammad had appointed no Joshua; unlike Moses he had died and given
no guidance as to the man who should take up and carry on his work. If we
can imagine the people of Israel left thus helpless on the other side of the
Jordan with the course of conquest that they must pursue opening before
them, we shall have a tolerably exact idea of the situation in Islam when
Muhammad dropped the reins. Certainly, the people of Islam had little
conception of what was involved in the great precedent that they were
about to establish, but, nevertheless, there lies here, in the first elective
council which they called, the beginning of all the confusions, rivalries, and
uncertainties that were to limit and finally to destroy the succession of the
Commanders of the Faithful.

Muhammad had ruled as an absolute monarch--a Prophet of God in his own

right. He had no son; though had he left such issue it is not probable that it
would have affected the direct result. Of Moses's son we hear nothing till
long afterward, and then under very suspicious circumstances. The old free
spirit of the Arabs was too strong, and as in the Ignorance (al-jalailiya), as
they called the pre-Muslim age, the tribes had chosen from time to time
their chiefs, so it was now fixed that in Islam the leader was to be elected by
the people. But wherever there is an election, there there are parties; and
 8

this was no exception. Of such parties we may reckon roughly four. There
were the Early Believers, who had suffered with Muhammad at Mecca,
accompanied him to al-Madina and had fought at his side through all the
Muslim campaigns. These were called Muhajirs, because they had made with
him the Hijra or migration to al-Madina. Then there was the party of the
citizens of al-Madina, who had invited him to come to them and had
promised him allegiance. These were called Ansar or Helpers. Eventually we
shall find these two factions growing together and forming the one party of
the old original believers and Companions of Muhammad (sahibs, i.e., all
those who came in contact with the Prophet as believers and who died in
Islam), but at the first they stood apart and there was much jealousy
between them. Then, in the third place, there was the party of recent
converts who had only embraced Islam at the latest moment when Mecca
was captured by Muhammad, and no other way of escape for them was
open. They were the aristocratic party of Mecca and had fought the new
faith to the last. Thus they were but indifferent believers and were regarded
by the others with more than suspicion. Their principal family was
descended from a certain Umayya, and was therefore called Umayyad.
There will be much about this family in the sequel. Then, fourth, there was
growing up a party that might be best described as legitimists; their theory
was that the leadership belonged to the leader, not because he was elected
to it by the Muslim community, but because it was his right. He was
appointed to it by God as completely as Muhammad had been. This idea
developed, it is true, somewhat later, but it developed very rapidly. The
times were such as to force it on.

These, then, were the parties of which account must be taken, but before
proceeding to individuals in these parties, it will be well to fix some
genealogical relationships, so as to be able to trace the family and tribal
jealousies and intrigues that were so soon to transfer themselves from the
little circle of Mecca and al-Madina and to fight themselves out on the broad
field of Muslim history. For, in truth, in the development of no other state
have little causes produced such great effects as here. For example, it may
be said, broadly and yet truly, that the seclusion of Muslim women, with all
its disastrous effects at the present day for a population of two hundred
millions, runs back to the fact that A’isha, the fourteen-year-old wife of
 9

Muhammad, once lost a necklace under what the gossips of the time
thought were suspicious circumstances. As to the point now in hand, it is
quite certain that Muslim history for several hundred years was conditioned
and motived by the quarrels of Meccan families. The accompanying
genealogy will give the necessary starting-point.

GENEALOGICAL CHART FOR EARLIEST HISTORY OF ISLAM

The mythical ancestor is Quraysh; hence "the Quraysh," or "Quraysh" as a

name for the tribe. Within the tribe, the two most important families are
those of Hashim and Umayya; their rivalries for the succession of the
Prophet fill the first century and a half of Muslim history, and the
immediately pre-Islamic history of Mecca is similarly filled with a contest
between them as to the guardianship of the Ka‘ba and the care of the
pilgrims to that sanctuary. Whether this earlier history is real, or a reflection
from the later Muslim times, we need not here consider. The next important
division is that between the families of al-Abbas and Abu Talib, the uncles of
 10

the Prophet. From the one were descended the Abbasids, as whose heir-at-
law the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire now claims the Khalifate, and from
the other the different conflicting lines of Shi‘ites, whose intricacies we shall
soon have to face.

CHRONOLOGICAL CHART OF ALIDS

To return: in this first elective council the choice fell upon Abu Bakr. He was
a man distinguished by his piety and his affection for and close intimacy with
Muhammad. He was the father of Muhammad's favorite wife, A’isha, and
was some two years younger than his son-in-law. He was, also, one of the
earliest believers and it is evident that this, with his advanced age, always
respected in Arabia, went far to secure his election. Yet his election did not
pass off without a struggle in which the elements that later came to
absolute schism and revolution are plainly visible. The scene, as it can be put
together from Arabic historians, is curiously suggestive of the methods of
modern politics. As soon as it was assured that the Prophet, the hand which
had held together all those clashing interests, was really dead, a convention
 11

was called of the leaders of the people. There the strife ran so high between
the Ansar, the Muhajirs and the Muslim aristocrats of the house of Umayya,
that they almost came to blows. Suddenly in the tumult, Umar, a man of
character and decision, "rushed the convention" by solemnly giving to Abu
Bakr the hand-grasp of fealty. The accomplished fact was recognized--as it
has always been in Islam--and on the next day the general mass of the
people swore allegiance to the first Khalifa, literally Successor, of
Muhammad.

On his death, in A.H. 13 (A.D. 634), there followed Umar. His election passed
off quietly. He had been nominated by Abu Bakr and nothing remained but
for the people to confirm that nomination. There thus entered a second
principle--or rather precedent--beside that of simple election. A certain right
was recognized in the Khalifa to nominate his successor, provided he chose
one suitable and eligible in other respects. Unlike Cromwell in a similar case,
Abu Bakr did not nominate one of his own sons, but the man who had been
his right hand and who, he knew, could best build up the state. His foresight
was proved by the event, and Umar proved the second founder of Islam by
his genius as a ruler and organizer and his self-devotion as a man. Through
his generals, Damascus and Jerusalem were taken, Persia crushed in the
great battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand, and Egypt conquered. He was
also the organizer of the Muslim state, and it will be advisable to describe
part of his system, both for its own sake and in order to point the contrast
with that of his successors. He saw clearly what were the conditions under
which the Muslims must work, and devised a plan, evidently based on
Persian methods of government, which, for the time at least, was perfect in
its way.

The elements in the problem were simple. There was the flood of Arabs
pouring out of Arabia and bearing everything down in their course. These
must be retained as a conquering instrument if Islam were to exist. Thus
they must be prevented from settling down on the rich lands they had
seized,--from becoming agriculturists, merchants, and so on, and so losing
their identity among other peoples. The whole Arab stock must be
preserved as a warrior caste to fight the battles of God. This was secured by
a regulation that no new lands should be held by a Muslim. When a country
 12

was conquered, the land was left to its previous possessors with the duty of
paying a high rent to the Muslim state and, besides, of furnishing fodder and
food, clothing and everything necessary to the Muslim camp that guarded
them. These camps, or rather camp-cities, were scattered over the
conquered countries and were practically settlements of Muslims in partibus
infidelium. The duty of these Muslims was to be soldiers only. They were fed
and clothed by the state, and the money raid into the public treasury,
consisting of plunder or rents of conquered lands (kharaj), or the head-tax
on all non-Muslims (jizya), was regularly divided among them and the other
believers. If a non-Muslim embraced Islam, then he no longer paid the head-
tax, but the land which he had previously held was divided among his
former co-religionists, and they became responsible to the state. He, on the
other hand, received his share of the public moneys as regularly distributed.
Within Arabia itself, no non-Muslim was permitted to live. It was preserved,
if we may use the expression, as a breeding-ground for defenders of the
faith and as a sacred soil not to be polluted by the foot of an unbeliever. It
will readily be seen what the results of such a system must have been. The
entire Muslim people was retained as a gigantic fighting machine, and the
conquered peoples were machines again to furnish it with what was
needed. The system was communistic, but in favor of one special caste. The
others--the conquered peoples--were crushed to the ground beneath their
burdens. Yet they could not sell their land and leave the country; there was
no one to buy it. The Muslims would not, and their fellow-coreligionists
could not, for with it went the land-tax.

Such was, in its essence, the constitution of Umar, forever famous in Muslim
tradition. It stood for a short time, and could not have stood for a long time;
but the cause of its overthrow was political and not social-economic. With
the next Khalifa and the changes which came with him, it went, in great
part, to the ground. The choice of Umar to the Khalifate had evidently been
dictated by a consideration of his position as one of the earliest believers
and as son-in-law of the Prophet. The party of Early Believers had thus
succeeded twice in electing their candidate. But with the death of Umar in
A.H. 23 (A.D. 644) the Meccan aristocratic party of the family of Umayya that
had so long struggled against Muhammad and had only accepted Islam
when their cause was hopelessly lost, had at last a chance. Umar left no
 13

directions as to his successor. He seems to have felt no certainty as to the

man best fitted to take up the burden, and when his son sought to urge him
to name a Khalifa, he is reported to have said, "If I appoint a Khalifa, Abu
Bakr appointed a Khalifa; and if I leave the people without guidance, so did
the Apostle of God." But there is also a story that after a vain attempt to
persuade one of the Companions to permit himself to be nominated, he
appointed an elective council of six to make the choice after his death under
stringent conditions, which went all to wreck through the pressure of
circumstances. The Umayyads succeeded in carrying the election of Uthman,
one of their family, an old man and also a son-in-law of Muhammad, who by
rare luck for them was an Early Believer. After his election it was soon
evident that he was going to rule as an Umayyad and not as a Muslim. For
generations back in Mecca, as has already been said, there had been,
according to tradition, a continual struggle for pre-eminence between the
families of Umayya and of Hashim. In the victory of Muhammad and the
election of the first two Khalifas, the house of Hashim had conquered, but it
had been the constant labor of the conquerors to remove all tribal and
family distinctions and frictions and to bring the whole body of the Arabs to
regard one another as brother Muslims. Now, with a Khalifa of the house of
Umayya, all that was swept away, and it was evident that Uthman--a pious,
weak man, in the hands of his energetic kinsfolk--was drifting to a point
where the state would not exist for the Muslims but for the Umayyads. His
evil spirit was his cousin Marwan ibn al-Hakam, whom he had appointed as
his secretary and who eventually became fourth Umayyad Khalifa. The
father of this man, al-Hakam ibn al-As, accepted Islam at the last moment
when Mecca was captured, and, thereafter, was banished by Muhammad
for treachery. Not till the reign of Uthman was he permitted to return, and
his son, born after the Hijra, was the most active assertor of Umayyad
claims. Under steady family pressure, Uthman removed the governors of
provinces who had suffered with Muhammad and fought in the Path of God
(sabil Allah), and put in their places his own relations, late embracers of the
faith. He broke through the Constitution of Umar and gifted away great
tracts of state lands. The feeling spread abroad that in the eyes of the
Khalifa an Umayyad could do no wrong, and the Umayyads themselves were
not backward in affording examples. To the Muhajirs and Ansar they were
 14

godless heathen, and probably the Muhajirs and Ansar were right. Finally,
the indignation could no longer be restrained. Insurrections broke out in the
camp-cities of al-Kufa and al-Basra, and in those of Egypt and at last in al-
Madina itself. There, in A.H. 35 (A.D. 655), Uthman fell under the daggers of
conspirators led by a Muhammad, a son of Abu Bakr, but a religious fanatic
strangely different from his father, and the train was laid for a long civil war.
In the confusion that followed the deed the chance of the legitimist party
had come, and Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was chosen.

Fortunately this is not a history of Islam, but of Muslim political institutions,

and it is, therefore, unnecessary to go into the manifold and contradictory
stories told of the events of this time. These have evidently been carefully
redacted in the interests of later orthodoxy, and to protect the character of
men whose descendants later came to power. The Alids built up in favor of
Ali a highly ingenious but flatly fictitious narrative, embracing the whole
early history and exhibiting him as the true Khalifa kept from his rights by
one after the other of the first three, and suffering it all with angelic
patience. This varies from the extreme Shi‘ite position, which damns all the
three at a sweep as usurpers, through a more moderate one which contents
itself with cursing Umar and Uthman, to a rejection of Uthman only, and
even, at the other extreme, satisfies itself with anathematizing the later
Umayyads. At this point the Shi‘ites join hands with the body of orthodox
believers, who are all sectaries of Ali to a certain degree. Yet this tendency
has been counteracted to some extent by a strongly catholic and irenic spirit
which manifests itself in Islam. After a controversy is over and the figures in
it have faded into the past, Islam casts a still deeper veil over the
controversy itself and glorifies the actors on both sides into fathers and
doctors of the Church. An attempt is made to forget that they had fought
one another so bitterly, and to hold to the fact only that they were brother
Muslims. The Shi‘ites well so-called, for Shi‘a means sect, have never
accepted this; but it is the usage of orthodox, commonly called Sunnite,
Islam. A concrete expression of any result reached by the body of the
believers then often takes the form of a tradition assigned to Muhammad. In
this case, it is a saying of his that ten men, specified by name and prominent
leaders in these early squabbles, were certain of Paradise. It has further
become an article in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet are
 15

not to be mentioned save with praise; and one school of theologians, in

their zeal for the historic Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Yazid, the
slayer of al-Husayn, and reckoned as the worst of all the Umayyads, because
he had been a Khalifa in full and regular standing. This catholic recognition
of the unity of Islam we shall meet again and again.

Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details and to adjust the rights
and wrongs of this story, we return to the fixed fact of the election of Ali
and the accession to power of the legitimist party. This legitimist party, or
parties, had been gradually developing, and their peculiar and mutually
discordant views deserve attention. Those views all glorified Ali, the full
cousin of Muhammad and husband of his daughter Fatima, but upon very
different grounds. There could not but exist the feeling that a descendant of
the Prophet should be his successor, and the children of All, al-Hasan and al-
Husayn were his only grandchildren and only surviving male descendants.
This, of course, reflected a dignity upon Ali, their father, and gave him a
claim to the Khalifate. Again, Ali himself seems to have made a great and
hardly comprehensible impression upon his contemporaries. The proverb
ran with the people, "There is no sword save Dhu-l-faqar, and no youth save
Ali." He was not, perhaps, so great a general as one or two others of his
time, but he stood alone as a warrior in single combat; he was a poet and an
orator, but no statesman. As one of the earliest of the Early Believers, it
might be expected that the Muhajirs would support him, and so they did;
but the matter went much farther, and he seems to have excited a feeling of
personal attachment and devotion different from that rendered to the
preceding Khalifas. Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat as to his
claim. The idea of election was thrown aside, and his adherents proclaimed
his right by the will and appointment of God to the successorship of the
Prophet. As God had appointed Muhammad as Prophet, so He had
appointed Ali as his helper in life and his successor in death. This was
preached in Egypt as early as the year 32.

It will easily be seen that with such a following, uniting so many elements,
his election could be brought about. Thus it was; but an evil suspicion rested
upon him. Men thought, and probably rightly, that he could have saved the
aged Uthman if he had willed, and they even went the length of accusing
 16

him of being art and part in the murder itself. The ground was hollow
beneath his feet. Further, there were two other old Companions of the
Prophet, Talha and az-Zubayr, who thought they had a still better claim to
the Khalifate; and they were joined by A’isha, the favorite wife of
Muhammad, now, as a finished intrigante, the evil genius of Islam. Ali had
reaped all the advantage of the conspiracy and murder, and it was easy to
raise against him the cry of revenge for Uthman. Then the civil war began. In
the struggle with Talha and az-Zubayr, Ali was victorious. Both fell at the
battle of the Camel (A.H. 36), so called from the presence bf A’isha mounted
on a camel like a chieftainess of the old days. But a new element was to
enter. The governorship of Syria had been held for a long time by Mu‘awiya,
an Umayyad, and there the Umayyad influence was supreme. There, too,
had grown up a spirit of religious indifference, combined with a preservation
of all the forms of the faith. Mu‘awiya was a statesman by nature, and had
moulded his province into an almost independent kingdom. The Syrian army
was devoted to him, and could be depended upon to have no other
interests than his. From the beginning of Ali's reign, he had been biding his
time; had not given his allegiance, but had waited for the hour to strike for
revenge for Uthman and power for himself. The time came and Mu‘awiya
won. We here pass over lightly a long and contradictory story. It is enough
to note how the irony of history wrought itself out, and a son of the Abu
Sufyan who had done so much to persecute and oppose Muhammad in his
early and dark days and had been the last to acknowledge his mission,
became his successor and the ruler of his people. But with Ali ends the
revered series of the four "Khalifas who followed a right course" (al-khulafa
ar-rashidun), reverenced now by all orthodox Muslims, and there begins the
division of Islam into sects, religious and political--it comes to the same
thing.

The Umayyads themselves clearly recognized that with their accession to

power a change had come in the nature of the Muslim state. Mu‘awiya said
openly that he was the first king in Islam, though he retained and used
officially the title of Khalifa and Commander of the Faithful. Yet such a
change could not be complete nor could it carry with it the whole people--
that is clear of itself. For more than one hundred years the house of Umayya
held its own. Syria was solid with it and it was supported by many statesmen
 17

and soldiers; but outside of Syria and north Arabia it could count on no part
of the population. An anti-Khalifa, Abd Allah, son of the az-Zubayr of whom
we have already heard, long held the sacred cities against them. Only in A.H.
75 (A.D. 692) was he killed after Mecca had been stormed and taken by their
armies. Southern Arabia and Mesopotamia, with its camp-cities al-Kufa and
al-Basra, Persia and Egypt, were, from time to time, more or less in revolt.
These risings went in one or other of two directions. There were two great
anti-Umayyad sects. At one time in Mu‘awiya's contest with Ali, he trapped
All into the fatal step of arbitrating his claim to the Khalifate. It was fatal, for
by it Ali alienated some of his own party and gained less than nothing on the
other side. Part of Ali's army seceded in protest and rebellion, because he--
the duly elected Khalifa--submitted his claim to any shadow of doubt. ` On
the other hand, they could not accept Mu‘awiya, for him they regarded as
un-duly elected and a mere usurper. Thus they drifted and split into
innumerable sub-sects. They were called Kharijites--goers out--because they
went out from among the other Muslims, refused to regard them as
Muslims and held themselves apart. For centuries they continued a thorn in
the side of all established authority. Their principles were absolutely
democratic. Their idea of the Khalifate was the old one of the time of Abu
Bakr and Umar. The Khalifa was to be elected by the whole Muslim
community and could be deposed again at need. He need be of no special
family or tribe; he might be a slave, provided he was a good Muslim ruler.
Some admitted that a woman might be Khalifa, and others denied the need
of any Khalifa at all; the Muslim congregation could rule itself. Their religious
views were of a similarly unyielding and antique cast, but with that we have
nothing now to do.

It cannot be doubted that these men were the true representatives of the
old Islam. They claimed for themselves the heirship to Abu Bakr and Umar,
and their claim was just. Islam had been secularized; worldly ambition,
fratricidal strife, luxury, and sin had destroyed the old bond of brotherhood.
So they drew themselves apart and went their own way, a way which their
descendants still follow in Uman, in east Africa, and in Algeria. To them the
orthodox Muslims--meaning by that the general body of Muslims--were
antipathetic more than even Christians or Jews. These were "people of a
book" (ahl kitab), i.e., followers of a revealed religion, and kindly treatment
 18

of them was commanded in the Qur’an. They had never embraced Islam,
and were to be judged and treated on their own merits. The non-Kharijite
Muslims, on the other hand, were renegades (murtadds) and were to be
killed at sight. It is easy to understand to what such a view as this led.
Numberless revolts, assassinations, plunderings marked their history.
Crushed to the ground again and again, again and again they recovered.
They were Arabs of the desert; and the desert was always there as a refuge.
It is probable, but as yet unproved, that mingled with the political reasons
for their existence as a sect went tribal jealousies and frictions; of such there
have ever been enough and to spare in Arabia. Naturally, under varying
conditions, their views and attitudes varied. In the, wild mountains of
Khuzistan, one of their centres and strongholds, the primitive barbarism of
their faith had full sway. It drew its legitimate consequence, lived out its life,
and vanished from the scene. The more moderate section of the Kharijites
centred round al-Basra. Their leader there was Abd Allah ibn Ibad, and from
about the year 60 on the schism between his followers and the more
absolute of these "come-outers" can be traced. It is characteristic of the
latter that they aided for a time Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr when he was
besieged in Mecca by the Umayyads, but deserted him finally because he
refused to join the names of Talha and his own father, az-Zubayr, with those
of Uthman and Ali in a general commination. The Kharijites were all good at
cursing, and the later history of this section of them shows a process of
disintegration by successive secessions, each departing in protest and
cursing those left behind as heathen and unbelievers. Characteristic, too, for
the difference between the two sections, were their respective attitudes
toward the children of their opponents. The more absolute party held that
the children of unbelievers were to be killed with their parents; the
followers of Abd Allah ibn Ibad, that they were to be allowed to grow up
and then given their choice. Again, there was a difference of opinion as to
the standing of those who held with the Kharijites but remained at home
and did not actually fight in the Path of God. These the one party rejected
and the other accepted. Again, were the non-Kharijites Muslims to the
extent that the Kharijites might live amongst them and mix with them? This
the severely logical party denied, but Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed.
 19

From this it will be abundantly clear that the only party with a possible
future was that of Ibn Ibad. His sect survives to the present day under the
name of Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, according to their
traditions, their first Imam, or president, was elected about A.H. 134. He was
of a family which had reigned there before Islam,. and from the time of his
election on, the Ibadites have succeeded in holding Uman against the rest of
the Muslim world. Naturally, the election of the Imam by the community has
turned into the rule of a series of dynasties; but the theory of election has
always held fast. They were sailors, merchants, and colonizers already by the
tenth century A.D., and carried their state with its theology and law to
Zanzibar and the coast of East Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite fugitives
passed into North Africa, and there they still maintain the simplicity of their
republican ideal and their primitive theological and legal views. Their home
is in the Mzab in the south of Algeria, and, though as traders and capitalists
they may travel far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling in marriage
with other Muslims is forbidden them.

At the opposite extreme from these in political matters stands the sect that
is called the Shi‘a. It, as we have seen, is the name given to the party that
glorifies Ali and his descendants and regards the Khalifate as belonging to
them by right divine. How early this feeling arose we have already seen, but
the extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the innumerable
differing views that developed, the maze of conspiracies, tortuous and
underground in their methods, some in good faith and some in bad, to
which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi‘a the most difficult side of a
knowledge of the Muslim East. Yet some attempt at it must be made. If
there was ever a romance in history, it is the story of the founding of the
Fatimid dynasty in Egypt; if there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in
history, it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins and the Druses;
if there was ever the persistence of an idea, it is in the present Shi‘ite
government in Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the whole
world of Islam still looks to appear and bring in the reign of justice and the
truth upon the earth. All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and his
children on the part of their followers twelve centuries ago.
 20

In A.H. 40 (A.D. 660) Ali fell by the dagger of a Kharijite. These being at the
opposite pole from the Shi‘ites, are the only Muslim sect that curses and
abhors Ali, his family and all their works. Orthodox Islam reveres Ali and
accepts his Khalifate; his family it also reverences, but rejects their
pretensions. The instinct of Islam is to respect the accomplished fact, and so
even the Umayyads, one and all, stand in the list of the successors of the
Prophet, much as Alexander VI and his immediate predecessors do in that of
the Popes.

To Ali succeeded his son, al-Hasan, but his name does not stand on the roll
of the Khalifate as usually reckoned. It shows some Shi‘ite tinge when the
historian says, "In the Khalifate of al-Hasan," and, thereafter, proceeds with,
"In the days of Mu‘awiya," the Umayyad Khalifa who followed him.
Mu‘awiya had received the allegiance of the Syrian Muslims and when he
advanced on al-Kufa, where al-Hasan was, al-Hasan met him and gave over
into his hands all his supposed rights. That was in A.H. 41; in A.H. 49 he was
dead by poison. Twelve years later al-Husayn, his brother, and many of his
house fell at Karbala in battle against hopeless odds. It is this last tragedy
that has left the deepest mark of all on the Muslim imagination. Yearly when
the fatal day, the day of Ashura, the tenth of the month Muharram, comes
round, the story is rehearsed again at Karbala and throughout, indeed, all
the Shi‘ite world in what is a veritable Passion Play. No Muslim, especially no
Persian, can read of the death of al-Husayn, or see it acted before his eyes,
without quivering and invoking the curse of God upon all those who had
aught to do with it or gained aught by it. That curse has clung fast through
all the centuries to the name of Yazid, the Umayyad Khalifa of the time, and
only the stiffest theologians of the traditional school have labored to save
his memory through the merits of the historical Khalifate. But even after this
tragedy it was not out with the blood of Muhammad. Many descendants
were left and their party lived on in strange, half underground fashion, as
sects do in the East, occasionally coming to the surface and bursting out in
wild and, for long, useless rebellion.

In these revolts the Shi‘a was worthy of its name, and split into many
separate divisions, according to the individuals of the house of Ali to whom
allegiance was rendered and who were regarded as leaders, titular or real.
 21

These subdivisions differed, also, in the principle governing the choice of a

leader and in the attitude of the people toward him. Shi‘ism, from being a
political question, became theological. The position of the Shi‘ite was and is
that there must be a law (nass) regulating the choice of the Imam, or leader
of the Muslim community; that that law is one of the most important
dogmas of the faith and cannot have been left by the Prophet to develop
itself under the pressure of circumstances; that there is such an Imam clearly
pointed out and that it is the duty of the Muslim to seek him out and follow
him. Thus there was a party who regarded the leadership as belonging to Ali
himself, and then to any of his descendants by any of his wives. These
attached themselves especially to his son Muhammad, known from his
mother as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, who died in 81, and to his
descendants and successors. It was in this sect that the most characteristic
Shi‘ite views first developed. This Muhammad seems to have been the first
concerning whom it was taught, after his death, that he was being
preserved by God alive in retirement and would come forth at his appointed
time to bring in the rule of righteousness upon the earth. In some of the
innumerable sub-sects the doctrine of the deity, even, of Ali was early held,
in others a doctrine of metempsychosis, generally among men and
especially from one Imam to his successor others, again, advanced the duty
of seeking the rightful Imam and rendering allegiance to him till it covered
the whole field of faith and morals--no more was required of the believer. To
one of these sects, al-Mukanna, "the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan," adhered
before he started on his own account.

We have seen already that so early as 32 the doctrine had been preached in
Egypt that Ali was the God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here we
have its legitimate development, which was all the quicker as it had, or
assumed, a theological basis, and did not simply urge the claims to
leadership of the family of the Prophet after the fashion in which inheritance
runs among earthly kings. That was the position at first of the other and far
more important Shi‘ite wing. It regarded the leadership as being in the blood
of Muhammad and therefore limited to the children of Ali by his wife Fatima,
the daughter of Muhammad. Again, the attitude toward the person of the
leader varied, as we have already seen. One party held that the leadership
was by the right of the appointment of God, but that the leader himself was
 22

simply a man as other men. These would add to "the two words" (al-
kalimalani) of the creed, "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the
Apostle of God," a third clause, "and Ali is the representative of God."
Others regarded him as an incarnation of divinity; a continuing divine
revelation in human form. His soul passed, when he died, to his next
successor. He was, therefore, infallible and sinless, and was to be treated
with absolute, blind obedience. Here there is a mingling of the most
strangely varied ideas. In Persia the people had been too long accustomed
to looking upon their rulers as divine for them to be capable of taking up any
other position. A story is told of the governor of a Persian province who
wrote to the Khalifa of his time that he was not able to prevent his people
from giving him the style and treatment of a god; they did not understand
any other kind of ruler; it was as much as his authority was worth to attempt
to make them desist. From this attitude, combined with the idea of the
transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi‘ite doctrine was derived.

But though the party of Ali might regard the descendants of Ali as semi-
divine, yet their conspiracies and revolts were uniformly unsuccessful, and it
became a very dangerous thing to head one. The party was willing to get up
a rising at any time, but the leader was apt to hang back. In fact, one of the
most curious features of the whole movement was the uselessness of the
family of Ali and the extent to which they were utilized by others. They have
been, in a sense, the cat's-paws of history. Gradually they themselves drew
back into retirement and vanished from the stage, and, with their vanishing,
a new doctrine arose. It was that of the hidden Imam. We have already seen
the case of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of
these concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on another line of
descent, vanished in the same way in the latter part of the second century of
the Hijra, and another about A.H. 260. Their respective followers held that
they were being kept in concealment by God and would be brought back at
the appointed time to rule over the world and bring in a kind of Muslim
millennium. This is the oriental version of the story of Arthur in Avalon and
of Frederick Barbarossa in Kyffhaiiser.

But that has led us far away and we must go back to the fall of the
Umayyads and the again disappointed hopes of the Alids. By the time of the
 23

last Khalifa of the Umayyad house, Marwan II, A.H. 127-132 (A.D. 744-750),
the whole empire was more or less in rebellion, partly Shi‘ite and partly
Kharijite. The Shi‘ites themselves had, as usual, no man strong enough to act
as leader; that part was taken by as-Saffah, a descendant of al-Abbas, an
uncle of Muhammad. The rebellion was ostensibly to bring again into power
the family of the Prophet, but under that the Abbasids understood the
family of Hashim, while the Alids took it in the more exact sense of
themselves. They were made a cat's-paw, the Abbasid dynasty was founded,
and they were thrown over. Thus, the Khalifate remained persistently in the
hands of those who, up to the last, had been hostile to the Prophet. This al-
Abbas had embraced the faith only when Mecca was taken by the Muslims.
Later historians, jealous for the good name of the ancestor of the longest
line of all the Successors, have labored to build up a legend that al-Abbas
stayed in Mecca only because he could there be more useful in the cause of
his nephew. This is one of the perversions of early history of which the
Muslim chronicles are full.

But the story of the Umayyads is not yet out. From the ruin that
overwhelmed them, one escaped and fled to North Africa. There, he vainly
tried to draw together a power. At last, seeing in Spain some better
prospect of success, he crossed thither, and by courage, statesmanship, and
patience, carved out a new Umayyad empire that lasted for 300 years. One
of his descendants in A.H. 317 (A.D. 929) took the title of Khalifa and claimed
the homage due to the Commander of the Faithful. There is story that al-
Mansur, the second Abbasid, once asked his courtiers, "Who is the Falcon of
Quraysh?" They named one after another of the great men of the tribe,
beginning, naturally, with his majesty himself, but to no purpose. "No," he
said, "the Falcon of Quraysh is Abd ar-Rahman, the Umayyad, who found his
way over deserts and seas, flung himself alone into a strange country, and
there, without any helper but himself, built up a realm. There has been none
like him of the blood of Quraysh."
 24

CHAPTER 2

Shi‘ite revolts against Abbasids; Idrisids; Zaydites; Imamites; the Twelvers; constitutional
theory of modern Persia; origin of Fatimids; Maymun the oculist; plan of the conspiracy; the
Seveners; the Qarmatians; Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi and founding of Fatimid dynasty in North
Africa; their spread to Egypt and to Syria; al-Hakim Bi’amrillah; the Druses; the Assassins;
Saladin and the Ayyubids.

IT is not in place here to deal with all the numberless little Shi‘ite revolts
against the Abbasids which now followed. Those only are of interest to us
which had more or less permanent effect on the Muslim state and states.
Earliest among such comes the revolt which founded the dynasty of the
Idrisids. About the middle of the second century the Abbasids were hard
pressed. The heavens themselves seemed to mingle in the conflict. The early
years of their rule had been marked by great showers of shooting stars, and
the end of the age was reckoned near by both parties. Messianic hope was
alive, and a Mahdi, a Guided of God, was looked for. This had long been the
attitude of the Alids, and the Abbasids began to feel a necessity to gain for
their de facto rule the sanction of theocratic hopes. In 143 Halley's comet
was visible for twenty days, and in 147 there were again showers of shooting
stars. On the part of the Abbasids, homage was solemnly rendered to the
eldest son of al-Mansur, the Khalifa of the time, as successor of his father,
under the title al-Mahdi, and several sayings were forged and ascribed to the
Prophet which told who and what manner of man the Mahdi would be, in
terms which clearly pointed to this heir-apparent. The Alids, on their side,
were urged on to fresh revolts. These risings were still political in character
and hardly at all theological; they expressed the claims to sovereignty of the
house of the Prophet. On the suppression of one of them at al-Madina in
169, Idris ibn Abd Allah, a grandson of al-Hasan, escaped to North Africa--
that refuge of the politically disaffected--and there at the far-off Volubilis of
the Romans, in the modern Morocco, founded a state. It lasted till 375, and
planted firmly the authority of the family of Muhammad in the western half
of North Africa. Other Alid states rose in its place, and in 961 the dynasty of
the Sharifs of Morocco was established by a Muhammad, a descendant of a
Muhammad, brother of the same Abd Allah, grandson of al-Hasan. This
 25

family still rules in Morocco and claims the title of Khalifa of the Prophet and
Commander of the Faithful. Strictly, they are Shi‘ites, but their sectarianism
sits lightly upon them; it is political only and they have no touch of the
violent religious antagonism to the Sunnite Muslims that is to be found in
Persian Shi‘ism. As adherents of the legal school of Malik ibn Anas, their
Sunna is the same as that of orthodox Islam. The Sahih of al-Bukhari is held
in especially high reverence, and one division of the Moorish army always
carries a copy of it as a talisman. They are really a bit of the second century
of the Hijra crystallized and surviving into our time.

Another Shi‘ite line which lasts more or less down to the present day, is that
of the Zaydites of al-Yaman. They were so called from their adherence to
Zayd, a grandson of al-Husayn, and their sect spread in north Persia and
south Arabia. The north Persian branch is of little historic importance for our
purpose. For some sixty-four years, from 250 on, it held Tabaristan, struck
coins and exercised all sovereign rights; then it fell before the Samanids. The
other branch has had a much longer history. It was founded about 280, at
Sa‘da in al-Yaman and there, and later at San‘a, Zaydite Imams have ruled off
and on till our day. The Turkish hold upon south Arabia has always been of
the slightest. Sometimes they have been absolutely expelled from the
country, and their control has never extended beyond the limits of their
garrisoned posts. The position of these Zaydites was much less extreme
than that of the other Shi‘ites. They were strictly Fatimites, that is, they held
that any descendant of Fatima could be Imam. Further, circumstances might
justify the passing over, for a time, of such a legitimate Imam and the
election as leader of someone who had no equally good claim. Thus, they
reverenced Abu Bakr and Umar and regarded their Khalifate as just, even
though Ali was there with a better claim. The election of these two Khalifas
had been to the advantage of the Muslim state. Some of them even
accepted the Khalifate of Uthman and only denounced his evil deeds.
Further, they regarded it as possible that there might be two Imams at the
same time, especially when they were in countries widely apart. This,
apparently, sprang from the sect being divided between north Persia and
south Arabia. Theologically, or philosophically--it is hard to hold the two
apart in Islam--the Zaydites were accused of rationalism. Their founder,
 26

Zayd, the grandson of al-Husayn, had studied under the great Mu‘tazilite,
Wasil ibn Ata, of whom much more hereafter.

But if the Zaydites were lax both in their theology and in their theory of the
state, that cannot be said of another division of the Shi‘ites, called the
Imamites on account of the stress which they laid on the doctrine of the
person of the Imam. For them the Imam of the time was explicitly and
personally indicated, Ali by Muhammad and each of the others in turn by his
predecessor. But it was hard to reconcile with this a priori position that an
Imam must have been indicated, the fact that there was no agreement as to
the Imam who had been indicated. Down all possible lines of descent the
sacred succession was traced until, of the seventy-two sects that the
Prophet had foretold for his people, seventy, at least, were occupied by the
Imamites alone. Further, the number of Hidden Imams was constantly
running up; with every generation, Alids found it convenient to withdraw
into retirement and have reports given out of their own deaths. Then two
sects would come into existence--one which stopped at the Alid in question,
and said that he was being kept in concealment by God to be brought back
at His pleasure; and another which passed the Imamship on to the next
generation. Out of this chaos two sects, adhering to two series of Imams,
stand clear through their historical importance. The one is that of the
Twelvers (Ithua‘ashariya); theirs is the official creed of modern Persia. About
A.H. 260 a certain Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, twelfth in descent from Ali,
vanished in the way just described. The sect which looked for his return
increased and flourished until, at length, with the conquest of Persia in A.H.
907 (A.D. 1502) by the Safawids--a family of Alid descent which joined arms
to sainthood--Persia became Shi‘ite, and the series of the Shahs of Persia
was begun. The position of the Shah is therefore essentially different from
that of the Khalifa of the Sunnites. The Khalifa is the successor of
Muhammad, with a dignity and authority which inheres in himself; he is both
king and pontiff; the Shah is a mere locum tenens, and reigns only until God
is pleased to restore to men the true Imam. That Imam is still in existence,
though hidden from human eyes. The Shah, therefore, has strictly no legal
authority; he is only a guardian of the public order. True legal authority lies,
rather, with the learned doctors of religion and law. As a consequence of
this, the Shi‘ites still have Mujtahids, divines and legists who have a right to
 27

form opinions of their own, can expound the original sources at first hand,
and can claim the unquestioning assent of their disciples. Such men have not
existed among the Sunnites since the middle of the third century of the
Hijra; from that time on all Sunnites have been compelled to swear to the
words of some master or other, long dead.

This division of the Shi‘ites is the only one that exists in great numbers down
to the present day. The second of the two mentioned above came to power
earlier, ran a shorter course, and has now vanished from the stage, leaving
nothing but an historical mystery and two or three fossilized, half-secret
sects--strange survivals which, like the survivals of geology, tell us what
were the living and dominant forces in the older world. It will be worth while
to enter upon some detail in reciting its history, both for its own romantic
interest and as an example of the methods of Shi‘ite propaganda. Its
success shows how the Abbasid empire was gradually undermined and
brought to its fall. It itself was the most magnificent conspiracy, or rather
fraud, in all history. To understand its possibility and its results, we must
hold in mind the nature of the Persian race and the condition of that race at
this time. Herodotus was told by his Persian friends that one of the three
things Persian youth was taught was to tell the truth. That may have been
the case in the time of Herodotus, but certainly this teaching has had no
effect whatever on an innate tendency in the opposite direction; and it is
just possible that Herodotus's friends, in giving him that information, were
giving also an example of this tendency. Travellers have been told curious
things before now, but certainly none more curious than this. As we know
the Persian in history, he is a born liar. He is, therefore, a born conspirator.
He has great quickness of mind, adaptability, and, apart from religious
emotion, no conscience. In the third century of the Hijra (the ninth A.D.), the
Persians were either devoted Shi‘ites or simple unbelievers. The one class
would do anything for the descendants of Ali; the other, anything for
themselves. This second class, further, would by preference combine doing
something for themselves with doing something against Islam and the
Arabs, the conquerors of their country. So much by way of premise.

In the early part of this third century, there lived at Jerusalem a Persian
oculist named Maymun. He was a man of high education, professional and
 28

otherwise; had no beliefs to speak of, and understood the times. He had a
son, Abd Allah, and trained him carefully for a career. Abd Allah, however
known as Abd Allah ibn Maymun--though he had thought of starting as a
prophet himself, saw that the time was not ripe, and planned a larger and
more magnificent scheme. This was to be no ordinary conspiracy to burst
after a few years or months, but one requiring generations to develop. It
was to bring universal dominion to his descendants, and overthrow Islam
and the Arab rule. It succeeded in great part, very nearly absolutely.

His plan was to unite all classes and parties in a conspiracy under one head,
promising to each individual the things which he considered most desirable.
For the Shi‘ites, it was to be a Shi‘ite conspiracy; for the Kharijites, it took a
Kharijite tinge; for Persian nationalists, it was anti-Arab; for free-thinkers, it
was frankly nihilistic. Abd Allah himself seems to have been a sceptic of the
most refined stamp. The working of this plan was achieved by a system of
grades like those in freemasonry. His emissaries went out, settled each in a
village and gradually won the confidence of its inhabitants. A marked
characteristic of the time was unrest and general hostility to the
government. Thus, there was an excellent field for work. To the enormous
majority of those involved in it the conspiracy was Shi‘ite only, and it has
been regarded as such by many of its historians; but it is now tolerably plain
how simply nihilistic were its ultimate principles. The first object of the
missionary was to excite religious doubt in the mind of his subject, by
pointing out curious difficulties and subtle questions in theology. At the
same time he hinted that there were those who could answer these
questions. If his subject proved tractable and desired to learn further, an
oath of secrecy and absolute obedience and a fee were demanded--all quite
after the modern fashion. Then he was led up through several grades,
gradually shaking his faith in orthodox Islam and its teachers and bringing
him to believe in the idea of an Imam, or guide in religious things, till the
fourth grade was reached. There the theological system was developed, and
Islam, for the first time, absolutely deserted. We have dealt already with the
doctrine of the Hidden Imam and with the present-day creed of Persia, that
the twelfth in descent from Ali is in hiding and will return when his time
comes. But down the same line of descent seven Imams had been reckoned
to a certain vanished Isma‘il, and this Isma‘il was adopted by Abd Allah ibn
 29

Maymun as his Imam and as titular head of his conspiracy. Hence, his
followers are called Isma‘ilians and Seveners (Sab‘iya). The story which is
told of the split between the Seveners and the Twelvers, which were to be,
is characteristic of the whole movement and of the wider divergence of the
Seveners from ordinary Islam and its laws. The sixth Imam was Ja‘far as-
Sadiq (d. A.H. 148); he appointed his son Isma‘il as his successor. But Isma‘il
was found drunk on one occasion, and his father in wrath passed the
Imamship on to his brother, Musa al-Qazam, who is accordingly reckoned as
seventh Imam by the Twelvers. One party, however, refused to recognize
this transfer. Isma‘il's drunkenness, they held, was a proof of his greater
spirituality of mind; he did not follow the face-value (zahr) of the law, but its
hidden meaning (batn). This is an example of a tendency, strong in Shi‘ism,
to find a higher spiritual meaning lying within the external or verbal form of
the law; and in proportion as a sect exalted Ali, so it diverged from literal
acceptance of the Qur’an. The most extreme Shi‘ites, who tended to deify
their Imam, were known on that account as Batinites or Innerites. On this
more hereafter.

But to return to the Seveners: in the fourth grade a further refinement was
added. Everything went in sevens, the Prophets as well as the Imams. The
Prophets had been Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and
Isma‘il, or rather his son Muhammad, for Isma‘il himself had died in his
father's lifetime. Each of these Prophets had had a helper. The helper of
Adam had been Seth; of Noah, Shem; and the helper of Muhammad, the son
of Isma‘il, was Abd Allah ibn Maymun himself. Between each pair of
Prophets there came six Imams--it must be remembered that the world was
never left without an Imam--but these Imams had had no revelation to
make; were only guides to already revealed truth. Thus, we have a series of
seven times seven Imams, the first, and thereafter each seventh, having the
superior dignity of Prophet. The last of the forty-nine Imams, this
Muhammad ibn Isma‘il, is the greatest and last of the Prophets, and Abd
Allah ibn Maymun has to prepare the way for him and to aid him generally. It
is at this point that the adherent of this system ceases to be a Muslim. The
idea of a series of Prophets is genuinely Islamic, but Muhammad, in Muslim
theology, is the last of the Prophets and the greatest, and after him there
will come no more.
 30

Such, then, was the system that those who passed the fourth degree
learned and accepted. The great majority did not pass beyond; but those
who were judged worthy were admitted to three further degrees. In these
degrees, their respect for religious teaching of every kind, doctrinal, moral,
ritual, was gradually undermined; the Prophets and their works were
depreciated and philosophy and philosophers put in their place. The end
was to lead the very few who were admitted to the inmost secrets of the
conspiracy to the same position as its founder. It is clear what a tremendous
weapon, or rather machine, was thus created. Each man was given the
amount of light he could bear and which was suited to his prejudices, and he
was made to believe that the end of the whole work would be the attaining
of what he regarded as most desirable. The missionaries were all things to
all men, in the broadest sense, and could work with a Kharijite fanatic, who
longed for the days of Umar; a Bedawi Arab, whose only idea was plunder; a
Persian driven to wild cries and tears by the thought of the fate of Ali, the
well-beloved, and of his sons; a peasant, who did not care for any family or
religion but only wished to live in peace and be let alone by the tax-
gatherers; a Syrian mystic, who did not know very well what he thought, but
lived in a world of dreams; or a materialist, whose desire was to clear all
religions out of the way and give humanity a chance. All was fish that came
to their net. So the long seed-planting went on. Abd Allah ibn Maymun had
to flee to Salamiya in Syria, died there and went to his own place--if he got
his deserts, no desirable one--and Ahmad, his son or grandson, took up the
work in his stead. With him the movement tends to the surface, and we
begin to touch hard facts and dates. In southern Mesopotamia--what is
called the Arab Iraq--we find a sect appearing, nicknamed Qarmatians, from
one of their leaders. In A.H. 277 (A.D. 890-1) they were sufficiently numerous
and knew their strength enough to hold a fortress and thus enter upon
open rebellion. They were peasants, we must remember, Nabateans and no
Arabs, only Muslims by compulsion, and thus what we have here is really
a Jacquerie, or Peasants' War. But a disturbance of any kind suited the
Isma‘ilians. From there the rising spread into Bahrayn and on to south
Arabia, varying in its character with the character of the people.

But there was another still more important development in progress. A

missionary had gone to North Africa and there worked with success among
 31

the Berber tribes about Constantine, in what is now Algeria. These have
always been ready for any change. He gave himself out as forerunner of the
Mahdi, promised them the good of both worlds, and called them to arms.
The actual rising was in A.H. 269 (A.D. 902). Then there appeared among
them Said, the son of Ahmad, the son of Abd Allah, the son of Maymun the
oculist; but it was not under that name. He was now Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi
himself, a descendant of Ali and of Muhammad ibn Isma‘il, for whom his
ancestors were supposed to have worked and builtup this conspiracy. In
A.H. 296 (A.D. 909) he was saluted as Commander of the Faithful, with the
title of al-Mahdi. So far the conspiracy had succeeded. This Fatimid dynasty,
so they called themselves from Fatima, their alleged ancestress, the
daughter of Muhammad, conquered Egypt and Syria half a century later and
held them till A.H. 567 (A.D. 1171). When in A.H. 317 the Umayyads of Cordova
also claimed the Khalifate and used the title, there were three Commanders
of the Faithful at one time in the Muslim world. Yet it should be noticed that
the constitutional position of these Umayyads was essentially different from
that of the Fatimids. To the Fatimids, the Abbasids were usurpers. The
Umayyads of Cordova, on the other hand, held, like the Zaydites and some
jurisconsults of the highest rank, that, when Muslim countries were so far
apart that the authority of the ruler of the one could not make itself felt in
the other, it was lawful to have two Imams, each a true Successor of the
Prophet. The good of the people of Muhammad demanded it. Still, the unity
of the Khalifate is the more regular doctrine.

But only half of the work was done. Islam stood as firmly as ever and the
conspiracy had only produced a schism in the faith and had not destroyed it.
Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on the one hand, of ruling a
people who were in great bulk fanatical Muslims and did not understand any
jesting with their religion, and, on the other hand, of being head of a
conspiracy to destroy that very religion. The Syrians and Arabs had
apparently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and North Africans, and
Ubayd Allah found himself between the devil and the deep sea. The
Qarmatians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans, stormed the holy city
Mecca, and, most terrible of all, carried off the sacred black stone. When an
enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they declined--they had orders
not to send it back. Everyone understood that the orders were from Africa.
 32

So Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address them in a public letter,

exhorting them to be better Muslims. The writing and reading of this letter
must have been accompanied by mirth, at any rate no attention was paid to
it by the Qarmatians. It was not till the time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that
they were permitted to do business with that stone. Then they sent it back
with the explanatory or apologetic remark that they had carried it off under
orders and now sent it back under orders. Meanwhile the Fatimid dynasty
was running its course in Egypt but without turning the people of Egypt
from Islam. Yet it produced one strange personality and two sects, stranger
even than the sect to which it itself owed its origin. The personality is that of
al-Hakim Bi’amrillah, who still remains one of the greatest mysteries that are
to be met with in history. In many ways he reminds us curiously of the
madness of the Julian house; and, in truth, such a secret movement as that
of which he was a part, carried on through generations from father to son,
could not but leave a trace on the brain. We must remember that the Khalifa
of the time was not always of necessity the head of the conspiracy, or even
fully initiated into it. In the latter part of the Fatimid rule we find distinct
traces of such a power behind the throne, consisting, as we may imagine, of
descendants and pupils of those who had been fully initiated from the first
and had passed through all the grades. In the case of al-Hakim, it is possible,
even, to trace to a certain extent, the development of his initiation. During
the first part of his reign he was fanatically Muslim and Shi‘ite. He
persecuted alternately the Christians and the Jews, and then the orthodox
and the Shi‘ites. In the latter part, there was a change. He had, apparently,
reached a point of philosophical indifference, for the persecutions of
Christians and Jews ceased, and those who had been forced to embrace
Islam were permitted to relapse. This last was without parallel, till in 1844
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe wrung from the Porte the concession that a
Muslim who apostatized to Christianity should not be put to death. But,
mingled with this indifference, there appeared a strange but regular
development of Shi‘ite doctrine. Some of his followers began to proclaim
openly that the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident that he
himself accepted and believed this. But the Egyptian populace would have
none of it, and the too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the
Lebanon and there preached to the native mountain tribes. The results of
 33

their labors are the Druses of to-day, who worship al-Hakim still and expect
his return to introduce the end of all things. Finally, al-Hakim vanished on the
night of February 12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery unread to this day.
Whether he was murdered, and if so why, or vanished of free-will, and if so
again why, we have no means of telling. Our guess will depend upon our
reading of his character. So much is certain, that he was a ruler of the
autocratic type, who introduced many reforms, most of which the people of
his time could not in the least understand and therefore misrepresented as
the mere whims of a tyrant, and many of which, from our ignorance, are still
obscure to us. If we can imagine such a man of strong personality and desire
for the good of his people but with a touch of madness in the brain, cast
thus in the midst between his orthodox subjects and a wholly unbelieving
inner government, we shall perhaps have the clew to the strange stories
told of him.

Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to which we shall refer, is
the sect known as the Assassins, whose Grand Master was a name of terror
to the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain. It, too, was founded, and
apparently for a purpose of personal vengeance, by a Persian who began as
a Shi‘ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt, studied under the
Fatimids--they had established at Cairo a great school of science--and
returned to Persia as their agent to carry on their propaganda. His methods
were the same as theirs, with a difference. That was the reduction of
assassination to a fine art. From his eagle's nest of Alamut--such is the
meaning of the name--and later from Masyaf in the Lebanon and other
mountain fortresses, he and his successors spread terror through Persia and
Syria and were only finally stamped out by the Mongol flood under Hulagu
in the middle of the seventh century of the Hijra (the 13th A.D.). Of the sect
there are still scattered remnants in Syria and India, and as late as 1866 an
English judge at Bombay had to decide a case of disputed succession
according to the law of the Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid dynasty itself fell
before the Kurd, Salah ad-Din, the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was
again orthodox.
 34

CHAPTER 3

The problem of the Abbasids; the House of Barmak; the crumbling of the empire; the
Prætorians of Baghdad; the Buwayhids; the situation of the Khalifa under them; the Saljuqs;
the possibilities of development under them; the Mongols and the Abbasid end; the
Egyptian Abbasids; the Ottoman Sultans, their heirs; theory of the Khalifate; the modern
situation; the signs of sovereignty for Muslims; five grounds of the claim of the Ottoman
Sultan; the consequences for the Sultan; other Muslim constitutions; the Shi‘ites; the
Ibadites; the Wahhabites; the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.

WE must now return to the Abbasids, whose empire we left crumbling

away. It was a shrewd stroke of policy on the part of its founder to put the
new capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Persia, Syria and Arabia.
For the only hope of permanence to the empire lay in welding these into a
unity. For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous rulers, and,
especially, during fifty years of guidance by the House of Barmak--Persians
who flung in their lot with the Abbasids and were their stay till the madness
of Harun ar-Rashid cast them down--this seemed to be succeeding; but, just
as the empire of Charlemagne melted under his sons, so did the empire of al-
Mansur and al-Ma’mun. The Bedawi tribes fell back into the desert and to
the free chaos of the old pre-Islamic life. As the great philosophical historian,
Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the Arabs by their nature are incapable of
founding an empire except when united by religious enthusiasm, and are of
all peoples least capable of governing an empire when founded. After the
first Abbasids, it is a fatal error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab or to
speak of the Muslim civilization as Arabian. The conquered peoples
overcame their conquerors. Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in
native independent dynasties flung off the Arab yoke. These dynasties were
mostly Shi‘ite; Shi‘ism, in great part, is the revolt of the Aryan against
Semitic monotheism. The process in all this was gradual but certain.
Governors of provinces revolted and became semi-independent. Sometimes
they acknowledged a shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, by having his
name on their coins and in the Friday prayers; sometimes they did not. At
other times they were, or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted, they
revolted absolutely. With them, it was a question of conscience. At last, not
 35

even in his own City of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa master. As
in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of mercenaries assumed control and
their leader was de facto ruler. Later, from A.H. 320 to 447 (A.D. 932-1055),
the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward and puppet of the Shi‘ite
Buwayhids. Baghdad itself they held from 334. But still, a curious spiritual
value--we cannot call it authority--was left to the shadowy successors of
Muhammad. Muslim princes even in far-off India did not feel quite safe upon
their thrones unless they had been solemnly in-vested by the Khalifa and
given their fitting title. Those very rulers in whose power the Khalifa's life lay
sought sanction from him for their rule. At one time there seemed to be
some hope that the fatal unity of theocratical Islam would be broken and
that a dualism with promise of development through conflict--such as the
rivalry between Pope and Emperor which kept Europe alive and prevented
both State and Church from falling into decrepit decay--might grow up; that
the Khalifa might become a purely spiritual ruler with functions of his own,
ruling with mutual subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction beside a
temporal Sultan. The Buwayhids were Shi‘ites and merely tolerated, for
state reasons, the impieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (A.D. 1055),
Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, entered Baghdad, was proclaimed Sultan of the
Muslims and freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite yoke. By 470, all western Asia,
from the borders of Afghanistan to those of Egypt and the Greek Empire,
were Saljuq. With the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as Pope,
there was a chance that the Muslim State might enter on a stage of healthy
growth through conflict. But that was not to be. Neither State nor Church
rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was finally and forever cut
off by the Mongol flood. When the next great Sultanate that of the
Ottoman Turks--arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of the Khalifate as
well. This is what might have been in Islam, built on actual history in Europe.
The situation that did arise in Islam may become more clear to us if we can
imagine that in Europe the vast plans of Gregory VII. had been carried out
and the Pope had become the temporal as well as the spiritual head of the
Christian world. Such a situation would have been similar to that in the
world of Islam at its earliest time during some few years under the dynasty
of the Umayyads, when the one temporal and spiritual sovereign ruled from
Samarqand to Spain. Then we can imagine how the vast fabric of such an
 36

imperial system broke down by its own weight. Under conflicting claims of
legitimacy, an anti-Pope arose and the great schism began. Thereafter the
process of disintegration was still more rapid. Provinces rose in insurrection
and dropped away from each rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the
sovereigns over them professed themselves to be the lieutenants of the
supreme Pontiff and sought investiture from him. Last, the States of the
Church itself--all that was left to it--came under the rule of some one of
these princes and the Pope was, to all intents, a prisoner in his own palace.
Yet the sovereignty of the Khalifa was not simply a legal fiction, any more
than that of the Pope would have been in the parallel just sketched. The
Muslim princes thought it well to seek spiritual recognition from him, just as
Napoleon I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius VII.

But a wave was soon to break in and sweep away all these forms. It came
with the Mongols under Hulagu, who passed from the destruction of the
Assassins to the destruction of Baghdad and the Khalifate. In A.H. 656 (A.D.
1258), the city was taken and the end of the Abbasids had come. An uncle of
the reigning Khalifa escaped and fled to Egypt, where the Mamluk Sultan
received him and gave him a spiritual court and ecclesiastical recognition. He
found it good to have a Khalifa of his own to use in any question of
legitimacy. The name had yet so much value. Finally, in 1517, the Mamluk rule
went down before the Ottoman Turks, and the story told by them is that the
last Abbasid, when he died in 1538, gave over his rights to their Sultan,
Sulayman the Great. Since then, the Ottoman Sultan of Constantinople has
claimed to be the Khalifa of Muhammad and the spiritual head of the
Muslim world.

Such were the fates of the Commanders of the Faithful. We have traced
them through a long and devious course, full of confusions and
complications. Leaving aside the legitimist party, the whole may be summed
in a word. The theoretical position was that the Imam, or leader, must be
elected by the Muslim community, and that position has never, theoretically,
been abandoned. Each new Ottoman sovereign is solemnly elected by the
Ulama, or canon lawyers and divines of Constantinople. His temporal
sovereignty comes by blood; in bestowing this spiritual sovereignty the
Ulama act as representatives of the People of Muhammad. Thus the
 37

theoretical position was liable to much modification in practice. The Muslim

community resolves itself into the people of the capital; still further, into the
body-guard of the dead Khalifa; and, finally, as now, into the peculiar
custodians of the Faith. Among the Ibadites the position from the first
seems to have been that only those learned in the law should act as
electors. Along with this, the doctrine developed that it was the duty of the
people to recognize un fait accompli and to do homage to a successful
usurper--until another more successful should appear. They had learned that
it was better to have a bad ruler than no ruler at all. This was the end of the
democracy of Islam.

Finally, it may be well to give some account of the constitutional question as

it exists at the present day. The greatest of the Sultans of Islam is
undoubtedly the Emperor of India. Under his rule are far more Muslims than
fall to any other. But the theory of the Muslim State never contemplated the
possibility of Muslims living under the rule of an unbeliever. For them, the
world is divided into two parts, the one is Dar al-Islam, abode of Islam; and
the other is Dar al-harb, abode of war. In the end, Dar al-harb must disappear
into Dar al-Islam and the whole world be Muslim. These names indicate with
sufficient clearness what the Muslim attitude is toward non-Muslims. It is
still a moot point among canon lawyers, however, whether Jihad, or holy
war, may be made, unprovoked, upon any Dar al-harb. One thing is certain,
there must be a reasonable prospect of success to justify any such
movement; the lives of Muslims must not be thrown away. Further, the
necessity of the case--in India, especially--has brought up the doctrine that
any country in which the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its
injunctions--even some of them--followed, must be regarded as Dar al-
Islam and that Jihad within its borders is forbidden. We may doubt, however,
if this doctrine would hold back the Indian Muslims to any extent if a good
opportunity for a Jihad really presented itself. The Shi‘ites, it may be
remarked, cannot enter upon a Jihad at all until the Hidden Imam returns
and leads their armies.

Again the two signs of sovereignty for Muslims are that the name of the
sovereign should be on the coinage and that he should be prayed for in the
Friday sermon (khutba). In India, the custom seems to be to pray for "the
 38

ruler of the age" without name.; then each worshipper can apply it as he
chooses. But there has crept in a custom in a few mosques of praying for the
Ottoman Sultan as the Khalifa; the English government busies itself little
with these things until compelled, and the custom will doubtless spread. The
Ottoman Sultan is certainly next greatest to the Emperor of India and would
seem, as a Muslim ruling Muslims, to have an unassailable position. But in his
case also difficult and ambiguous constitutional questions can be raised. He
has claimed the Khalifate, as we have seen, since 1538, but the claim is a
shaky one and brings awkward responsibilities. As stated at the present day,
it has five grounds. First, de facto right; the Ottoman Sultan won his title by
the sword and holds it by the sword. Second, election; this form has been
already described. Third, nomination by the last Abbasid Khalifa of Egypt; so
Abu Bakr nominated Umar to succeed him, and precedent is everything in
Islam. Fourth, possession and guardianship of the two Harams, or Sacred
Cities, Mecca and al Madina. Fifth, possession of some relies of the Prophet
saved from the sack of Baghdad and delivered to Sultan Salim, on his
conquest of Egypt, by the last Abbasid. But these all shatter against the
fixed fact that absolutely accepted traditions from the Prophet assert that
the Khalifa must be of the family of Quraysh; so long as there are two left of
that tribe, one must be Khalifa and the other his helper. Still, here, as
everywhere, the principal of Ijma, Agreement of the Muslim people, comes
in and must be reckoned with. These very traditions are probably an
expression in concrete form of popular agreement. The Khalifate itself is
confessedly based upon agreement. The canon lawyers state the case thus:
The Imamites and Isma‘ilians hold that the appointment of a leader is
incumbent upon God. There is only the difference that the Imamites say that
a leader is necessary in order to maintain the laws unimpaired, while the
Isma‘ilians regard him as essential in order to give instruction about God.
The Kharijites, on the other hand, recognize no fundamental need of an
Imam; he is only allowable. Some of them held that he should be appointed
in time of public trouble to do away with the trouble, thus a kind of dictator;
others, in time of peace, because only then can the people agree. The
Mu‘tazilites and the Zaydites held that it was for man to appoint, but that
the necessity was based on reason; men needed such a leader. Yet some
Mu‘tazilites taught that the basis was partly reason and partly obedience to
 39

tradition. On the other hand, the Sunnites hold that the appointment of an
Imam is incumbent upon men and that the basis is obedience to the
tradition of the Agreement of the Muslim world from the earliest times. The
community of Islam may have disputed over the individual to be appointed,
but they never doubted that the maintenance of the faith in its purity
required a leader, and that it was, therefore, incumbent on men to appoint
one. The basis is Ijma, Agreement, not Scripture or tradition from
Muhammad or analogy based on these two.

It will be seen from this that the de facto ground to the claim of the
Ottoman Sultan is the best. The Muslim community must have a leader; this
is the greatest Muslim ruling Muslims; he claims the leadership and holds it.
If the English rule were to become Muslim, the Muslims would rally to it. The
ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomination to little more,
except for antiquarians; the possession of the Prophetic relics is a sentiment
that would have weight with the crowd only; no canon lawyer would
seriously urge it. The guardianship of the two Harams is precarious. A
Turkish reverse in Syria would withdraw every Turkish soldier from Arabia
and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of the blood of the Prophet,
would proclaim a Khalifa from among themselves. At present, only the
Turkish garrison holds them in check.

But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely cannot become a

constitutional monarch in our sense. He rules under law--divine law--and the
people can depose him if he breaks it; but he cannot set up beside himself a
constitutional assembly and give it rights against himself. He is the successor
of Muhammad and must rule, within limitations, as an absolute monarch. So
impossible is the modern Khalifate, and so gigantic are its responsibilities.
The millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and all Muslims of central Asia;
the Muslims of India who are not Shi‘ite also look to him. So, too, in Africa
and wherever in the world the People of Muhammad have gone, their eyes
turn to the Bosphorus and the Great Sultan. This is what has been called the
modern Pan-Islamic movement; it is a modern fact.

The position of the other Muslim sects we have already seen. Of Shi‘ite
rulers, there are the Imamites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south
Arabia and fugitive in Africa; strange secret bodies of Isma‘ilians--Druses,
 40

Nusayrites, Assassins--still holding their own in mountain recesses, forgotten

by the world; oldest of all, the Sharifs of Morocco, who are Sunnites and
antedate all theological differences, holding only by the blood of the
Prophet. At Zanzibar, Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants of
the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other, there are some fossilized
descendants of every sect that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace
of Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and death. Insurrections
and heresies have their own uses.

It only remains to make mention of two modern movements which have

deeply affected the Islam of to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed
above, strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim world into closer
touch with the science and thought of the Christian world, rallying all the
Muslim peoples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as their spiritual
head and holding fast by the kernel of Islam. It is a reform movement whose
trend is forward. The other two, to which we now come, are reform
movements also, but their trend is backward. They look to the good old
days of early Islam and try to restore them.

The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from Muhammad ibn Abd al-
Wahhab (Slave of the Bountiful), its founder, a native of Najd in central
Arabia, who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam back to its primitive
purity and to do away with all the usages and beliefs which had arisen to
cloud its absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation in Islam have
never led to anything but the founding of new dynasties. They may begin
with a saintly reformer, but in the first or the second generation there s sure
to come the conquering disciple; religion and rule go together, and he who
meddles with the one must next grasp at the other. The third stage is the
extinction of the new dynasty and the vanishing of its party into a more or
less secret sect, the vitality of which is again directed into religious channels.
The Wahhabites were no exception. Their rule extended from the Persian
Gulf to the Red Sea, touched al-Yaman and Hadramawt and included some
districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early in the nineteenth
century; but now, after many dynastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites
proper has almost ceased, although the Turks have not gained any new
footing in Najd. There, a native Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free
 41

from Turkish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha’il. But the zeal of
the Wahhabites gave an impulse to reform in the general body of Muslims
which is not yet, by any. means, extinct. Especially in India, their views have
been widely spread by missionaries, and at one time there was grave fear of
a Wahhabite insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise again, and
the life of Wahhabism has passed into the Muslim Church as a whole.
Politically it has failed, but the spirit of reform remains and has undoubtedly
influenced the second reform movement to which we now come.

That is the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, founded in 1837 by Muhammad ibn Ali

as-Sanusi in order to reform and spread the faith. The tendency to organize
has always been strong among Orientals, and in Islam itself there have risen,
as we have seen, from the earliest times, secret societies for conspiracy and
insurrection. But apart from these dubious organizations, religious feeling
has also expressed itself in brotherhoods closely corresponding to the
monastic orders of Europe, except that they were, and are, self-governing
and under no relations but those of sentiment to the head of the Muslim
Faith. Rather, these orders of darwishes have been inclined toward heresies
of a mystical and pantheistic type more than toward the development and
support of the severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This is a side
of Muhammadanism with which we shall have to deal in some detail
hereafter. In the meantime, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of as-
Sanusi is one of the orders of darwishes, but distinguished from all its
predecessors in its severely reforming and puritanic character. It has taken
up the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the same problem in a
rather different way. Its principles are of the strictest monotheism; all
usages and ideas that do not accord with their views of the exact letter of
the Qur’an are prohibited. The present head of the Brotherhood, the son of
the founder, who himself died in 1859, claims to be the Mahdi and has
established a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the eastern Sahara, between
Egypt and Tripolis. The mother house of the order is there, and from it
missionaries have gone out and established other houses throughout all
north Africa and Morocco and far into the interior. The Head himself has of
late retreated farther into the desert. There is also an important centre at
Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis are vitiated into the order in
great numbers. From Mecca these brethren return to their homes all over
 42

the Muslim world, and the order is said to be especially popular in the Malay
Archipelago. So there has sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications,
an imperium in imperio. All the brethren in all the degrees--for, just as in the
monastic orders of Europe, there are active members and lay members--
reverence and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inaccessible oasis in
the African desert. There he works toward the end, and there can be little
doubt what that end will be. Sooner or later Europe--in the first instance,
England in Egypt and France in Algeria--will have to face the bursting of this
storm. For this Mahdi is different from him of Khartum and the southern
Sudan in that he knows how to rule and wait; for years he has gathered
arms and munitions, and trained men for the great Jihad. When his plans are
ready and his time is come, a new chapter will be opened in the history of
Islam, a chapter which will cast into forgetfulness even the recent volcanic
outburst in China. It will then be for the Ottoman Sultan of the time to show
what he and his Khalifate are worth. He will have to decide whether he will
throw in his lot with a Mahdi of the old Islam and the dream of a Muslim
millennium, or boldly turn to new things and carry the Successorship and the
People of Muhammad to join the civilized world.
 43

PART 2. DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE

 44

CHAPTER 1

The scope of jurisprudence among Muslims; the earliest elements in it, Arab custom, Jewish
law, personality of Muhammad; his attitude toward law; elements after death of
Muhammad; Qur’an, Usage of the Prophet, common law of al-Madina; conception
of Sunna before Muhammad and after; traditions and their transmission; traditions in book
form; influence of Umayyads; forgery of traditions; the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas;
the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal; the musannafs; al-Bukhari; Muslim; Ibn Maja; at-Tirmidhi;
an-Nasa’i; al-Baghawi; the problem of the Muslim lawyers; their sources; Roman law; the
influence of the doctrine of the Responsa prudentium; Opinion in Islam; the Law of Nature
or Equity in Islam; istihsan; istislah; Analogy; the patriarchal period in Islam; the Umayyad
period; the growth of the canon law.

IN tracing the development of Muslim jurisprudence few of the difficulties

are encountered which surrounded Sir Henry Maine when he first examined
the origins and history of European law. We do not need to push our
researches back to the primitive family, nor to work our way through
periods of centuries guided by the merest fragments of documents and
hints of usage. Our subject was born in the light of history; it ran its course in
a couple of hundred years and has left at every important point
authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its whither. Our
difficulties are different, but sufficiently great. Shortly, they are two. The
mass of material is overpowering; the strangeness of the ideas involved is
perplexing. The wealth of material will become plain, to some extent at
least, as the history is traced; but for the strangeness of the contents, of the
arrangement and the atmosphere of these codes some preparation must be
given from the outset. How, indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows
no distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal law; which prescribes
and describes the use of the toothpick and decides when a wedding
invitation may be declined, which enters into the minutest and most
unsavory details of family life and lays own rules of religious retreat? Is it by
some subtle connection of thought that the chapter on oaths and vows
follows immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on the building line
on a street is inserted in a chapter on bankruptcy and composition? One
thing, at least, is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most absolute sense,
fits the old definition, and is the science of all things, human and divine. It
 45

tells what we must render to Cæsar and what to God, what to ourselves,
and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering
to each man his due it utterly shatters. While Muslim theology defines
everything that a man shall believe of things in heaven and in earth and
beneath the earth--and this is no flat rhetoric--Muslim law prescribes
everything that a man shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It
takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in terms of duty. Nothing
can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam
never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of the
Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so.

It will, therefore, be well for the student to work through the sketch of a
code of Muslim law which is inserted in Appendix I. One has been chosen
which belongs to the school of ash-Shafi‘i because of its general
accessibility. It should be remembered that what is given is the merest table
of contents. The standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to eight
hundred and eleven closely printed quarto pages. Even a mere reading of
this table of contents, however, will show in how different a sphere of
thought from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must return to the
beginning of things, to the egg from which this tremendous system was
hatched.

The mother-city of Islam was the little town of Yathrib, called Madinat an-
Nabi, the City of the Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the Hijra or
Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of the Christian era. Here the
first Muslim state was founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim
jurisprudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were the result of the
inter-working of the same highly complicated causes. The ferments in the
case may be classified and described as follows: First, in the town itself
before the appearance of Muhammad on its little stage little, but so
momentous for the future--there were two parties, often at war, oftener at
peace. There was a genuine Arab element and there was a large settlement
of Jews. To the Arabs any conception of law was utterly foreign. An Arab
tribe has no constitution; its system is one of individualism; the single man is
a sovereign and no writ can lie against him; the tribe can cast him forth from
its midst; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So stands the case now in the
 46

desert, and so it was then. Some slight hold there might be on the tribe
through the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, always a
somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of the slightest. Further, the
avenging of a broken oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath;
if he did not care to right his client, no one else would interfere. There was
customary law, undoubtedly, but it was protected by no sanction and
enforced by no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, well; if not,
neither had anything o fear but the anger of his opponent. That law o
custom we shall find again appearing in the system o Islam, but there it will
be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God working through the
authority of the state. The Jewish element was in a different case. They may
have been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish proselytes--many
Arab tribes, we know, had gone over bodily to Judaism--but their lives were
ruled and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and divine legislation on
Sinai there was an immense accretion by legal fiction and by usage; the
Roman codes had left their mark and the customary law of the desert as
well. All this was working in the life of the town when Muhammad and his
little band of fugitives from Mecca entered it. Being Meccans, they must
have brought with them the more developed legal ideas of that trading
centre; but these were of comparatively little account in the scale. The new
and dominating element was the personality of Muhammad himself. His
contribution was legislation pure and simple, the only legislation that has
ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later, he ruled his community as
an absolute monarch, as a prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and
judged the people. He had no need of a code, for his own will was enough.
He followed the customary law of the town, as it has been described above,
when it suited him, and when he judged that it was best. If not, he left it and
there was a revelation. So the legislative part of the Qur’an grew out of such
scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of the squabbles and
questions of the townsfolk of al-Madina. The system was one of pure
opportunism; but of what body of legislation can that not be said? Of
course, on the one hand, not all decisions were backed by a revelation, and
Muhammad seems, on the other, to have made a few attempts to deal
systematically with certain standing and constantly recur-ring problems--
such, for example, as the conflicting claims of heirs in an estate, and the
 47

whole complicated question of divorce--but in general, the position holds

that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand to mouth. He did not draw up
any twelve tables or ten commandments, or code, or digest; he was there
and the people could come and ask him questions when they chose, and
that was enough. The conception of a rounded and complete system which
will meet any case and to which all cases must be adjusted by legal fiction or
equity, the conception which we owe to the genius and experience of the
Roman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From time to time he got into
difficulties. A revelation proved too wide or too narrow, or left out some
important possibility. Then there came another to supplement or correct, or
even to set the first quite aside--Muhammad had no scruples about
progressive revelation as applied to himself. Thus, through these
interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat contradictions have come
into the Qur’an and have proved the delight of generations of Muslim
jurisconsults.

Such, then, was the state of things legal in al-Madina during the ten years of
Muhammad's rule there until his death in A.D. 632. Of law there was, strictly
speaking, none. In his decisions, Muhammad could follow certainly the
customary law of the town; but to do so there was no necessity upon him
other than prudence, for his authority was absolute. Yet even with such
authority and such freedom, his task was a hard one. The Jews, the native
Arabs of al-Madina, and his fellow fugitives from Mecca lived in more or less
of friction. He had to see to it that his decisions did not bring that friction to
the point of throwing the whole community into a flame. The Jews, it is true,
were soon eliminated, but the influence of their law lasted in the customary
law of the town long after they themselves had become insignificant. Still,
with all this, the suitor before Muhammad had no certainty on what basis his
claims would be judged; whether it would be the old law of the town, or a
rough equity based on Muhammad's own ideas, or a special revelation ad
hoc. So far, then, we may be said to have the three elements--common law,
equity, legislation. Legal fiction we shall meet later; Muhammad had no
need of it.

But with the death of Muhammad in A.D. 632 the situation was completely
changed. We can now speak of Muslim law; legislation plays no longer any
 48

part; the process of collecting, arranging, correlating, and developing has

begun. Consider the situation as it must have presented itself to one of the
immediate successors of Muhammad, as he sat in his place and judged the
people. When a case came up for decision, there were several sources from
which a law in point might be drawn. First among them was the Qur’an. It
had been collected from the fragmentary state in which Muhammad had
left it by Abu Bakr, his first Khalifa, some two years after his death. Again,
some ten years later, it was revised and given forth in a final public
recension by Uthman, the third Khalifa. This was the absolute word of God--
thoughts and language--and stood and, in theory, still stands first of all
sources for theology and law. If it contained a law clearly applying to the
case in hand, there was no more to be said; divine legislation had settled the
matter. If not, recourse was next had to the decisions of the Prophet. Had a
similar one come before him, and how had he ruled? If the memories of the
Companions of the Prophet, the Sahibs, could adduce nothing similar from
one of his decisions, then the judge had to look further for an authority. But
the decisions of Muhammad had been many, the memories of his
Companions were capacious, and possessed further, as we must recognize
with regret, a constructive power that helped the early judges of Islam out
of many close corners. But if tradition even--true or false--finally failed, then
the judge fell back on the common law of al-Madina, that customary law
already mentioned. When that, too, failed, the last recourse was had to the
common-sense of the judge--roughly, what we would call equity. At the
beginning, therefore, of Muslim law, it had the following sources--
legislation, the usage of Muhammad, the usage of al-Madina, equity.
Naturally, as time went on and the figure of the founder drew back and
became more obscure and more venerated, equity gradually into disuse; a
closer search was m de for decisions of that founder which could in any way
be pressed into service; a method of analog closely allied to legal fiction,
was built up to assist in this, and the development of Muslim jurisprudence
as a system and a science was fairly begun. Further, in later times, the
decisions of the first four Khalifas and the agreement (ijma) of the
immediate Companions of Muhammad came to assume an importance only
second to that of Muhammad himself. Later still, as a result of this, the
opinion grew up that a general agreement of the jurisconsults of any
 49

particular time was to be regarded as a legitimate source of law. But we

must return to consider our subject more broadly and in another field.

The fact has already been brought out that the sphere of law is much wider
in Islam than it has ever been with us. By it all the minutest acts of a Muslim
are guarded. Europe, also, passed through a stage similar to this in its
sumptuary laws; and the tendency toward inquisitorial legislation still exists
in America, but not even the most mediævally minded American Western
State has ventured to put upon its statute-book regulations as to the use of
the toothpick and the wash-cloth. Thus, the Muslim conception of law is so
wide as to reach essential difference. A Muslim is told by his code not only
what is required under penalty, but also what is either recommended or
disliked though without reward or penalty being involved. He may certainly
consult his lawyer, to learn how near the wind he can sail without
unpleasant consequences; but he may also consult him as his spiritual
director with regard to the relative praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of
classes of actions of which our law takes no cognizance. In consequence,
actions are divided by Muslim canon lawyers (faqihs) into five classes. First,
necessary (fard or wajib); a duty the omission of which is punished, the
doing rewarded. Secondly, recommended (mandub or mustahabb); the
doing is rewarded, but the omission is not punished. Thirdly, permitted
(ja’iz or mubah); legally indifferent. Fourthly, disliked (makruh); disapproved
by the law, but not under penalty. Fifthly, forbidden (haram); an action
punishable by law. All this being so, it will be easily understood that the
record of the manners and customs of the Prophet, of the little details of his
life and conversation, came to assume a high importance. Much of that was
too petty ever to reach expression in the great digests of law; not even the
most zealous fixer of life by rule and line would condemn his fellow-
religionist because he preferred to carry a different kind of walking-stick
from that approved by the Prophet, or found it fitting to arrange his hair in a
different way. But still, all pious Muslims paid attention to such things, and
fenced their lives about with the strictest Prophetic precedent. In
consequence of this, there early arose in Islam a class of students who made
it their business to investigate and hand down the minutest details as to the
habits of Muhammad. This was a separate thing from the study of law,
although fated to be eventually connected with it. Even in the time of
 50

the Jahiliya--the period before Islam, variously explained as the ignorance or

as the rudeness, uncivilizedness--it had been a fixed trait of the Arab mind to
hold closely to old paths. An inherent conservatism canonized the sunna--
custom, usage--of the ancients; any stepping aside from it was a bid‘a--
innovation--and had to win its way by its merits, in the teeth of strong
prejudice. With the coming of Muhammad and the preaching of Islam, this
ancestral sunna had in great part to yield. But the temper of the Arab mind
remained firm, and the sunna of Muhammad took its place. Pious Muslims
did not say, "Such was the usage of our fathers, and it is mine;" but, "I
follow the usage of the Prophet of God." Then, just as the old sunna of the
heathen times had expressed itself through the stories of great warriors, of
their battles and loves; through anecdotes of wise men, and their keen and
eloquent words; so it was with the sunna of the one man, Muhammad.
What he said, and what he did; what he refrained from doing; what he gave
quasi-approval to by silence; all was passed on in rapidly increasing,
pregnant little narratives. First, his immediate Companions would note,
either by committing to memory or to a written record, his utterances and
table-talk generally. We have evidence of several such Boswells, who fixed
his words as they fell. Later, probably, would come notes of his doings and
his customs, and of all the little and great happenings of the town. Above
all, a record was being gathered of all the cases judged by him, and of his
decisions; of all the answers which he gave to formal questions on religious
life and faith. All this was jotted down by the Companions on sahifas--odd
sheets--just as they had done in the Ignorance with the proverbs of the wise
and their dark sayings. The records of sayings were called hadiths; the rest,
as a whole, sunna--custom, for its details was used the plural, sunan--
customs. At first, each man had his own collection in memory or in writing.
Then, after the death of the Prophet and when his first Companions were
dropping off, these collections were passed on to others of the second
generation. And so the chain ran on and in time a tradition came to consist
formally of two things--the text or matter (matn) so handed on, and the
succession (isnad) over whose lips it had passed. A said, "There narrated to
me B, saying, 'There narrated to me C, saying,'" so far the isnad, until the last
link came, and the matn, the Prophet of God said, "Some of my injunctions
abrogate others," or "The Jann were created of a smokeless flame," or
 51

whatever it might be. What has just been said suggests that it was at first
indifferent whether traditions were preserved orally or in writing. That is
true of the first generation; but it must be remembered at the sane time,
that the actual passing on was oral; the writing merely aided the memory to
hold that which was already learned. But with time, and certainly by the
middle of the second century of the Hijra, two opposing tendencies in this
respect had developed. Many continued to put their trust in the written
Word, and even came to pass traditions on without any oral communication.
But for others there lay grave dangers in this. One was evidently real. The
unhappy character of the Arabic script, especially when written without
diacritical points, often made it hard, if not practically impossible, to
understand such short, contextless texts as the traditions. A guide was
necessary to show how the word should be read, and how understood. At
the present time a European scholar will sometimes be helpless before even
a fully vocalized text, and must take refuge in native commentaries or in
that oral tradition, if it still exists and he has access to it, which supplies at
least a third of the meaning of an Arabic book. Strengthening this came
theological reasons. The words of the Prophet would be profaned if they
were in a book. Or, again, they would be too much honored and the Qur’an
itself might be neglected. This last fear has been justified to a certain extent
by the event. On these grounds, and many more, the writing and
transmitting in writing of traditions came to be fiercely opposed; and the
opposition continued, as a theological exercise, long after many books of
traditions were in existence, and after the oral transmission had become the
merest farce and had even frankly dropped out.

It is to the formation of these books of traditions, or, as we night say,

traditions in literature, that we must now turn. For long, the
fragmentary sahifas and private collections made by separate scholars for
their own use sufficed. Books dealing with law (fiqh) were written before
there were any in that department of literature called hadith. The cause of
this is tolerably plain. Law and treatises of law were a necessity for the
public and thus were encouraged by the state. The study of traditions, on
the other hand, was less essential and of a more personal and private
nature. Further, under the dynasty of the Umayyads, who reigned from A.D.
41 to A.H. 132, theological literature was little encouraged. They were simple
 52

heathen in all but name, and belonged, and recognized that they belonged,
not to Islam but to the Jahiliya. For reasons of state, they encouraged and
spread--also freely forged and encouraged others to forge--such traditions
as were favorable to their plans and to their rule generally. This was
necessary if they were to carry the body of the people with them. But they
regarded themselves as kings and not as the heads of the Muslim people.
This same device has been used after them by all the contending factions of
Islam. Each party has sought sanction for its views by representing them in
traditions from the Prophet, and the thing has gone so far that on almost
every disputed point there are absolutely conflicting prophetic utterances in
circulation. It has even been held, and with some justification, that the entire
body of normative tradition at present in existence was forged for a
purpose. With this attitude of the Umayyads we shall have to deal at greater
length later. It is sufficient now to note that the first real appearance
of hadith in literature was in the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas who died in A.H.
179.

Yet even this appearance is not so much of hadith for its own sake, as of
usages bearing upon law and of the law that can be drawn from these
usages. The book is a corpus iuris not a corpus traditionum. Its object was
not so much to separate from the mass of traditions in circulation those
which could be regarded as sound of origin and to unite them in a formal
collection, as to build up a system of law based partly on tradition. The
previous works dealing with law proper had been of a speculative character,
had shown much subjective reliance on their own opinion on the part of the
writers and had drawn little from the sacred usage of the Prophet and
quoted few of his traditional sayings. Against that the book of Malik was a
protest and formed a link between such law books pure and the collections
of traditions pure with which we now come to deal.

To Malik the matn, or text, of a tradition had been the only thing of
importance. To the isnad, or chain of authority running back to the Prophet,
he had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was a lawyer and gathered
traditions, not for their own sake but to use them in law. To others, the
tradition was the thing, and too much care could not be given to its details
and its authenticity. And the care was really called for. With the course of
 53

time and the growing demand, the supply of traditions had also grown until
there was no doubt in the mind of anyone that an enormous proportion
were simple forgeries. To weed out the sound ones, attention had to be
given to the isnad; the names upon it had to be examined; the fact of their
having been in intercourse to be determined; the possibility of the case in
general to be tested. Thus there were formed real collections of supposedly
sound traditions, which were called Musnads, because each tradition
was musnad--propped; supported--against the Companions from whom it
proceeded. In accordance with this also they were arranged according to
the Companions. After the name of the Companion were given all the
traditions leading back to him. One of the earliest and greatest of these
books was the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died A.H. 241; of him more
hereafter. This book has been printed recently at Cairo in six quarto volumes
of 2,885 pages and is said to contain about thirty thousand traditions going
back to seven hundred Companions.

But another type of tradition-book was growing up, less mechanical in

arrangement. It is the Musannaf, the arranged, classified--and in it the
traditions are arranged in chapters according to their subject matter. The
first Musannaf to make a permanent mark was the Sahih--sound--of al-
Bukhari, who died in A. H. 257. It is still extant and is the most respected of
all the collections of traditions. The principle of arrangement in it is legal;
that is, the traditions are classified in these chapters so as to afford bases
for a complete system of jurisprudence. Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent
of speculative law and his book was thus a protest against a tendency
which, as we shall see later, was strong in his time. Another point in which
al-Bukhari made his influence felt and with greater effect, was increased
severity in the testing of tractions. He established very strict laws, though of
a somewhat mechanical kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them.
His book contains about seven thousand traditions, and he chose those, so
at least runs the story, out of six hundred thousand which he found in
circulation. The rest were rejected as failing to meet his tests. How far the
forgery of traditions had gone may be seen from the example of Ibn Abi
Awja, who was executed in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he had himself
put into circulation four thousand that were false. Another and a
similar Sahih is that of Muslim, who died in A.H. 261. He was not so markedly
 54

juristic as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the mass of existing
tradition from illegitimate accretions than to construct a basis for a
complete law code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on the science
of tradition generally. In some slight details his principle of criticism differed
from that of al-Bukhari.

These two collections, called the two Sahihs--as-Sahihan--are

technically jami‘s, i.e. they contain all the different classes of traditions,
historical, ethical, dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by
common agreement, the two most honored authorities in the Muslim world.
A believer finds it hard, if not impossible, to reject a tradition that is found in
both.

But there are four other collections which are called Sunan--Usages--and
which stand only second to the two Sahihs. These are by Ibn Maja (d. 303),
Abu Da’ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279) and an-Nasa’i (d. 303).
They deal almost entirely with legal traditions, those that tell what is
permitted and what is forbidden, and do not convey information on
religious and theological subjects. They are also much more lenient in their
criticisms of dubious traditions. To work exclusion with them, the rejection
needed to be tolerably unanimous. This was required by their standpoint
and endeavor, which was to find a basis for all the minutest developments
and details of jurisprudence, civil and religious.

These six books, the two Sahihs and the four Sunans, came to be regarded in
time as the principal and all-important sources for traditional science. This
had already come about by the end of the fifth century, although even after
that voices of uncertainty continued to make themselves heard. Ibn Maja
seems to have been the last to secure firm footing, but even he is included
by al-Baghawi (d. 516) in his Masabih as-sunna, an attempted epitome into
one book of what was valuable in all. Still, long after that, Ibn Khaldun, the
great historian (d. 808), speaks of five fundamental works; and others speak
of seven, adding the Muwatta of Malik to the six above. Others, again,
especially in the West, extended the number of canonical works to ten,
though with varying members; but all these must be regarded as more or
less local, temporary, and individual eccentricities. The position of the six
stands tolerably firm.
 55

So much it has been necessary to interpolate and anticipate with regard to

the students of tradition whose interest lay in gathering up and preserving,
not in using and applying. From the earliest time, then, there existed these
two classes in the bosom of Islam, students of tradition proper and of law
proper. For long they did not clash; but a collision was inevitable sooner or
later.

Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not widened beyond the little
market-town of al-Madina, that collision might have been long in coining. Its
immediate causes were from without, and are to be found in the wave of
conquest that carried Islam, within the century, to Samarqand beyond the
Oxus and to Tours in central France. Consider what that wave of conquest
was and meant. Within fourteen years of the Hijra, Damascus was taken, and
within seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the year 21, the
Muslims held Persia; in 41 they were at Herat, and in 56 they reached
Samarqand. In the West, Egypt was taken in the year 20; but the way
through northern Africa was long and hard. Carthage did not fall till 74, but
Spain was conquered with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in A.D. 732, the year
of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was turned and the mercy of Tours was
wrought by Charles the Hammer; but the Muslims still held Narbonne and
raided in Burgundy and the Dauphiné. The wealth that flowed into Arabia
from these expeditions was enormous; money and slaves and luxuries of
every kind went far to transform the old life of hardness and simplicity.
Great estates grew up: fortunes were made and lost; the intricacies of the
Syrian and Persian civilizations overcame their conquerors. All this meant
new legal conditions and problems. The system that had sufficed to guard
the right to a few sheep or camels had to be transformed before it would
suffice to adjust the rights and claims of a tribe of millionnaires. But it must
not be thought that these expeditions were only campaigns of plunder.
With the Muslim armies everywhere went law and justice, such as it was.
Jurists accompanied each army and were settled in the great camp cities
which were built to hold the conquered lands. Al-Basra and al-Kufa and
Fustat, the parent of Cairo, owe their origin to this, and it was in these new
seats of militant Islam that speculative jurisprudence arose and moulded the
Muslim system.
 56

The early lawyers had much to do and much to learn, and it is to their credit
that they recognized both necessities. Muslim law is no product of the
desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have said; but rather of the
labor of these men, struggling with a gigantic problem. They might have
taken their task much more easily than they did; they might have lived as
Muhammad had done, from hand to mouth, and have concealed their own
sloth by force and free invention of authorities. But they recognized their
responsibility to God and man and the necessity of building up a stable and
complete means of rendering justice. These armies of Muslims, we must
remember, were not like the hordes of Attila or Chingis Khan, destroyers
only. The lands they conquered were put to hard tribute, but it was under a
reign of law. They recognized frankly that it was for them that this mighty
empire existed; but they recognized also that it could continue to exist only
with order and duty imposed upon all. They saw, too, how deficient was
their own knowledge and learned willingly of the people among loin they
had come. And here, a second time, Roman law--the parent-law of the
world--made itself felt. There were schools of that law in Syria at Cæsarea
and Beyrout, but we need not imagine that the Muslim jurists studied there.
Rather, it was the practical school of the courts as they actually existed
which they attended. These courts were permitted to continue in existence
till Islam had learned from them all that was needed. We can still recognize
certain principles that were so carried over. That the duty of proof lies upon
the plaintiff, and the right of defending himself with an oath upon the
defendant; the doctrine of invariable custom and that of the different kinds
of legal presumption. These, as expressed in Arabic, are almost verbal
renderings of the pregnant utterances of Latin law.

But most important of all was a liberty suggested by that system to the
Muslim jurisconsults. This was through the part played in the older school by
the Responsa Prudentium, answers by prominent lawyers to questions put to
them by their clients, in which the older law of the Twelve Tables was
expounded, expanded, and often practically set aside by their comments. Sir
Henry Maine thus states the situation: "The authors of the new
jurisprudence, during the whole progress of its formation, professed the
most sedulous respect for the letter of the code. They were merely
explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its full meaning; but then, in the
 57

result, by placing texts together, by adjusting the law to states of fact which
actually presented themselves, and by speculating on its possible
application to others which might occur, by introducing principles of
interpretation derived from the exegesis of other written documents which
fell under their observation, they educed a vast variety of canons which had
never been dreamt of by the compilers of the Twelve Tables, and which
were in truth rarely or never to be found there." All this precisely applies to
the development of law in Islam. The part of the Twelve Tables was taken by
the statute law of the Qur’an and the case law derived from the Usage of
Muhammad; that of the Roman Iurisprudentes by those speculative jurists
who worked mostly outside of al-Madina in the camp cities of Mesopotamia
and Syria--the very name for lawyer in Arabic, faqih, plural fuaqha, is a
translation of prudens, prudentes; and that of the Responsa, the answers, by
the "Opinion" which they claimed as a legitimate legal method and source.
Further, the validity of a general agreement of jurisconsults "reminds us of
the rescript of Hadrian, which ordains that, if the opinions of the
licensed prudentes all agreed, such common opinion had the force of
statute; but if they disagreed, the judge might follow which he chose." The
Arabic term, ra’y, here rendered Opinion, has passed through marked
vicissitudes of usage. In old Arabic, before it, in the view of some, began to
keep bad company, it meant an opinion that was thoughtful, weighed and
reasonable, as opposed to a hasty dictate of ill-regulated passion. In that
sense it is used in a tradition--probably forged--handed down from
Muhammad. He was sending a judge to take charge of legal affairs in al-
Yaman, and asked him on what he would base his legal decisions. "On the
Qur’an," he replied. "But if that contains nothing to the purpose?" "Then
upon your usage." "But if that also fails you?" "Then I will follow my own
opinion." And the Prophet approved his purpose. A similar tradition goes
back to Umar, the first Khalifa, and it, too, is probably a later forgery,
written to defend this source of law. But, with the revolt against the use of
Opinion, to which we shall soon come, the term itself fell into grave
disrepute and came to signify an unfounded conclusion. In its extremest
development it went beyond the Responsa, which professed always to be in
exact accord with the letter of the older law, and attained to be Equity in the
strict sense; that is, the rejection of the letter of the law for a view supposed
 58

to be more in accordance with the spirit of justice itself. Thus, Equity, in the
English sense, is the law administered by the Court of Chancery and claims,
in the words again of Sir Henry Maine, to "override the older jurisprudence
of the country on the strength of an intrinsic ethical superiority." In Roman
law, as introduced by the edict of the Prætor, it was the law of Nature, "the
part of law 'which natural reason appoints for all mankind.'" This is
represented in Islam under two forms, covered by two technical terms. The
one is that the legist, in spite of the fact that the analogy of the fixed code
clearly points to one course, "considers it better" (istihsan) to follow a
different one; and the other is that, under the same conditions, he chooses a
free course "for the sake of general benefit to the community" (istislah).
Further scope of Equity Muslim law never reached, and the legitimacy of
these two developments was, as we shall see, bitterly contested. The
freedom of opinion, with its possibility of a system of Equity, had eventually
to be given up, and all that was left in its place was a permissibility of
analogical deduction (qiyas), the nearest thing to which in Western law is
Legal Fiction. In a word, the possibility of development by Equity was lost,
and Legal Fiction entered in its place. But this anticipates, and we must
return to the strictly historical movement.

During the first thirty years after the death of Muhammad--the period
covered by the reigns of the four theocratic rulers whom Islam still calls "the
Four Just, or Rightly Guided Khalifas" (al-Khulafa ar-rashidun)--the two twin
studies of tradition (hadith) and of law (fiqh) were fostered and encouraged
by the state. The centre of that state was still in al-Madina, on ground sacred
with the memories of the Prophet, amid the scenes where he had himself
been lord and judge, and under the conditions in which his life as ruler had
been cast. All the sources, except that of divine revelation, which had been
open to him, were open to his successors and they made full use of all.
Round that mother-hearth of Islam was still gathered the great body of the
immediate Companions of Muhammad, and they formed a deliberative or
consulting council to aid the Khalifa in his task. The gathering of tradition
and the developing of law were vital functions; they were the basis of the
public life of the state. This patriarchal period in Muslim history is the golden
age of Islam. It ended with the death of Ali, in the year 40 of the Hijra, and
the succession of Mu‘awiya in the following year. "For thirty years," runs a
 59

tradition from the Prophet, "my People will tread in my Path (sunna); then
will come kings and princes."

And so it was Mu‘awiya was the first of the Umayyad dynasty and with him
and them Islam, in all but the name, was at an end. He and they were Arab
kings of the old type that had reigned before Muhammad at al-Hira and
Ghassan, whose will had been their law. The capital of the new kingdom was
Damascus; al-Madina became a place of refuge, a Cave of Adullam, for the
old Muslim party. There they might spin theories of state and of law, and
lament the good old days; so long as there was no rebellion, the Umayyads
cared little for those things or for the men who dreamt them. Once, the
Umayyads were driven to capture and sack the holy city, a horror in Islam to
this day. After that there was peace, the peace of the accomplished fact.
This is the genuinely Arab period in the history of Islam. It is a period fall of
color and light and life; of love and song, battle and feasting. Thought was
free and conduct too. The great theologian of the Greek Church, John of
Damascus, held high office at the Umayyad court, and al-Akhtal, a Christian
at least in name, was their poet laureate. It is true that the stated services of
religion were kept up and on every Friday the Khalifa had to entertain the
people by a display of eloquence and wit in the weekly sermon. But the old
world was dead and the days of its unity would never come again. So all
knew, except the irreconcilable party, the last of the true Muslims who still
haunted the sacred soil of al-Madina and labored in the old paths. They
gathered the traditions of the Prophet; they regulated their lives more and
more strictly by his usage; they gave ghostly council to the pious who
sought their help; they labored to build up elaborate systems of law. But it
was all elaboration and hypothetical purely. There was in it no vitalizing
force from practical life.

From this time on Muslim law has been more or less in the position held by
the canon law of the Roman Church in a country that will not recognize it
yet dares not utterly reject it. The Umayyads were statesmen and
opportunists; they lived, in legal things, as much from hand to mouth as
Muhammad had done, He cut all knots with divine legislation; they cut them
with the edge of their will. Under them, as under him, a system of law was
impossible. But at the same time, in quiet and in secret, this canon law of
 60

Islam was slowly growing up, slowly rounding into full perfection of detailed
correlation. It was governing absolutely the private lives of all the good
Muslims that were left, and even the godless Umayyads, as they had to
preach on Fridays to the People of Muhammad, so they had to deal with it
cautiously and respectfully. Of the names and lives of these obscure jurists
little has reached us and it is needless to give that little here. Only with the
final fall of the Umayyads, in the year of the Hijra 132, do we come into the
light and see the different schools forming under clear and definite leaders.
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CHAPTER 2

The Abbasid revolution; the compromise; the problem of the Abbasids; the two classes of
canon lawyers and theologians; the rise of legal schools; Abu Hanifa; his application of Legal
Fiction; istihsan: the Qadi Abu Yusuf; Muhammad ibn al-Hasan; Sufyan ath-Thawri; al-Awza‘i;
Malik ibn Anas; the Usage of al-Madina; istislah; the doctrine of Agreement; the beginning of
controversy; traditionalists or historical lawyers versus rationalists or philosophical lawyers;
ash-Shafi‘i, a mediator and systematizer; the Agreement of the Muslim people a formal
source; "My People will never agree in an error;" the resultant four sources, Qur’an, Usage,
Analogy, Agreement; the traditionalist revolt; Da’ud az-Zahiri and literalism; Ahmad ibn
Hanbal; the four abiding schools; the Agreement of Islam; the Disagreement of Islam; iurare
in verba magistri; the degrees of authority; the canon and the civil codes in Islam; their
respective spheres; distribution of schools at present day; Shi‘ite law; Ibadite law.

THAT great revolution which brought the Abbasid dynasty to power seemed
at first to the pious theologians and lawyers to be a return of the old days.
They dreamt of entering again into their rights; that the canon law would be
the full law of the land. It was only slowly that their eyes were opened, and
many gave up the vain contest and contented themselves with compromise.
This had been rare under the Umayyads; the one or two canon lawyers who
had thrown in their lot with them had been marked men. Az-Zuhri (d. 124), a
man of the highest moral and theological reputation who played a very
important part in the first codifying of traditions, was one of these, and the
later pious historians have had hard work to smooth over his connection
with the impious Umayyads. Probably--it may be well to say here---the
stories against the Umayyads have been much heightened in color by their
later tellers and also az-Zuhri, being a man of insight and statesmanship,
may have recognized that their rule was the best chance for peace in the
country. Muslims have come generally to accept the position that unbelief
on the part of the government, if the government is strong and just, is
better than true belief and anarchy. This has found expression, as all such
things do, in traditions put in the mouth of the Prophet.

But while only a few canonists had taken the part of the Umayyads, far more
accepted the favors of the Abbasids, took office under them and worked in
their cause. The Abbasids, too, had need of such men. It was practically the
religious sentiment of the people that had overthrown the Umayyads and
 62

raised them to power; and that religious sentiment, though it could never be
fully satisfied, must yet be respected and, more important still, used. There
is a striking parallel between the situation then, and that of Scotland at the
Revolution Settlement of 1688. The power of the Stuarts--that is, of the
worldly Umayyads--had been overthrown. The oppressed Church of the
Covenant--that is, the old Muslim party--had been freed. The state was to be
settled upon a new basis. What was that basis to be? The Covenanting party
demanded the, recognition of the Headship of Christ--that the Kirk should
rule the state, or should be the state, and that all other religious views
should be put under penalty. The old Muslim party looked for similar things.
That religious life should be purified; that the canon law should be again the
law of the state; that the constitution of Umar should be restored. How the
Covenanters were disappointed, how much they got and how much they
failed to get, needs no telling here.

Exactly in the same way it befell the old Muslims. The theological
reformation was sweeping and complete. The first Abbasids were pious, at
least outwardly; the state was put upon a pious footing. The canon law also
was formally restored, but with large practical modifications. Canon lawyers
were received into the service of the state, provided they were adaptable
enough. Impossible men had no place under the Abbasids; their officials
must be pliable and dexterous, for a new modus vivendi was to be found.
The rough and ready Umayyad cutting of the knot had failed; the turn had
now come for piety and dexterity in twisting law. The court lawyers learned
to drive a coach and four through any of the old statutes, and found their
fortunes in their brains. So the issue was bridged. But a large party of
malcontents was left, and from this time on in Islam the lawyers and the
theologians have divided into two classes, the one admitting, as a matter of
expediency, the authority of the powers of the time and aiding them in their
task as rulers; the other, irreconcilable and unreconciled, denouncing the
state as sunk in unbelief and deadly sin and its lawyers as traitors to the
cause of religion. To pursue our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by
a handful of Covenanting congregations and in America by the much more
numerous and powerful Reformed Presbyterian Church.
 63

It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the Umayyad pressure and the
encouragement of legal studies--such as it was--by the Abbasids, definite
and recognized schools of law began to form. What had so long been in
process in secret became public, and its results crystallized under certain
prominent teachers. We will now take up these schools in the order of the
death dates of their founders; we will establish their principles and trace
their histories. We shall find the same conceptions recurring again and again
which have already been brought out, Qur’an, tradition (hadith), agreement
(ijma), opinion (ra’y), analogy (qiyas), local usage (urf), preference (istihsan),
in the teeth of the written law--till at length, when the battle is over, the
sources will have limited themselves to the four which ha e survived to the
present day--Qur’an, tradition, agreement, analogy. And, similarly, of the six
schools to be mentioned, four only will remain to the present time, but
these of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believers.

The Abbasids came to power in the year of the Hijra 132, and in 150 died Abu
Hanifa, the first student and teacher to leave behind him a systematic body
of teaching and a missionary school of pupils. He was a Persian by race, and
perhaps the most distinguished example of the rule that Muslim scientists
and thinkers might write in Arabic but were seldom of Arab blood. He does
not seem to have held office as a judge or to have, practised law at all. He
was, rather, an academic student, a speculative or philosophical jurist we
might call him. His system of law; therefore, was not based upon the
exigencies of experience; it did not arise from an attempt to meet actual
cases. We might say of it, rather, but in a good sense, that it was a system of
casuistry, an attempt to build up on scientific principles a set of rules which
would answer every conceivable question of law. In the hands of some of
his pupils, when applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casuistry in
a bad sense; but no charge of perverting justice for his own advantage
seems to have been brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief
instruments in constructing his system were opinion and analogy. He leaned
little upon traditions of the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the
Qur’anic texts and develop from them his details. But the doing of this
compelled him to modify simple opinion--equivalent to equity as we have
seen--and limit it to analogy of some written statute (nass). He could hardly
forsake a plain res iudicata of Muhammad, and follow his own otherwise
 64

unsupported views. but he might choose to do so if he could base it on

analogy from the Qur’an. Thus, he came to use what was practically legal
fiction. It is the application of an old law in some sense or way that was
never dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which may, in fact, run
directly counter to the purpose of the law. The fiction is that it is the original
law that is being observed, while, as a matter of fact, there has come in its
place an entirely different law. So Abu Hanifa would contend that he was
following the divine legislation of the Qur’an, while his adversaries
contended that he was only following his own opinion.

But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from equity to legal fiction, on
another he developed a new principle of even greater freedom. Reference
has already been made to the changes which were of necessity involved in
the new conditions of the countries conquered by the Muslims. Often the
law of the desert not only failed to apply to town and agricultural life; it was
even directly mischievous. On account of this, a consideration of local
conditions was early accepted as a principle, but in general terms. These
were reduced to definiteness by Abu Hanifa under the formula of "holding
for better" (istihsan). He would say, "The analogy in the case points to such
and such a rule but under the circumstances I hold it for better to rule thus
and thus."

This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently attacked by his

opponents, as wads his system in general. Yet that system by its
philosophical perfection--due to its theoretical origin--and perfection in
detail--due to generations of practical workers--has survived all attack and
can now be said to be the leading one of the four existing schools. No legal
writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he seem to have, himself,
cast his system into a finished code. That was done by his immediate pupils,
and especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in 182, and Muhammad
ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189. The first was consulting lawyer and chief Qadi
to the great Khalifa Harun ar-Rashid, and, if stories can be believed, proved
himself as complaisant of conscience as a court casuist need be.
Innumerable are the tales afloat of his minute knowledge of legal subtleties
and his fertility of device in applying them to meet the whims of his master,
Harun. Some of them have found a resting place in that great mirror of
 65

mediæval Muslim life, The Thousand and One Nights; reference may be made
to Night 296. Through his influence, the school of Abu Hanifa gained an
official importance which it never thereafter lost. He wrote for Harun a book
which we have still, on the canon law as applied to the revenues of the
state, a thorny and almost impossible subject, for the canon law makes
really no provision for the necessary funds of even a simple form of
government and much less for such an array of palaces and officials as had
grown up around the Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in
expression and by ability of the highest kind in reconciling the irreconcilable.

But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily with the new ways. Many
found that only in asceticism, in renunciation of the world and engaging in
pious exercises was there any chance of their maintaining the old standards
in a state that was for them based on oppression and robbery. One of these
was Sufyan ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high repute, who narrowly missed
founding a separate school of law and who died in 161. There has come
down to us a correspondence between him and Harun, which, though it
cannot possibly be genuine, throws much light on the disappointment of the
sincerely religious section. Harun writes on his accession to the Khalifate
(170), complaining that Sufyan had not visited him, in spite of their bond of
brotherhood, and offering him wealth from the public treasury. Sufyan
replied, denouncing such use of public funds and all the other uses of them
by Harun--many enough--except those precisely laid down in the codes. On
the basis of these, Harun would have had to work for his own living. There
are also other denunciations for crimes in the ruler which he punished in
others. Harun is said to have kept the letter and wept over it at intervals, but
no change of life on his part is recorded. Apparently, with the accession of
the Abbasids ascetic and mystical Islam made a great development. It
became plain to the pious that no man could inherit both this world and the
next.

While Abu Hanifa was developing his system in Mesopotamia, al-Awza‘i was
working similarly in Syria. He was born at Baalbec, lived at Damascus, and at
Beyrout where he died in 157. Of him and his teaching we know
comparatively little. But so far it is clear that he was not a speculative jurist
of the same type as Abu Hanifa, but paid especial attention to traditions. At
 66

one time is school was followed by the Muslims of Syria and the entire West
to Morocco and Spain. But its day was a short one. The school of Abu
Hanifa, championed by Abu Yusuf with his tremendous influence as chief
Qadi of the Abbasid empire, pushed it aside, and at the present day it has no
place except in history. For us, its interest is that of another witness to the
early rise and spread of systems of jurisprudence outside of Arabia.

In A.H. 179, three years before the death of Abu Yusuf and twenty-nine after
that of Abu Hanifa, there died at al-Madina the founder and head of an
independent school of a very different type. This was Malik ibn Anas, under
whose hands what we may call, for distinction, the historical school of al-
Madina took form. Al-Madina, it will be remembered, was the mother-city of
Muslim law. It was the special home of the traditions of the Prophet and the
scene of his legislative and judicial life. Its pre-Islamic customary law had
been sanctioned, in a sense, by his use. It had been the capital of the state in
its purest days. From the height of all these privileges its traditionists and
lawyers looked down upon the outsiders and parvenus who had begun to
intermeddle in sacred things.

But it must not be thought that this school was of a rigid traditionism. The
case was quite the reverse, and in many respects it is hard to make a
distinction between it and that of Abu Hanifa. Its first source was, of
necessity, the Qur’an. Then came the usage of the Prophet. This merged into
the usage of the Successors of the Prophet and the unwritten custom of the
town. It will be seen that here the historical weight of the place came to
bear. No other place, no other community, could furnish that later tradition
with anything like the same authority. Further, Malik ibn Anas was a
practical jurist, a working judge. He was occupied in meeting real cases from
day to day. When he sat in public and judged the people, or with his pupils
around him and expounded and developed the law, he could look back upon
a line of canon lawyers who had sat, in his place and done as he was doing.
In that lies the great difference. He was in practical touch with actual life;
that was one point; and, secondly, he was in the direct line of the apostolic
succession, and in the precise environment of the Prophet. So when he
went beyond Qur’an, prophetic usage, agreement, and gave out decisions
on simple opinion, the feeling of the community justified him. It was a
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different thing for Malik ibn Anas, sitting there in state in al-Madina, to use
his judgment, than for some quick-brained vagabond of a Persian or Syrian
proselyte, some pauvre diable with neither kith nor kin in the country, to lay
down principles of law. So the pride of the city of the Prophet distinguished
between him and Abu Hanifa.

But though the speculative element in the school of Malik, apart from its
local and historical environment, which gave it unifying weight, was
essentially the same as in the school of Abu Hanifa, yet it is true that at al-
Madina it played a less important part. Malik used tradition more copiously
and took refuge in opinion less frequently. Without opinion, he could not
have built his system; but for him it was not so much a primary principle as a
means of escape. Yet one principle of great freedom he did derive from it
and lay down with clearness; it is the conception of the public advantage
(istislah). When a rule would work general injury it is to be set aside even in
the teeth of a valid analogy. This, it will be seen, is nearly the same as the
preference of Abu Hanifa. The technical term istislah, chosen by Malik to
express his idea, was probably intended to distinguish it from that of Abu
Hanifa, and also to suggest in the public advantage (maslaha) a more valid
basis than the mere preference of the legist.

Another conception which Malik and his school developed into greater
exactitude and force was that of the agreement (ijma). It will be
remembered that from the death of Muhammad all the surviving
Companions resident in al-Madina formed a kind of consultive council to aid
the Khalifa with their store of tradition and experience. Their agreement on
any point was final; it was the voice of the Church. This doctrine of the
infallibility of the body of the believers developed in Islam until at its widest
it was practically the same as the canon of catholic truth formulated by
Vincent of Lerins, Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. But Malik,
according to the usual view, had no intention of granting any such deciding
power to the outside world. The world for him was al-Madina and the
agreement of al-Madina established catholic verity. Yet there are narratives
which suggest that he approved the agreement and local usage of al-Madina
for al-Madina because they suited al-Madina. Other places might also have
their local usages which suited them better.
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In the next school we shall find the principle of agreement put upon a
broader basis and granted greater weight. Finally, Malik is the first founder
of a system from whom a law book, the Muwatta mentioned above, has
come down to us. It is not in the exact sense, a manual or code; rather a
collection of materials for a code with remarks by the collector. He gives the
traditions which seem to him of juristic importance--about seventeen
hundred in all--arranged according to subject, and follows up each section,
when necessary, with remarks upon the usage of al-Madina, and upon his
own view of the matter. When he cannot find either tradition or usage, he
evidently feels himself of sufficient authority to follow his own opinion, and
lay down on that basis a binding rule. This, however, as we have seen, is very
different from allowing other people, outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same
thing. The school founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles is one of the
surviving four. As that of Abu Hanifa spread eastward, so that of Malik
spread westward, and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip which
it has especially gained in western North Africa may be due to the influence
of the Idrisids whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when Malik was in
the height of his reputation there, and also to hatred of the Abbasids who
championed the school of Abu Hanifa.

But now we pass from simple development to development through

conflict. Open conflict, so far as there had been any, had covered points of
detail; for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu Hanifa, on the one
hand, and by Malik, on the other. One of the chiefest of the pupils of Abu
Hanifa, the Muhammad ibn al-Hasan already mentioned, spent three years in
study with Malik at al-Madina and found no difficulty in thus combining his
schools. The conflict of the future was to be different and to touch the very
basis of things. The muttering of the coming storm had been heard for long,
but it was now to burst. Exact dates we cannot give, but the reaction must
have been progressing in the latter part of the life of Malik ibn Anas.

The distinction drawn above between traditionists and lawyers will be

remembered, and the promise of future collision which always has come
between historical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical students of
systems of jurisprudence. The one side points to the absurdities, crudities,
and inadequacies of a system based upon tradition and developing by
 69

usage; the other says that we are not wise enough to rewrite the laws of our
ancestors. These urge a necessity; those retort an inability. Add to this a
belief on the part of the traditionists that they were defending a divine
institution and the situation is complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme
right said that law should be based on Qur’an and tradition only; the
extreme left, that it was better to leave untrustworthy and obscure
traditions and work out a system of rules by logic and the necessities of the
case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed the conflict to which
we now come.

In that conflict three names stand out: ash-Shafi‘i who died in 204, Ahmad
ibn Hanbal who died in 241 and Da’ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely
enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi‘i, struck the mediating note and the
other two diverged further and further from the via media thus shown
toward a blank traditionism.

Ash-Shafi‘i is without question one of the greatest figures in the history of

law. Perhaps he had not the originality and keenness of Abu Hanifa; but he
had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and full grasp of means and
ends that enabled him to say what proved to be the last word in the matter.
After him came attempts to tear down; but they failed. The fabric of the
Muslim canon law stood firm. There is a tradition from the Prophet that he
promised that with the end of every century would come a restorer of the
faith of his people. At the end of the first century was the pious Khalifa,
Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, who by some accident strayed in among the
Umayyads. At the end of the second came ash-Shafi‘i. His work was to
mediate and systematize and bore especially on the sources from which
rules of law might be drawn. His position on the positive side may be stated
as one of great reverence for tradition. "If you ever find a tradition from the
Prophet saying one thing," he is reported to have said, "and a decision from
me saying another thing, follow the tradition." An absolutely authentic--
according to Muslim rules of evidence--and clear tradition from the Prophet
he regarded as of equally divine authority with a passage in the Qur’an. Both
were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form; the Qur’an was
verbally inspired; such traditions were inspired as to their content. And if
such a tradition contradicted a Qur’anic passage and came after it in time,
 70

then the written law of the Qur’an was abrogated by the oral law of the
tradition. But this involved grave difficulties. The speculative jurists had
defended their position from the beginning by pointing to the many
contradictory traditions which were afloat, and asking how the house of
tradition could stand when so divided against itself. A means of reconciling
traditions had to be found, and to this ash-Shafi‘i gave himself. We need not
go over his methods here; they were the same that have always been used
in such emergencies. The worship of the letter led to the straining of the
letter, and to explaining away of the letter.

But there lay a rock in his course more dangerous than any mere
contradiction in differing traditions. Usages had grown up and taken fast
hold which were in the teeth of all traditions. These usages were in the
individual life, in the constitution of the state, and in the rules and decisions
of the law courts. The pious theologian and lawyer might rage against them
as he chose; they were there, firmly rooted, immovable. They were not
arbitrary changes, but had come about in the process of time through the
revolutions of circumstances and varying conditions. Ash-Shafi‘i showed his
greatness by recognizing the inevitable and providing a remedy. This lay in
an extension of the principle of agreement and the erection of it into 'a
formal source. Whatever the community of Islam has agreed upon at any
time, is of God. We have met this principle before, but never couched in so
absolute and catholic a form. The agreement of the immediate Companions
of Muhammad had weight with his first Successors. The agreement of these
first Companions and of the first generation after them, had determining
weight in the early church. The agreement of al-Madina had weight with
Malik ibn Anas. The agreement of many divines and legists always had
weight of a kind. Among lawyers, a principle, to the contrary of which the
memory of man ran not, had been determining. But this was wider, and
from this time on the unity of Islam was assured. The evident voice of the
People of Muhammad was to be the voice of God. Yet this principle, if full of
hope and value for the future, involved the canonists of the time in no small
difficulties. Was it conceivable that the agreement could override the usage
of the Prophet? Evidently not. There must, then, they argued, once have
existed some tradition to the same effect as the agreement, although it had
now been lost. Some such lost authority must be presupposed. This can
 71

remind us of nothing so much as of the theory of the inerrant but lost

original of the Scriptures. And it had the fate of that theory. The weight of
necessity forced aside any such trifling and the position was frankly
admitted that the agreement of the community was a safer and more
certain basis than traditions from the Prophet. Traditions were alleged to
that effect. "My People will never agree in an error," declared Muhammad,
or, at least, the later church made him so declare.

But ash-Shafi‘i found that even the addition of agreement to Qur’an and
Prophetic usage did not give him basis enough for his system. Opinion he
utterly rejected; the preference of Abu Hanifa and the conception of the
common welfare of Malik ibn Anas were alike to him. It is true also that both
had beer practically saved under agreement. But he held fast by analogy,
whether based on the Qur’an or on the usage of the Prophet. It was an
essential instrument for his purpose. As was said, "The laws of the Qur’an
and of the usage are limited; the possible cases are unlimited; that which is
unlimited can never be contained in that which is limited." But in ash-Shafi‘i's
use of analogy there is a distinction to be observed. In seeking to establish a
parallelism between a case that has arisen and a rule in the Qur’an or usage,
which is similar in some points but not precisely parallel, are we to look to
external points of resemblance, or may we go further and seek to determine
the reason (illa) lying behind the rule and from that draw our analogy? The
point seems simple enough and the early speculative jurists sought the
reason. For that they were promptly attacked by the traditionists. Such a
method was an attempt to look into the mysteries of God, they were told;
man has no business to inquire after reasons, all he has to do is to obey. The
point thus raised was fought over for centuries and schools are classified
according to their attitude toward it. The position of ash-Shafi‘i seems to
have been that the reason for a command was to be considered in drawing
an analogy, but that there must be some clear guide, in the text itself,
pointing to the reason. He thus left himself free to consider the causes of
the divine commands and yet produced the appearance of avoiding any
irreverence or impiety in doing so.

Such then are the four sources or bases (asls) of jurisprudence as accepted
and defined by ash-Shafi‘i--Qur’an, prophetic usage, analogy, agreement.
 72

The last has come to bear more and more weight. Every Shafi‘ite law book
begins each section with words to this effect, "The basis of this rule, before
the agreement (qabla-l-ijma), is" Qur’an or usage as the case may be. The
agreement must put its stamp on every rule to make it valid. Further, all the
now existing schools have practically accepted ash-Shafi‘i's classification of
the sources and many have contended that a lawyer, no matter what his
school, who does not use all these four sources, cannot be permitted to act
as a judge. Ash-Shafi‘i has accomplished his own definition of a true jurist,
"Not he is a jurist who gathers statements and prefers one of them, but he
who establishes a new principle from which a hundred branches may
spring."

But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied with this compromise.
They objected to analogy and they objected to agreement; nothing but the
pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them. And their numbers
were undoubtedly large. The common people always heard traditions
gladly, and it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the professional
lawyers. How much simpler, it struck the average mind, it would be to follow
some clear and unambiguous saying of the Prophet; then one could feel
secure. This desire of the plain man to take traditions and interpret them
strictly and liter-ally was met by the school of Da’ud az-Zahiri, David the
literalist. He was born three or four years before the death of ash-Shafi‘i,
which occurred in 204. He was trained as a Shafi‘ite and that, too, of the
narrower, more traditional type; but it was not traditional enough for him.
So he had to cut himself loose and form a school of his own. He rejected
utterly analogy; he limited agreement, as a source, to the agreement of the
immediate Companions of Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by
the Wahhabites alone among moderns; he limited himself to Qur’an and
prophetic usage.

In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi‘i had evidently exercised a very

great personal influence upon his followers. All looked up to him and were
prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a tendency for a scholar
to take a thing upon the word of his master. "Ash-Shafi‘i taught so; I am a
Shafi‘ite and I hold so." This, too, Da’ud utterly rejected. The scholar must
examine the proofs for himself and form his own opinion. But he had
 73

another peculiarity, and one which gained him the name of literalist.
Everything, Qur’an and tradition, must be taken in the most exact sense,
however absurd it might be. Of course, to have gone an inch beyond the
very first meaning of the words would have been to stray in the direction of
analogy. Yet, as fate would have it, to analogy, more or less, he had in the
end to come. The inexorable law that the limited cannot bound the
unlimited was proved again. "Analogy is like carrion," confessed a very much
earlier traditionist, "when there is nothing else you eat it." Da’ud tried to
make his meal more palatable by a change in name. He called it a proof
(dalil) instead of a source (asl); but what difference of idea he involved in
that it is hard to determine. This brought him to the doctrine of cause,
already mentioned. Were we at liberty to seek the cause of a divine word or
action and lead our "proof" from that? If the cause was directly stated, then
Da’ud held that we must regard it as having been the cause in this case; but
we were not at liberty, he added, to look for it, or on it, as cause in any other
case.

It is evident that here we have to do with an impossible man and school, and
so the Muslim world found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to permit a
Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same grounds, that objection to
circumstantial evidence will throw out a man now as juror. If they had been
using modern language, they would have said that it was because he was a
hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite school lasted for centuries and drew long
consequences, historical and theological, for which there is no space here. It
never held rank as an acknowledged school of Muslim law.

We now come to the last of the four schools, and it, strange as its origin
was, need not detain us long. The Zahirite reaction had failed through its
very extremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted Shafi‘ite to head
the last attack upon the school of his master. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was a
theologian of the first rank; he made no claim to be a constructive lawyer.
His Musnad has already been dealt with. It is an immense collection of some
thirty thousand traditions, but these are not even arranged for legal
purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox faith in the rationalist
persecution under the Khalifa al-Ma’mun, and his sufferings gained him the
position of a saint. But he never dreamed' of forming a school, least of all in
 74

opposition to his master, ash-Shafi‘i. He died in 241, and after his death his
disciples drew together and the fourth school was founded. It was simply
reactionary and did not make progress in any way. It minimized agreement
and analogy and tended toward literal interpretation. As might be expected
from its origin, its history has been one of violence, of persecution and
counter-persecution, of insurrection and riot. Again and again the streets of
Baghdad ran blood from its excesses. It has now the smallest following of
the four surviving schools.

There is no need to pursue this history further. With ash-Shafi‘i the great
development of Muslim jurisprudence closes. Legislation, equity, legal
fiction have done their parts; the hope for the future lay, and lies, in the
principle of the agreement. The commonsense of the Muslim community,
working through that expression of catholicity, has set aside in the past
even the undoubted letter of the Qur’an, and in the future will still further
break the grasp of that dead hand. It is the principle of unity in Islam. But
there is a principle of variety as well. The four schools of law whose origin
has been traced are all equally valid and their decisions equally sacred in
Muslim eyes. The believer may belong to any one of these which he
chooses; he must belong to one; and when he has chosen his school, he
accepts it and its rules to the uttermost. Yet he does not cast out as heretics
the followers of the other schools. In every chapter their codes differ more
or less; but each school bears with the others; sometimes, it may be, with a
superior tone, but still bears. This liberty of variety in unity is again
undoubtedly due to the agreement. It has expressed itself, as it often does,
in apocryphal traditions from the Prophet, the last rag of respect left to the
traditionist school. Thus we are told that the Prophet said, "The
disagreement of My People is a Mercy from God." This supplements and
completes the other equally apocryphal but equally important tradition: "My
People will never agree upon an error."

But there is a third principle at work which we cannot view with the same
favor. As said above, every Muslim must attach himself to a legal school, and
may choose any one of these four. But once he has chosen his school he is
absolutely bound by the decisions and rules of that school. This is the
principle against which the Zahirites protested, but their protest, the only bit
 75

of sense they ever showed, was in vain. The result of its working throughout
centuries has been that now no one--except from a spirit of historical
curiosity--ever dreams of going back from the text-books of the present day
to the works of the older masters. Further, such an attempt to get behind
the later commentaries would not be permitted. We have comment upon
comment upon comment, abstract of this and expansion of that; but each
hangs by his predecessor and dares not go another step backward. The
great masters of the four schools settled the broad principles; they were
authorities of the first degree (mujtahidun mutlaq), second to Muhammad in
virtue of his inspiration only. Second,--one the masters who had authority
within the separate schools (mujtahidun fi-l-madhahib) to determine the
questions that arose there. Third, masters of still lesser rank for minor points
(mujtahidun bilfatwa). And so the chain runs on. The possibility of a new
legal school arising or of any considerable change among these existing
schools is flatly denied. Every legist now has his place and degree of liberty
fixed, and he must be content.

These three principles, then, of catholic unity and its ability to make and
abrogate laws, of the liberty of diversity in that unity, and of blind subjection
to the past within that diversity, these three principles must be our hope
and fear for the Muslim peoples, What that future will be none can tell. The
grasp of the dead hand of Islam is close, but its grip at many points has been
forced to relax. Very early, as has already been pointed out, the canon law
had to give way to the will of the sovereign, and ground once lost it has
never regained. Now, in every Muslim country, except perhaps the
Wahhabite state in central Arabia, there are two codes of law administered
by two separate courts. The one judges by this canon law and has
cognizance of what we may call private and family affairs, marriage, divorce,
inheritance. Its judges, at whose head in Turkey stands the Shaykh al-Islam, a
dignity first created by the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II in 1453, after the
capture of Constantinople, also give advice to those who consult them on
such personal matters as details of the ritual law, the law of oaths and vows,
etc. The other court knows no law except the custom of the country
(urf, ada) and the will of the ruler, expressed often in what are
called Qanuns, statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, besides the
codices of canon law, there is an accepted and authoritative corpus of
 76

such Qanuns. It is based on the Code Napoléon and administered by courts

under the Minister of Justice. This is the nearest approach in Islam to the
development by statute, which comes last in Sir Henry Maine's analysis of
the growth of law. The court guided by these Qanuns decides all matters of
public and criminal law, all affairs between man and man. Such is the legal
situation throughout the whole Muslim world, from Sulu to the Atlantic and
from Africa to China. The canon lawyers, on their side, have never admitted
this to be anything but flat usurpation. There have not failed some even who
branded as heretics and unbelievers those who took any part in such courts
of the world and the devil. They look back to the good old days of the rightly
guided Khalifas, when there was but one law in Islam, and forward to the
days of the Mahdi when that law will be restored. There, between a dead
past and a hopeless future, we may leave them. The real future is not theirs.
Law is greater than lawyers, and it works in the end for justice and life.

Finally, it may be well to notice an important and necessary modification

which holds as to the above statement that a Muslim may choose any one of
the four schools and may then follow its rules. As might be expected,
geographical influences weigh overwhelmingly in this choice. Certain
countries are Hanifite or Shafi‘ite; in each, adherents of the other sects are
rare. This geographical position may be given roughly as follows: central
Asia, northern India, and the Turks everywhere are Hanifite. Lower Egypt,
Syria, southern India and the Malay Archipelago are Shafi‘ite. Upper Egypt
and North Africa west of Egypt are Malikite. Practically, only the Wahhabites
in central Arabia are Hanbalites. Further, the position holds in Islam that the
country, as a whole, follows the legal creed of its ruler, just as it follows his
religion. It is not only cuius regio eius religio, but cuius religio eius lex. Again
and again, a revolution in the state has driven one legal school from power
and installed another. Yet the situation occurs sometimes that a sovereign
finds his people divided into two parties, each following a different rite, and
he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis belonging to both, and
enforcing the decisions of these Qadis. Thus, at Zanzibar, at present, there
are eight Ibadite judges and two Shafi‘ite, all appointed by the Sultan and
backed by his authority. On the other hand, the Turkish government, ever
since it felt itself strong enough, has thrown the full weight of its influence
on the Hanifite side. In almost all countries under its rule it appoints Hanifite
 77

judges only; valid legal decisions can be pronounced only according to that
rite. The private needs of non-Hanifites are met by the appointment of
salaried Muftis--givers of fatwàs, or legal opinions--of the other rites.

In the above sketch there have been of necessity two considerable

omissions. The one is of Shi‘ite and the other of Ibadite law. Neither seems
of sufficient importance to call for separate treatment. The legal system of
the Shi‘ites is derived from that of the so-called Sunnites and differs in
details only. We have seen already that the Shi‘ites still have Mujtahids who
are not bound to the words of a master, but can give decisions on their own
responsibility. These seem to have in their hands the teaching power which
strictly belongs only to the Hidden Imam. They thus represent the principle
of authority which is the governing conception of the Shi‘a. The Sunnites, on
the other hand, have reached the point of recognizing that it is the People
of Muhammad as a whole which rules through its agreement. In another
point the Shi‘ite conception of authority affects their legal system. They
utterly reject the idea of co-ordinate schools of law; to the doctrine of the
varying (ikhtilaf) as it is called, and the liberty of diversity which lies in it,
they oppose the authority of the Imam. There can be only one truth and
there can be no trifling with it even in details. Among the Shi‘ites of the
Zaydite sect this was affected also by their philosophical studies and a
philosophical doctrine of the unity of truth; but to the Imamites it is an
authoritative necessity and not one of thought. Thus on two important
points the Shi‘ites lack the possibility of freedom and development which is
to be found with the Sunnites. Of the jurisprudence of the Ibadites we know
comparatively little. A full examination of Ibadite fiqh would be of the
highest interest, as the separation of its line of descent goes far back behind
the formation of any of the orthodox systems and it must have been
codified to a greater or less extent by Abd Allah ibn Ibad himself. Its basis
appears to be three-fold, Qur’an, prophetic usage, agreement--naturally that
of the Ibadite community. There is no mention of analogy, and traditions
seem to have been used sparingly and critically. Qur’an bore the principal
emphasis. See above, for the Ibadite position on the form of the state and
on the nature of its headship.
 78

PART 3. THEOLOGY
 79

CHAPTER 1

The three principles in the development; first religious questionings; Murji’ites, Kharijites,
Qadarites; influence of Christianity; the Umayyads and Abbasids; the Mu‘tazilites; the
Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the Qur’an.

BEFORE entering upon a consideration of the development of the theology

of Islam, it will be well to mark clearly the three principles which run
continuously through that development, which conditioned it for evil and
for good and which are still working in it. In dealing with jurisprudence and
with the theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly how false is
the current idea that Islam has ceased to grow and has no hope of future
development. The organism of Islam, like every other organism, has periods
of rest when it appears to have reached a cul de sac and to have outlived its
life. But after these periods come others of renewed quickening and its vital
energy pours itself forth again alter et idem. In the state, we saw how the
old realms passed into decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take
their places. The despotism by the grace of God of formal Islam was
tempered by the sacred right of insurrection and revolution, and the People
of Muhammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from time to time, its
unquenchable vitality.

In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than
through the masses; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take
biographical form wherever our knowledge renders that possible.

But whether we have men or naked movements, the begetters of which are
names to us or less, three threads are woven distinctly through the web of
Muslim religious thought. There is tradition (naql); there is reason (aql) and
there is the unveiling of the mystic (kashf). They were in the tissue of
Muhammad's brain and they have been in his church since he died. Now one
would be most prominent, now another, according to the thinker of the
time; but all were present to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form lives
now only with the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi; reason has
become a scholastic hand-maid of theology except among the modern
Indian Mu‘tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no more accept as Muslims
 80

than a Trinitarian of the Westminster confession would give the name of

Christian to a Unitarian of the left wing; the inner light of the mystic has
assumed many forms, running from plainest pantheism to mere devout
ecstasy.

But in the church of Muhammad they are all working still; and the catholicity
of Islam, in spite of zealots, persecutions and counter-persecutions, has
attained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity. Two of the
principles we have met already in the students of hadith and of speculative
law. The Hanbalites maintained in theology their devotion to tradition; they
fought for centuries all independent thinking which sought to rise above
what the fathers had told; they fought even scholastic theology of the
strictest type and would be content with nothing but the rehearsal of the
old dogmas in the old forms; they fought, too, the mystical life in all its
phases. On the other hand, Abu Hanifa was tinged with rationalism and
speculation in theology as in law, and his followers have walked in his path.
Even the mystical light has been touched in our view of the theory of the
state. It has flourished most among the Shi‘ites, who are driven to seek and
to find an inner meaning under the plain word of the Qur’an, and whose
devotion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission has kept alive the
thought of a continuous speaking of God to mankind and of an exalting of
mankind into the presence of God. It is for the student, then, to watch and
hold fast these three guiding threads.

The development of Muslim theology, like that of jurisprudence, could not

begin till after the death of Muhammad. So long as he lived and received
infallible revelations in solution of all questions of faith or usage that might
come up, it is obvious that no system of theology could be formed or even
thought of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even show him setting
his face against all discussions of dogma and repeating again and again, in
answer to metaphysical and theological questions, the crude
anthropomorphisms of the Qur’an. But these questions and answers are
probably forgeries of the later traditional school, shadows of future warfare
thrown back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, in the first
twenty or thirty years after Muhammad's death, the Muslims were too
 81

much occupied with the propagation of their faith to think what that faith
exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning spirit in this direction was
aroused comparatively late and remained for some time on what might be
called a private basis. Individual men had their individual views, but sects did
not quickly arise, and when they did were vague and hard to define in their
positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything which has reached us
about the early Muslim heresies is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory.
Names, slates, influences and doctrines are all seen through a haze, and
nothing more than an approximation to an outline can be attempted. Vague
stories are handed down of the early questionings and disputings of
certain ahl-al-ahwa, "people of wandering desires," a name singularly
descriptive of the always flighty and sceptical Arabs; of how they compared
Scripture with Scripture and got up theological debates, splitting points and
defining issues, to great scandal and troubling of spirit among the simpler-
minded pious. These were not yet heretics; they were the first investigators
and systematizers.

Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their existence can be tolerably
conditioned through the historical facts and philosophical necessities of the
time. The one is that of the Murji’ites, and the other of the Qadarites. A
Murji’ite is literally "one who defers or postpones," in this case postpones
judgment until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judgment. They arose
as a sect during and out of the civil war between the Shi‘ites, the Kharijites
and the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Muslims, and most of
them claimed that they were the only true Muslims and that the others were
unbelievers. This was especially the attitude of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites
toward the Umayyads; to them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already,
were godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed and slaughtered
the true saints of God. The Murji’ites, on the other hand, worked out a view
on which they could still support the Umayyads without homologating all
their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they held,
were de facto the rulers of the Muslim state; fealty had been sworn to them
and they confessed the Unity of God and the apostleship of the Prophet.
Thus, they were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can possibly be
compared with the sin of polytheism (shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all
Muslims to acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until the secrets
 82

of the Last Day all judgment or condemnation of any sins they might have
committed. Sins less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in revolt
against them and in breaking the oath of fealty.

Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji’ites, and it was the origin
also of the theory of the accomplished fact in the state, of which we have
had to take account several times. Thus, between the fanatical venerators of
the canon law, to whom all the Khalifas, after the first four, were an
abomination, and the purely worldly lawyers of the court party, there came
a group of pious theologians who taught that the good of the Muslim
community required obedience to the ruler of the time, even though his
personal unworthiness were plain. As a consequence, success can legitimate
anything in the Muslim state.

But with the passing away of the situation which gave rise to Murji’ism, it
itself changed from politics to theology. As a political party it had opposed
the political puritanism of the Kharijites; it now came to oppose the
uncompromising spirit in which these damned all who differed from them
even in details and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God over their
opponents. It is true that this came natural to Islam. The earlier Muslims
seem in general to have been oppressed by a singularly gloomy fatalism. To
use modern theological language, they labored under a terrible
consciousness of sin. They viewed the world as an evil temptress, seducing
men from heavenly things. Their lives were hedged about with sins, great
and little, and each deserved the eternal wrath of God. The recollection of
their latter end they kept ever before them and the terrors that it would
bring, for they felt that no amount of faith in God and His Prophet could
save them in the judgment to come. The roots of this run far back. Before
the time of Muhammad and at his time there were among the Arab tribes,
scattered here and there, many men who felt a profound dissatisfaction
with heathenism, its doctrines and religious rites. The conception of God
and the burden of life pressed heavily upon them. They saw men pass away
and descend into the grave, and they asked whither they had gone and what
had become of them. The thought of this fleeting, transitory life and of the
ocean of darkness and mystery that lies around it, drove them away to seek
truth in solitude and the deserts. They were called Hanifs--the word is of very
 83

doubtful derivation--and Muhammad himself, in the early part of his career,

reckoned himself one of them. But we have evidence from heathen Arab
poetry that these Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Christian
monks, and that the term hanif was used as a synonym for rahib, monk.

And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from these solitary hermits,
scattered here and there throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to
God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry
we feel how strong was the impression made on the Arab mind by the
gaunt, weird men with their endless watchings and night prayers. Again and
again there is allusion to the lamp of the hermit shining through the
darkness, and we have pictures of the caravan or of the solitary traveller on
the night journey cheered and guided by its glimmer. These Christian
hermits and the long deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten tribes--judged
and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold--that lie throughout the
Syrian waste and along the caravan routes were the two things that most
stirred the imagination of Muhammad and went to form his faith. To
Muhammad, and to the Semite always, the whole of life was but a long
procession from the great deep to the great deep again. Where are the
kings and rulers of the earth? Where are the peoples that were mighty in
their day? The hand of God smote them and they are not. There is naught
real in the world but God. From Him we are, and unto Him we return. There
is nothing for man but to fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes
sport of them that trust it.

Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite
ever returns in the end. To this the later Murji’ites opposed a doctrine of
Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they declared, saved, and Faith
alone. If the sinner believed in God and His Prophet he would not remain in
the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held that the sinner who died
unrepentant would remain therein eternally, even though he had confessed
Islam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they considered, could not be a
believer in the true sense. This is still the Ibadite position, and from it
developed one of the most important controversies of Islam as to the
precise nature of faith. Some extreme Murji’ites held that faith (iman) was a
confession in the heart, private intercourse with God, as opposed to Islam,
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public confession with the lips. Thus, one could be a believer (mu’min), and
outwardly confess Judaism or Christianity; to be a professed Muslim was not
necessary. This is like the doctrine of the Imamites, called taqiya, that it is
allowable in time of stress to dissemble one's religious views; and it is worth
noticing that Jahm ibn Safwan (killed, 131?), one of these extreme Murji’ites,
was a Persian proselyte in rebellion against the Arab rule, and of the loosest
religious conduct. But these Antinomians were no more Muslims than the
Anabaptists of Munster had a claim to be Christians. The other wing of the
Murji’ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who held that faith (iman) is
acknowledgment with the tongue as well as the heart and that works are a
necessary supplement. This is little different from the orthodox position
which grew up, that persuasion, confession, and works made up faith.
When Murji’ism dropped out of existence as a sect it left as its contribution
to Islam a distinction between great and little sins (kabiras, saghiras), and
the position that even great sins, if not involving polytheism (shirk), would
not exclude the believer forever from the Garden.

The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin in a philosophical necessity
of the human mind. A perception of the contradiction between man's
consciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and the
absolute rule and predestination of God, on the other, is the usual beginning
of the thinking life, both in individuals and in races. It was so in Islam. In
theology as in law, Muhammad had been an opportunist pure and simple.
On the one hand, his Allah is the absolute Semitic despot who guides aright
and leads astray, who seals up the hearts of men and opens them again,
who is mighty over all. On the other hand, men are exhorted to repentance,
and punishment is threatened against them if they remain hardened in their
unbelief. All these phases of a wandering and intensely subjective mind,
which lived only in the perception of the moment, appear in the Qur’an.
Muhammad was a poet rather than a theologian just as he was a prophet
rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the Muslims paused in their career
of conquest and began to think at all, they thought of this. Naturally, so long
as they were fighting in the Path of God, it was the conception of God's
absolute sovereignty which most appealed to them; by it their fates were
fixed, and they charged without fear the ranks of the unbelievers. In these
earliest times, the fatalistic passages bore most stress and the others were
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explained away. This helped, at least, to bring it about that the party which
in time came to profess the freedom of man's will, began and ended as an
heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never loge sight of the fact
that the eventual victory in Islam of the absolute doctrine of God's eternal
decree was the victory of the more fundamental of Muhammad's conflicting
conceptions. The other had been much more a campaigning expedient.

This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have been conditioning, derived its
name from their position that a man possessed qadar, or power, over his
actions. One of the first of them was a certain Ma‘bad al-Juhani, who paid
for his heresy with his life in A.H. 80. Historians tell that he with Ata ibn
Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to the celebrated ascetic,
al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110), and said, "O Abu Said, those kings shed the blood
of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say that their works are by the
decree of God." To this al-Hasan replied, "The enemies of God lie." The story
is only important as showing how the times and their changes were
widening men's thoughts. Very soon, now, we come from these drifting
tendencies to a formal sect with a formal secession and a fixed name. The
Murji’ites and the Qadarites melt from the scene, some of their tenets pass
into orthodox Islam; some into the new sect.

The story of its founding again connects with the outstanding figure of al-
Hasan al-Basri. He seems to have been the chief centre of the religious life
and movements of his time; his pupils appear and his influence shows itself
in all the later schools. Someone came to him as he sat among his pupils and
asked what his view was between the conflicting Murji’ites and Wa‘idites,
the first holding that the committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an
unbeliever, was to be accepted as a Muslim and his case left in the hands of
God; the other laying more stress upon the threats (wa‘id) in the Book of
God and teaching that the committer of a great sin could not be a believer,
that he had, ipso facto, abandoned the true faith, must go into the Fire and
abide there. Before the master could reply, one of his pupils--some say Amr
ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 141), others, Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131)--broke in with the
assertion of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither a believer
nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle which sat round the master, went
to another part of the mosque and began to develop his view to those who
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gathered round him. The name believer (mu’min), he taught, was a term of
praise, and an evil-doer was not worthy of praise and could not have that
name applied to him. But he was not an unbeliever, either, for he assented
to the faith. If he, then, died unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire--
for there are only two divisions in the next world, heaven and hell--but his
torments would be mitigated on account of his faith. The position to which
orthodox Islam eventually came was that a believer could commit a great
sin. If he did so, and died unrepentant, he went to hell; but after a time
would be permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell became for believers a sort
of purgatory. On this secession, al-Hasan only said "I‘tazala anna"--He has
seceded from us. So the new party was called the Mu‘tazila, the Secession.
That, at least, is the story, which may be taken for what it is worth. The fixed
facts are the rise at the beginning of the second century after the Hijra of a
tolerably definite school of dissenters from the traditional ideas, and their
application of reason to the dogmas of the Qur’an.

We have noted already the influence of Christianity on Muhammad through

the hermits of the desert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and that
asceticism grew and developed into quietism and thence into mysticism.
The last step was still in the future, but already at this time there were
wandering monks who imitated their Christian brethren in the wearing of a
coarse woollen frock and were thence called Sufis, from suf, wool. It was
not long before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of the three great
threads was definitely woven into the fabric of Muslim thought. But that
was not the limit of Christian influence. Those anchorites in their caves and
huts had little training in the theology of the schools; the dogmas of their
faith were of a practical simplicity. But in the development of the Murji’ites
and Qadarites it is impossible to mistake the workings of the dialectic
refinements of Greek theology as developed in the Byzantine and Syrian
schools. It is worth notice, too, that, while the political heresies of the
Shi‘ites and Kharijites held sway mostly in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia,
these more religious heresies seem to have arisen in Syria first and especially
at Damascus, the seat of the Umayyads.

The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was in many ways a return to

pre-Muslim times and to an easy enjoyment of worldly things; it was a
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rejection of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and name. The fear of
the wrath of God had small part with the most of them; sometimes it
appeared in the form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Further, as Muslim
governments always have done, they sought aid in their task of governing
from their non-Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius, the father of
Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer under them and that after his death,
this John of Damascus himself, the last great doctor of the Greek Church
and the man under whose hands its theology assumed final form, became
wazir and held that post until he withdrew from the world and turned to the
contemplative life. In his writings and in those of his pupil, Theodorus
Abucara (d. A.D. 826), there are polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form
of discussions between Christians and Muslims. These represent, there can
be little doubt, a characteristic of the time. The close agreement of Murji’ite
and Qadarite ideas with those formulated and defended by John of
Damascus and by the Greek Church generally can only be so explained. The
Murji’ite rejection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the goodness of
God and His love for His creatures, the Qadarite doctrine of free-will and
responsibility, are to be explained in the same way as we have already
explained the presence of sentences in the Muslim fiqh which seem to be
taken bodily from the Roman codes. In this case, also, we are not to think of
the Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek fathers, but as
picking up ideas from them in practical intercourse and controversy. The
very form of the tract of John of Damascus is significant, "When the Saracen
says to you such and such, then you will reply. . . ." This, as a whole, is a
subject which calls for investigation, but so far it is clear that the influence of
Greek theology on Islam can hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding
fact of the enormous emphasis laid by' both on the doctrine of the nature of
God and His attributes is enough. It may even be conjectured that the
harsher views developed by western Muslims, and especially by the
theologians of Spain, were due, on the other hand, to Augustinian and
Roman influence. It is, to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish
Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholastic theology, in the exact
sense, but gave almost all its energy to canon law.

But there were other influences to come. With the fall of the Umayyads and
the rise of the Abbasids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to the
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basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story of the founding of Baghdad
there, in 145, we have already heard. We have seen, too, that the victory of
the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the Arabs by the
Persians. Græcia capta and the rest came true here; the battles of al-Qadisiya
and Nahawand were avenged; Persian ideas and Persian religion began
slowly to work on the faith of Muhammad. At the court of the earliest
Abbasids it was fashionable to affect a little free thought. People were
becoming enlightened and played with philosophy and science. Greek
philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Manichæism, the old heathenism of Harran,
Judaism, Christianity--all were in the air and making themselves felt. So long
as the adherents and teachers of these took them in a purely academic way,
were good subjects and made no trouble, the earlier Abbasids encouraged
their efforts, gathered in the scientific harvest, paid well for translations,
instruments, and investigations, and generally posed as patrons of progress.

But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn tightly. The victory of the
Abbasids had raised high hopes among the Persian nationalists. They had
thought that they were rallying to the overthrow of the Arabs, and found,
when all was done, that they had got only another Arab dynasty. So revolts
had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously enough, they were of a
marked religious character. They were an expression of religious sects,
Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, Manichean, and parties with prophetic leaders of
their own; all are swept together by Muslim writers as Zinadiqs, probably
literally, "initiates," originally Manichæans, thereafter, practically non-
Muslims concealing their unbelief. For when not in open revolt they must
needs profess Islam. In 167, we find al-Mahdi, who was also, it is true, much
more strict than his father, al-Mansur, appointing a grand inquisitor to deal
with such heretics. Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself with
crushing actual rebellion; and Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, and heathen of
Harran were tolerated so long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek
science and philosophy.

That they did willingly, and so, through three intermediaries, science came
to the Arabs. There was a heathen Syrian source with its centre at Harran, of
which we know comparatively little. There was a Christian Syrian source
working from the multitudinous monasteries scattered over the country.
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There was a Persian source by which natural science, and medicine

especially, were passed on. Already in the fifth century A.D. an academy of
medicine and philosophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzistan.
One of the directors of this institution was summoned, in 148, to prescribe
for al-Mansur, and from that time on it furnished court physicians to the
Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and
Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocrates reached the Muslim peoples.

The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate was the golden age of
Muslim science, the period of growth and development for the People of
Muhammad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease with the close of
that period, but the Khalifate ceased to aid in carrying the torch. Thereafter,
learning was protected and fostered by individual rulers here and there, and
individual investigators and scholars still went on their own quiet paths. But
free intellectual life among the people was checked, and such learning as
still generally flourished fell more and more between fixed bounds.
Scholasticism, with its formal methods and systems, its subtle deductions
and endless ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew away attention
from the facts of nature. The oriental brain studied itself and its own
workings to the point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to the
certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy and orthodoxy proved alike
sterile.

We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu‘tazilites. These served

themselves heirs upon the Qadarites and denied that God predestined the
actions of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and external vicissitudes
came, they admitted, by God's qadar, but it was unthinkable that man
should be punished for actions not in his control. The freedom of the will is
an a priori certainty, and man possesses qadar over his own actions. This was
the position of Wasil ibn Ata, of whom we have already heard. But to it he
added a second doctrine, the origin of which is obscure, although suggestive
of discussions with Greek theologians. The Qur’an describes God as willing,
knowing, decreeing, etc.--strictly as the Willing One, the Knowing One, the
Decreeing One, etc.--and the orthodox hold that such expressions could only
mean that God possesses as Qualities (sifat) Will, Knowledge, Power, Life,
etc. To this Wasil raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities would
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be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the Mu‘tazilites always called
themselves the People of Unity and Justice (Ahl-at-tawhid wal‘adl); the Unity
being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in that they opposed
God's qadar over men and held that He must do for the creature that which
was best for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there can be no
necessity upon God, even to do justice; He is absolutely free, and what He
does man must accept. It flatly opposes the position held by the Mu‘tazilites
in general, that good and evil can be perceived and distinguished by the
intellect (aql). Good and evil have their nature by God's will, and man can
learn to know them only by God's teachings and commands. Thus, except
through revelation, there can be neither theology nor ethics.

The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl Muhammad al-Allaf
(d. circa 226), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil. At his hands
the doctrine of God's qualities assumed a more definite form. Wasil had
reduced God to a vague unity, a kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl
taught that the qualities were not in His essence, and thus separable from it,
thinkable apart from it, but that they were His essence. Thus, God was
omnipotent by His omnipotence, but it was His essence and not an His
essence. He was omniscient by His omniscience and it was His essence.
Further, he held that these qualities must be either negations or relations.
Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that would mean that there
was in God the complexity of subject and predicate, being and quality; and
God is absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians regard as a close
approximation to the Christian Trinity; for them, the persons of the Trinity
have always been personified qualities, and such seems really to have been
the view of John of Damascus. Further, God's Will, according to Abu
Hudhayl, as expressed in His Creative Word, did not necessarily exist in a
subject (fi mahall, in subiecto). When God said, "Be!" creatively, there was no
subject. Again, he endeavored--and in this he was followed by most of the
Mu‘tazilites to cut down the number of God's attributes. His will, he said,
was a form of His knowledge; He knew that there was good in an action,
and that knowledge was His will.

His position on the qadar question was peculiar. With regard to this world,
be was a Qadarite; but in the next world, both in heaven and in hell, he
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thought that all changes were by divine necessity. Otherwise, that is, if men
were free, there would be obligation to observe a law (taklif); but there is
no such obligation in the other world. Thus, whatever happened there
happened by God's decree. Further, he taught that, eventually, nothing
would happen there; that there would be no changes, but only an endless
stillness in which those in heaven had all its joys and those in hell all its pains.
This is a close approximation to the view of Jahm ibn Safwan, who held that
after the judgment both heaven and hell would pass away and God remain
alone as He was in the beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl seems to
have been led by two considerations, both significant for the drift of the
Mu‘tazilites. First, there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic
touched with utilitarianism. Thus, from their position that man could come
by the light of his reason to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew
the conclusion that it was man's duty so to attain, and that God would damn
eternally every man who did not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out
strikingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at present, were serving no
useful purpose because they had no inhabitants; therefore, at present they
did not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hudhayl. What has a
beginning must have an end. So he explained the end as the ceasing of all
changes. Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from Greek
philosophy. The Qur’an teaches that the world has been created in time;
Aristotle, that it is from eternity and to eternity. The creation, Abu Hudhayl
applied to changes; before that, the world was, but in eternal rest.
Hereafter, all changes will cease; rest will again enter and endure to all
eternity. We shall see how largely this doctrine was advanced and
developed by his successors.

But there were further complications in the doctrine of man's actions and
into some of these we must enter, on account of their later importance. Not
everything that comes from the action of a man is by his action. God has a
creative part in it, apparently as regards the effects. Especially, knowledge in
the mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but from God. The idea
seems to be that they teacher may teach, but that the being taught in the
pupil is a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished motions in the mind,
which he held were not altogether due to the man, and external motions
which were. There is given, too, to a man at the time of his performing an
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action an ability to perform the action, which is a special accident in him

apart from any mere soundness of health or limb.

In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God's working through man.

Another of his positions had a similar basis and was a curious combination of
historical criticism and mysticism, a combination which we shall find later in
al-Ghazzali, a much greater man. The evidence of tradition for things dealing
with the Unseen World (al-ghayb) he rejected. Twenty witnesses might hand
on the tradition in question, but it was not to be received unless among
them there was one, at least, of the People of Paradise. At all times, he
taught, there were in the world these Friends of God (awliya Allah,
sing. wali), who were protected against all greater sins and could not lie. It is
the word of these that is the basis for belief, and the tradition is merely a
statement of what they have said. This shows clearly how far the doctrine of
the ecstatic life and of knowledge gained through direct intercourse
between the believer and God had already advanced.

But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of daring and absolutely free-
minded speculators. They were applying to the ideas of the Qur’an the keen
solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they obtained were of the
most fantastically original character. Thrown into the wide sea and utter
freedom of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the bursting point
and, more than even a German metaphysician, they had lost touch of the
ground of ordinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and were swinging
loose on a wild hunt after ultimate truth, wielding as their weapons
definitions and syllogisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad in the Qur’an
gave scope enough of strange ideas from which to start, or which had to be
explained away. Their belief in the powers of the science of logic was
unfailing, and, armed with Aristotle's "Analytics," they felt sure that
certainty was within their reach. It was at the court and under the
protection of al-Ma’mun that they especially flourished, and some account
of the leading spirits among them will be necessary before we describe how
they reached their utmost pride of power and how they fell.

An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later historians of having made
use, to a high degree, of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He was
one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they; he read the books of the
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philosophers and mingled their teachings with the doctrines of the

Mu‘tazilites. He taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do nothing
to a creature, either in this world or in the next, that was not for the
creature's good and in accordance with strict justice. It was not only that
God would not do it; He had not the power to do anything evil. Evidently the
personality of God was fast vanishing behind an absolute law of right. To
this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine that God could do anything; He
could forgive whom He willed, and punish whom He willed. Further, he
taught that God's willing a thing meant only that He did it in accordance
with His knowledge; and when He willed the action of a creature that meant
only that He commanded it. This is evidently to evade phrases in the Qur’an.
Man, again, he taught, was spirit (ruh), and the body (badan) was only an
instrument. But this spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the body like
the essential oil in a rose, or butter in milk. In a universe determined by strict
law, man alone was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the air, and
by his action the stone went up; but when the force of his throw was
exhausted it came again under law and fell. If he had only asked himself how
it came to fall, strange things might have happened. But he, and all his
fellows, were only playing with words like counters. Further, he taught that
God had created all created things at once, but that He kept them in
concealment until it was time for them to enter on the stage of visible being
and do their part. All things that ever will exist are thus existing now, but, in
a sense, in retentis. This seems to be another attempt to solve the problem
of creation in time, and it had important. consequences. Further, the Qur’an
was no miracle (mu‘jiz) to him. The only miraculous elements in it are the
narratives about the Unseen World, and past things and things to come, and
the fact that God deprived the Arabs of the power of writing anything like it.
But for that, they could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a high
Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and analogy. Only the divinely
appointed Imam had the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad.
We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd as they are. The Muslim
writers on theological history have classified him rightly as more of a
physicist than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness
for playing with metaphysical paradoxes which often goes with it.
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Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu’tamir. His principal contribution
was the doctrine of tawlid and tawallud, begetting and deriving. It is the
transmission of a single action through a series of objects; the agent meant
to affect the first object only; the effect on the others followed. Thus, he
moves his hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What relation of
responsibility, then, does he bear to these derived effects? Generally, how
are we to view a complex of causes acting together and across one another?
The answer of later orthodox Islam is worth giving at this point. God creates
in the man the will to move his hand; He creates the movement of the hand
and also the movement of the ring. All is by God's direct creation at the
time. Further, could God punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of
the faith? Bishr's reply on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery
to avoid saying frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His
answer on the second was that God could have made a different and much
better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But
He was not bound to make a better world--in this Bishr separates from the
other Mu‘tazilites--He was only bound to give man free-will and, then, either
revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.

With Ma‘mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious. He
succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable
something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of
something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was a
union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the divine
nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma‘mar was evidently on the
road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on the
existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with His
absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God's Will. Nor could He be described
as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence
and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our conceptions cannot be
applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, he developed the
ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (jisms) only were created by God, and by
"substances" he seems to mean matter as a whole; all changes in them, or
it, come either of necessity: its nature, as when fire burns, the sin warms; or
of free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no part in these things.
He has given the material and has nothing to do with the coming and going
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of separate bodies; such are simple changes, forms of existence, and

proceed from the matter itself. Man is an incorporeal substance. The soul is
the man and his body is but a cover. This true man can only know and will;
the body perceives and does.

The last of this group whose views we need consider, is Thumama ibn
Ashras. He was of very dubious morals; was imprisoned as a heretic by
Harun ar-Rashid, but highly favored by al-Ma’mun, in whose Khalifate he
died, A.H. 213. He held that actions produced through tawallud had no
agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be
produced by tawallud through speculation, and is, therefore, an action
without an agent, and required even before revelation. That Jews,
Christians, Magians will be turned into dust in the next world and will not
enter either Paradise or Hell; the same will be the fate of cattle and children.
That any one of the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is excusable.
That all knowledge is a priori. That the only action which men possess is will;
everything besides that is a production without a producer. That the world
is the act of God by His nature, i.e., it is an act which His nature compels Him
to produce; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with Him. It may be
doubted how far Thumama was a professional theologian and how far he
was a free-thinking, easy-living man of letters.

In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of Aristotle can be clearly
traced. With Aristotle had come to them the idea of the world as law, an
eternal construction subsisting and developing on fixed principles. This
conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly at strife with
Muhammad's conception of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence,
the crudities and devices by which they strove to make good their footing
on strange ground and keep a right to the name of Muslim, while changing
the essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of Muhammad, who
has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the believer and settles Himself
firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too; of the vaguest
kind.

It remains now only to touch upon one or two points common to all the
Mu‘tazilites. First, the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed
agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on texts of the Qur’an and on
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tradition, that some believers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the
other world; this was the highest delight held out to them. But the
Mu‘tazilites perceived that vision involved a directing of the eyes on the part
of the seer and position on the part of the seen. God must, therefore, be in a
place and thus limited. So they were compelled to reject the agreement and
the traditions in question and to explain away the passages in the Qur’an.
Similarly, in Qur’an vii. 52, we read that God settled Himself firmly upon His
throne. This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and feet and eyes, the
Mu‘tazilites had to explain away in a more or less cumbrous fashion.

With one other detail of this class we must deal at greater length. It was
destined to be the vital point of the whole Mu‘tazilite controversy and the
test by which theologians were tried and had their places assigned. It had a
weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the Mu‘tazilites. There had
grown up very early in the Muslim community an unbounded reverence and
awe in the presence of the Qur’an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant,
the Prophet; the words, with few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is,
therefore, easily intelligible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam
Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had
existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may
have been brought forward later from the Qur’an itself, we can have no
difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and
that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damascus, has again played
a formative part. So, in correspondence with the heavenly and uncreated
Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncreated and eternal
Word of God; to the earthly manifestation in Jesus corresponds the Qur’an,
the Word of God which we read and recite. The one is not the same as the
other, but the idea to be gained from the expressions of the one is
equivalent to the idea which we would gain from the other, if the veil of the
flesh were removed from us and the spiritual world revealed.

That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from the
fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the end
of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind of transfusion
of ideas from Christianity and not as a result of controversy or dialectic
about the teachings of the Qur’an. We find the orthodox party vehemently
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opposing discussion on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological

subjects. "Our fathers have told us; it is the faith received from the
Companions;" was their argument from the earliest time we can trace. Malik
ibn Anas used to cut off all discussions with "Bila kayfa" (Believe without
asking how); and he held strongly that the Qur’an was uncreated. The same
word kalam which we have found applied to the Word of God--both the
eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifestation in the Qur’an--was used by
them most confusingly for "disputation;" "he disputed" was takallam and
"one who disputed" was mutakallim. All that was anathema to the pious,
and it is amusing to see the origin of what became later the technical terms
for scholastic theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all
"talking about" the sacred mysteries.

This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an inch

beyond the statements in the Qur’an and tradition and to draw
consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem
to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which shows how far
this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against him out
of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of attack was the orthodoxy
of his position on the lafz (utterance) of the Qur’an; was it created or
uncreated? He said readily that the Qur’an was uncreated and was
obstinately silent as to the utterance of it by men. At last, persistent
questioning drove him to an outburst. "The Qur’an is the Word of God and is
uncreated. The speech of man is created and inquisition (imtihan) is an
innovation (bid‘a)." But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the
conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated. Some, as we may gather
from this story, had felt themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur’an
in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of men and the writing of it by
men's hands--all between the boards, as they said--was uncreated. Others
were coming to deny absolutely the existence of the eternal Logos and that
this revealed Qur’an was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bukhari,
while holding tenaciously that the Qur’an was uncreated, refused to make
any statement as to its utterance by men. There was nothing said about that
in Qur’an or tradition.
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The second form of opposition was to any upholding of their belief by

arguments, except of the simplest and most apparent. That was an invasion
by reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith (naql). When the pious were
eventually driven to dialectic weapons, their arguments show that these
were snatched up to defend already occupied positions. They ring artificial
and forced. Thus, in the Qur’an itself, the Qur’an is called "knowledge from
God." It is, then, inseparable from God's quality of knowledge. But that is
eternal and uncreated; therefore, so too, the Qur’an. Again, God created
everything by the word, "Be." But this word cannot have been created,
otherwise a created word would be a creator. Therefore, God's word is
uncreated. Again, there stands in the Qur’an (vii, 52), "Are not the creation
and the command His?" The command here is evidently different from the
creation, i.e., not created. Further, God's command creates; therefore it
cannot be created. But it is God's word in command. It will be noticed here
how completely God's word is hypostatized. This appears still more strongly
in the following argument. God said to Moses, (Qur. vii, 141), "I have chosen
thee over mankind with my apostolate and my word." God, therefore, has a
word. But, again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses Moses with this word (kallama-
llahu Musa taklima, evidently regarded as meaning that God's word
addressed Moses) and said, "Lo, I am thy Lord." This argument is supposed
to put the opponent in a dilemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being
so addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and is, therefore,
unbelief; or he holds that the kalam which so addresses Moses is a created
thing. Then, a created thing asserts that it is Moses' Lord. Therefore,
God's kalam with which He addresses the prophets, or which addresses the
prophets, is eternal, uncreated.

But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, op-position to it was not slow in
appearing, and that on different sides. Literary vanity, national pride, and
philosophical scruples all made themselves felt. Even in Muhammad's
lifetime, according to the legend of the poet Labid and the verses which he
put up in challenge on the Ka‘ba, the Qur’an had taken rank as inimitable
poetry. At all points it was the Word of God and perfect in every detail. But,
among the Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one thing on which
each was more jealous and vain than another, it was skill in working with
words. The superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they might
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endure, though often with a bad grace; but Muhammad as a rival and
unapproachable literary artist they could not away with. So we find satire of
the weaknesses of the Qur’an appearing here and there, and it came to be a
sign of emancipation and freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and
balance it against other products of the Arab genius. The rival productions
of Musaylima, the False Prophet, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence,
and Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a treatise in defence of
the metaphors of the Qur’an. Among the Persians this was still more the
case. To them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also an Arab;
and while they accepted his mission, accepting his books in a literary way
was too much for them. As a prophet, he was a man; as a literary artist, he
was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may have felt; so, certainly, others felt
later. The poet Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a companion of
Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubious orthodoxy, used to amuse
himself by comparing poems by himself and others with passages in the
Qur’an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn al-Muqaffa (killed about
140), the translator of "Kalila and Dimna" and many other books into Arabic,
and a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an imitation of the Qur’an.

Added to all this came the influence of the Mu‘tazilite theologians. They had
a double ground for their opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine
and perfect book limited them too much in their intellectual freedom. They
were willing to respect and use the Qur’an, but not to accept its ipsissima
verba. Regarded as the production of Muhammad under divine influence, it
could have a human and a divine side, and things which needed to be
dropped or changed in it could be ascribed to the human side. But that was
not possible with a miraculous book come down from heaven. In a word,
they were meeting the difficulty which has been met by Christianity in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. The least they could do was to deny
that the Qur’an was uncreated.

But they had a still more vital, if not more important, philosophical base of
objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God's
qualities (sifat) and tried to limit them in every way. These qualities ran
danger, they held, of being hypostatized into separate persons like those in
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the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near that danger really lay in
the case of God's kalam. In orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos.

The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting as

showing that the Qur’an, even then, was given as a probative miracle
(mu‘jiz) because it deprived all men of power (i‘jaz) to imitate it. That is, its
æsthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and then regarded
as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr ibn al Mu’tamir
and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of the Mu‘tazilites, went still
further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who held the
eternity of the Qur’an; they had taken unto themselves two Gods. Further,
he asserted that men were quite capable of producing a work even finer
than the Qur’an in point of style. But the force of this opinion is somewhat
diminished by the liberality with which he denounced his opponents in
general as unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like those in
circulation with us about those who hold that few will be saved, and it is
worth noticing that upon this point of salvability the Mu‘tazilites were even
narrower than the orthodox.
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CHAPTER 2

Al-Ma’mun and the triumph of the Mu‘tazilites; the Mihna and Ahmad ibn Hanbal; al-Farabi;
the Fatimids and the Ikhwan as-Safa; the early mystics, ascetic and pantheistic; al-Hallaj.

SUCH for long was the situation between the Mu‘tazilites and their
orthodox opponents. From time to time the Mu‘tazilites received more or
less protection and state favor; at other times, they had to seek safety in
hiding. Popular favor they seem never to have enjoyed. As the Umayyads
grew weak, they became more stiff in their orthodoxy; but with the
Abbasids, and especially with al-Mansur, thought was again free. As has
been shown above, encouragement of science and research was part of the
plan of that great man, and he easily saw that the intellectual hope of the
future was with these theological and philosophical questioners. So their
work went slowly on, with a break under Harun ar-Rashid a magnificent but
highly orthodox monarch, who understood no trifling with things of the
faith. It is an interesting but useless question whether Islam could ever have
been broadened and developed to the point of enduring in its midst free
speculation and research. As the case stands in history, it has known periods
of intellectual life, but only under the protection of isolated princes here and
there. It has had Augustan ages; it has never had great popular yearnings
after wider knowledge. Its intellectual leaders have lived and studied and
lectured at courts; they have not gone down and taught the masses of the
people. To that the democracy of Islam has never come. Hampered by
scholastic snobbishness, it has never learned that the abiding victories of
science are won in the village school.

But most unfortunately for the Mu‘tazilites and for Islam, a Khalifa arose
who had a relish for theological discussions and a high opinion of his own
infallibility. This was al-Ma’mun. It did not matter that he ranged himself on
the progressive side; his fatal error was that he invoked the authority of the
state in matters of the intellectual and religious life. Thus, by enabling the
conservative party to pose as martyrs, he brought the prejudices and
passions of the populace still more against the new movement. He was that
most dangerous of all beings, a doctrinaire despot. He had ideas and tried to
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make other people live up to them. Al-Mansur, though a bloody tyrant, had
been a great statesman and had known how to bend people and things
quietly to his will. He had sketched the firm outlines of a policy for the
Abbasids, but had been cautious how he proclaimed his programme to the
world. The world would come to him in time, and he could afford to wait
and work in the dark. He knew, above all, that no people would submit to be
school-mastered into the way in which they should go. Al-Ma’mun, for all his
genius, was at heart a school-master. He was an enlightened patron of an
enlightened Islam. Those who preferred to dwell in the darkness of the
obscurant; he first scolded and then punished. Discussions in theology and
comparative religion were his hobby. That some such interchange of letters
between Muslims and Christians as that which crystallized in the Epistle of
al-Kindi took place at his court seems certain. Bishr al-Marisi, who had lived
in hiding in ar-Rashid's time on account of his heretical views, disputed, in
209, before al-Ma’mun on the nature of the Qur’an. He founded at Baghdad
an academy with library, laboratories, and observatory. All the weight of his
influence was thrown on the side of the Mu‘tazilites. It appeared as though
he were determined to pull his people up by force from their superstition
and ignorance.

At last, he took the final and fatal step. In 202 a decree appeared
proclaiming the doctrine of the creation of the Qur’an as the only truth, and
as binding upon all Muslims. At the same time, as an evident sop to the
Persian nationalists and the Alids, Ali was proclaimed the best of creatures
after Muhammad. The Alids, it should be remembered, had close points of
contact with the Mu‘tazilites. Such a theological decree as this was a new
thing in Islam; never before had the individual consciousness been
threatened by a word from the throne. The Mu‘tazilites through it practically
became a state church under erastian control. But the system of Islam never
granted to the Imam, or leader of the Muslim people, any position but that
of a protector and representative. Its theology could only be formed, as we
have seen in the case of its law, by the agreement of the whole community.
The question then naturally was what effect such a new thing as this decree
could have except to exasperate the orthodox and the masses. Practically,
there was no other effect. Things went on as before. All that it meant was
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that one very prominent Muslim had stated his opinion and thrown in his lot
with heretics.

For six years this continued, and then a method was devised of bringing the
will of the Khalifa home upon the people. In 217 a distinguished Mu‘tazilite,
Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was appointed chief qadi, and in 218 the decree was
renewed. But this time it was accompanied by what we would call a test-act,
and an inquisition (mihna) was instituted. The letter of directions for the
conduct of this matter, written by al-Ma’mun to his lieutenant at Baghdad, is
decisive as to the character of the man and the nature of the movement. It
is full of railings against the common people who know not the law and are
accursed. They are too stupid to understand philosophy or argument. It is
the duty of the Khalifa to guide them and especially to show them the
distinction between God and His book. He who holds otherwise than the
Khalifa is either too blind or too lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other
thing. Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their views. If they hold that
the Qur’an is uncreated, they have abandoned tawhid, the doctrine of God's
Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim land. Also, the qadis must
apply the same test to all the witnesses in cases before them. If these do not
hold that the Qur’an is created, they cannot be legal witnesses. Other letters
followed; the Mihna was extended through the Abbasid empire and applied
to other doctrines, e.g., that of free-will and of the vision of God. The Khalifa
also commanded that the death penalty for unbelief (kufr) should be
inflicted on those who refused to take the test. They were to be regarded as
idolaters and polytheists. The death of al-Ma’mun in the same year relieved
the pressure. It is true that the Mihna was continued by his successor, al-
Mu‘tasim, and by his successor, al-Wathiq, but without energy; it was more a
handy political weapon than anything else. In 234, the second year of al-
Mutawakhil, it was abolished and the Qur’an decreed untreated. At the
same time the Alids and all Persian nationalism came under a ban.
Practically, the status quo ante was restored and Mu‘tazilism was again left a
struggling heresy. The Arab party and the pure faith of Muhammad had re-
asserted themselves.

In this long conflict, the most prominent figure was certainly that of Ahmad
ibn Hanbal. He was the trust and strength of the orthodox; that he stood
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fast through imprisonment and scourging defeated the plans of the

Mu‘tazilites. In dealing with the development of law, we have seen what his
legal position was. The same held in theology. Scholastic theology (kalam)
was his abomination. Those who disputed over doctrines he cast out. That
their dogmatic position was the same as his made no difference. For him,
theological truth could not be reached by reasoning (aql); tradition (naql)
from the fathers (as-salaf) was the only ground on which the dubious words
of the Qur’an could be explained. So, in his long examinations before the
officials of al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim, he contented himself with repeating
either the words of the Qur’an which for him were proofs or such traditions
as he accepted. Any approach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected.
When they argued before him, he kept silence.

What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this incident? for it was
nothing more. The Mu‘tazilites dropped back into their former position, but
under changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace was further from
them than ever. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the
masses; and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed the honor of the
Word of God. For his persecutors there was nothing but hatred. And after
he had passed away, the conflict was taken up with still fiercer bitterness by
the school of law founded by his pupils. They continued to maintain his
principles of Qur’an and tradition long after the Mu‘tazilites themselves had
practically vanished from the scene, and all that was left for them to
contend against was the modified system of scholastic theology which is
now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these reactionary Hanbalites we
shall have to deal later.

The Mu‘tazilites, on their side, having seen the shipwreck of their hopes and
the growing storm of popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their
scholastic studies. They became more and more theologians affecting a
narrower circle, and less and less educators of the world at large. Their
system became more metaphysical and their conclusions more unintelligible
to the plain man. The fate which has fallen on all continued efforts of the
Muslim mind was coming upon them. Beggarly speculations and barren
hypotheses, combats of words over names, sapped them of life and reality.
What the ill-fated friendship of al-Ma’mun had begun was carried on and out
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by the closed circle of Muslim thought. They separated into schools, one at
al-Basra and another at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially developed
was the old question, What is a thing (shay)? They defined a thing,
practically, as a concept that could be known and of which something could
be said. Existence (wujud) did not matter. It was only a quality which could
be there or not. With it, the thing was an entity (mawjud); without it, a non-
entity (ma‘dum), but still a thing with all equipment of substance (jawhar)
and accident (arad), genus and species. The bearing of this was especially
upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God's adding a single quality,
things entered the sphere of existence and were for us. Here, then, is
evidently an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At al-Basra the
relation of God to His qualities was especially discussed, and there it came to
be pretty nearly a family dispute between al-Jubba‘i (d. 303) and his son Abu
Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that God has qualities, existent, eternal, added
to His essence; thus, He knows, for example, by such a quality of knowledge.
The students of Greek philosophy and the Shi‘ites denied this and said that
God knew by His essence. We have seen already Mu‘tazilite views as to this
point. Abu Hudhayl held that these qualities were God's essence and
not in it. Thus, He knew by a quality of knowledge, but that quality was His
essence. Al-Jubba‘i contented himself with safe-guarding this statement.
God knew in accordance with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a
state (hal) which required that He should be a knower. The orthodox had
said the first; his son, Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know an
essence and know it under different conditions. The conditions varied but
the essence remained. These conditions are not thinkable by themselves, for
we know them only in connection with the essence. These are states; they
are different from the essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba‘i
opposed to this a doctrine that these states were really subjective in the
mind of the perceiver, either generalizations or relationships existing
mentally but not externally. This controversy spun itself out at great length
through centuries. It eventually resolved itself into the fundamental
metaphysical inquiry, What is a thing? A powerful school came to a
conclusion that would have delighted the soul of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
Things are four, they said, entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As
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we have seen above, al-Jubba‘i denied the reality of both states and
relationships. Orthodox Islam has been of a divided opinion.

But all this time, other movements had been in progress, some of which
were to be of larger future importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In
255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a Mu‘tazilite he was really a
man of letters, free in life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned in
the writings of the philosophers and rather inclined to the doctrines of the
Tabi‘iyun, deistic naturalists. His confession of faith was of the utmost
simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God had neither body nor form,
could not be seen with the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was
a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not capable of philosophical
reflection, but held that Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the
Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more should be required of
him. Here we have evidently in part a reaction from the subtilties of
controversy, and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough to give
even the unsettled a chance to remain in the Muslim Church. Something of
the same kind we shall find, later, in the case of Ibn Rushd. Finally, we have
probably to see in his remark that the Qur’an was a body, turned at one time
into a man and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on the great
controversy of his time.

Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers proper, the students of
the wisdom of the Greeks. He represents the standpoint of the educated
man of the time, and was no specialist in anything but a general scepticism.
In the first generation of the philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense,
stands conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philosopher of the
Arabs. The name belongs to him of right, for he is almost the only example
of a student of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert. But he was
hardly a philosopher in any independent sense. His rôle was translating, and
during the reigns of al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim a multitude of translations
and original works de omni scibili came from his hands; the names of 265 of
these have come down to us. In the orthodox reaction under al-
Mutawakhil he fared ill; his library was confiscated but afterward restored.
He died about 260, and with him dies the brief, golden century of eager
acquisition, and the scholastic period enters in philosophy as in theology.
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That the glory was departing from Baghdad and the Khalifate is shown by
the second important name in philosophy. It is that of al-Farabi, who was
born at Farab in Turkestan, lived and worked in the brilliant circle which
gathered round Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid, at his court at Aleppo. In
music, in science, in philology, and in philosophy, he was alike master.
Aristotle was his passion, and his Arabic contemporaries and successors
united in calling him the second teacher, on account of his success in un-
knotting the tangles of the Greek system. It was in truth a tangled system
which came to him, and a tangled system which he left. The Muslim
philosophers began, in their innocence, with the following positions: The
Qur’an is truth and philosophy is truth; but truth can only be one; therefore,
the Qur’an and philosophy must agree. Philosophy they accepted in whole-
hearted faith, as it came to them from the Greeks through Egypt and Syria.
They took it, not as a mass of more or less contradictory speculation, but as
a form of truth. They, in fact, never lost a certain theological attitude. Under
such conditions, then, Plato came to them; but it was mostly Plato as
interpreted by Porphyrius, that is, as neo-Platonism. Aristotle, too, came to
them in the guise of the later Peripatetic schools. But in Aristotle, especially,
there entered a perfect knot of entanglement and confusion. During the
reign of al-Mu‘tasim, a Christian of Emessa in the Lebanon--the history in
details is obscure--translated parts of the "Enneads" of Plotinus into Arabic
and entitled his work "The Theology of Aristotle." A more unlucky bit of
literary mischief and one more far-reaching in its consequences has never
been. The Muslims took it all as solemnly as they took the text of the Qur’an.
These two great masters, Plato and Aristotle, they said, had expounded the
truth, which is one. Therefore, there must be some way of bringing them
into agreement. So generations of toilers labored valiantly with the welter
of translations and pseudographs to get out of them and into them the one
truth. The more pious added the third element of the Qur’an, and it must
remain a marvel and a magnificent testimonial to their skill and patience that
they got even so far as they did and that the whole movement did not end in
simple lunacy. That al-Farabi should have been so incisive a writer, so wide a
thinker and student; that Ibn Sina should have been so keen and clear a
scientist and logician; that Ibn Rushd should have known--really known--and
commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that the human brain, after all, is a
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sane brain and has the power of unconsciously rejecting and throwing out
nonsense and falsehood.

But it is not wonderful that, dealing with such materials and contradictions,
they developed a tendency to mysticism. There were many things which
they felt compelled to hold which could only be defended and rationalized in
that cloudy air and slanting light. Especially, no one but a mystic could bring
together the emanations of Plotinus, the ideas of Plato, the spheres of
Aristotle and the seven-storied heaven of Muhammad. With this matter of
mysticism we shall have to deal immediately. Of al-Farabi it is enough to say
that he was one of the most patient of the laborers at that impossible
problem. It seems never to have occurred to him, or to any of the others,
that the first and great imperative was to verify his references and sources.
The oriental, like the mediæval scholastic, tests minutely the form of his
syllogism, but takes little thought whether his premises state facts or not.
With a scrupulous scepticism in deduction, he combines a childlike
acceptance on tradition or on the narrowest of inductions.

But there are other and more ominous signs in al-Farabi of the scholastic
decline. There appears first in him that tendency toward the writing of
encyclopædic compends, which always means superficiality and the
commonplace. Al-Farabi himself could not be accused of either, but that he
thus claimed all knowledge for his portion showed the risk of the premature
circle and the small gain. Another is mysticism. He is a neo-Platonist, more
exactly a Plotinian; although he himself would not have recognized this title.
He held, as we have seen, that he was simply retelling the doctrines of Plato
and Aristotle. But he was also a devout Muslim. He seems to have taken in
earnest all the bizarre details of Muslim cosmography and eschatology; the
Pen, the Tablet, the Throne, the Angels in all their ranks and functions
mingle picturesquely with the system of Plotinus, his ἕν, his ψυχή, his νοῦς,
his receptive and active intellects. But to make tenable this position he had
to take the great leap of the mystic. Unto us these things are impossible;
with God, i.e., on another plane of existence, they are the simplest realities.
If the veil were taken from our eyes we would see them. This has always
been the refuge of the devout Muslim who has tampered with science. We
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shall look for it more in detail when we come to al-Ghazzali, who has put it
into classical form.

Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and a clericalist. His

conception of the model state is a strange compound of the republic of
Plato and Shi‘ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of course, in the
theocratic idea of the Muslim state; but his city, which is to take in all
mankind, a Holy Roman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once, a
community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later influence than that of the
mother city of Islam, al-Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence is
that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya, near Tunis. The
Hamdanids were Shi‘ites and Sayf ad-Dawla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed
peace and protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas.

This brings us again to the great mystery of Muslim history. What was the
truth of the Fatimid movement? Was the family of the Prophet the fosterer
of science from the earliest times? What degree of contact had they with the
Mu‘tazilites? With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law? That they
were themselves the actual beginners of everything--and everything has
been claimed for them--we may put down to legend. But one thing does
stand fast. Just as al-Ma’mun combined the establishment of a great
university at Baghdad with a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo
erected a great hall of science and threw all their influence and authority
into the spreading and extending of knowledge. This institution seems to
have been a combination of free public library and university, and was
probably the gateway connecting between the inner circle of initiated
Fatimid leaders and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already seen
how unhappy were the external effects of the Shi‘ite, and especially of the
Fatimid, propaganda on the Muslim world. But from time to time we
become aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and philosophical labor
and investigation accompanying that propaganda, and striving after
knowledge and truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which we can
know only through its occasional outbursts. Some of these are given above;
others will follow. The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and
dogmatic statements and explanations are not in place. It may be that it was
only a natural drawing together on the part of all the different forces and
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movements that were under a ban and had to live in secrecy and stillness. It
may be that the students of the new sciences passed over, simply through
their studies and political despair--as has often happened in our clay--into
different degrees of nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate
searching for, and dependence on, some absolute guide, an infallible Imam.
It may be that we have read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid
movement; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly ripened plan to
bring the rule of the world into the control of a band of philosophers, whose
task it was to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate it into self-
rule; that they saw--these unknown devotees of science and truth--no other
way of breaking down the barriers of Islam and setting free the spirits of
men. A wild hypothesis! But in face of the real mystery no hypothesis can
seem wild.

Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fatimids is the association known
as the Sincere Brethren (Ikhwan as-safa). It existed at al-Basra in the middle
of the fourth century of the Hijra during the breathing space which the free
intellectual life enjoyed after the capture of Baghdad by the Buwayhids in
334. It will be remembered how that Persian dynasty was Shi‘ite by creed
and how it, for the time, completely clipped the claws of the orthodox and
Sunnite Abbasid Khalifas. The only thing, thereafter, which heretics and
philosophers had to fear was the enmity of the populace, but that seems to
have been great enough. The Hanbalite mob of Baghdad had grown to be a
thing of terror. It was, then, an educational campaign on which this new
philosophy had to enter. Their programme was by means of clubs,
propagating themselves and spreading over the country from al-Basra and
Baghdad, to reach all educated people and introduce among them gradually
a complete change in their religious and scientific ideas. Their teaching was
the same combination of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism with
Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu‘tazilite theology, that we have
already known. Only there was added to it a Pythagorean reverence for
numbers, and everything, besides, was treated in an eminently superficial
and popularized manner. Our knowledge of the Fraternity and its objects is
based on its publication, "The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren" (Rasa’il
ikhwan as-safa) and upon scanty historical notices. The Epistles are fifty or
fifty-one in number and cover the field of human knowledge as then
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conceived. They form, in fact, an Arabic Encyclopédie. The founders of the

Fraternity, and authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most ten. We
have no certain knowledge that the Fraternity ever took even its first step
and spread to Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the development did
not pass. The division of members into four--learners, teachers, guides, and
drawers near to God in supernatural vision--and the plan of regular meetings
of each circle for study and mutual edification remained in its paper form.
The society was half a secret one and lacked, apparently, vitality and energy.
There was among its founders no man of weight and character. So it passed
away and has left only these Epistles which have come down to us in
numerous MSS., showing how eagerly they have been read and copied and
how much influence they at least must have exercised. That influence must
have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intellectual life, yet it carried with
it in a still higher degree the defects we have already noticed in al-Farabi. To
them must be added the most simple skimming of all real philosophical
problems and a treatment of nature and natural science which had lost all
connection with facts.

It has been suggested, and the suggestion seems luminous and fertile, that
this Fraternity was simply a part of the great Fatimid propaganda which, as
we know, honey-combed the ground everywhere under the Sunnite
Abbasids. Descriptions which have reached us of the methods followed by
the leaders of the Fraternity agree exactly with those of the missionaries of
the Isma‘ilians. They raised difficulties and suggested serious questionings;
hinted at possible answers but did not give them; referred to a source
where all questions would be answered. Again, their catch-words and fixed
phrases are the same as those afterward used by the Assassins, and we have
traces of these Epistles forming a part of the sacred library of the Assassins.
It is to be remembered that the Assassins were not simply robber bands
who struck terror by their methods. Both the western and the eastern
branches were devoted to science, and it may be that in their mountain
fortresses there was the most absolute devotion to true learning that then
existed. When the Mongols captured Alamut, they found it rich in MSS. and
in instruments and apparatus of every kind. It is then possible that the
elevated eclecticism of the Ikhwan as-safa was the real doctrine of the
Fatimids, the Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses; certainly, wherever
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we can test them there is the most singular agreement. It is a mechanical

and æsthetic pantheism, a glorification of Pythagoreanism, with its music
and numbers; idealistic to the last degree; a worship and pursuit of a
conception of a harmony and beauty in all the universe, to find which is to
find and know the Creator Himself. It is thus far removed from materialism
and atheism, but could easily be misrepresented as both. This, it is true, is a
very different explanation from the one given in our first Part; it can only be
put alongside of that and left there. The one expresses the practical effect
of the Isma‘ilians in Islam; the other what may have been their ideal.
However we judge them, we must always remember that somewhere in
their teaching, at its best, there was a strange attraction for thinking and
troubled men. Nasir ibn Khusraw, a Persian Faust, found peace at Cairo
between 437 and 444 in recognizing the divine Imamship of al-Mustansir,
and after a life of persecution died in that faith as a hermit in the mountains
of Badakhshan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Rani, who died in 362,
similarly accepted al-Mu‘izz as his spiritual chief and guide.

Another eclectic sect, but on a very different principle, was that of the
Karramites, founded by Abu Abd Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its
teachings had the honor to be accepted and protected by no less a man
than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna (388-421), Mahmud the Idol-
breaker, the first invader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi, Ibn
Sina and many another. But that, to which we will return, belongs to a later
date and, probably, to a modified form of Ibn Karram's teaching. For
himself, he was an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to the story, a man of no
education. He lost himself in theological subtleties which he seems to have
failed to understand. However, out of them all he put together a book which
he called "The Punishment of the Grave," which spread widely in Khurasan.
It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest anthropomorphism. Thus, for
him, God actually sat upon the throne, was in a place, had direction and so
could move from one point to another. He had a body with flesh, blood, and
limbs; He could be embraced by those who were purified to the requisite
point. It was a literal acceptance of the material expressions of the Qur’an
along with a consideration of how they could be so, and an explanation by
comparison with men--all opposed to the principle bila kayfa. So, apparently,
we must understand the curious fact that he was also a Murji’ite and held
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faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue. All men, except

professed apostates, are believers, he said, because of that primal covenant,
taken by God with the seed of Adam, when He asked, "Am I not your Lord?"
(Alastu bi-rabbikum) and they, brought forth from Adam's loins for the
purpose, made answer, "Yea, verily, in this covenant we remain until we
formally cast it off." This, of course, involved taking God's qualities in the
most literal sense. So, if we are to see in the Mu‘tazilites scholastic
commentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to logic and sense,
we must see in Ibn Karram one of those wooden-minded literalists, for
whom a metaphor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its external
meaning. He was part of the great stream of conservative reaction, in which
we find also such a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of
Ahmad's sense and reverence kept him by the safe proviso "without
considering how and without comparison." All Ahmad's later followers were
not so wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram inclined to the Kharijites.

Before we return to al-Jubba'i and the fate of the Mu‘tazilites, it remains to

trace more precisely the thread of mysticism, that kashf, revelation, which
we have already mentioned several times. Its fundamental fact is that it had
two sides, an ascetic and a speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in
result, and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic has been assigned,
in good and in bad faith, as an adherent of both.

It is to the form of mysticism which sprang from asceticism that we must

first turn. Attention has been given above to the wandering monks and
hermits, the sa’ihs (wanderers) and rahibs who caught Muhammad's
attention and respect. We have seen, too, how Muslim imitators began in
their turn to wander through the land, clad in the coarse woollen robes
which gave them the name of Sufis, and living upon the alms of the pious.
How early these appeared in any number and as a fixed profession is
uncertain, but we find stories in circulation of meetings between such
mendicant friars and al-Hasan al-Basri himself. Women, too, were among
them, and it is possible that to their influence a development of devotional
love-poetry was due. At least, many verses of this kind are ascribed to a
certain Rabi‘a, an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme other-
worldliness, who died in 135. Many other women had part in the
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contemplative life. Among them may be mentioned, to show its grasp and
spread, A’isha, daughter of Ja‘far as-Sadiq, who died in 145; Fatima of
Naysabur, who died in 223, and the Lady Nafisa, a contemporary and rival in
learning with ash-Shafi‘i and the marvel of her time in piety and the ascetic
life. Her grave is one of the most venerated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders
are still worked and prayer is always answered. She was a descendant of al-
Hasan, the martyred ex-Khalifa, and an example of how the fated family of
the Prophet was an early school for women saints. Even in the Heathenism
we have traces of female penitents and hermits, and the tragedy of Ali and
his sons and descendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving service and
religious enthusiasm with which women are dowered.

All these stood and stand in Islam on exactly the same footing as men. The
distinction in Roman Christendom that a woman cannot be a priest there
falls away, for in Islam is neither priest nor layman. They lived either as
solitaries or in conventual life exactly as did the men. They were called by
the same terms in feminine form; they were Sufiyas beside the Sufis; Zahidas
(ascetics) beside the Zahids; Waliyas (friends of God) beside the Walis;
Abidas (devotees) beside the Abids. They worked wonders (karamat, closely
akin to the χαρίσματα of 1 Cor. xii, 9) by the divine grace, and still, as we
have seen, at their own graves such are granted through them to the
faithful, and their intercession (shafa‘a) is invoked. Their religious exercises
were the same; they held dhikrs and women darwishes yet dance to singing
and music in order to bring on fits of ecstasy. To state the case generally,
whatever is said hereafter of mysticism and its workings among men must
be taken as applying to women also.

To return: one of the earliest male devotees of whom we have distinct note
is Ibrahim ibn Adham. He was a wanderer of royal blood, drifted from Balkh
in Afghanistan to al-Basra and to Mecca. He died in 161. Contempt for the
learning of lawyers and for external forms appears in him; obedience to
God, contemplation of death, death to the world formed his teaching.
Another, Da’ud ibn Nusayr, who died in 165, was wont to say, "Flee men as
thou fleest a lion. Fast from the world and let the breaking of thy fast be
when thou diest." Another, al-Fudayl ibn Iyad of Khurasan, who died in 187,
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was a robber converted by a heavenly voice; he cast aside the world, and his
utterances show that he lapsed into the passivity of quietism.

Reference has already been made in the chapter on jurisprudence to the

development of asceticism which came with the accession of the Abbasids.
The disappointed hopes of the old believers found an outlet in the
contemplative life. They withdrew from the world and would have nothing
to do with its rulers; their wealth and everything connected with them they
regarded as unclean. Ahmad ibn Hanbal in his later life had to use all his
obstinacy and ingenuity to keep free of the court and its contamination.
Another was this al-Fudayl. Stories--chronologically impossible--are told how
he rebuked Harun al-Rashid for his luxury and tyranny and denounced to his
face his manner of life. With such an attitude to those round him he could
have had little joy in his devotion. So it was said, "When al-Fudayl died,
sadness was removed from the world."

But soon the recoil came. Under the spur of such exercises and thoughts,
the ecstatic oriental temperament began to revel in expressions borrowed
from human love and earthly wine. Such we find by Ma‘ruf of al-Karkh, a
district of Baghdad, who died in 200, and whose tomb, saved by popular
reverence, is one of the few ancient sites in modern Baghdad; and by his
greater disciple, Sari as-Saqati, who died in 257. To this last is ascribed, but
dubiously, the first use of the word tawhid to signify the union of the soul
with God. The figure that the heart is a mirror to image back God and that it
is darkened by the things of the body appears in Abu Sulayman of
Damascus, who died in 215. A more celebrated ascetic, who died in 227, Bishr
al-Hafi (bare-foot), speaks of God directly as the Beloved (habib). Al-Harith
al-Muhasibi was a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and died in 243. The
only thing in him to which Ahmad could take exception was that he made
use of kalam in refuting the Mu‘tazilites; even this suspicion against him he is
said to have abandoned. Sari and Bishr, too, were close friends of Ahmad's.
Dhu-n-Nun, the Egyptian Sufi, who died in 245, is in more dubious repute. He
is said to have been the first to formulate the doctrine of ecstatic states
(hals, maqamas); but if he went no further than this, his orthodoxy, in the
broad sense, should be above suspicion. Islam has now come to accept
these as right and fitting. Perhaps the greatest name in early Sufiism is that
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of al-Junayd (d. 297); on it no shadow of heresy has ever fallen. He was a

master in theology and law, reverenced as one of the greatest of the early
doctors. Questions of tawhid he is said to have discussed before his pupils
with shut doors. But this was probably tawhid in the theological and not in
the mystical sense--against the Mu‘tazilites and not on the union of the soul
with God. Yet he, too, knew the ecstatic life and fell fainting at verses which
struck into his soul. Ash-Shibli (d. 334) was one of his disciples, but seems to
have given himself more completely to the ascetic and contemplative life. In
verses by him we find the vocabulary of the amorous intercourse with God
fully developed. The last of this group to be mentioned here shall be Abu
Talib al-Makki, who died in 386. It is his distinction to have furnished a text-
book of Sufiism that is in use to this day. He wrote and spoke openly
on tawhid, now in the Sufi sense, and got into trouble as a heretic, but his
memory has been restored to orthodoxy by the general agreement of Islam.
When, in 488, al-Ghazzali set himself to seek light in Sufiism, among the
treatises he studied were the books of four of those mentioned above, Abu
Talib, al-Muhasibi, al-Junayd, and ash-Shibli.

In the case of these and all the others already spoken of there was nothing
but a very simple and natural development such as could easily be paralleled
in Europe. The earliest Muslims were burdened, as we have seen, with the
fear of the terrors of an avenging God. The world was evil and fleeting; the
only abiding good was in the other world; so their religion became an ascetic
other-worldliness. They fled into the wilderness from the wrath to come.
Wandering, either solitary or in companies, was the special sign of the true
Sufi. The young men gave themselves over to the guidance of the older
men; little circles of disciples gathered round a venerated Shaykh;
fraternities began to form. So we find it in the case of al-Junayd, so in that of
Sari as-Saqati. Next would come a monastery, rather a rest-house; for only in
the winter and for rest did they remain fixed in a place for any time. Of such
a monastery there is a trace at Damascus in 150 and in Khurasan about 200.
Then, just as in Europe, begging friars organized themselves. In faith they
were rather conservative than anything else; touched with a religious
passivism which easily developed into quietism. Their ecstasies went little
beyond those, for instance, of Thomas à Kempis, though struck with a
warmer oriental fervor.
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The points on which the doctors of Islam took exception to these earlier
Sufis are strikingly different from what we would expect. They concern the
practical life far more than theological speculation. As was natural in the
case of professional devotees, a constantly prayerful attitude began to
assume importance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the five daily
prayers, the salawat. This development was in all probability aided by the
existence in Syria of he Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted the duty
of prayer above all other religious obligations. These, also, abandoned
property and obligations and wandered as poor brethren over the country.
They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic Greek monks who
eventually led to the controversy concerning the uncreated light manifested
at the transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine to the Eastern
Church. Considering these points, it can hardly be doubted that there was
some historical connection and relation here, not only with earlier but also
with later Sufiism. There is a striking resemblance between the Sufis seeking
by patient introspection to see the actual light of God's presence in their
hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting solitarily in their cells and
seeking the divine light of Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels.

But our immediate point is the matter of constant, free prayer. In the Qur’an
(xxxiii, 41) the believers are exhorted to "remember (dhikr) God often;" this
command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative depreciation of the five
canonical prayers. Their meetings for the purpose, much like our own
prayer-meetings, still more like the "class-meetings" of the early Methodists,
as opposed to stated public worship, were called dhikrs. These services were
fiercely attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived and are the
darwish functions which tourists still go to see at Constantinople and Cairo.
But the more private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each in his
house repeating his Qur’anic litanies through the night, until to the passer-
by it sounded like the humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-
gutters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to have fallen before
ridicule and accusations of heresy.

Another point against the earlier Sufis was their abuse of the principle
of tawakkul, dependence upon God. They gave up their trades and
professions; they even gave up the asking for alms. Their ideal was to be
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absolutely at God's disposal, utterly cast upon His direct sustenance (rizq).
No anxiety for their daily bread was permitted to them; they must go
through the world separated from it and its needs and looking up to God.
Only one who can do this is properly an acknowledger of God's unity, a
true Muwahhid. To such, God would assuredly open the door of help; they
were at His gate; and the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His
help used to come.

To this it may be imagined that the more sober, even among Sufis, made
vehement objection. It fell under two heads. One was that of leash, the
gaining of daily bread by labor. The examples of the husbandman who casts
his seed into the ground and then depends upon God, of the merchant who
travels with his wares in similar trust, were held up against the wandering
but useless monk. As always, traditions were forged on both sides. Said a
man--apparently in a spirit of prophecy--one day to the Prophet, "Shall I let
my camel run free and trust in God?" Replied the Prophet, or someone for
him with a good imitation of his humorous common-sense, "Tie up your
camel and trust in God." The other head was the use of remedies in sickness.
The whole controversy parallels strikingly the "mental science" and
"Christian science" of the present day. Medicine, it was held,
destroyed tawakkul. In the fourth century in Persia this insanity ran high and
many books were written for it and against it. The author of one on the first
side was consulted in an obstinate case of headache. "Put my book under
your pillow," he said, "and trust in God." On both these points the usage of
the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth of the Sufi position. They
had notoriously earned their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had
possessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the most barbaric and
multifarious remedies. So the agreement of Islam eventually righted itself,
though the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained for centuries a
thing of delight for theologians. In the end only the wildest fanatics held by
absolute tawakkul.

But all this time the second form of Sufiism had been slowly forcing its way.
It was essentially speculative and theological rather than ascetic and
devotional. When it gained the upper hand, zahid (ascetic) was no longer a
convertible term with Sufi. We pass over the boundary between Thomas à
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Kempis and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of this movement
cannot be hard to find in the light of what has preceded. They lie partly in
the neo-Platonism which is the foundation of the philosophy of Islam.
Probably it did not come to the Sufis along the same channels by which it
reached al-Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics and, perhaps,
especially through the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and his asserted
teacher, Stephen bar Sudaili with his Syriac "Book of Hierotheos." We need
not here consider whether the Monophysite heresy is to be reckoned in as
one of the results of the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying forms
of it meant the frank deifying of a man and thus raised the possibility of the
equal deifying of any other man and of all men. But there is no certainty that
these views had an influence in Islam. It is enough that from A.D. 533 we find
the Pseudo-Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the ultra
Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with the whole mystical
movement in Christendom. According to it, all is akin in mature to the
Absolute, and all this life below is only a reflection of the glories of the
upper sphere, where God is. Through the sacraments and a hierarchy of
angels man is led back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to a
knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the atonement fade out of view. The
incarnation is but an example of how the divine and the human can join. All
is an emanation or an emission of grace from God; and the yearnings of man
are back to his source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and travailing
nature are striving to return to their origin. When this conception had seized
the Oriental Church, when it had passed into Islam and dominated its
emotional and religious life; when through the translation of the Pseudo-
Dionysius by Scotus Erigena in 850, it had begun the long contest of idealism
in Europe, the dead school of Plotinus had won the field, and its influence
ruled from the Oxus to the Atlantic.

But the roots of Sufiism struck also in another direction. We have already
seen an early tendency to regard Ali and, later, members of his house
as incarnations of divinity. In the East, where God comes near to man, the
conception of God in man is not difficult. The Semitic prophet through
whom God speaks easily slips over into a divine being in whom God exists
and may be worshipped. But if with one, why not with another? May it not
be possible by purifying exercises to reach this unity? If one is a Son of God,
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may not all become that if they but take the means? The half-understood
pantheism which always lurks behind oriental fervors claims its due. From
his wild whirling dance, the darwish, stung to cataleptic ecstasy by the
throbbing of the drums and the lilting chant, sinks back into the
unconsciousness of the divine oneness. He has passed temporarily from this
scene of multiplicity into the sea of God's unity and, at death, if he but
persevere, he will reach that haven where he fain would be and will abide
there forever. Here, we have not to do with calm philosophers rearing their
systems in labored speculations, but with men, often untaught, seeking the
salvation of their souls earnestly and with tears.

One of the earliest of the pantheistic school was Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d.
261). He was of Persian parentage, and his father had been a follower of
Zarathustra. As an ascetic he was of the highest repute; he was also an
author of eminence on Sufiism (al-Ghazzali used his books) and he joined to
his devout learning and self-mortification clear miraculous gifts. But equally
clear was his pantheistic drift and his name has come down linked to the
saying, "Beneath my cloak there is naught else than God." It is worth
noticing that certain other of his sayings show that, even in his time, there
were Sufi saints who boasted that they had reached such perfection and
such miraculous powers that the ordinary moral and ceremonial law no
longer applied to them. The antinomianism which haunted the later Sufiism
and darwishdom had already appeared.

But the greatest name of all among these early pantheists was that of al-
Hallaj (the cotton carder), a pupil of al-Junayd, who was put to death with
great cruelty in 309. It is almost impossible to reach any certain conclusion
as to his real views and aims. In spite of what seem to be utterances of the
crassest pantheism, such as, "I am the Truth," there have not been wanting
many in later Islam who have reverenced his memory as that of a saint and
martyr. To Sufis and darwishes of his time and to this day he has been and is
a patron saint. In his life and death he represents for them the spirit of revolt
against dogmatic scholasticism and formalism. Further, even such a great
doctor of the Muslim Church as al-Ghazzali defended him and, though
lamenting some incautious phrases, upheld his orthodoxy. At his trial itself
before the theologians of Baghdad, one of them refused to sign
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the fatwa declaring him an unbeliever; he was not clear, he said, as to the
case. And it is true that such records as we have of the time suggest that his
condemnation was forced by the government as a matter of state policy. He
was a Persian of Magian origin, and evidently an advanced mystic of the
speculative type. He carried the theory to its legitimate conclusion, and
proclaimed the result publicly. He dabbled in scholastic theology; had
evident Mu‘tazilite leanings; wrote on alchemy and things esoteric. But with
this mystical enthusiasm there seem to have united in him other and more
dangerous traits. The stories which have reached us show him of a character
fond of excitement and change, surrounding himself with devoted
adherents and striving by miracle-working of a commonplace kind to add to
his following. His popularity among the people of Baghdad and their
reverence for him rose to a perilous degree. He may have had plans of his
own as a Persian nationalist; he may have had part in one of the Shi‘ite
conspiracies; he may have been nothing but a rather weak-headed devotee,
carried off his feet by a sudden tide of public excitement, the greatest trial
and danger that a saint has to meet. But the times were not such then in
Baghdad that the government could take any risks. Al-Muqtadir was Khalifa
and in his weak hands the Khalifate was slipping to ruin. The Fatimids were
supreme in North Africa; the Qarmatians held Syria and Arabia, and were
threatening Baghdad itself. In eight years they were to take Mecca. Persia
was seething with false prophets and nationalists of every shade. Thirteen
years later Ibn ash-Shalmaghani was put to death in Baghdad on similar
grounds; in his case, Shi‘ite conspiracy against the state was still more
clearly involved. We can only conclude in the words of Ibn Khallikan (d. 681),
"The history of al-Hallaj is long to relate; his fate is well known; and God
knoweth all secret things." With him we must leave, for the present,
consideration of the Sufi development and return to the Mu‘tazilites and to
the people tiring of their dry subtilties.
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CHAPTER 3

The rise of orthodox kalam; al-Ash‘ari; decline of the Mu‘tazilites; passing of heresy into
unbelief; development of scholastic theology by Ash‘arites; rise of Zahirite kalam; Ibn Hazm;
persecution of Ash‘arites; final assimilation of kalam.

As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at first refused to enter

upon any discussion of sacred things. Malik ibn Anas used to say,
"God's istiwa (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known; how it is
done is unknown; it must be believed; questions about it are an
innovation (bid‘a)." But such a position could not be held for any length of
time. The world cannot be cut in two and half assigned to faith and half to
reason. So, as time went on, there arose on the orthodox side men who,
little by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith that was in them.
They thus came to use kalam in order to meet the kalam of the Mu‘tazilites;
they became mutakallims, and the scholastic theology of Islam was founded.
It is the history of this transfer of method which we have now to consider.

Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. It was at first a gradual,

unconscious drift, and people did not recognize its existence. Afterward,
when they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human mind to ascribe
broad movements to single men asserted itself and the whole was put
under the name of al-Ash‘ari. It is true that with him, in a sense, the change
suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it had already been long in
progress. As we have seen, al-Junayd discussed the unity of God, but it was
behind closed doors. Ash-Shafi‘i held that there should be a certain number
of men trained thus to defend and purify the faith, but that it would be a
great evil if their arguments should become known to the mass of the
people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected,
and rightly, of defending his faith with argument, and thereby incurred
Ahmad's displeasure. Another contemporary of Ahmad's, al-Karabisi (d.
345), incurred the same displeasure, and the list might easily be extended.
But the most significant fact of all is that the movement came to the surface
and showed itself openly at the same time in the most widely separated
lands of Islam. In Mesopotamia there was al-Ash‘ari, who died after 320; in
Egypt there was at-Tahawi, who died in 331; in Samarqand there was al-
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Mataridi, who died in 333. Of these at-Tahawi is now little more than a name;
al-Mataridi's star has paled before that of al-Ash‘ari; al-Ash‘ari has come in
popular view to be the solitary hero before whom the Mu‘tazilite system
went down. It will perhaps be sufficient if we take his life and experiences as
our guide in this period of change; the others must have followed very much
in the same path.

He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year in which al-Kindi died and
Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished from the sight of men. He came into a
world full of intellectual ferment; Alids of different camps were active in
their claim to be possessors of an infallible Imam; Zaydites and Qarmatians
were in revolt; the decree of 234 that the Qur’an was uncreated had had
little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu‘tazilites; in 261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu
Yazid, died. Al-Ash‘ari himself was of the best blood of the desert and of a
highly orthodox family which had borne a distinguished part in Muslim
history. Through some accident he came in early youth into the care of al-
Jubba‘i, the Mu‘tazilite, who, according to one story, had married al-Ash‘ari's
mother; was brought up by him and remained a stanch Mu‘tazilite, writing
and speaking on that side, till he was forty years old.

Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted the pulpit of the
mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, "He who knows me, knows me; and he
who knows me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of so and so. I
have maintained the creation of the Qur’an and that God will not be seen in
the world to come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their actions.
Lo, I repent that I have, been a Mu‘tazilite and turn to opposition to them."
It was a voice full of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of the
Mu‘tazilites had publicly passed and that, hereafter, they would be met with
their own weapons. What led to this change of mind is strictly unknown;
only legends have reached us. One, full of psychological truth, runs that one
Ramadan, the fasting month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger,
the Prophet appeared to him three times in his sleep, and commanded him
to turn from his vain kalam and seek certainty in the traditions and the
Qur’an. If he would but give himself to that study, God would make clear the
difficulties and enable him to solve all the puzzles. He did so, and his mind
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seemed to be opened; the old contradictions and absurdities had fled, and
he cursed the Mu‘tazilites and all their works.

It can easily be seen that in some such way as this the blood of the race may
have led him back to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert, whose
word must be accepted as its own proof. The gossips of the time told
strange tales of rich relatives and family pressure; we can leave these aside.
When he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met his old teacher, al-
Jubba‘i, in public discussions again and again till the old man withdrew. One
of these discussions legend has handed down in varying forms. None of
them may be exactly true, but they are significant of the change of attitude.
He came to al-Jubba‘i and said, "Suppose the case of three brothers; one
being God-fearing, another godless and a third dies as a child. What of them
in the world to come?

Al-Jubba‘i replied, "The first will be rewarded in Paradise; the second

punished in Hell, and the third will be neither rewarded nor punished." Al-
Ash‘ari continued, "But if the third said, 'Lord, Thou mightest have granted
me life, and then I would have been pious and entered Paradise like my
brother,' what then? "Al-Jubba‘i replied, "God would say, 'I knew that if thou
wert granted life thou wouldst be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell.'"
Then al-Ash‘ari drew his noose, "But what if the second said, 'Lord, why
didst Thou not. make me die as a child? Then had I escaped Hell.'" Al-Jubba‘i
was silenced, and Al-Ash‘ari went away in triumph. Three years after his
pupil had left him the old man died. The tellers of this story regard it as
disproving the Mu‘tazilite doctrine of "the best"--al-aslah--namely, that God
is constrained to do that which may be best and happiest for His creatures.
Orthodox Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no such
constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He chooses.

But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a
protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites, which held that
the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms of
human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash‘ari's position,
a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of purely rationalistic
theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and
usage (sunna) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early church (salaf).
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The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the
evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages.
In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities (sifat aqliya) of
God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech: but explained
away the Qur’anic anthropomorphisms of God's face, hands, feet, etc. In the
second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Baghdad and
come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away
nothing, but contented himself with the position that the
anthropomorphisms were to be taken, bila kayfa wala tashbih, without
asking how and without drawing any comparison. The first phrase is
directed against the Mu‘tazilites, who inquired persistently into the nature
and possibility of such things in God; the second, against the
anthropomorphists (mushabbihs, comparers; mujassims, corporealizers),
mostly ultra Hanbalites and Karramites, who said that these things in God
were like the corresponding things in men. At all stages, however, he was
prepared to defend his conclusions and assail those of his adversaries by
dint of argument.

The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed and
the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash‘arite. Both are in the Appendix
of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw attention to two, only, of
the obscurer points. On the vexed question, "What is a thing?" he
anticipated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and theoretical, and those
later ones also who did not follow him, regarded, as we have seen,
existence (wujud) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing
(mawjud). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of "existence";
then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became existent. But
al-Ash‘ari and his followers held that existence was the "self" (ayn) of the
entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the
whole, Appendix of Creeds.

On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims chose to
express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took up a mediating
position. The old orthodox position was absolutely fatalistic; the
Mu‘tazilites, following their principle of Justice, gave to man an initiative
power. Al-Ash‘ari struck a middle path. Man cannot create anything; God is
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the only creator. Nor does man's power produce any effect on his actions at
all. God creates in His creature power (qudra) and choice (ikhtiyar). Then He
creates in him his action corresponding to the power and choice thus
created. So the action of the creature is created by God as to initiative and
as to production; but it is acquired by the creature. By acquisition (kasb) is
meant that it corresponds to the creature's power and choice, previously
created in him, without his having had the slightest effect on the action. He
was only the locus or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash‘ari is supposed
to have accounted for free-will and entailed responsibility upon men. It may
be doubted whether the second point occupied him much. It was open to
his God to do good or evil as He chose; the Justice of the Mu‘tazilites was
left behind. He may have intended only to explain the consciousness of
freedom, as some have done more recently. The closeness with which al-
Ash‘ari in this comes to the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz and to the
Kantian conception of existence shows how high a rank he must take as an
original thinker. His abandoning of the Mu‘tazilites was due to no mere
wave of sentiment but to a perception that their speculations were on too
narrow a basis and of a too barren scholastic type. He died after 320 with a
curse on them and their methods as his last words.

A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi. The creed of an-Nasafi in the
Appendix of Creeds, pp. 308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi
were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who was more than
suspected of Mu‘tazilite and Murji’ite leanings. Muslim theologians usually
reckon, up some thirteen points of difference between al-Mataridi and al-
Ash‘ari and admit that seven of these are not much more than combats of
words. Those which occur in an-Nasafi's creed are marked with a star.

We are now in a position to finish shortly with the Mu‘tazilites. Their work,
as a constructive force, is done. From this time on there is kalam among the
orthodox, and the term mutakallim denotes nothing but a scholastic
theologian, whether of one wing or another. And so, like any other organ
which has done its part and for the existence of which there is no longer any
object, they gradually and quietly dropped into the background. They had
still, sometimes, to suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there were
men who continued to call themselves Mu‘tazilites; but their heresies came
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to be heresies of the schools and not burning questions in the eyes of the
masses. We need now draw attention to only a few incidents and figures in
this dying movement. The Muslim historians lay much stress on the
orthodox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381-422, and narrate how
he persecuted the Mu‘tazilites, Shi‘ites and other heretics and compelled
them, under oath, to conform.

But there are several difficulties in the way of this persecution, which make
it probable that it was more nominal than otherwise. Al-Qadir was bitterly
orthodox; he had written a treatise on theology and compelled his unhappy
courtiers to listen to a public reading of it every week. But he enjoyed,
outside of his palace, next to no power. He was in the control of the Shi‘ite
Buwayhids, who, as we have seen, ruled Baghdad and the Khalifate from
320 to 447. These dubious persecutions are said to have fallen in 408 and
420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain visited Baghdad about 390 and has
left us a record of the state of religious things there. He found in session
what may perhaps best be described as a Parliament of Religions. It seems
to have been a free debate between Muslims of all sects, orthodox and
heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews and Christians--unbelievers of every
kind. Each party had a spokesman, and at the beginning of the proceedings
the rule was rehearsed that no one might appeal to the sacred books of his
creed but might only adduce arguments founded upon reason. The pious
Spanish Muslim went to two meetings but did not peril his soul by any
further visits. In his narrative we recognize the horror with which the
orthodox of Spain viewed such proceedings--Spain, Muslim and Christian,
has always favored the straitest sect; but when such a thing was permitted
in Baghdad, religious liberty there at least must have been tolerably broad.
Possibly it was sittings of the Ikhwan as-safa upon which this scandalized
Spaniard stumbled. He himself speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims.

But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi‘ite authority in Baghdad gave all the
miscellaneous heretics a chance for life, it was different in the growing
dominions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic monarch had embraced
the anthropomorphic faith of the Karramites, the most literal-minded of all
the Muslim sects. In consequence, all forms of Mu‘tazilism and all kinds of
mutakallims were an abomination to him, and it was a very real persecution
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which they met at his hands. That al-Qadir, his spiritual suzerain, urged him
on is very probable; it is also possible that respect for the growing power of
Mahmud may have protected al-Qadir to some extent from the Buwayhids.
In 420 Mahmud took from them Ispahan and held there a grand inquisition
on Shi‘ites and heretics of all kinds.

To proceed with the Mu‘tazilites; when we come to al-Ghazzali and his times
we shall find that they have ceased to be a crying danger to the faith.
Though their views might, that doctor held, be erroneous in some respects,
they were not to be considered as damnable. Again, in 538, there died az-
Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often called the last of the
Mu‘tazilites. He was not that by any means, but his heresies were either mild
or were regarded mildly. A single point will show this, His commentary on
the Qur’an, the Kashshaf, was revised and expurgated in the orthodox
interest by al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in that form is now the most popular and
respected of all expositions. The Kashshaf itself, in its original, unmodified
form, has been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn Rushd, the
Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is combating the arguments of the
mutakallims, makes little difference between the Mu‘tazilites and the
others. They are only, to him, another variety of scholastic theologian, with a
rather better idea, perhaps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we
shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek in such matters. Since
then, and into quite modern times, there have been sporadic cases of
theologians called Mu‘tazilites by themselves or others. Practically, they
have been scholastics of eccentric views. Finally, the use of this name for
themselves by the present-day broad school Muslims of India is absolutely
unhistorical and highly misleading.

We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological

consequences of the preceding theology.

Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy which has to be met so much
as simple unbelief, more or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the
earlier period are now dividing in two directions, one part inclining toward
milder forms of heresy and the other toward doubt in the largest sense,
passing over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and thence dividing
into materialists, deists, and theists. Thus we have seen earlier the workings
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of al-Farabi and of the Ikhwan as-safa. The teachings of the latter pass on to
the Isma‘ilians who developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres
of their power, scattered from Persia to Syria. These were otherwise called
Assassins; otherwise Batinites in the narrower sense--in the broader that
term meant only those who found under the letter of the Qur’an a hidden,
esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta‘limites or claimers of a ta‘lim, a secret
teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much
to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful and rather watery
philosophy of the "Sincere Brethren" was transmuted through ambition and
fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands and daggers of these fierce
sectaries. Into this period, too, fall some well-known names of dubious and
more than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni (d. 440) even at the court of
Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep his footing and his head. Yet it may be
doubted how far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He was certainly the
first scientific student of India and Indica and of chronology and calendars, a
man whose attainments and results show that our so-called modern
methods are as old as genius. On religion, he maintained a prudent silence,
but earned the favor of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weakness
in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science
who went his own way without treading on the religious toes of other
people.

His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different
nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer
through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud
he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such heresies
as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an insatiable
intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopædist of his age, and his scientific
work, and especially that in medicine, went further than anything else to put
the Muslim East and mediæval Europe in the strait waistcoat from which the
first has not yet emerged and the second only shook itself free in the
seventeenth century. He was a student of Aristotle and a mystic, as all
Muslim students of Aristotle have been. How far his mysticism enabled him
to square the Qur’an with his philosophy is not clear; such men seldom said
exactly what they meant and all that they thought. He was also a diligent
student and reader of the Qur’an and faithful in his public religious duties.
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Yet the Muslim world asserts that he left behind him a testamentary
tractate (wasiya) defending dissimulation as to the religion of the country in
which we might be; that it was not wrong for the philosopher to go through
religious rites which for him had no meaning. He, too, is significant for his
time, and, if our interest were philosophy, would call for lengthened
treatment. As it is, he marks for us the accomplished separation between
students of theology and students of philosophy.

An equally well known and by us much better loved name is that of Umar al-
Khayyam, who died later, about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with Ibn
Sina. He, too, was a bon vivant, but of a deeper, more melancholy strain. His
wine meant more than friendly cups; it was a way of escape from the world
and its burden. His science, too, went deeper. He was not a gatherer and
arranger of the wisdom of the past; his reformed calendar is more perfect
than that which we even now use. His faith is a riddle to us, as it was to his
comrades. But it was because he had no certain truth to proclaim that Umar
did not speak out clearly. His last words were almost those of Rabelais, "I go
to meet the great Perhaps." Anecdotage connects his name with that of al-
Ghazzali. Neither had escaped the pall of universal scepticism which must
have descended upon their time. But al-Ghazzali, by God's grace, as he
himself reverently says, was enabled to escape. Umar died under it.

A very different man was Abu-l-Ala al-Ma‘arri, the blind poet and singer of
intellectual freedom. In Arabic literature there is no other voice like his, clear
and confident. He was a man of letters; no philosopher nor theologian nor
scientist, though at one time he seems to have come in contact with a circle
like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same; and his spirit was like that of
one of the heroic poets of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to
keep his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven to earth, and
who lived his own life out in his own way, undaunted. In his darkness he
nourished great thoughts and flung out a sœva indignatio on hypocrisy and
subservience which reminds of Lessing. But Abu-l-Ala was a great poet, and
his scorn of priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suffering
humanity and his confidence in the light of reason are thrown into scraps of
burning, echoing verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the town of
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his birth, Ma‘arrat an-Nu‘man, in northern Syria, in 449. The problem is how
he was suffered to live out his long life of eighty-six years.

We can now return to the development of scholastic theology in the

orthodox church at the hands of the followers of al-Ash‘ari. They had to
fight their way against many and most differing opponents. At the one
extreme were the dwindling Mu‘tazilites, passing slowly into comparatively
innocuous heretics, and the growing party of unbelievers, philosophical and
otherwise, open and secret. At the other extreme was the mob of
Hanbalites, belonging to the only legal school which laid theological burdens
on its adherents. The theologians, in this case, certainly varied as to the
weight of their own anathemas against all kalam, but were at one in that
they carried the bulk of the multitude with them and could enforce their
conclusions with the cudgels of rioters. In the midst were the rival orthodox
(pace the Hanbalites) developers of kalam, among whom the Mataridites
probably held the most important place. Thus, the Ash‘arite school was the
nursling as well as the child of controversy.

It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least in tradition, with the final
form of that system, should be that of a controversialist. But this man, Abu
Bakr al-Baqilani the Qadi, was more than a mere controversialist. It is his
glory to have contributed most important elements to and put into fixed
form what is, perhaps, the most fantastic and daring metaphysical scheme,
and almost certainly the most thorough theological scheme, ever thought
out. On the one hand, the Lucretian atoms raining down through the empty
void, the self-developing monads of Leibnitz, pre-established harmony and
all, the Kantian "things in themselves" are lame and impotent in their
consistency beside the parallel Ash‘arite doctrines; and, on the other, not
even the rigors of Calvin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can
compete with the unflinching exactitude of the Muslim conclusions.

First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash‘arites was that of Kant, to fix the
relation of knowledge to the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani defined
knowledge (ilm) as cognition (ma‘rifa) of a thing as it is in itself. But in
reaching that "thing in itself" they were much more thorough than Kant.
Only two of the Aristotelian categories survived their attack, substance and
quality. The others, quantity, place, time and the rest, were only
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relationships (i‘tibars) existing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and

not things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must exist in something,
and a quality cannot exist in another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could
not exist in either of the two things which it brought together; for example,
in the cause or the effect. It must be in a third thing. But to bring this third
thing and the first two together, other relationships would be needed and
other things for these relationships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in
an infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aristotle the position
that such an infinite series backward (tasalsal) is inadmissible. Relationships,
then, had no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective
nonentities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter was now impossible for
them. All the categories had gone except substance and quality; and among
them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the possibility of suffering the
impress of form. A possibility is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a
subjectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the active form and all
causes must also go. They, too, are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for
these thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting character of
appearances drove them to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a
quality planted in the nature of a thing; that the idea "nature" did not exist.
Then this drove them further. Substances exist only with qualities, i.e.,
accidents. These qualities may be positive or they may be negative; the
ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most fruitful
conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence, the substances
themselves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as quality is fleeting,
has only a moment's duration.

But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility of
receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So
atomists they became, and, as always, after their own fashion. Their atoms
are not of space only, but also of time. The basis of all the manifestation,
mental and physical, of the world in place and time, is a multitude of
monads. Each has certain qualities but has extension neither in space nor
time. They have simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one another.
Between them is absolute void. Similarly as to time. The time-atoms, if the
expression may be permitted, are equally unextended and have also
absolute void--of time--between them. Just as space is only in a series of
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atoms, so time is only in a succession of untouching moments and leaps

across the void from one to the other with the jerk of the hand of a clock.
Time, in this view, is in grains and can exist only in connection with change.
The monads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature in themselves,
no possibility of development along certain lines. The Muslim monads are,
and again are not, all change and action in the world are produced by their
entering into existence and dropping out again, not by any change in
themselves.

But this most simple view of the world left its holders in precisely the same
difficulty, only in a far higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was compelled
to fall back on a pre-established harmony to bring his monads into orderly
relations with one another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell back
upon God and found in His will the ground of all things.

We here pass from their ontology to their theology, and as they were
thorough-going metaphysicians, so now they are thorough-going
theologians. Being was all in the one case; now it is God that is all. In truth,
their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism which destroys the possibility
of a philosophy in order to drive men back to God and His revelations and
compel them to see in Him the one grand fact of the universe. So, when a
darwish shouts in his ecstasy, "Huwa-l-haqq," he does not mean, "He is the
Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New Testament sense of "The
Way, the Truth, and the Life," but simply, "He is the Fact"--the one Reality.

To return: from their ontology they derived an argument for the necessity of
a God. That their monads came so and not otherwise must have a cause;
without it there could be no harmony or connection between them. And this
cause must be one with no cause behind it; otherwise we would have the
endless chain. This cause, then, they found in the absolutely free will of God,
working without any matter beside it and unaffected by any laws or
necessities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their qualities and, by
that means, brings to pass all the motion and change of the world. These, in
our sense, do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved, that really
means that God has annihilated--or permitted to drop out of existence, by
not continuing to uphold, as another view held--the atoms making up that
thing in its original position, and has created them again and again along the
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line over which it moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and effect. A
man writes with a pen and a piece of paper. God creates in his mind the will
to write; at the same moment he gives him the power to write and brings
about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen and the appearance on
the paper. No one of these is the cause of the other. God has brought about
by creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite combination to produce
these appearances. Thus we see that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is
simply the presence, in the mind of the man, of this choice created there by
God. This may not seem to us to be very real, but it has, certainly, as much
reality as anything else in their world. Further, it will be observed how
completely this annihilates the machinery of the universe. There is no such
thing as law, and the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated
miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordinary operations of nature
are on the same level. The world and the things in it could have been quite
different. The only limitation upon God is that He cannot produce a
contradiction. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time. There is no
such thing as a secondary cause; when there is the appearance of such, it is
only illusional. God is producing it as well as the ultimate appearance of
effect. There is no nature belonging to things. Fire does not burn and a knife
does not cut. God creates in a substance a being burned when the fire
touches it and a being cut when the knife approaches it.

In this scheme there are certainly grave difficulties, philosophical and

ethical. It establishes a relationship between God and the atoms; but we
have already seen that relationships are subjective illusions. That, however,
was in the case of the things of the world, perceived by the senses--
contingent being, as they would put it. It does not hold of necessary being.
God possesses a quality called Difference from originated things (al-
mukhalafa lil-hawadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free cause; and the
existence of a free cause they were compelled by their principles to admit.
The ethical difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of nature and no
certainty, or nexus, as to causes and effects; if there is no regular
development in the life, mental, moral, and physical of a man--only a series
of isolated moments; how can there be any responsibility, any moral claim
or duty? This difficulty seems to have been recognized more clearly than the
philosophical one. It was met formally by the assertion of a certain order
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and regularity in the will of God. He sees to it that a man's life is a unity, and,
for details, that the will to eat and the action always coincide. But such an
answer must have been felt to be inadequate and to involve grave moral
dangers for the common mind. Therefore, as we have seen, the study of
kalam was hedged about with difficulties and restrictions. Theologians
recognized its trap-falls and doubts, even for themselves, and lamented that
they were compelled by their profession to study it. The public discussion of
its questions was regarded as a breach of professional etiquette.
Theologians and philosophers alike strove to keep these deeper mysteries
hidden from the multitude. The gap between the highly educated and the
great mass--that fundamental error and greatest danger in Muslim society--
comes here again to view. Further, even among theologians, there was
some difference in degree of insight, and books and phrases could be read
by different men in very different ways. To one, they would suggest
ordinary, Qur’anic doctrines; another would see under and behind them a
trail of metaphysical consequences bristling with blasphemous possibilities.
Thus, Muslim science has been always of the school; it has never learned the
vitalizing and disinfecting value of the fresh air of the market-place. This
applies to philosophers even more than to theologians. The crowning
accusation which Ibn Rushd, the great Aristotelian commentator, brought
against al-Ghazzali was that he discussed such subtilties in popular books.

This, then, was the system which seems to have reached tolerably complete
form at the hands of al-Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the completion of
the system there went by no means its universal or even wide-spread
acceptance in the Muslim world. That of al-Mataridi held its own for long,
and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is used largely in the Turkish
schools. In the fifth century it was considered remarkable that Abu Dharr (d.
434), a theologian of Herat, should be an Ash‘arite rather than, apparently, a
Mataridite. It was not till al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash‘arite system came
to the orthodox hegemony in the East, and it was only as the result of the
work of Ibn Tumart, the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it conquered
the West. For long its path was darkened by suspicion and persecution. This
came almost entirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu‘tazilites had no force
behind them, and while the views of deists and materialists were steadily
making way in secret, their public efforts appeared only in very occasional
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disputes between theologians and philosophers. As we have seen, Muslim

philosophy has always practised an economy of teaching.

The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head toward the close of the
reign of Tughril Beg, the first Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen, the
Saljuqs had taken Merv and Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril Beg had entered
Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite domination of the Buwayhids
who had so long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a theologically
unschooled Turk, should be captured by the simplicity and concreteness of
the Hanbalite doctrines.

Added to this political factor there was a theological movement at work

which was deeply hostile to the Ash‘arites as they had developed. An
important point in the method of al-Ash‘ari himself, and, after him, of his
followers, was to put forth a creed, expressed in the old-fashioned terms
and containing the old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at all possible,
and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpretation which was, naturally,
accessible to the professional student only. Accordingly what had at first
seemed a weapon against the Mu‘tazilites came to be viewed with more and
more suspicion by the holders to the old, unquestioning orthodoxy. The
duty also of religious investigation and speculation (nazr) came to have
more and more stress laid upon it. The bila kayfa dropped into the
background. A Muslim must have a reason for the faith that was in him, they
said; otherwise, he was no true Muslim, was in fact an unbeliever. Of course,
they limited carefully the extent to which he should go. For the ordinary
man a series of very simple proofs would be prepared; the student, on the
other hand, when carefully led, could work his way through the system
sketched above. All this, naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition.

It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school of law (fiqh) developed
into a school of kalam and applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its
new victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theologian of Spain. He died
in 456, after a stormy life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of
his vituperative style coupled him, in popular proverb, with al-Hajjaj, the
blood-thirsty lieutenant of the Umayyads in al-Iraq. "The sword of al-Hajjaj
and the tongue of Ibn Hazm," they said. But for all his violence of language
and real weight of character and brain, he made little way for his views in his
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lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after his death before they came
into any prominence. The theologians and lawyers around him in the West
were devoted to the study of fiqh in the narrowest and most technical
sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their predecessors
and neglected the great original sources of the Qur’an and the traditions.
The immediate study of tradition (hadith) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the
other hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he absolutely rejected, each
man must draw from the sacred texts his own views. So the whole system
of the canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, naturally, did not
like it. Analogy (qiyas), their principal instrument, he swept away. It had no
place either in law or theology. Even on the principle of agreement (ijma) he
threw a shadow of doubt.

But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm's originality lay.
Strictly, his Zahirite principles when applied there should have led him to
anthropomorphism (tajsim). The literal meaning of the Qur’an, as we have
seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending from His
throne. But to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination only less
than the speculative arguments with which the Ash‘arites tried to avoid it.
His own method was purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted in
his dictionary until he found some other meaning for "hand" or "foot," or
whatever the stumbling-block might be.

But the most original point in his system is his doctrine of the names of God,
and his basing of that doctrine upon God's qualities. The Ash‘arites, he
contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave inconsistency in saying
that God was different in nature, qualities, and actions from all created
things, and yet that the human qualities could be predicated of God, and
that men could reason about God's nature. He accepted the doctrine of
God's difference (mukhalafa) on highly logical, but, for us, rather startling
grounds. The Qur’an applies to Him the words, "The Most Merciful of those
that show mercy," but God, evidently, is not merciful. He tortures children
with all manner of painful diseases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our
human sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot be predicated of
God. What then does the Qur’an mean by those words? Simply that they--
arhamu-rrahimin--are one of God's names, applied to Him by Himself and
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that we have no right to take them as descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to

use them to throw light on God's nature. They form one of the Ninety-nine
Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna) of which the Prophet has spoken in
a tradition. Similarly, we may call God the Living One (al hayy), because He
has given us that as one of His names, not because of any reasoning on our
part. Do we not say that His life is different from that of all other living
beings? These names then, are limited to ninety-nine and no more should be
formed, however full of praise such might be for God, or however directly
based on His actions. He has called Himself al-Wahib, the Giver, and so we
may use that term of Him. But He has not called Himself al-Wahhab the
Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of Him, though it is one of
praise. Of course, you may describe His action and say that He is the guider
of His saints. But you must not make from that a name, and call Him simply
the Guider. Further, if we regard these names as expressing qualities in God,
we involve multiplicity in God's nature; there is the quality and the thing
qualified. Here we are back at the old Mu‘tazilite difficulty and it is
intelligible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with the Mu‘tazilites than with
the Ash‘arites. The one party were Muslims and sinned in ignorance--
invincible ignorance, a Roman Catholic would call it; the others were
unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from the way. The Mu‘tazilites had
tried to limit the qualities as much as possible. At the best they had said that
they were God's essence and not in His essence. Al-Ash‘ari and his school
had fairly revelled in qualities and had mapped out the nature of God with
the detail--and daring--of a phrenological chart.

Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the will of God only. God has
willed that this should be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he concedes, is
always saying what does not agree with the truth. But, still, God may
pronounce that one lie is a sin, and one not. Muslim ethics, it is true, have
never branded lying as sinful in itself.

For the Shi‘ites and their doctrine of an infallible Imam, Ibn Hazm cannot
find strong enough expressions of contempt.

In Ibn Hazm's time, and he praises God for it, there were but few Ash‘arites
in the West. Theology generally did not find many students. So things went
on till long after his death. To this fiery controversialist the worst blow of all
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would have been if he could have known that the men who were at last to
bring his system, in part and for a time, into public acceptance and repute,
were also to complete the conquest of Islam for the Ash‘arite school. That
was still far in the future, and we must return to the persecution,

The accounts of the persecution which set in are singularly conflicting. Some
assign it to Hanbalite influence; others tell of a Mu‘tazilite wazir of Tughril
Beg. That the traditionalist party was the main force in it seems certain. In all
probability, however, all the other anti-Ash‘arite sects, from the Mu‘tazilites
on, took their own parts. The Ash‘arite party represented a via media and
would be set upon with zest by all the extremes. They were solemnly cursed
from the pulpits and, what added peculiar insult to it, the Rafidites, an
extreme Kharijite sect, were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the
greatest theologian of the time, fled to the Hijaz and gained the title of
Imam of the two Harams (Imam al-Haramayn), by living for four years
between Mecca and al-Madina. Al-Qushayri, the author of a celebrated
treatise on Sufiism, was thrown into prison. The Ash‘arite doctors generally
were scattered to the winds. Only with the death of Tughril Beg in 455 did
the cloud pass. His successor, Alp-Arslan, and especially the great wazir,
Nizam al-Mulk, favored the Ash‘arites. In 459 the latter founded the
Nizamite Academy at Baghdad to be a defence of Ash‘arite doctrines. This
may fairly be regarded as the turning-point of the whole controversy. The
Hanbalite mob of Baghdad still continued to make itself felt, but its excesses
were promptly suppressed. In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there
by the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended Ash‘arite lectures.

It is needless to spend more time over the other theologians who were links
in the chain between al-Ash‘ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their views
wavered, this way and that, only the rationalizing tendency became
stronger and stronger. There was danger that the orthodox system would
fossilize and lose touch with life as that of the Mu‘tazilites had done. It is
true that Sufiism still held its ground. All theologians practically were
touched by it in its simpler form; and the cause of the higher Sufiism of
ecstasy, wonders by saints (karamat) and communion of the individual soul
with God had been eloquently and effectively urged by al-Qushayri (d. 465)
in his Risala. But in spite of the labors of so many men of high ability, the
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religious outlook was growing ever darker. Keen observers recognized that
some change was bound to come. That it might be an inflowing of new life
by a new al-Ash‘ari was their prayer. It is more than dubious whether even
the keenest mind of the time could have recognized what form the new life
must take. They had not the perspective and could only feel a vague need.
But from what has gone before it will be plain that Islam had again to
assimilate to itself something from without or perish. Such had been its
manner of progress up till now. New opinions had arisen; had become
heresies; conflict had followed; part of the new thought had been absorbed
into the orthodox church; part had been rejected; through it all the life of
the church had gone on in fuller and richer measure, being always, in spite of
everything, the main stream; the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out of
sight. So it had been with Murji’ism; so with Mu‘tazilism. With the orthodox,
tradition (naql) still stood fast, but reason (aql) had taken a place beside it.
Kalam, in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become fairly a part of their
system. What was to be the new element, and who was to be its champion?
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CHAPTER 4

Al-Ghazzali, his life, times, and work; Sufiism formally accepted into Islam.

WITH the time came the man. He was al-Ghazzali, the greatest, certainly the
most sympathetic figure in the history of Islam, and the only teacher of the
after generations ever put by a Muslim on a level with the four great Imams.
The equal of Augustine in philosophical and theological importance, by his
side the Aristotelian philosophers of Islam, Ibn Rushd and all the rest, seem
beggarly compilers and scholiasts. Only al-Farabi, and that in virtue of his
mysticism, approaches him. In his own person he took up the life of his time
on all its sides and with it all its problems. He lived through them all and
drew his theology from ms experience. Systems and classifications, words
and arguments about words, he swept away; the facts of life as he had
known them in his own soul he grasped. When his work was done the
revelation of the mystic (kashf) was not only a full part but the basal part in
the structure of Muslim theology. That basis, in spite, or rather on account
of the work of the mutakallims had previously been lacking. Such a
scepticism as their atomic system had practically amounted to, could
disprove much but could prove little. If all the categories but substance and
quality are mere subjectivities, existing in the mind only, what can we know
of things? An ultra-rational basis had to be found and it was found in the
ecstasy of the Sufis. But al-Ghazzali brought another element into fuller and
more effective working. With him passes away the old-fashioned kalam, a
thing of shreds and patches, scraps of metaphysics and logic snatched up
for a moment of need, without grasp of the full sweep of philosophy, and
incapable, in the long run, of meeting it. Even its atomic system is a
philosophy of amateurs, with all their fantastic one-sidedness, their vigor
and rigor. But al-Ghazzali was no amateur. His knowledge and grasp of the
problems and objects of philosophy were truer and more vital than in any
other Muslim up to his time--perhaps after it, too. Islam has not fully
understood him any more than Christendom fully understood Augustine,
but until long after him the horizon of Muslims was wider and their air
clearer for his work. Then came a new scholasticism, reigning to this day.
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So much by way of preface. We must now give some account of the life and
experiences, the ideas and sensations, of this great leader and reformer. For
his life and his work were one. Everything that he thought and wrote came
with the weight and reality of personal experience. He recognized this
connection himself, and has left us a book--the Munqidh min ad-dalal,
"Rescuer from Error"--almost unique in Islam, which, in the form of an
apology for the faith, is really an Apologia pro vita sua. This book is our main
source for what follows.

Al-Ghazzali was born at Tus in 450. He lost his father when young and was
educated and brought up by a trusted Sufi friend. He early turned to the
study of theology and canon law, but, as he himself confesses, it was only
because they promised wealth and reputation. Very early he broke away
from taqlid, simple acceptance of religious truth on authority, and he began
to investigate theological differences before he was twenty. His studies
were of the broadest, embracing canon law, theology, dialectic, science,
philosophy, logic and the doctrines and practices of the Sufis. It was a Sufi
atmosphere in which he moved, but their religious fervors do not seem to
have laid hold of him. Pride in his own intellectual powers, ambition and
contempt for others of less ability mastered him. The latter part of his life as
a student was spent at Naysabur as pupil and assistant of the Imam al-
Haramayn. Through the Imam he stood in the apostolic succession of
Ash‘arite teachers, being the fourth from al-Ash‘ari himself. There he
remained till the death of the Imam in 478, when he went out to seek his
fortune and found it with the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk. By him al-Ghazzali
was appointed, in 484, to teach in the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad. There
he had the greatest success as a teacher and consulting lawyer, and his
worldly hopes seemed safe. But suddenly he was struck down by mysterious
disease. His speech became hampered; his appetite and digestion failed. His
physicians gave him up; his malady, they said, was mental and could only be
mentally treated. His only hope lay in peace of mind. Then he suddenly
quitted Baghdad, in 488, ostensibly on pilgrimage to Mecca. This flight, for it
was so in effect, of al-Ghazzali was unintelligible to the theologians of the
time; since that time it has marked the greatest epoch in the church of Islam
after the return of al-Ash‘ari.
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That it should be unintelligible was natural. No cause could be seen on the

surface, except some possible political complications; the cause in reality lay
in al-Ghazzali's mind and conscience. He was wandering in the labyrinth of
his time. From his youth he had been a sceptical, ambitious student, playing
with religious influences yet unaffected by them. But the hollowness of his
life was ever present with him and pressing upon him. Like some with us, he
sought to be converted and could not bring it to pass. His religious beliefs
gradually gave way and fell from him, piece by piece.

At last, the strain became too great and at the court of Nizam al-Mulk he
touched for two months the depths of absolute scepticism. He doubted the
evidence of the senses; he could see plainly that they often deceived. No
eye could perceive the movement of a shadow, but still the shadow moved;
a gold piece would cover any star, but a star was a world larger than the
earth. He doubted even the primary ideas of the mind. Is ten more than
three? Can a thing be and not be? Perhaps; he could not tell. His senses
deceived him, why not his mind? May there not be something behind the
mind and transcending it, which would show the falsity of its convictions
even as the mind showed the falsity of the information given by the senses?
May not the dreams of the Sufis be true, and their revelations in ecstasy the
only real guides? When we awake in death, may it not be into a true but
different existence? All this--perhaps. And so he wandered for two months.
He saw clearly that no reasoning could help him here; he had no ideas on
which he could depend, from which he could begin. But the mercy of God is
great; He sends His light to whom He wills, a light that flows in, and is given
by no reasoning. By it al-Ghazzali was saved; he regained the power to think,
and the task which he now set before him was to use this power to guide
himself to truth.

When he looked around, he saw that those who gave themselves to the
search for truth might be divided into four groups. There were the scholastic
theologians, who were much like the theologians of all times and faiths.
Second, there were the Ta‘limites, who held that to reach truth one must
have an infallible living teacher, and that there was such a teacher. Third,
there were the followers of philosophy, basing on logical and rational
proofs. Fourth, there were the Sufis, who held that they, the chosen of God,
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could reach knowledge of Him directly in ecstasy. With all these he had, of
course, been acquainted to a greater or less degree; but now he settled
down to examine them one by one, and find which would lead him to a
certainty to which he could hold, whatever might come. He felt that he
could not go back to the unconscious faith of his childhood; that nothing
could restore. All his mental being must be made over before he could find
rest. He began with scholastic theology, but found no help there. Grant the
theologians their premises and they could argue; deny them and there was
no common ground on which to meet. Their science had been founded by
al-Ash‘ari to meet the Mu‘tazilites; it had done that victoriously, but could do
no more. They could hold the faith against heretics, expose their
inconsistencies; against the sceptic they availed nothing. It is true that they
had attempted to go further back and meet the students of philosophy on
their own ground; to deal with substances and attributes and first principles
generally; but their efforts had been fruitless. They lacked the necessary
knowledge of the subject, had no scientific basis, and were constrained
eventually to fall back on authority. After study of them and their methods it
became clear to al-Ghazzali that the remedy for his ailment was not in
scholastic theology.

Then he turned to philosophy. He had seen already that the weakness of the
theologians lay in their not having made a sufficient study of primary ideas
and the laws of thought. Three years he gave up to this. He was at Baghdad
at the time, teaching law and writing legal treatises, and probably the three
years extended from the beginning of 484 to the beginning of 487. Two
years he gave, without a teacher, to the study of the writings of the
different schools. of philosophy, and almost another to meditating and
working over his results. He felt that he was the first Muslim doctor to do
this with the requisite thoroughness. And it is noteworthy that at this stage
he seems to have again felt himself to be a Muslim, and in an enemy's
country when he was studying philosophy. He speaks of the necessity of
understanding what is to be refuted; but this may be only a confusion
between his attitude when writing after 500, and his attitude when
investigating and seeking truth, fifteen years earlier. He divides the
followers of philosophy in his time into three: Materialists, Deists
(Tabi‘is, i.e. Naturalists), and Theists. The materialists reject a creator; the
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world exists from all eternity; the animal comes from the egg and the egg
from the animal. The wonder of creation compels the deists to admit a
creator, but the creature is a machine, has a certain poise (i‘tidal) in itself
which keeps it running; its thought is a part of its nature and ends with
death. They thus reject a future life, though admitting God and His
attributes.

He deals at much greater length with the teachings of those whom he calls
theists, but through all his statements of their views his tone is not that of a
seeker but that of a partisan; he turns his own experiences into a warning to
others, and makes of their record a little guide to apologetics. Aristotle he
regards as the final master of the Greek school; his doctrines are best
represented for Arabic readers in the books of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi; the
works of their predecessors on this subject are a mass of confusion. Part of
these doctrines must be stamped as unbelief, part as heresy, and part as
theologically indifferent. He then divides the philosophical sciences into six,
mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics, political economy, ethics; and
discusses these in detail, showing what must be rejected, what is
indifferent, what dangers arise from each to him who studies or to him who
rejects without study.

Throughout, he is very cautious to mark nothing as unbelief that is not really

so; to admit always those truths of mathematics, logic, and physics that
cannot intellectually be rejected; and only to warn against an attitude of
intellectualism and a belief that mathematicians, with their success in their
own department, are to be followed in other departments, or that all
subjects are susceptible of the exactness and certainty of a syllogism in
logic. The damnable errors of the theists are almost entirely in their
metaphysical views. Three of their propositions mark them as
unbelievers. First, they reject the resurrection of the body and physical
punishment hereafter; the punishments of the next world will be spiritual
only. That there will be spiritual punishments, al-Ghazzali admits, but there
will be physical as well. Second, they hold that God knows universals only,
not particulars. Third, they hold that the world exists from all eternity and to
all eternity. When they reject the attributes of God and hold that He knows
by His essence and not by something added to His essence, they are only
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heretics and not unbelievers. In physics he accepts the constitution of the

world as developed and explained by them; only all is to be regarded as
entirely submitted to God, incapable of self-movement, a tool of which the
Creator makes use. Finally, he considers that their system of ethics is derived
from the Sufis. At all times there have been such saints, retired from the
world--God has never left himself without a witness; and from their ecstasies
and revelations our knowledge of the human heart, for good and for evil, is
derived.

Thus in philosophy he found little light. It did not correspond entirely to his
needs, for reason cannot answer all questions nor unveil all the enigmas of
life. He would probably have admitted that he had learned much in his
philosophical studies--so at least we may gather from his tone; he never
speaks disrespectfully of philosophy and science in their sphere; his
continual exhortation is that he who would understand them and refute
them must first study them; that to do otherwise, to abuse what we do not
know, brings only contempt on ourselves and on the cause which we
champion. But with his temperament he could not found his religion on
intellect. As a lawyer he could split hairs and define issues; but once the
religious instinct was aroused, nothing could satisfy him but what he
eventually found. And so, two possibilities and two only were before him,
though one was hardly a real possibility, if we consider his training and
mental powers. He might fall back on authority. It could not be the authority
of his childish faith, "Our fathers have told us," he himself confesses, could
never again have weight with him. But it might be some claimer of authority
in a new form, some infallible teacher with a doctrine which he could accept
for the authority behind it. As the Church of Rome from time to time gathers
into its fold men of keen intellect who seek rest in submission, and the
world marvels, so it might have been with him. Or again, he might turn
directly to God and to personal intercourse with Him; he might seek to know
Him and to be taught of Him without any intermediary, in a word to enter on
the path of the mystic.

He came next to examine the doctrine of the Ta‘limites. They, a somewhat

outlying wing of the Fatimid propaganda, had come at this time into
alarming prominence. In 483 Hasan ibn as-Sabbah had seized Alamut and
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entered on open rebellion. The sect of the Assassins was applying its
principles. But the poison of their teaching was also spreading among the
people. The principle of authority in religion, that only by an infallible
teacher could truth be reached and that such an infallible teacher existed if
he could only be found, was in the air. For himself, al-Ghazzali found the
Ta‘limites and their teaching eminently unsatisfactory: They had a lesson
which they went over parrot-fashion, but beyond it they were in dense
ignorance. The trained theologian and scholar had no patience with their
slackness and shallowness of thought. He labored long, as ash-Shahrastani
later confesses that he, too, did, to penetrate their mystery and learn
something from them; but beyond the accustomed formulæ there was
nothing to be found. He even admitted their contention of the necessity of a
living, infallible teacher, to see what would follow--but nothing followed.
"You admit the necessity of an Imam," they would say. "It is your business
now to seek him; we have nothing to do with it." But though neither al-
Ghazzali nor ash-Shahrastani, who died 43 (lunar) years after him, could be
satisfied with the Ta‘limites, many others were. The conflict was hot, and al-
Ghazzali himself wrote several books against them.

The other possibility, the path of the mystic, now lay straight before him. In
the Munqidh he tells us how, when he had made an end of the Ta’limites, he
began to study the books of the Sufis, without any suggestion that he had
had a previous acquaintance with them and their practices. But probably
this means nothing more than it does when he speaks in a similar way of
studying the scholastic theologians; namely, that he now took up the study
in earnest and with a new and definite purpose. He therefore read carefully
the works of al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the fragments of al-Junayd, ash-Shibli,
and Abu Yazid al-Bistami. He had also the benefit of oral teaching; but it
became plain to him that only through ecstasy and the complete
transformation of the moral being could he really understand Sufiism. He
saw that it consisted in feelings more than in knowledge, that he must be
initiated as a Sufi himself; live their life and practise their exercises, to attain
his goal.

On the way upon which he had gone up to this time, he had gained three
fixed points of faith. He now believed firmly in God, in prophecy, and in the
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fast judgment. He had also gained the belief that only by detaching himself
from this world, its life, enjoyments, honors, and turning to God could he be
saved in the world to come. He looked on his present life, his writing and his
teaching, and saw of how little value it was in the face of the great fact of
heaven and hell. All he did now was for the sake of vainglory and had in it no
consecration to the service of God. He felt on the edge of an abyss. The
world held him back; his fears urged him away. He was in the throes of a
conversion wrought by terror; his religion, now and always, in common with
ail Islam, was other-worldly. So he remained in conflict with himself for six
months from the middle of 488. Finally, his health broke down under the
strain. In his feebleness and overthrow he took refuge with God, as a man at
the end of his resources. God heard him and enabled him to make the
needed sacrifices. He abandoned all and wandered forth from Baghdad as a
Sufi. He had put his brilliant present and brilliant future absolutely behind
him; had given up everything for the peace of his soul. This date, the end of
488, was the great era in his life; but it marked an era, too, in the history of
Islam. Since al-Ash‘ari went back to the faith of his fathers in 300, and cursed
the Mu‘tazilites and all their works, there had been no such epoch as this
flight of al-Ghazzali. It meant that the reign of mere scholasticism was over;
that another element was to work openly in the future Church of Islam, the
element of the mystical life in God, of the attainment of truth by the soul in
direct vision.

He went to Syria and gave himself up for two years to the religious exercises
of the Sufis. Then he went on pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem; then to the
tomb of Abraham at Hebron; finally to Mecca and al-Madina. With this
religious duty his life of strict retirement ended. It is evident that he now felt
that he was again within the fold of Islam. In spite of his former resolution to
retire from the world, he was drawn back. The prayers of his children and his
own aspirations broke in upon him, and though he resolved again and again
to return to the contemplative life, and did often actually do so, yet events,
family affairs, and the anxieties of life, kept continually disturbing him.

This went on, he tells us, for almost ten years, and in that time there were
revealed to him things that could not be reckoned and the discussion of
which could not be exhausted. He learned that the Sufis were on the true
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and only path to the knowledge of God; that neither intelligence nor
wisdom nor science could change or improve their doctrine or their ethics.
The light in which they walk is essentially the same as the light of prophecy;
Muhammad was a Sufi when on his way to be a prophet. There is none other
light to light any man in this world. A complete purifying of the heart from
all but God is their Path; a seeking to plunge the heart completely in the
thought of God, is its beginning, and its end is complete passing away in
God. This last is only its end in relation to what can be entered upon and
grasped by a voluntary effort; in truth, it is only the first step in the Path, the
vestibule to the contemplative life. Revelations (mukashafas, unveilings)
came to the disciples from the very beginning; while awake they see angels
and souls of prophets, hear their voices and gain from them guidance. Then
their State (hal, a Sufi technicality for a state of ecstasy) passes from the
beholding of forms to stages where language fails and any attempt to
express what is experienced must involve some error. They reach a nearness
to God which some have fancied to be a hulul, fusion of being, others
an ittihad, identification, and others a wusul, union; but these are all
erroneous ways of indicating the thing. Al-Ghazzali notes one of his books in
which he has explained wherein the error lies. But the thing itself is the true
basis of all faith and the beginning of prophecy; the karamat of the saints
lead to the miracles of the prophets. By this mea is the possibility and the
existence of prophecy can be proved, and then the life itself of Muhammad
proves that he was a prophet. Al-Ghazzali goes on to deal with the nature of
prophecy, and how the life of Muhammad shows the truth of his mission;
but enough has been given to indicate his attitude and the stage at which he
had himself arrived.

During this ten years he had returned to his native country and to his
children, but had not undertaken public duty as a teacher. Now that was
forced upon him. The century was drawing to a close. Everywhere there was
evident a slackening of religious fervor and faith. A mere external
compliance with the rules of Islam was observed, men even openly
defended such a course. He adduces as an example of this the Wasiya of Ibn
Sina. The students of philosophy went their way, and their conduct shook
the minds of the people; false Sufis abounded, who taught antinomianism;
the lives of many theologians excited scandal; the Ta‘limites were still
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spreading. A religious leader to turn the current was absolutely needed, and
his friends looked to al-Ghazzali to take up that duty; some distinguished
saints had dreams of his success; God had promised a reformer every
hundred years and the time was up. Finally, the Sultan laid a command upon
him to go and teach in the academy at Naysabur, and he was forced to
consent. His departure for Naysabur fell at the end of 499, exactly eleven
years after his flight from Baghdad. But he did not teach there long. Before
the end of his life we find him back at Tus, his native place, living in
retirement among his disciples, in a Madrasa or academy for students and a
Khanqah or monastery for Sufis.

There he settled down to study and contemplation. We have already seen

what theological position he had reached. Philosophy had been tried and
found wanting. In a book of his called Tahafut, or "Destruction," he had
smitten the philosophers hip and thigh; he had turned, as in earlier times al-
Ash‘ari, their own weapons against them, and had shown that with their
premises and methods no certainty could be reached. In that book he goes
to the extreme of intellectual scepticism, and, seven hundred years before
Hume, he cuts the bond of causality with the edge of his dialectic and
proclaims that we can know nothing of cause or effect, but simply that one
thing follows another. He combats their proof of the eternity of the world,
and exposes their assertion that God is its creator. He demonstrates that
they cannot prove the existence of the creator or that that Creator is one;
that they cannot prove that He is incorporeal, or that the world has any
creator or cause at all; that they cannot prove the nature of God or that the
human soul is a spiritual essence. When he has finished there is no
intellectual basis left for life; he stands beside the Greek sceptics and beside
Hume. We are thrown back on revelation, that given immediately by God to
the individual soul or that given through prophets. All our real knowledge is
derived from these sources. So it was natural that in the latter part of his life
he should turn to the traditions of the Prophet. The science of tradition
must certainly have formed part of his early studies, as of those of all Muslim
theologians, but he had not specialized in it; his bent had lain in quite other
directions. His master, the Imam al-Haramayn, had been no student of
tradition; among his many works is not one dealing with that subject. Now
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he saw that the truth and the knowledge of the truth lay there, and he gave
himself, with all the energy of his nature, to the new pursuit.

The end of his wanderings came at Tus, in 505. There he died while seeking
truth in the traditions of Muhammad, as al-Ash‘ari, his predecessor, had
done. The stamp of his personality is ineffaceably impressed on Islam. The
people of his time reverenced him as a saint and wonder-worker. He himself
never claimed to work karamat and always spoke modestly of the light
which he had reached in ecstasy. After his death legends early began to
gather round him, and the current biographies of him are untrustworthy to a
degree. It says much for the solidity of his work that he did not pass into a
misty figure of popular superstition. But that work remained and remains
among his disciples and in his books. We must now attempt to estimate its
bearing and scope.

For him, as for the mutakallims in general, the fundamental thing in the
world and the starting-point of all speculation is will. The philosophers in
their intellectualism might picture God as thought--thought thinking itself
and evolving all things thereby. Their source was Plotinus; that of the
Muslims was the terrific "Be!" of creation. But how can we know this will of
God if we are simply part of what it has produced? In answering this, al-
Ghazzali and his followers have diverged from the rest of Islam, but not into
heresy. Their view is admitted to be a possible interpretation of Qur’anic
passages, if not that commonly held. The soul of man, al-Ghazzali taught, is
essentially different from the rest of the created things. We read in the
Qur’an (xv, 29; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of His spirit (ruh). This
is compared with the rays of the sun reaching a thing on the earth and
warming it. In virtue of this, the soul of man is different from everything else
in the world. It is a spiritual substance (jawhar ruhani), has no corporeality,
and is not subject to dimension, position or locality. It is not in the body or
outside of the body; to apply such categories to it is as absurd as to speak of
the knowledge or ignorance of a stone. Though created, it is not shaped; it
belongs to the spiritual world and not to this world of sensible things. It
contains some spark of the divine and it is restless till it rests again in that
primal fire; but, again, it is recorded in tradition that the Prophet said, "God
Most High created Adam in His own form (sura)." Al-Ghazzali takes that to
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mean that there is a likeness between the spirit of man and God in essence,
quality, and actions. Further, the spirit of man rules the body as God rules
the world. Man's body is a microcosm beside the macrocosm of this world,
and they correspond, part by part. Is, then, God simply the anima mundi? No,
because He is the creator of all by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His
will. Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His primary conception
is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From
thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round
universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They
are kin, and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. "He who knows
his own soul, knows his Lord," said another tradition.

This view of the nature of the soul is essential to the Sufi position and is
probably borrowed from it. But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if
the view be pushed any further. It tends (1) to destroy the important Muslim
dogma of God's Difference (mukhalafa) from all created things, and (2) to
maintain that the souls of men are partakers of the divine nature and will
return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali labored to safeguard both dangers, but
they were there and showed themselves in time. Just as the Aristotelian +
neo-Platonic philosophers reached the position that the universe with all its
spheres was God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic position that
God was the world. Before the atomic scholastics the same danger also lay.
It is part of the irony of the history of Muslim theology that the very
emphasis on the transcendental unity should lead thus to pantheism. Al-
Ghazzali's endeavor was to strike the via media. The Hegelian Trinity might
have appealed to him.

To return, his views on science, as we have already seen, were the same as
those of the contemporary students of natural philosophy. Their teachings
he accepted, and, so far, he can be compared to a theologian of the present
day, who accepts evolution and explains it to suit himself. His world was
framed on what is commonly called the Ptolemaic system. He was no fiat-
earth man like the present Ulama of Islam; God had "spread out the earth
like a carpet," but that did not hinder him from regarding it as a globe.
Around it revolve the spheres of the seven planets and that of the fixed
stars; Alphonso the Wise had not yet added the crystalline sphere and
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the primum mobile. All that astronomers and mathematicians teach us of

the laws under which these bodies move is to be accepted. Their theory of
eclipses and of other phenomena of the heavens is true, whatever the
ignorant and superstitious may clamor. Yet it is to be remembered that the
most important facts and laws have been divinely revealed. As the
weightiest truths of medicine are to be traced back to the teaching of the
prophets, so there are conjunctions in the heavens which occur only once in
a thousand years and which man can yet calculate because God has taught
him their laws. And all this structure of the heavens and the earth is the
direct work of God, produced out of nothing by His will, guided by His will,
ever dependent for existence on His will, and one day to pass away at His
command. So al-Ghazzali joins science and revelation. Behind the order of
nature lies the personal, omnipotent God who says; "Be!" and it is. The
things of existence do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolution,
but are produced directly by Him.

Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali's attitude toward the physical

universe that deserves attention, but which is very difficult to grasp or
express. Perhaps it may be stated thus: Existence has three modes; there is
existence in the alam al-mulk, in the alam al-jabarut, and in the alam al-
malakut. The first is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses; it
exists by the power (qudra) of God, one part proceeding from another in
constant change. The alam al-malakut exists by God's eternal decree,
without development, remaining in one state without addition or
diminution. The alam al-jabarut comes between these two; it seems
externally to belong to the first, but in respect of the power of God which is
from all eternity (al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the second. The soul
(nafs) belongs to the alam al-malakut, is taken from it and returns to it. In
sleep and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into contact with the
world from which it is derived. This is what happens in dreams--"sleep is the
brother of death," says al-Ghazzali; and thus, too, the saints and the
prophets attain divine knowledge. Some angels belong to the world
of malakut; some to that of jabarut, apparently those who have shown
themselves here as messengers of God. The things in the heavens, the
preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, etc., belong to the world of malakut.
On the one hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and, on the other,
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these terms for them are not metaphors. Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the
difficulty of Muslim eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects the
right to allegorize--these things are real, actual; but he relegates them to this
world of malakut. Again, the Qur’an, Islam, and Friday (the day of public
worship) are personalities in the world of malakut and jabarut. So, too, the
world of mulk must appear as a personality at the bar of these other worlds
at the last day. It will come as an ugly old woman, but Friday as a beautiful
young bride. This personal Qur’an belongs to the world of jabarut, but Islam
to that of malakut.

But just as those three worlds are not thought of as separate in time, so
they are not separate in space. They are not like the seven heavens and
seven earths of Muslim literalists, which stand, story-fashion, one above the
other. Rather they are, as expressed above, modes of existence, and might
be compared to the speculations on another life in space of n dimensions,
framed, from a very different starting-point and on a basis of pure physics,
by Balfour Stewart and Tait in their "Unseen Universe." On another side they
stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas, whether through neo-
Platonism or more immediately. Sufism at its best, and when stripped of the
trap-pings of Muslim tradition and Qur’anic exegesis, has no reason to shrink
from the investigation either of the physicist or of the metaphysician. And
so it is not strange to find that all Muslim thinkers have been tinged with
mysticism to a greater or less degree, though they may not all have
embraced formal Sufiism and accepted its vocabulary and system. This is
true of al-Farabi, who was avowedly a Sufi; true also of Ibn Sina, who,
though nominally an Aristotelian, was essentially a neo-Platonist, and
admitted the possibility of intercourse with superior beings and with the
Active Intellect, of miracles and revelations; true even of Ibn Rushd, who
does not venture to deny the immediate knowledge of the Sufi saints, but
only argues that experience of it is not sufficiently general to be made a
basis for theological science.

In ethics, as we have already seen, the position of al-Ghazzali is a simple one.

All our laws and theories upon the subject, the analysis of the qualities of
the mind, good and bad, the tracing of hidden defects to their causes--all
these things we owe to the saints of God to whom God Himself has revealed
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them. Of these there have been many at all times and in all countries, and
without them and their labors and the light which God has vouchsafed to
them, we could never know ourselves. Here, as everywhere, comes out al-
Ghazzali's fundamental position that the ultimate source of all knowledge is
revelation from God. It may be major revelation, through accredited
prophets who come forward as teachers, divinely sent and supported by
miracles and by the evident truth of their message appealing to the human
heart, or it may be minor revelation--subsidiary and explanatory--through
the vast body of saints of different grades, to whom God has granted
immediate knowledge of Himself. Where the saints leave off, the prophets
begin; and, apart from such teaching, man, even in physical science, would
be groping in the dark.

This position becomes still more prominent in his philosophical system. His
agnostic attitude toward the results of pure thought has been already
sketched. It is essentially the same as that taken up by Mansell in his
Bampton lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought." Mansell, a pupil and
continuator of Hamilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton's doctrine of
the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to theology, maintaining that we
cannot know or think of the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative
and finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no positive knowledge
of the attributes of God. This, though disguised by the methods and
language of scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali's attitude in the Tahafut.
Mansell's opponents said that the was like a man sitting on the branch of a
tree and sawing off his seat. Al-Ghazzali, for the support of his seat, went
back to revelation, either major, in the books sent down to the prophets, or
minor, in the personal revelations of God's saints. Further, it was not only in
the Muslim schools that this attitude toward philosophy prevailed. Yehuda
Halevi (d. A.D. 1145; al-Ghazzali, d. 1111) also maintains in his Kusari the
insufficiency of philosophy in the highest questions of life, and bases
religious truth on the incontrovertible historical facts of revelation. And
Maimonides (d. A.D. 1204) in his Moreh Nebuchim takes essentially the same
position.

Of his views on dogmatic theology little need be said. Among modern

theologians he stands nearest to Ritschl. Like Ritschl, he rejects metaphysics
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and opposes the influence of any philosophical system on his theology. The
basis must be religious phenomena, simply accepted and correlated. Like
Ritschl, too, he was emphatically ethical in his attitude; he lays stress on
the value for us of a doctrine or a piece of knowledge. Our source of
religious knowledge is revelation, and beyond a certain point we must not
inquire as to the how and why of that knowledge. To do so would be to
enter metaphysics and the danger-zone where we lose touch with vital
realities and begin to use mere words. On one point he goes beyond Ritschl,
and, on another, Ritschl goes beyond him. In his devotion to the facts of the
religious consciousness Ritschl did not go so far as to become a mystic,
indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious indignation; al-Ghazzali did
become a mystic. But, on the other hand, Ritschl refused absolutely to enter
upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes--all that was mere
metaphysics and heathenism; al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself,
and his only advance was to keep the doctrine on a strictly Qur’anic basis. So
it stands written; not, so man is compelled by the nature of things to think.

His work and influence in Islam may be summed up briefly as follows: First,
he led men back from scholastic labors upon theological dogmas to living
contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the traditions. What
happened in Europe when the yoke of mediæval scholasticism was broken,
what is happening with us now, happened in Islam under his leadership. He
could be a scholastic with scholastics, but to state and develop theological
doctrine on a Scriptural basis was emphatically his method. We should now
call him a Biblical theologian.

Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he reintroduced the element

of fear. In the Munqidh and elsewhere he lays stress on the need of such a
striking of terror into the minds of the people. His was no time, he held, for
smooth, hopeful preaching; no time for optimism either as to this world or
the next. The horrors of hell must be kept before men; he had felt them
himself. We have seen how other-worldly was his own attitude, and how the
fear of the Fire had been the supreme motive in his conversion; and so he
treated others.

Third, it was by his influence that Sufiism attained a firm and assured
position in the Church of Islam.
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Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical theology within the range

of the ordinary mind. Before his time they had been surrounded, more or
less, with mystery. The language used was strange; its vocabulary and terms
of art had to be specially learned. No mere reader of the Arabic of the street
or the mosque or the school could understand at once a philosophical
tractate. Greek ideas and expressions, passing through a Syriac version into
Arabic, had strained to the uttermost the resources of even that most
flexible tongue. A long training had been thought necessary before the
elaborate and formal method of argumentation could be followed. All this
al-Ghazzali changed, or at least tried to change. His Tahafut is not addressed
to scholars only; he seeks with it a wider circle of readers, and contends that
the views, the arguments, and the fallacies of the philosophers should be
perfectly intelligible to the general public.

Of these four phases of al-Ghazzali's work, the first and the third are
undoubtedly the most important. He made his mark by leading Islam back to
its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a place in its system to the
emotional religious life. But it will have been noticed that in none of the four
phases was he a pioneer. He was not a scholar who struck out a new path,
but a man of intense personality who entered on a path already blazed and
made it the common highway. We have here his character. Other men may
have been keener logicians, more learned theologians, more gifted saints;
but he, through his personal experiences, had attained so overpowering a
sense of the divine realities that the force of his character--once combative
and restless, now narrowed and intense--swept all before it, and the Church
of Islam entered on a new era of its existence.

So much space it has been necessary to give to this great man. Islam has
never outgrown him, has never fully understood him. In the renaissance of
Islam which is now rising to view his time will come and the new life will
proceed from a renewed study of his works.

From this time on, the Ash‘arites may be fairly regarded as the dominant
school so far as the East is concerned. Saladin (d. 589) did much to aid in the
establishment of this hegemony. He was a devout Muslim with the taste of
an amateur for theological literature. Anecdotes tell how he had a special
little catechism composed, and used himself to instruct his children in it. He
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founded theological academies in Egypt at Alexandria and Cairo, the first

there except the Fatimid Hall of Science. One of the few blots on his name is
the execution of the pantheistic Sufi, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, at
Aleppo in 587. Meanwhile, in the farther East, Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (d. 606)
was writing his great commentary on the Qur’an, the Mafatih al-Ghayb, "The
Keys of the Unseen," and carrying on the work of al-Ghazzali. The title of his
commentary itself shows the dash of mysticism in his teaching, and he was
in correspondence with Ibn Arabi, the arch-Sufi of the time. He studied
philosophy, too, commented on works of Ibn Sina, and fought the
philosophers on their own ground as al-Ghazzali had done. Kalam and
philosophy are now, in the eyes of the theologians, a true philosophy and a
false. Philosophy has taken the place of Mu‘tazilism and the other heresies.
The enemies of the faith are outside its pale, and the scholasticizing of
philosophy goes on steadily. According to some, a new stage was marked by
al-Baydawi (d. 685), who confused inextricably philosophy and kalam, but
the newness can have been comparative only. A century later al-Iji (d. 756)
writes a book, al-Mawagif, on kalam, half of which is given to metaphysics
and the other half to dogmatics. At-Taftazani is another name worthy of
mention. He died in 791, after a laborious life as a controversialist and
commentator. When we reach Ibn Khaldun (d. 808), the first philosophical
historian and the greatest until the nineteenth century of our era, we find
that kalam has fallen again from its high estate. It has become a scholastic
discipline, useful only to repel the attacks of heretics and unbelievers; and of
heretics, says Ibn Khaldun, there are now none left. Reason, he goes on,
cannot grasp the nature of God; cannot weigh His unity nor measure His
qualities. God is unknowable and we must accept what we are told about
Him by His prophets. Such was the result of the destruction of philosophy in
Islam.
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CHAPTER 5

Islam in the West; Ibn Tumart and the Muwahhids; philosophy in the West under Muwahhid
protection; Ibn Bajja; Ibn Tufayl; Ibn Rushd; Ibn Arabi; Ibn Sa‘bin.

WE have now anticipated one of the strangest and most characteristic

figures and movements in the history of Islam. The preceding account,
except as relates to Ibn Khaldun, has told of the triumphs of the Ash‘arites
in the East only. In the West the movement was slower, and to it we must
now turn. The Maghrib--the Occident, as the Arabs called all North Africa
beyond Egypt--had been slow from the first to take on the Muslim impress.
The invading army had fought its way painfully through, but the Berber
tribes remained only half subdued and one-tenth Islamized. Egypt was
conquered in A.H. 20, and Samarqand had been reached in 56; but it was not
till 74 that the Muslims were at Carthage. And even then and for long after
there arose insurrection after insurrection, and the national spirit of the
Berbers remained unbroken. Broadly, but correctly, Islam in North Africa for
more than three centuries was a failure. The tribal constitutions of the
Berbers were unaffected by the conception of the Khalifate and their
primitive religious aspirations by the Faith of Muhammad. Not till the
possibility came to them to construct Muslim states out of their own tribes
did their opposition begin to weaken. And then it w as rather political Islam
that had weakened. When the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 356 and moved
the seat of their empire from al-Mahdiya to the newly founded Cairo, Islam
assumed a new meaning for North Africa. The Fatimid empire there quickly
melted away, and in its place arose several independent states, Berber in
blood though claiming Arab descent and bearing Arab names. Islam no
longer meant foreign oppression, and it began at last to make its way.
Again, in the preceding period of insurrection the Berber leaders had
frequently appeared in the guise and with the claim of prophets, men
miraculously gifted and with a message from God. These wild tribesmen,
with all their fanaticism for their own tribal liberties, have always been
peculiarly accessible to the genius which claims its mission from heaven. So
they had taken up the Fatimid cause and worshipped Ubayd Allah the
Mahdi. And so they continued thereafter, and still continue to be swayed by
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saints, darwishes, and prophets of all degrees of insanity and cunning. The
latest case in point is that of the Shaykh as-Sanusi, with whom we have
already dealt. As time went on, there came a change in these prophet-led
risings and saint-founded states. They gradually slipped over from being
frankly anti-Muhammadan, if also close imitations of Muhammad's life and
methods, to being equally frankly Muslim. The theology of Islam easily
afforded them the necessary point of connection. All that the prophet of the
day need do was to claim the position of the Mahdi, that Guided One, who
according to the traditions of Muhammad was to come before the last day,
when the earth shall be filled with violence, and to fill it again with
righteousness. It was easy for each new Mahdi to select from the vast and
contradictory mass of traditions in Muslim eschatology those which best
fitted his person and his time. To the story and the doctrine of one of these
we now come.

At the beginning of the sixth century a certain Berber student of theology,

Ibn Tumart by name, travelled in the East in search of knowledge. An early
and persistent western tradition asserts that he was a favorite pupil of al-
Ghazzali's, and was marked out by him as showing the signs of a future
founder of empire. This may be taken for what it is worth. What is certain is
that Ibn Tumart went back to the Maghrib and there brought about the
triumph of a doctrine which was derived, if modified, from that of the
Ash‘arites. Previously all kalam had been under a cloud in the West.
Theological studies had been closely limited to fiqh, or canon law, and that
of the narrowed school of Malik ibn Anas. Even the Qur’an and the
collections of traditions had come to be neglected in favor of systematized
law-books. The revolt of Ibn Hazm against this had apparently accomplished
little. It had been too one-sided and negative, and had lacked the weight of
personality behind it. Ibn Hazm had assailed the views of others with a
wealth of vituperative language. But he had been a controversialist only.
There is a story, tolerably well authenticated, that the books of al-Ghazzali
were solemnly condemned by the Qadis of Cordova, and burnt in public. Yet,
against that is to be set that all the Spanish theologians did not approve of
this violence.
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Ibn Tumart started in life as a reformer of the corruptions of his day, and
seems to have slipped from that into the belief that he had been appointed
by God as the great reformer for all time. As happens with reformers, from
exhortation it came to force; from preaching at the abuses of the
government to rebellion against the government. That government, the
Murabit, went down before Ibn Tumart and his successors, and the
pontifical rule of the Muwahhids, the asserters of God's tawhid or unity,
rose in its place. The doctrine which he preached bears evident marks of the
influence of al-Ghazzali and of Ibn Hazm. Tawhid, for him, meant a complete
spiritualizing of the conception of God. Opposed to tawhid, he set tajsim,
the assigning to God of a jism or body having bulk. Thus, when the
theologians of the West took the anthropomorphic passages of the Qur’an
literally, he applied to them the method of ta’wil, or interpretation, which he
had learned in the East, and explained away these stumbling-blocks. Ibn
Hazm, it will be remembered, resorted to grammatical and lexicographical
devices to attain the same end, and had regarded ta’wil with abhorrence. To
Ibn Tumart, then, this tajsim was flat unbelief and, as Mahdi, it was his duty
to oppose it by force of arms, to lead a jihad against its maintainers. Further,
with Ibn Hazm, he agreed in rejecting taqlid. There was only one truth, and it
was man's duty to find it for himself by going to the original sources.

This is the genuine Zahirite doctrine which utterly rejects all comity with the
four other legal rites; but Ibn Tumart, as Mahdi, added another element. It is
based on a very simple Imamite philosophy of history. There has always
been an Imam in the world, a divinely appointed leader, guarded by isma,
protection against error. The first four Khalifas were of such divine
appointment; thereafter came usurpers and oppressors. Theirs was the
reign of wickedness and lies in the earth. Now he, the Mahdi, was come of
the blood of the Prophet and bearing plainly all the necessary, accrediting
signs to overcome these tyrants and anti-Christs. He thus was an Imamite,
but stood quite apart from the welter of conflicting Shi‘ite sects the
Seveners, Twelvers, Zaydites and the rest--as far as do the present Sharifs of
Morocco with their Alid-Sunnite position. The Mahdi, it is to be remembered,
is awaited by Sunnites as by Shi‘ites, and is guarded against error as much as
an Imam, since he partakes of the general isma which in divine things
belongs to prophets. Such a leader, then, could claim from the people
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absolute obedience and credence. His word must be for them the source of
truth. There was, therefore, no longer any need of analogy (qiyas) as a
source, and we accordingly find that Ibn Tumart rejected it in all but legal
matters and there surrounded it with restrictions. Analogical argument in
things theological was forbidden.

But where he absolutely parted company from the Ash‘arites was with
regard to the qualities of God. In that, too, he followed the view of Ibn Hazm
sketched above. We must take the Qur’anic expressions as names and not
as indicating attributes to us. It is true that his creed shows signs of a
philosophical width lacking in Ibn Hazm. Like the Mu‘tazilites, e.g. Abu
Hudhayl, he defines largely by negations. God is not this; is not affected by
that. It is even phrased so as to be capable of a pantheistic explanation, and
we find that Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on it. But it may be doubted
whether Ibn Tumart was himself a pantheist. All phases of Islam, as we have
seen, ran toward that; and here there is only a little indiscretion in the
wording. But it may easily have been that he had besides, like the Fatimids, a
secret teaching or exposition of those simpler declarations which were
intended for the mass of the people. Among his successors distinct traces of
such a thing appear; both Aristotelian philosophers and advanced Sufis are
connected with the Muwahhid movement. That, however, belongs to the
sequel.

The success of Ibn Tumart, if halting at first, was eventually complete. As a

simple lawyer who felt called upon to protest--as, indeed, are all good
Muslims in virtue of a tradition from Muhammad--against the abuses of the
time, he accomplished comparatively little. As Mahdi, he and his supporter
and successor, Abd al-Mu'min, swept the country. For his movement was
not merely Imamite and Muslim, but an expression as well of Berber
nationalism. Here was a man, sprung from their midst, of their own stock
and tongue, who, as Prophet of God, called them to arms. They obeyed his
call, worshipped him and fought for him. He translated the Qur’an for them
into Berber; the call to prayers was given in Berber; functionaries of the
church had to know Berber; his own theological writings circulated in Berber
as well as in Arabic. As Persia took Islam and moulded it to suit herself, so
now did the Berber tribes. And a strange jumble they made of it. With them,
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the Zahirite system of canon law, rejected by all other Muslim peoples,
enjoyed its one brief period of power and glory. Shi‘ite legends and
superstitions mingled with philosophical free thought. The book of
mystery, al-Jafr, written by Ali, and containing the history of the world to the
end of time, was said to have passed from the custody of al-Ghazzali at his
death to the hands of the Mahdi and was by him committed to his
successors. If only in view of the syncretism practised by both, it was fitting
that al-Ghazzali and Ibn Tumart should be brought closely together. Yet it is
hard to explain the persistence with which the great Ash‘arite is made the
teacher and guide of the semi-Zahirite. There must have been something,
now obscure to us, in their respective systems which suggested to
contemporaries such intimate connection.

The rule of the Muwahhids lasted until 667, nearly one hundred years, and
involved in its circle of influence many weighty personalities. With some of
these we will now deal shortly.

It has been told above how narrow in general were the intellectual interests
of the West. Canon law, poetry, history, geography were eagerly pursued,
but little of original value was produced. Originality and the breaking of
ground in new fields were under a ban. Subtilty of thought and luxury of life
took their place. Above all, and naturally, this applied to philosophy. And so
it comes that the first philosophic name in the Muslim West is that of Abu
Bakr ibn Bajja, for mediæval Europe Avenpace, who died comparatively
young in 533. For him, as for all, and still more in the West than in the East,
the problem of the philosopher was how to gain and maintain a tenable
position in a world composed mostly of the philosophically ignorant and the
religiously fanatical. This problem had two sides, internal and external. The
inner and the nobler one was how such a mind could in its loneliness rise to
its highest level and purify itself to the point of knowing things as they really
are and so reach that eternal life in which the individual spirit loses itself in
the Active Intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός, al-aql al-fa‘‘al) which is above all and
behind all. The other, and baser, was how to so present his views and adapt
his life that the life and the views might be possible in a Muslim community.

Ibn Bajja was a close disciple of al-Farabi, who is to be regarded as the

spiritual father of the later Arabic philosophy; Ibn Sina practically falls out. In
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logic, physics, and metaphysics he followed al-Farabi closely. But we can see
how the times have moved and the philosophies with them. The essential
differences have appeared and Ibn Bajja can no longer, with a good
conscience, appear as a pious Muslim. The Sufi strain also is much weaker.
The greatest joy and the closest truth are to be found in thought, and not in
the sensuous ecstasies of the mystic. The intellect is the highest element in
man's being, but is only immortal as it joins itself to the one Active Intellect,
which is all that is left of God. Here we have the beginning of the doctrine
which, later, under the name of Averroism and pampsychism ran like wild
fire through the schools of Europe. Further, only by the constant exercise of
its own functions can the intellect of man be thus raised. He must live
rationally at all points; be able to give a reason for every action. This may
compel him to live in solitude; the world is so irrational and will not suffer
reason. Or some of the disciples of reason may draw together and form a
community where they may live the calm life of nature and of the pursuit of
knowledge and self-development. So they will be at one with nature and the
eternal, and far removed from the frenzied life of the multitude with its
lower aims and conceptions. It is easy to see how the iron of a fight against
overwhelming odds had entered this soul. Only the friendship of some of
the Murabit princes saved him; but he died in the end, says a story, by
poison.

With the next names we find ourselves at a Muwahhid court, and there the
atmosphere has changed. It is evident that, whatever might be the temper
of the people, the chiefs of the Muwahhids viewed philosophy with no
disfavor. Their problem, as in the case of the Fatimids, seems rather to have
been how much the people might be taught with safety. Their solution of
the problem--here we proceed on conjecture, but the basis is tolerably
sound--was that the bulk of the people should be taught nothing but the
literal sense of the Qur’an, metaphors, anthropomorphisms and all; that the
educated lay public, which had already some inkling of the facts, should be
assured that there was really no difference between philosophy and
theology that they were two phases of one truth; and that the philosophers
should have a free hand to go on their own way, always provided that their
speculations did not spread beyond their own circle and agitate the minds of
the commonalty. It was a beautiful scheme, but like all systems of
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obscurantism it did not work. On the one hand, the people refused to be
blindfolded, and, on the other, philosophy died out of inanition.

In accordance with this, we find the Muwahhid chiefs installing the

Zahirite fiqh as the official system and sternly stopping all speculative
discussing either of canon law or of theology. "The Word so stands written;
take it or the sword," is the significant utterance which has come to us from
Abu Ya’qub (reg. 558-580), son of Abd al-Mu'min. The same continued under
his son Abu Yusuf al-Mansur (reg. 580-595), who added a not very carefully
concealed contempt for the Mahdiship of Ibn Tumart. All such things were
ridiculous in his philosophic eyes.

Under these men and in adjustment with their system lived and worked Ibn
Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, the last of the great Aristotelians. Ibn Tufayl was wazir
and physician to Abu Ya’qub and died a year after him, in 531. His was a calm,
contemplative life, secluded in princely libraries. But his objects were the
same as those of Ibn Bajja. He has evidently no hope that the great body of
the people can ever be brought to the truth. A religion, sensuous and
sensual alike, is needed to restrain the wild beast in man, and the masses
should be left to the guidance of that religion. For a philosopher to seek to
teach them better is to expose himself to peril and them to the loss of that
little which they have. But in his methods, on the other hand, Ibn Tufayl is
essentially at one with al-Ghazzali. He is a mystic who seeks in Sufi exercises,
in the constant purifying of mind and body and in the unwearying search for
the one unity in the individual multiplicity around him, to find a way to lose
his self in that eternal and one spirit which for him is the divine. So at last he
comes to ecstasy and reaches those things which eye hath not seen nor ear
heard. The only difference between him and al-Ghazzali is that al-Ghazzali
was a theologian and saw in his ecstasy Allah upon His throne and around
Him the things of the heavens, as set forth in the Qur’an, while Ibn Tufayl
was a philosopher, of nee-Platonic+ Aristotelian stamp, and saw in his
ecstasy the Active Intellect and Its chain of causes reaching down to man
and back to Itself.

The book by which his name has lived, and which has had strange haps, is
the romance of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, "The Living One, Son of the Waking One."
In it he conceives two islands, the one inhabited and the other not. On the
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inhabited island we have conventional people living conventional lives, and

restrained by a conventional religion of rewards and punishments. Two men
there, Salaman and Asal, have raised themselves to a higher level of self-
rule. Salaman adapts himself externally to the popular religion and rules the
people; Asal, seeking to perfect himself still further in solitude, goes to the
other island. But there he finds a man, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, who has lived alone
from infancy and has gradually, by the innate and uncorrupted powers of
the mind, developed himself to the highest philosophic level and reached
the Vision of the Divine. He has passed through all the stages of knowledge
until the universe lies clear before him, and now he finds that his philosophy
thus reached, without prophet or revelation, and the purified religion of Asal
are one and the same. The story told by Asal of the people of the other
island sitting in darkness stirs his soul and he goes forth to them as a
missionary. But he soon learns that the method of Muhammad was the true
one for the great masses, and that only by sensuous allegory and concrete
things could they be reached and held. He retires to his island again to live
the solitary life.

The bearing of this on the system of the Muwahhids cannot be mistaken. If

it is a criticism of the finality of historical revelation, it is also a defence of the
attitude of the Muwahhids toward both people and philosophers. By the
favor of Abu Ya‘qub, Ibn Tufayl had practically been able to live on an island
and develop himself by study. So, too, Abu Ya‘qub might stand for the
enlightened but practical Salaman. Yet the meaning evidently is that
between them they failed and must fail. There could only be a solitary
philosopher here and there, and happy for him if he found a princely patron.
The people which knew not the truth were accursed. Perhaps, rather, they
were children and had to be humored and guided as such in an endless
childhood.

It is evident that such a solitary possessor of truth had two courses open to
him. He could either busy himself in his studies and exercises, as had done
Ibn Bajja and Ibn Tufayl, or he could boldly enter public life and trust to his
dialectic ingenuity and resource--perhaps, also, to his plasticity of
conscience--to carry him past all whispers of heresy and unbelief. The latter
course was chosen by Ibn Rusted. He was born at Cordova, in 520, of a
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family of jurists and there studied law. From his legal studies only a book on
the law of inheritance has reached us, and it, though frequently commented
on, has never been printed. In 548 he was presented to Abu Ya’qub by Ibn
Tufayl and encouraged by him in the study of philosophy. In it his greatest
work was done. In spite of the shreds and patches of neo-Platonism which
clung to him, he was the greatest mediaeval commentator on Aristotle. It is
only part of the eternal puzzle of the Muslim mind that the utility of Greek
for a student of Aristotle seems never to have struck him. Thereafter he
acted as judge in different places in Spain and was court physician for a
short time in 578 to Abu Ya’qub. In 575 he had written his tractates, to which
we shall come immediately, mediating between philosophy and theology.
Toward the end of his life he was condemned by Abu Yusuf al-Mansur for
heresy and banished from Cordova. This was in all likelihood a truckling on
the part of al-Mansur to the religious prejudices of the people of Spain, who
were probably of stiffer orthodoxy than the Berbers. He was in Spain, at
Cordova, at the time, and was engaged in carrying on a religious war with
the Christians. On his return to Morocco the decree of exile was recalled and
Ibn Rushd restored to favor. We find him again at the court in Morocco, and
he died there in 595.

This is not the place to enter upon Ibn Rushd's philosophical system. He was
a thorough-going Aristotelian, as he knew Aristotle. That was probably
much better than any of his predecessors; but even he had not got clear
from the fatal influence of Plotinus. Above all, he is essentially a theologian
just as much as they. In Aristotle there had been given what was to all
intents a philosophical revelation. Only in the knowledge and acceptance of
it could truth and life be found. And some must reach it; one at least there
must always be. If a thing is not seen by someone it has existed in vain;
which is impossible. If someone at least does not know the truth, it also has
existed in vain, which is still more impossible. That is Ibn Rushd's way of
saying that the esse is the percipi and that there must be a perceiver. And he
has unlimited faith in his means of reaching that Truth--only by such
capitalization can we express his theologic attitude. The logic of Aristotle is
infallible and can break through to the supreme good itself. Ecstasy and
contemplation play no part with him; there he separates from Ibn Tufayl.
Such intercourse with the Active Intellect may exist; but it is too rare to be
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taken into account. Obviously, Ibn Rushd himself, who to himself was the
percipient of truth for his age, had never reached that perception. Solitary
meditation he cannot away with; for him the market-place and contact with
men; there he parts with Ibn Bajja. In truth, he is nearer to the life in life of
Ibn Sina, and that, perhaps, explains his constant attacks on the Persian bon
vivant.

All his predecessors he joys in correcting, but his especial bête noire is al-
Ghazzali. With him it is war on life or death. He has two good causes. One is
al-Ghazzali's "Destruction of the Philosophers;" of it, Ibn Rushd, in his turn,
writes a "Destruction." This is a clever, incisive criticism, luminous with
logical exactitude, yet missing al-Ghazzali's vital earnestness and incapable
of reaching his originality. But al-Ghazzali had not only attacked the
philosophers; he had also spread the knowledge of their teachings and
reasonings, and had said that there was nothing esoteric and impossible of
grasp in them for the ordinary mind. He had thus assailed the fundamental
principles of the Muwahhid system. Against this, Ibn Rushd wrote the
tractates spoken of above. They were evidently addressed to the educated
laity; not to the ignorant multitude, but to those who had already read such
books as those of al-Ghazzali and been affected by them, yet had not
studied philosophy at first hand. That they were not intended for such
special students is evident from the elaborate care that is taken in them to
conceal, or, if that were not possible, to put a good face upon obnoxious
doctrines. Thus, his philosophy left no place in reality for a system of
rewards and punishments or even for any individual existence of the soul
after death, for a creation of the material world, or for a providence in the
direct working of the supreme being on earth. But all these points are
involved or glossed over in these tractates.

Further, it is plain that their object was to bring about a reform of religion in
itself, and also of the attitude of theologians to students of philosophy. In
them he sums up his own position under four heads: First, that philosophy
agrees with religion and that religion recommends philosophy. Here, he is
fighting for his life. Religion is true, a revelation from God; and philosophy is
true, the results reached by the human mind; these two truths cannot
contradict each other. Again, men are frequently exhorted in the Qur’an to
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reflect, to consider, to speculate about things; that means the use of the
intelligence, which follows certain laws, long ago traced and worked out by
the ancients. We must, therefore, study their works and proceed further on
the same course ourselves, i.e., we must study philosophy.

Second, there are two things in religion, literal meaning and interpretation. If
we find anything in the Qur’an which seems externally to contradict the
results of philosophy, we may be quite sure that there is something under
the surface. We must look for some possible interpretation of the passage,
some inner meaning; and we shall certainly find it.

Third, the literal meaning is the duty of the multitude, and interpretation the
duty of scholars. Those who are not capable of philosophical reasoning must
hold the literal truth of the different statements in the Qur’an. The imagery
must be believed by them exactly as it stands, except where it is absolutely
evident that we have only an image. On the other hand, philosophers must
be given the liberty of interpreting as they choose. If they find it necessary,
from some philosophical necessity, to adopt an allegorical interpretation of
any passage or to find in it a metaphor, that liberty must be open to them.
There must be no laying down of dogmas by the church as to what may be
interpreted and what may not. In Ibn Rushd's opinion, the orthodox
theologians sometimes interpreted when they should have kept by the
letter, and sometimes took literally passages in which they should have
found imagery. He did not accuse them of heresy for this, and they should
grant him the same liberty.

Fourth, those who know are not to be allowed to communicate

interpretations to the multitude. So Ali said, "Speak to the people of that
which they understand; would ye that they give the lie to God and His
messenger?" Ibn Rushd considered that belief was reached by three
different classes of people in three different ways. The many believe
because of rhetorical syllogisms (khitabiya), i.e., those whose premises
consist of the statements of a religious teacher (maqbulat), or are
presumptions (maznunat). Others believe because of controversial
syllogisms (jadliya), which are based on principles (mashhurat) or admissions
(musallamat). All these premises belong to the class of propositions which
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are not absolutely certain. The third class, and by far the smaller, consists of
the people of demonstration (burhan).

Their belief is based upon syllogisms composed of propositions which are

certain. These consist of axioms (awwaliyat) and five other classes of
certainties. Each of these three classes of people has to be treated in the
way that suits its mental character. It is wrong to put demonstration or
controversy before those who can understand only rhetorical reasoning. It
destroys their faith and gives them nothing to take its place. The case is
similar with those who can only reach controversial reasoning but cannot
attain unto demonstration. Thus Ibn Rushd would have the faith of the
multitude carefully screened from all contact with the teachings of
philosophers. Such books should not be allowed to go into general
circulation, and if necessary, the civil authorities should step in to prevent it.
If these principles were accepted and followed, a return might be looked for
of the golden age of Islam, when there was no theological controversy and
men believed sincerely and earnestly.

On this last paragraph it is worth noticing that its threefold distinction is

"conveyed" by Ibn Rushd from a little book belonging to al-Ghazzali's later
life, after he had turned to the study of tradition, Iljam al-Awamm an ilm al-
kalam, "The reining in of the commonalty from the science of kalam."

Such was, practically, the end of the Muslim Aristotelians. Some flickers of
philosophic study doubt-less remained. So we find a certain Abu-l-Hajjaj ibn
Tumlus (d. 620) writing on Aristotle's "Analytics," and the tractates of Ibn
Rushd described above were copied at Almeria in 724. But the fate of all
Muslim speculation fell, and this school went out in Sufiism. It was not Ibn
Rushd that triumphed but Ibn Tufayl, and that side of Ibn Tufayl which was
akin to al-Ghazzali. From this point on, the thinkers and Writers of Islam
become mystics more and more overwhelmingly. Dogmatic theology itself
falls behind, and of philosophical disciplines only formal logic and a
metaphysics of the straitest scholastic type are left. Philosophy becomes the
handmaid of theology, and a very mechanical handmaid at that. It is only in
the schools of the Sufis that we find real development and promise of life.
The future lay with them, however dubious it may seem to us that a future in
such charge must be.
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The greatest Sufi in the Arabic-speaking world was undoubtedly Muhyi ad-
Din ibn Arabi. He was born in Murcia in 560, studied hadith, and fiqh at
Seville, and in 598 set out to travel in the East. He wandered through the
Hijaz, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and died at Damascus in 638, leaving
behind him an enormous mass of writings, at least 150 of which have come
down to us. Why he left Spain is unknown; it is plain that he was under the
influence of the Muwahhid movement. He was a Zahirite in law; rejected
analogy, opinion, and taqlid, but admitted agreement. His attachment to the
opinions of Ibn Hazm especially was very strong. He edited some of that
scholar's works, and was only prevented by his objections to taqlid from
being a formal Hazmite. But with all that literalness in fiqh, his mysticism in
theology was of the most rampant and luxurious description. Between the
two sides, it is true, there existed a connection of a kind. He had no need for
analogy or opinion or for any of the workings of the vain human intelligence
so long as the divine light was flooding his soul and he saw the things of the
heavens with plain vision. So his cooks are a strange jumble of theosophy
and metaphysical paradoxes, all much like the theosophy of our own day. He
evidently took the system of the mutakallims and played with it by means of
formal logic and a lively imagination. To what extent he was sincere in his
claim of heavenly illuminings and mysterious powers it would be hard to say.
The oriental mystic has little difficulty in deceiving himself. His opinions--so
far as we can know them--may be briefly sketched as follows: The being of
all things is God: there is nothing except Him. All things are an essential
unity; every part of the would is the whole world. So man is a unity in
essence but a multiplicity in individuals. His anthropology was an advance
upon that of al-Ghazzali toward a more unflinching pantheism. He has the
same view that the soul of man is a spiritual substance different from
everything else and proceeding from God. But he obliterates the difference
of God and makes souls practically emanations. At death these return into
God who sent them forth. All religions to Ibn Arabi were practically
indifferent; in them all the divine was working and was worshipped. Yet
Islam is the more advantageous and Sufiism is its true philosophy. Further,
man has no free-will; he is con-strained by the will of God, which is really all
that exists. Nor is there any real difference between good and evil; the
essential unity of all things makes such a division impossible.
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The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we need deal--and, perhaps,
absolutely the last--is Abd al-Haqq ibn Sa‘bin. He was as much a mystic as Ibn
Arabi, but was apparently more deeply read in philosophy and did not cast
his conceptions in so theological and Qur’anic a mould. He, too, was born. in
Murcia about 613, and must very early have founded a school of his own,
gathered disciples round him and established a wide reputation. High skill in
alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to him, which probably means that
he claimed to be a wali, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers. He is
accused of posing as a prophet, although in orthodox Islam Muhammad is
the last and the seal of the prophets But against this, it may be said that he
had no need of the actual title, "prophet"; many mystics held--heretically, it
is true--that the wali stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He had
evidently besides this a more solid reputation in philosophy, as is shown by
his correspondence with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250 A.D.).
The story is told on the Muslim side only, but has vraisemblance and seems
to be tolerably authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed certain
questions in philosophy--on the eternity of the world, the nature of the soul,
the number and nature of the categories, etc.--to different Muslim princes,
begging that they would submit them to their learned men. So the
questions came to ar-Rashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to
Ibn Sa‘bin as a scholar whose reputation had reached even the Sicilian court.
Ar-Rashid passed them on; Ibn Sa‘bin accepted the commission with a smile-
-this is the Muslim account--and triumphantly and contemptuously
expounded the difficulties of the Christian monarch and student. In his
replies he certainly displays a very complete and exact knowledge of the
Aristotelian and neo-Platonic systems, and is far less a blind follower of
Aristotle than is Ibn Rushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most unpleasant,
and we discover in the end that all this is a mere preliminary discipline,
leading in itself to agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing but
vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision of the Sufi can certainty and
peace be found. So we have again the circle through which al-Ghazzali went.
As distinguished from Ibn Rushd, the prophet, with Ibn Sa‘bin, takes higher
rank than the sage. Beyond the current division of the soul into the
vegetative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two others, derived from
the reasonable, the soul of wisdom and the soul of prophecy. The first of
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these is the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the prophet; and the
last is the highest. Of the reasonable soul upward, he predicates
immortality.

His position otherwise must have been practically the same as that of Ibn
Arabi. Like him he was a Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. "God is the
reality of existing things," he taught, and it is evident that he belonged to
the school of pantheism in which God is all, and separate things are
emanations from him. In life we have flashes of recognition of the heavenly
realities, but only at death--which is our true birth--do we reach union with
the eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intellect.

Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold these views in public so long
as the Muwahhids were strong enough to protect him. But their empire was
rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had passed. An attack on
him at Tunis, where the Hafsids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643,
and there he took refuge at--of all places--Mecca. The refuge seems to have
been secure. He lived there more than twenty years amid a circle of
disciples, among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about 667. There is
a poorly authenticated story that he died by suicide. The man himself, with
so many of his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For all his haughty
pride of learning, it is noted of him that his first disciples were from among
the poor. His contemporaries described him as "a Sufi after the manner of
the philosophers." The last vestige of the Muwahhid empire passed away in
the year of his death.
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CHAPTER 6

The rise and spread of darwish Fraternities; the survival and tradition of the Hanbalite
doctrine; Abd ar-Razzaq; Ibn Taymiya, his attacks on saint-worship and on the mutakallims;
ash-Sha‘rani and his times; the modern movements; Wahhabism and the influence of al-
Ghazzali; possibilities of the present.

OUR sources now begin to grow more and more scanty, and we must
hasten over long intervals of time and pass with little connection from one
name to another. Preliminary investigations are also to a great extent
lacking, and it is possible that the centuries which we shall merely touch may
have witnessed developments only less important than those with which we
have already dealt. But that is not probable; for when, after a long silence,
the curtain rises again for us in the twelfth Muslim century, we shall find at
work only those elements and conditions whose inception and growth we
have now set forth.

One name in our rapid flight deserves mention, at least. It is that of Umar ibn
al-Farid, the greatest poet that Arabic mysticism has produced. He was born
at Cairo in 586, lived for a time at Mecca, and died at Cairo in 632. He led no
new movement or advance, but the East still cherishes his memory and his
poems.

We have already noticed the beginnings of darwish Fraternities and the

founding of monasteries or khanqahs. During the period over which we
have just passed, these received a great and enduring impetus. The older
ascetics and walis gathered round them groups of personal followers and
their pupils carried on their names. But it was long, apparently, before
definite corporations were founded of fixed purpose to perpetuate the
memory of their masters. One of the earliest of these seems to have been
the fraternity of Qadirite darwishes, founded by Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, who
died in 561 at Baghdad, where pilgrimage is still made to his shrine. So, too,
the Rifa‘ite Fraternity was founded at Baghdad by Ahmad ar-Rifa‘a in 576.
Another was that of the Shadhilites, named after their founder, ash-Shadhili,
who died in 656. Again another is that of the Badawites, whose founder was
Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675); his shrine at Tanta in Lower Egypt is still one of
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the most popular places of pilgrimage. Again, the order of the Naqshbandite
darwishes was founded by Muhammad an-Naqshbandi, who died in 791.
Among the Turks by far the most popular religious order is that of the
Mawlawites, founded by the great Persian mystical poet, Jalal ad-Din ar-
Rumi (d. 672), whose Mesnevi is read over all Islam. These and very many
others, especially of later date, are still in existence. Others, once founded,
have again become extinct. Thus, Ibn Sa‘bin, though he was surrounded by
disciples who for a time after his death carried on the order of Sab‘inites,
does not seem now to have any to do him honor. The same holds of a
certain Adi al-Haqqari who founded a cloister near Mawsil and died about
558. It is significant that al-Ghazzali, though he founded a cloister for Sufis at
Tus and taught and governed there himself, left no order behind him.
Apparently in his time the movement toward continuous corporations had
not yet begun. It is true that there are at present in existence darwish
Fraternities which claim to be descended from the celebrated ascetics
and walis, Ibrahim ibn Adham (d. 161), Sari as-Saqati (d. 257) and Abu Yazid
al-Bistami (d. 261), but it may be gravely doubted whether they can show
any sound pedigree. The legend of Shaykh Ilwan, who is said to have
founded the first order in 49, may be safely rejected. It is significant that
the Awlad Ilwan, sons of Ilwan, as his followers are called, form a sect of the
Rifa‘ites. Further, just as the Sufis have claimed for themselves all the early
pious Muslims, and especially the ten to whom Muhammad made specific
promise of Paradise (al-ashara al-mubashshara), so these Fraternities are
ascribed in their origin to, and put under the guardianship of the first
Khalifas, and, in Egypt at least, a direct descendant of Abu Bakr holds
authority over all their orders.

In these orders all are darwishes, but only those gifted by God with
miraculous powers are walis. Those of them who are begging friars
are faqirs. They stand under an elaborate hierarchy grading in dignity and
holiness from the Qutb, or Axis, who wanders, often invisible and always
unknown to the world, through the lands performing the duties of his
office, and who has a favorite station on the roof of the Ka‘ba, through
his naqibs or assistants, down to the lowest faqir. But the members of these
orders are not exclusively faqirs. All classes are enrolled as, in a sense, lay
adherents. Certain trades affect certain fraternities; in Egypt, for example,
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the fishermen are almost all Qadirites and walk in procession on their
festival day, carrying colored nets as their banners. Much the same thing
held, and holds, of the monastic orders of Europe, but the Muslim does not
wait till he is dying to put on the weeds of Ahmad al-Badawi or ash-Shadhili.
Finally, reference may be made again to the last and most important of all
these orders, the militant Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.

We have now returned to the period of al-Iji and at-Taftazani, when

philosophy definitely descended from the throne and became the servant
and defender of theology. From this time on, the two independent forces at
work are the unveiling of the mystic (kashf) and tradition (naql). The only
place for reason (aql) now is to prove the possibility of a given doctrine.
That done, its actual truth is proven by tradition. These two
then, kashf and naql, hold the field, and the history of Muslim theology from
this point to the present day is the history of their conflicts. The mystics are
accused of heresy by the traditionalists. The traditionalists are accused by
the mystics of formalism, hypocrisy, and, above all, of flat inability to argue
logically. Both accusations are certainly true. No fine fence on personality
can conceal the fact that Muslim mysticism is simple pantheism of the
Plotinian type, the individuals are emanations from the One. On the other
hand, the formalism of the traditionalists can hardly be exaggerated. They
pass over almost entirely into canon lawyers, meriting richly the fine
sarcasm of al-Ghazzali, who asked the faqihs of his day what possible value
for the next world could lie in a study of the Qur’anic law of inheritance or
the like. Tradition (hadith), in the exact sense of the sayings and doings of
Muhammad, falls into the background, and fiqh, the systems built upon it by
the generations of lawyers, from the four masters down, takes its place.
Again, the accusation of illogical reasoning is also thoroughly sound. The
habit of unending subdivision deprived the minds of the canonists of all
breadth of scope, and their devotion to the principle of acceptance on
authority (taqlid) weakened their feeling for argument. It is true, further,
that the mystics, such as they were, had heired all the philosophy left in
Islam, and were thus become the representatives of the intellectual life.
They had so much of an advantage over their more orthodox opponents.
But the intellectual life with them, as with the earlier philosophers, remained
of a too subjective character. The fatal study of the self, and the self only--
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that tramping along the high a priori road--and neglect of the objective
study of the outside world which ruined their forerunners, was their ruin as
well. Outbursts of intellectual energy and revolt we may meet with again
and again; there will be few signs of that science which seeks facts patiently
in the laboratory, the observatory, and the dissecting-room.

Curiously enough, there fall closely together at this time the death dates of
two men of the most opposite schools. The one was Ibn Taymiya, the
anthropomorphist free lance, who died in 728, and the other was Abd ar-
Razzaq, the pantheistic Sufi, who died in 730. Abd ar-Razzaq of Samarqand
and Kashan was a close student and follower of Ibn Arabi. He commented
on his books and defended his orthodoxy. In fact, so closely had Ibn Arabi
come to be identified with the Sufi position as a whole that a defence of him
was a favorite form in which to cast a defence of Sufiism generally. But Abd
ar-Razzaq did not follow his master absolutely. On the freedom of the will
especially he left him. For Ibn Arabi, the doctrine of the oneness of all things
had involved fatalism. Whatever happens is determined by the nature of
things, that is, by the nature of God. So the individuals are bound by the
whole. Abd ar-Razzaq turned this round. His pantheism was of the same
type as that of Ibn Arabi; God, for him, was all. But there is freedom of the
divine nature, he went on. It must therefore exist in man also, for he is an
emanation from the divine. His every act, it is true, is predetermined, in time,
in form, and in place. But his act is brought about by certain causes,
themselves predetermined. These are what we would call natural laws in
things, natural abilities, aptitudes, etc., in the agent; finally, free choice itself.
And that free choice is in man because he is of and from God. Further, it is
evident that Abd ar-Razzaq's anxiety is to preserve a basis for morals.
Among the predetermining causes he reckons the divine commands,
warnings, proofs in the Qur’an. The guidance of religion finds thus its place
and the prophets their work. But what of the existence of evil and the
necessity of restraint in a world that has emanated from the divine? This
problem he faces bravely. Our world must be the best of all possible worlds;
otherwise God would have made it better. Difference, then, among men and
things belongs to its essence and necessity. Next, justice must consist in
accepting these different things and adapting them to their situations. To
try to make all things and men alike would be to leave some out of existence
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altogether. That would be a great injustice. Here, again, religion enters. Its
object is to rectify this difference in qualities and gifts. Men are not
responsible for these, but they are responsible if they do not labor to
correct them. In the hereafter all will be reabsorbed into the divine being
and taste such bliss as the rank of each deserves. For those who need it
there will be a period of purgatorial chastisement, but that will not be
eternal, in sha Allah.

Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Razzaq divides men into classes according to
their insight into divine things. The first is of men of the world, who are ruled
by the flesh (nafs) and who live careless of all religion. The second is of men
of reason (aql). They through the reason contemplate God, but see only His
external attributes. The third is of men of the spirit (ruh) who, in ecstasy, see
God face to face in His very essence, which is the substrate of all creation.

In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Razzaq follows, of course, the neo-Platonic model

and shows great ingenuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic
phrases and ideas of the Qur’an. Like all Muslim thinkers he displays an
anxiety to square with his philosophy the terms dear to the multitude.

To Ibn Taymiya all this was the very abomination of desolation itself. He had
no use for mystics, philosophers, Ash‘arite theologians, or, in fact, for
anyone except himself. A contemporary described him as a man most able
and learned in many sciences, but with a screw loose. However it may have
been about the last point, there can be no question that he was the reviver
for his time and the transmitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite
tradition, and that his work rendered possible the Wahhabites and the
Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was the champion of the religion of the
multitude as opposed to that of the educated few with which we have been
dealing so long. This popular theology had been going steadily upon its way
and producing its regular riots and disputings. It is related of a certain
Ash‘arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d. 620), that, in Damascus, he
never dared to pass by a certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The
same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the normal salutation of the
Peace to a Hanbalite theologian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was
more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that he did not regard Fakhr
ad-Din as a Muslim. When people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a
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theological jest and replied, "That man believes in 'Speech in the Mind'
(kalam nafsi, hadith fi-n-nafs), so I returned his salutation mentally." The
point is a hit at the Ash‘arites, who contended that thought was a kind of
speech without letters or sounds, and that God's quality of Speech could
therefore be without letters or sounds.

But even the simple orthodoxy of the populace had not remained
unchanged. It had received a vast accretion of the most multifarious
superstitions. The cult of saints, alive and dead, of holy sites, trees,
garments, and the observance of all manner of days and seasons had been
developing parallel to the advance of Sufiism among the educated.
The walis were untiring in the recital of the karamat which God had worked
for them, and the populace drank in the wonders greedily. The metaphysical
and theological side they left untouched. "This is a holy man," they said,
"who can work miracles; we must fear and serve him." And so they would
do without much thought whether his morality might not be antinomian
and his theology pantheistic. To abate this and other evils and bring back
the faith of the fathers was the task which Ibn Taymiya took up.

He was born near Damascus in 661 and educated as a Hanbalite. His family
had been Hanbalite for generations, and he himself taught in that school
and was reckoned as the greatest Hanbalite of his time. His position, too,
was practically that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, modified by the necessities
imposed by new controversaries. Thus he was an anthropomorphist, but of
what exact shade is obscure. He was accused of teaching that God was
above His throne, could be pointed at, and that He descended from His seat
as a man might, i.e., that He was in space. But he certainly distinguished
himself from the crasser materialists.

He refused to be classed as the adherent of any school or of any system

save that of Muhammad and the agreement of the fathers. He claimed for
himself the rights of a mujtahid and went back to first sources and principles
in everything. His self-confidence was extreme, and he smote down with
proud words the Rightly Guided Khalifas, Umar and Ali, themselves. His
bases were Qur’an, tradition from the Prophet and from the Companions
and analogy. Agreement, in the broad sense of the agreement of the Muslim
people, he rejected. If he had accepted it he would have been forced to
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accept innumerable superstitions, beliefs, and practices--especially the

whole doctrine of the walis and their wonders--for their basis was
agreement. The agreement of the Companions he did accept, while
convicting them right and left of error as individuals.

His life was filled up with persecutions and misfortune. He was a popular
idol, and inquiries for his judgment on theological and canonical questions
kept pouring in upon him. If there was no inquiry, and he felt that a situation
called for an expression of opinion from him, he did not hesitate to send it
out with all formality. It is true that it is the duty of every Muslim, so far as
he can, to do away or at least to denounce any illegality or unorthodox view
or practice which he may observe. This duty evidently weighed heavily on
Ibn Taymiya, and there was fear at one time at the Mamluk court lest he
might go the way of Ibn Tumart. In one of these utterances he defined the
doctrine of God's qualities as Ibn Hazm had done, and joined thereto
denunciations of the Ash‘arite kalam and of the Qur’anic exegesis of the
mutakallims as a whole. They were nothing but the heirs and scholars of
philosophers, idolaters, Magians, etc.; and yet they dared to go beyond the
Prophet and his heirs and Companions. The consequence of this fatwa or
legal opinion was that he was silenced for a time as a teacher. On another
occasion he gave out a fatwa on divorce, pronouncing tahlil illegal. Tahlil is a
device by which an awkward section in the canon law is evaded. If a man
divorces his wife three times, or pronounces a threefold divorce formula, he
cannot remarry her until she has been married to another man, has
cohabited with him and been divorced by him. Muslim ideas of sexual purity
are essentially different from ours, and the custom has grown up, when a
man has thus divorced his wife in hasty anger, of employing another to
marry her on pledge of divorcing her again next day. Sometimes the man so
employed refuses to carry out his contract; such refusal is a
frequent motif in oriental tales. To avoid this, the husband not infrequently
employs one of his slaves and then presents him to his former wife the next
day. A slave can legally marry a free woman, but when he becomes her
property the marriage is ipso facto annulled, because a slave cannot be the
husband of his mistress or a slave woman the wife of her master. It is to Ibn
Taymiya's credit that he was one of the few to lift up their voices against this
abomination. His independence is shown at its best.
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But it was with the Sufis that he had his worst conflicts, and at their hands
he suffered most. In many points his career is parallel to that of Ahmad ibn
Hanbal, the Sufi movement taking the place that was played by Mu‘tazilism
in the life of the earlier saint. One great difference, it may be remarked, was
that al-Ma’mun urged the persecution of Ibn Hanbal, while an-Nasir, the
great Mamluk Sultan (reg. 693, 698-708, 709-741), supported Ibn Taymiya as
far as he possibly could. The beginning of the Sufi controversy was
characteristic. Ibn Taymiya heard that a certain an-Nasr al-Manbiji (d. 719?), a
reputed follower of Ibn Arabi and of Ibn Sa‘bin, had reached a position of
influence in Cairo. That was enough to make Ibn Taymiya address an epistle
to him, intended to turn him from his heresies. It is needless to give in detail
the position and content of the epistle. He wrote as a strong monotheist of
the old-fashioned type and exposed and assailed unmercifully the doctrine
of Unity (ittihad) of the mystics. Al-Manbiji retorted with countercharges of
heresy, and; as he had behind him all the Sufis of Egypt--as great an army as
the Christian monks and ascetics or earlier Egypt and much like to them Ibn
Taymiya had to pay for his eagerness for a fight with long and painful
imprisonment at Cairo, Alexandria and Damascus. Here it is evident that he
had lost touch. with the drift of popular, and especially Egyptian, feeling.

But his fearlessness was like that of Ibn Hanbal himself, and in 726 he gave
out a fatwa which ran still straighter in the teeth of the beliefs of the people
and which sent him to a prison which he never left alive. It had long been a
custom in Islam to make pious pilgrimage to the graves of saints and
prophets and there to do reverence to their memory and to ask their aid. It
was part of that cult of saints which had so overspread and overcome the
earlier simplicity of Islam. The most outstanding case in point was, and is,
the pilgrimage to the tomb of Muhammad at al-Madina, which has come to
be a more or less essential part of the Hajj to the Ka‘ba itself. Against all this
Ibn Taymiya lifted a voice of emphatic protest. These shrines were in great
part false, and when they were genuine the visitation of them was an
idolatrous imitation of heathen practices. Equally idolatrous was all invoking
of saints or prophets, including Muhammad himself; to God alone should
prayer be directed. The clamor raised by this fatwa was tremendous. This
was no doctrine of the schools which he had touched, but a bit of concrete
religiosity which appealed to everyone. His public life practically ended, and
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the practices which he had denounced abide to this day. It is a bitter satire
on his position that when he died in 726 the populace paid to his relics all
these signs of superstitious reverence against which he had protested. He
became a saint, malgré lui. His work had been to keep alive the Hanbalite
doctrine and pass it on unchanged to modern times. He did not destroy
philosophy: it was dead of itself before he came. Nor Sufiism: it is still very
much alive. Nor kalam: it still continues in the form to which it had
crystallized by his time. But he and his disciples made possible the
Wahhabites and the monotheistic revival of our day. The faith of
Muhammad himself was not to perish entirely from the earth.

It would now be possible to pass at once to the Wahhabite movement in the

latter part of the twelfth century of the Hijra. All the elements for the
explanation of it and of the modern situation are in our hands. But there is
one figure which stands out so clearly in an otherwise most obscure picture
and is so significant for the time, that some account must be taken of it. It is
that of ash-Sha‘rani, theologian, canonist, and mystic. He was a Cairene and
died in 973. The rule of Egypt had passed half a century before to the
Ottoman Turks, and they governed by means of a Turkish Pasha. The
condition of the people, as we find it sketched by ash-Sha‘rani, was a most
unhappy one. They were bent down, and especially the peasantry, under a
load of taxation. The Turks found it advisable, too, to cultivate the friendship
of the canon lawyers and professional theologians in order to maintain their
hold upon the people. These canonists, in consequence, were rapidly
becoming an official class with official privileges. Further, the process, the
beginnings of which we have already seen, by which religious science was
narrowed to fiqh, had gone still further. Practically, the two classes of
theologians left were the canonists and the mystics. And the mystics had
fallen far from their pride of power under the Mamluks. They now were of
the poor of the laud, a kind of Essenes over against the Pharisees of the
schools.

Such, at least, is the picture of his time which ash-Sha‘rani gives. How far it is
exact must remain uncertain. For, of the many puzzling personalities in
Islam, ash-Sha‘rani is perhaps for us the most unintelligible. He combined
the most abject superstitions of a superstitious ago and country with lofty
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ethical indignation; social humility of the most extreme with an intellectual

pride and arrogance rarely paralleled, a keen and original grasp of the canon
law of the four schools with an utter submission of the intellect to the
inbreathings of the divine from without; a power of discreet silence as to
the inconvenient with an open-mouthed vehemence in other things. He was
a devoted follower of Ibn Arabi and defended his memory against the
accusation of heresy. Yet his position is singularly different from that of Ibn
Arabi, and a doubt cannot but rise as to either his knowledge, his
intelligence, or his honesty. Practically where he differs from the ordinary
Muslim is in his extension of the doctrine of saints. As to the Most Beautiful
Names (al-asma al-husna), he follows Ibn Hazm. So, too, as to God's
qualities, he follows the older school and would prefer to leave them
unconsidered. But he is, otherwise and in general, a sound Ash‘arite, e.g., on
the doctrine of predestination, and of man's part in his works (iktisab).
There is in him no sign of the Plotinian pantheism of Ibn Arabi. The doctrine
of God's difference (mukhalafa) he taught, and that He created the world by
His will and not by any emanation of energy.

But truth for him is not to be reached by speculation and argument: its only
basis is through the unveiling of the inner eye which brings us to the
immediate Vision of the Divine. Those who have reached that Vision, guide
and teach those who cannot or have not. Upon that Vision all systems are
built, and reason can only serve the visionary as a defence against the
gainsayer or against his own too wild thoughts. Naturally, with such a
starting-point as this the supernatural side of things (al-ghayb) receives
strong emphasis. The Jinn and the angels are most intense realities. Ash-
Sha‘rani met them in familiar converse. He met, too, al-Khadir, the undying
pilgrim saint who wanders through the lands, succoring and guiding. The
details of these interviews are given with the greatest exactness. A Jinni in
the form of a dog ran into his house on such a day by such a door, with a
piece of European paper in his mouth--this is a touch of genius--on which
certain theological questions were written. The Jinni wished ash-Sha‘rani's
opinion as to them. Such was the origin of one of his books, and another
sprang from a similarly exactly described talk with al-Khadir. Yet he was
content also with smaller mercies and reckons as a karama that he was
enabled to read through a certain book for some time at the rate of two and
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a half times daily. To all this it would be possible of course to say flatly that
he lied. But such a judgment applied to an oriental is somewhat crude, and
the knot of the mystic's mind in any land is not to be so easily cut. Further,
the doctrine of the walis is developed by him at length. They possess a
certain illumination (ilham), which is, however, different from the inspiration
(wahy) of the prophets. So, too, they never reach the grade of the prophets,
or a nearness to God where the requirements of a revealed law fall away
from them, i.e., they must always walk according to the law of a prophet.
They are all guided by God, whatever their particular Rule (tariqa) may be,
but the Rule of al-Junayd is the best because it is in most essential
agreement with the Law (shari‘a) of Islam. Their karamat are true and are a
consequence of their devout labors, for these are in agreement with the
Qur’an and the Sunna. The order of nature will not be broken for anyone
who has not achieved more than is usual in religious knowledge and
exercises. All walis stand under a regular hierarchy headed by the Qutb; yet
above him in holiness stand the Companions of the Prophet. This marks a
very moderate position. Many Sufis had contended that the walis stood
higher than even the prophets, not to speak of their Companions.

It will be seen that his position is essentially a mediating one. He wishes to

show that the beliefs of the mystics and of the mutakallims are really one
although they are reached by different paths. In fiqh he made a similar
attempt. The Sufis had always looked down on those theologians who were
canonists pure and simple. A study of canon law was a necessity, they
thought; but as a propædeutic only. The canonists who went no further
never reached religion at all. Especially they held that no Sufi should join
himself to any of the four contending schools. Their controversies were
upon insignificant details which had nothing to do with the life in God. But
could it not be shown that their differences were not actual--one view being
true and the other false--but were capable of being reduced to a unity? This
was the problem that ash-Sha‘rani attacked. These differing opinions, he
held, are adapted to different classes of men. Some men of greater gifts and
endurance can follow the hardest of these opinions, while the easier are to
be recognized as concessions (rukhsa) from God to the weakness of others.
Each man may follow freely the view which appeals to him; God has
appointed it for him.
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Ash-Sha‘rani was one of the last original thinkers in Islam; for a thinker he
was despite his dealings with the Jinn and al-Khadir. Egypt keeps his
memory. A mosque in Cairo bears his name, as does also a division of the
Badawite darwishes. In modern times his books have been frequently
reprinted, and his influence is one of the ferments in the new Islam.

We must now pass over about two hundred years and come to the latter
part of the twelfth century of the Hijra, a period nearly coinciding with the
end of the eighteenth of our era. There these two movements come again
to light. Wahhabism, the historical origin of which we have already seen, is a
branch of the school of Ibn Taymiya. Manuscripts of the works of Ibn
Taymiya copied by the hand of Ibn Abd al-Wabhab exist in Europe. So the
Wahhabites refused to accept as binding the decisions of the four orthodox
sects of canon law. Agreement as a source they also reject. The whole
People of Muhammad can err and has erred. Only the agreement of the
Companions has binding force for them. It is, therefore, the duty and right
of every man to draw his own doctrine from the Qur’an and the traditions;
the systems of the schools should have no weight with him. Again, they take
the authropomorphisms of the Qur’an in their literal sense. God has a hand,
God settles Himself on His throne; so it must be held "without inquiring how
and without comparison." They profess to be the only true Muslims,
applying to themselves the term Muwahhids and calling all others Mushriks,
assignees of companions to God. Again, like Ibn Taymiya, they reject the
intercession of walis with God. It is allowable to ask of God for the sake of a
saint but not to pray to the saint. This applies also to Muhammad.
Pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, the presenting of offerings there, all acts
of reverence, they also forbid. No regard should be paid even to the tomb of
the Prophet at al-Madina. All such ceremonies are idolatrous. Whenever
possible the Wahhabites destroy and level the shrines of saints.

Over other details, such as the prohibition of the use of tobacco, we need
not spend time. Wahhabism as a political force is gone. It has, however, left
the Sanusi revolt as its direct descendant and what may be the outcome of
that Brotherhood we have no means of guessing. It has also left a general
revival and reformation throughout the Church of Islam, much parallel, as
 186

has been remarked, to the counter-reformation which followed the

Protestant Reformation in Europe.

The second movement is the revival of the influence of al-Ghazzali. That

influence never became absolutely extinct and it seems to have remained
especially strong in al-Yaman. In that corner of the Muslim world
generations of Sufis lived comparatively undisturbed, and it was the Sayyid
Murtada, a native of Zabid in Tihama, who by his great commentary on
the Ihya of al-Ghazzali practically founded the modern study of that book.
There have been two edition of this commentary in ten quarto volumes and
many of the Ihya itself and of other works by al-Ghazzali. Whether his
readers understand him fully or not, there can be no question of the wide
influence which he is now exercising. At Mecca, for example, the orthodox
theological teaching is practically Ghazzalian and the controversy
throughout all Arabia is whether Ibn Taymiya and al-Ghazzali can be called
Shaykhs of Islam. The Wahhabites hold that anyone who thus honors al-
Ghazzali is an unbeliever, and the Meccans retort the same of the followers
of Ibn Taymiya.

These two tendencies then--that back to the simple monotheism of

Muhammad and that to an agnostic mysticism--are the hopeful signs in
modern Islam. There are many other drifts in which there is no such hope.
Simple materialism under European, mostly French, influence is one. A
seeking of salvation in the study of canon law is another. Canon law is still
the field to which an enormous proportion of Muslim theologians turn.
Again, there are various forms of frankly pantheistic mysticism. That is
especially the case among Persians and Turks. For the body of the people,
religion is still overburdened, as in Ibn Taymiya's days, with a mass of
superstition. Lives of walis containing the wildest and most blasphemous
stories abound and are eagerly read. The books of ash-Sha‘rani are
especially rich in such hagiology. It is difficult for us to realize that stories like
the most extravagant in the Thousand and One Nights are the simplest
possibilities to the masses of Islam. The canon lawyers, still, in their
discussions, take account of the existence of Jinn, and no theologian would
dare to doubt that Solomon sealed them up in brass bottles. Of philosophy,
in the free and large sense, there is no trace. Ibn Rushd's reply to al-
 187

Ghazzali's "Destruction of the Philosophers" has been printed, but only as a

pendant to that work. In it, too, Ibn Rushd carefully covers his great
heresies. His tractates on the study of kalam, spoken of above, have also
been reprinted at Cairo from the European edition. But these tractates are
arranged to give no clew to his real philosophy. The Arabic Aristotelianism
has perished utterly from the Muslim lands. Of the modern Indian
Mu‘tazilism no account need be taken here. It is derived from Europe and is
ordinary Christian Unitarianism, connecting with Muhammad instead of with
Jesus.

From the above sketch some necessary conditions are clear, which must be
fulfilled if there is to be a chance for a future development in Islam.
Education must be widely extended. The proportion of trained minds must
be greatly increased and the barrier between them and the commonalty
removed. The economy of teaching has failed; it has destroyed the doctrine
which it sought to protect. Again, the slavery of the disciple to the master
must cease. It must always be possible for the student, in defiance of taqlid,
to go back to first principles or to the primary facts and to disregard what
the great Imams and Mujtahids have taught. So much of health there was in
the Zahirite system.

Third, these primary facts must include the facts of natural science. The
student, emancipated from the control of the schools, must turn from the
study of himself to an examination of the great world. And that examination
must not be cosmological but biological; it must not lose itself in the
infinities but find itself in concrete realities. It must experiment and test
rather than build lofty hypotheses.

But can the oriental mind thus deny itself? The English educational
experiment in Egypt may go far to answer that question.
 188

APPENDIX 1. ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS

 189

1. ASH-SHAHRASTANI ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF MUSLIM SECTS

Then I applied myself to what of arrangement was easy of attainment and

to what of attainment was easy of arrangement, until I had crowded them
[the different opinions] into four fundamentals, which are the great
principles. The first fundamental concerns the Qualities (sifat) with the Unity
(tawhid); it embraces the question of the eternal (azali) Qualities, affirmed
by some and denied by others, and of the exposition of the essential
Qualities (sifat adh-dhat) and of the active Qualities (sifat al-fi‘l) and of what
is necessary in God Most High and what is possible for Him and what is
impossible; it involves the controversies between the Ash‘arites and the
Karramites and the Anthropomorphists (mujassims) and the Mu‘tazilites.

The second fundamental concerns decree (qadar) and justice (adl); it

embraces the question of destiny (qada) and decree (qadar); of force (jabr)
and acquisition (kasb); of the willing of good and of evil and of the decreed
and the known, affirmed by some and denied by others; it involves the
controversies between the Qadarites and Najjarites and Jabarites and
Ash‘arites and Karramites.

The third fundamental concerns promise (wa‘d) and the decisions (hukms);
it embraces the question of faith (iman) and repentance (tawba) and
threatening (wa‘id) and postponing (irja) and pronouncing anyone an
unbeliever (takfir) and leading anyone astray (tadlil), affirmed by some and
denied by others; it involves the controversies between the Murji’ites and
the Wa‘idites and the Mu‘tazilites and the Ash‘arites and the Karramites.

The fourth fundamental concerns tradition (sam) and reason (aql) and the
prophetic mission (risala) and the imamate; it embraces the questions of the
determination of actions as good (tahsin) or vile (taqbih); of the
advantageous (salah) and most advantageous (aslah); of benignity (lutf); of
the prophets being guarded against sin (isma); of the condition of the
imamate, by statute (nass) according to some and by agreement (ijma)
according to others, and how it is transferred on the view of those who say
it is by statute, and how it is fixed on the view of those who say it is by
agreement; it involves the controversies between the Shi‘ites and the
 190

Kharijites and the Mu‘tazilites and the Karramites and the Ash‘arites.--
Translated from Cureton's Arabic text, p. 4.
 191

2. THE PROPHET IN A TRADITION

"Islam is built upon five things; testimony that there is no god but God and
that Muhammad is the Apostle of God. Prayer (salat), the Poor-rate (zakat),
Pilgrimage (hajj) and Fast (sawm) in Ramadan."

A TRADITION OF THE PROPHET

Jibril came in the form of an Arab of the desert and sat down so that his
knees touched the knees of the Prophet and said, "O Apostle of God, what
is Islam?" He said, "That thou should bear witness that there is no god save
God and that I am the Apostle of God; that thou shouldest perform the
prayers (salat) and bring the poor-rate (zakat) and fast in the month of
Ramadan and pilgrimage to the House if the way is possible for thee." He
said, "Thou hast spoken truly." Then he said, "What is Faith (iman)?" The
Prophet said, "That thou should believe in God and His angels and His cooks
and His messengers and in the Last Day, and that thou should believe in the
decreeing (qadar) both of good and of evil." He said, "Thou hast spoken
truly." Then he said, "What is right doing (ihsan)?" The Prophet said, "That
thou should serve God as though thou sawest Him; for though thou seest
Him not, He sees thee." He said, "Thou hast spoken truly." Then he said,
"When shall be the Last Day (as-sa‘a)?" The Prophet said, "The questioned
knoweth not more of that than the questioner." Then he arose and went
out. And the Prophet said, "That was Jibril; he came to you to teach you
your religion (din)."--Translated from Cureton's text of ash-Shahrastani, p. 27.
 192

3. A SHORT CREED BY AL-ASH‘ARI

Our doctrine which we teach and our religion (diyana) which we follow
consists in clinging fast to the Book of God and the Usage (sunna) of His
Prophet and to that which is handed down from the Companions, their
immediate followers (tabi‘s) and from the leaders (imams) in tradition--with
that we take refuge; and we teach that which Ahmad ibn Hanbal--may God
illumine his face, exalt his rank and make great his reward--followed; and we
shun that which is opposed to his doctrine. For he is the excellent leader,
the perfect chief, through whom God made plain the truth, when error was
made manifest, and showed the path and smote down the innovations of
the innovators, the deviations of the deviators and the doubts of the
doubters. So, the mercy of God be upon him for an appointed leader and an
instructed chief, and upon all the leaders of the Muslims.

The sum of our doctrine is this, that we believe in God, His Angels, His
Books, His Apostles, in all that has come from God, and what trustworthy
men (thiqat) have reported from the Apostles of God; we oppose nothing
thereof. That God is One God, Single, One, Eternal; beside Him no God
exists; He has taken to Himself no wife (sahiba), nor child (walad); and that
Muhammad is His Servant (abd) and His Apostle. That Paradise and Hell are
Verity and that the Hour (as-sa‘a) will come without doubt, and God will
arouse those that are in the graves. That God has settled Himself (istawa)
upon His throne, as He has said, (Qur. 20, 4); "the Rahman has settled
Himself upon His throne." That God has a countenance, as He has said, (Qur.
55, 27); "and the countenance of thy Lord will abide, full of majesty and
glory;" and two hands, as He has said, (Qur. 5, 69); "much more! both His
hands are spread out," and (Qur. 38, 75); "that which I have created with
both My hands;" and two eyes, without asking how (bila kayfa), as He has
said, (Qur. 54, 14'); "which swims forth under Our eyes." That whoever
thinks that God's name is other than He, is in error. That God has Knowledge
(ilm), as He has said, (Qur. 35, 12); "Not one woman becomes pregnant and
brings forth, except by His knowledge." We maintain that God has Power
(qudra), as He has said, (Qur. 41, 14); "and have they not seen that God who
 193

created them is stronger than they?" We maintain that God has Hearing
(sam) and Seeing (basar) and do not deny it, as do the Mu‘tazilites, Jahmites
and Kharijites. We teach that God's Word (kalam) is uncreated, and that He
has never created anything except by saying to it, "Be!" and it forthwith
became, as He has said, (Qur, 16, 42); "Our speech to anything when We
willed it was, 'Be' and it was." Nothing exists upon earth, be it good or bad,
but that which, God wills; but all things are by God's Will (mashya). No one is
able to do anything before God does it, neither is anyone independent of
God, nor can he withdraw himself from God's Knowledge. There is no
Creator but God. The works (amals) of creatures are created and
predestined by God, as He said, (Qur. 37, 94); "and God has created you and
what ye do." Man is able to create nothing; but they are created, as He has
said, (Qur. 35, 31); "Is there any Creator except God?" and (Qur. 16, 17) "and
is He who created like him who created not?" and (Qur. 52, 35); "were they
created out of nothing, or are they the creators?" and such passages are
many in the Qur’an. And God maintains the believers in obedience to Him, is
gracious unto them, cares for them, reforms them, and guides them aright;
but the unbelievers He leads astray, guides them not aright, vouchsafes
them not Faith (iman), by His Grace, as the People of error and pride
maintain. For should He be gracious unto them and help them aright, then
would they be pious, and should He guide them aright, then would they
allow themselves to be guided aright, as He has said, (Qur. 7, 177); "whom
God guideth aright, he allows himself to be guided aright, and whom He
leads astray, they are he losers." God is able to help the unbelieving aright
and to be gracious unto thorn, so that they shall become believing, but He
wills that they shall be unbelieving as is known. For He has made them
impervious to all help and sealed their hearts. Good and Evil happen
according to the Destiny (qada) and Decree (qadar) of God for good and.
evil, for the sweet and the bitter. We know that the misfortune that befalls
us is not in order that we may go astray, and that the good fortune which
befalls us is not in order that we may go aright. We have no control over
that which is good or hurtful to us, except so far as God wills. We flee from
our anxieties to God and commit at all times our distress and poverty to
Him. We teach that the Qur’an is God's Word, and that it is uncreated, and
that whosoever says that it is created is an unbeliever (kafir). We believe
 194

that God at the Day of Resurrection (yawm al-qiyama) will be visible to the
eyes, as the moon is seen upon the night of the full moon; the believers will
see Him, according to traditions which have come down from the Prophet.
We teach that while the believers will see Him, the unbelievers will be
separated from Him by a wall of division, as God has said, (Qur. 83, 15);
"Surely not! They will be separated from their Lord, upon that Day." We
teach that Moses besought God that he might see Him in this world; then
God revealed Himself to the mountain and turned it into dust and taught
Moses thereby that he could not see Him in this world (Qur. 7, 139). We are
of the opinion that we may not accuse anyone of unbelief (kufr), who prays
towards Mecca, on account of sin committed by him, such as unchastity,
theft, wine drinking, as the Kharijites believe, who judge that these thereby
become unbelievers. We teach that whoever commits a great sin (kabira), or
anything like it, holding it to be allowed, is an unbeliever, since he does not
believe in its prohibition. We teach that Islam is a wider idea than Faith
(iman), so that not every Islam is Faith. We believe that God turns the hearts
upside down, and holds them between two of His fingers, that He lays the
heavens upon a finger and the earth upon a finger, according to the
tradition from the Prophet. We believe that God will not leave in Hell any of
those who confess His Unity (muwahhid) and hold fast to the Faith, and that
there is no Hell for him whom the Prophet has by his witness appointed to
Paradise. We hope for Paradise for sinners and fear on their account, that
they will be punished in Hell. We teach that God will release a few out of
Hell, on account of Muhammad's intercession (shafa‘a) after they have been
scorched there. We believe in the punishment of the grave. We believe that
the Tank (hawd) and the Balance are Verities: that the Bridge as-Sirat is a
Verity; that the Arousing (ba‘th) after death is a Verity; that God will set up
His creatures in a place (mawqif) and will hold a reckoning with the
Believers. 1 We believe that Faith (iman) consists in word (qawl) and in work
(amal) and that it increases and diminishes. We trust in the sound Traditions
handed down from the Apostle of God, which trustworthy people (thiqat),
just man from just man, up to the Apostle, have transmitted. We hold by the

1
For Muslim eschatology reference may still he made to Sale's introduction to the Qur’an, § 4. The
punishment of the grave is what, in the case of unbelievers, follows the inquisition by the two
angels Munkar and Nakir; see on them Lane's Modern Egyptians, chap. xxviii; on the whole subject, see
translations by Gautier and Wolff and tractate by Rüling (Bibliography, p. 367)
 195

love of the early Believers (salaf), whom God chose to be Companions to the
Prophet, and we praise them with the praise with which God praised them,
and we carry on their succession. We assert that the Imam succeeding the
Apostle of God was Abu Bakr; that God through him made the Religion (din)
mighty, and caused him to conquer the Apostates (murtadds). The Muslims
made him their Imam, just as Muhammad had made him Imam at prayers.
Then followed [as legal Imam] Umar ibn al-Khattab; then Uthman ibn Affan;
his murderers killed him out of wickedness and enmity; then Ali ibn Abi Talib.
These are the Imams after the Apostle, and their Khalifate is that of the
Prophetic office [i.e., they are, though not prophets, successors of the
Prophet]. We bear witness of Paradise for the Ten (al-asharatu-l-
mubashshara), to whom the Apostle bore witness of it, and we carry on the
succession of the other Companions of the Prophet and hold ourselves far
from that which was in dispute between them. We hold that the four Imams
were in the true way, were rightly guided and excellent, so that no one
equals them in excellence. We hold as true the traditions which the People
of Tradition (naql) have established, concerning the descent of God to the
lowest heaven (sama ad-dunya), and that the Lord will say, "Is there a
supplicant? Is there a seeker for forgiveness?" and the rest of that which
they have handed down and established, contrary to that which the
mistaken and misled opine. We ground ourselves in our opposition on the
Qur’an, the Sunna of the Prophet, the agreement of the Muslims and what is
in accordance therewith, but put forth no novelty (bid‘a) not sanctioned by
God, and opine of God nothing that we have not been taught. We teach that
God will come on the Day of Resurrection, as He has said, (Qur. 89, 23);
"When the earth shall be turned to dust, and the Lord shall appear and the
angels, rank on rank," and that God is near to His servants, in what way
(kayfa) He wills, as He has said, (Qur. 50, 15); "and We are nearer to him than
the artery in his neck;" and (Qur. 53, 8); "Then He approached and came
near and was two bows' length distant or even nearer." To our Religion
(din) belongs further, that we on Fridays and on festival days pray behind
every person, pious and profane--so are the conditions for congregational
prayers, as it is handed down from Abd Allah ibn Umar that he prayed
behind al-Hajjaj. To our Religion belongs the wiping (mash) of the inner
boots (khuffs) upon a journey and at home, in contradiction to the deniers
 196

of this. 2 We uphold the prayer for peace for the Imams of the Muslims,
submission to their office, and maintain the error of those who hold it right
to rise against them whenever there may be apparent in them a falling away
from right. We are against armed rebellion against them and civil war.

We believe in the appearance of anti-Christ (ad-Dajjal) according to the

tradition handed down from the Prophet; in the punishment of the grave,
and in Munkar and Nakir and in their questions to the buried in their graves.
We hold the tradition of the journey to heaven (mi‘raj, Qur. 17) of
Muhammad as true, and declare many of the visions in sleep to be true, and
we say that there is an explanation for them. We uphold the alms for the
dead of the Muslims and prayer for them, and believe that God will help
them therewith. We hold as true that there are enchanters in the world, and
that enchantment is and exists. We hold as a religious duty the prayer which
is held over the dead of those who have prayed toward Mecca, whether
they have been believers or godless; we uphold also their right of testation.
We acknowledge that Paradise and Hell are created, and that whoever dies
or is killed, dies or is killed at his appointed time (ajal); that the articles of
sustenance (rizq) from God, with which He sustains His creatures, are
permitted (halal) and forbidden (haram); 3 that Satan makes evil suggestions
to men, and puts them in doubt, and causes them to be possessed, contrary
to that which the Mu‘tazilites and the Jahmites maintain, as God said, (Qur.
2, 276); "Those who take usury will [at the Resurrection] stand there like one
whom Satan causes to be possessed by madness," and (Qur. 114, 4 ff.); "I
take my refuge in God, from the evil suggestion, from the stealthy one who
makes suggestions in the hearts of men, by means of men and Jinn." We
affirm that God may distinguish the pious by signs which He manifests
through them. Our teaching concerning the little children of the polytheists
(mushriqs) is this, that God will kindle a fire in the other world for them, and

2
This, one of the dividing questions between Sunnites and Shi’ites, belongs to theology as well as law.
See p. 314 and Goldziher, Zur Literaturgeschichte der Si‘a, p. 87.
3
The Mu‘tazilites held that articles of sustenance of a forbidden nature, such as pork or wine, could not be
called rizq in this technical sense; that God could not so use them. The orthodox retorted p. 299 that a man
might live his life out on forbidden things; had he then been independent of God as to his sustenance? The
Mu‘tazilites defined rizq as "a possession which its possessor eats" and as "that from which one is not
hindered from profiting"; the orthodox, as a name for that which God sends to man and the other animals
and they eat it and profit by it.
 197

will say, "Run in there;"--as the tradition says. 4 We believe that God knows
what men do and what they will to do, what happens and how that which
does not happen, if it should happen, would happen. We believe in the
obedience of the Imams and in their counsel of the Muslims. We consider
right the separation from every inciter to innovation (bid‘a) and the turning
aside from the People of wandering desires (ahl al-ahwa).--Translated from
the Arabic text in Spitta's Zur Geschichte al-As‘ari's, pp. 133 ff.

4
Some will run into the fire and find themselves immediately in Paradise; these would have been believers.
Others will refuse, and will be treated as their parents.
 198

4. A SHORT CREED BY AL-GHAZZALI

An exposition of the Creed of the People of the Sunna on the two Words of
Witnessing (kalimatan ash-shahada) which form one of the Foundations of
Islam.

[Intended to be committed to memory by children. It forms the first section

of the second book of his Ihya, vol. ii, pp. 17-42 of edit. of Cairo with
commentary of the Sayyid Murtadà.]

We say--and in God is our trust--Praise belongeth unto God, the Beginner,

the Bringer back, the Doer of what He willeth, the Lord of the Glorious
Throne and of Mighty Grasp, the Guider of His chosen creatures to the right
path and to the true way, the Granter of benefits to them after the witness
to the Unity (tawhid) by guarding their articles of belief from obscurities of
doubt and opposition, He that bringeth them to follow His Apostle, the
Chosen one (al-Mustafa), and to imitate the traces of his Companions, the
most honored, through His aid and right guidance revealed to them in His
essence and His works by His beautiful qualities which none perceives, save
he who inclines his ear. He is the witness who maketh known to them that
He in His essence is One without any partner (sharik). Single without any
similar, Eternal without any opposite, Separate without any like. He is One,
Prior (qadim) with nothing before Him, from eternity (azali) without any
beginning, abiding in existence with none after Him, to eternity (abadi)
without any end, subsisting without ending, abiding without termination. He
hath not ceased and He will not cease to be described with glorious
epithets; finishing and ending, through the cutting off of the ages and .the
terminating of allotted times, have no rule over Him, but He is the First and
Last, the External and the Internal, and He knoweth everything.

We witness that He is not a body possessing form, nor a substance

possessing bounds and limits: He does not resemble bodies, either in
limitation or in accepting division. He is not a substance and substances do
not exist in Him; and He is not an accident and accidents do not exist in Him,
nay He does not resemble an entity, and no entity resembles Him; nothing is
like Him and He is not like anything; measure does not bound Him and
 199

boundaries do not contain Him; the directions do not surround Him and
neither the earth nor the heavens are on different sides of Him. Lo, He is
seated firmly upon His Throne (arsh), after the manner which He has said,
and in the sense in which He willed a being seated firmly (istiwa), which is far
removed from contact and fixity of location and being established and being
enveloped and being removed. The Throne does not carry Him, but the
Throne and those that carry it are carried by the grace of His power and
mastered by His grasp. He is above the Throne and the Heavens and above
everything unto the limit of the Pleiades, with an aboveness which does not
bring Him nearer to the Throne and the Heavens, just as it does not make
Him further from the earth and the Pleiades. Nay, He is exalted by degrees
from the Throne and the Heavens, just as He is exalted by degrees from the
earth and the Pleiades; and He, in spite of that, is near to every entity and is
"nearer to a creature than the artery of his neck" (Qur. 50, 15), and He
witnesseth everything, since His nearness does not resemble the nearness
of bodies, just as His essence does not resemble the essence of bodies. He
does not exist in anything, just as nothing exists in Him: He has exalted
Himself far therefrom that a place should contain Him, just as He has
sanctified Himself far therefrom that time should limit Him. Nay, He was
before He had created Time and Place and He is now above that which He
was above, and distinct from His creatures through His qualities. There is not
in His essence His equal, nor in His equal His essence. He is far removed from
change of state or of place. Events have no place in Him, and mishaps do not
befall him. Nay, He does not cease, through His glorious epithets, to be far
removed from changing, and through His perfect qualities to be
independent of perfecting increase. The existence of His essence is known
by reason; His essence is seen with the eyes, a benefit from Him and a grace
to the pious, in the Abiding Abode and a completion in beatitude from Him,
through gazing upon His gracious face.

We witness that He is living, powerful, commanding, conquering;

inadequacy and weakness befall Him not; slumber seizes Him not, nor sleep.
Passing away does not happen to Him, nor death. He is Lord of the Worlds,
the Visible and the Invisible, that of Force and that of Might; He possesses
Rule and Conquest and Creation and Command; the heavens are rolled in His
right hand and the created things are overcome in His grasp; He is separate
 200

in creating and inventing; He is one in bringing into existence and

innovating; He created the creation and their works and decreed their
sustenance and their terms of life; not a decreed thing escapes His grasp
and the mutations of things are not distant from His power; the things
which He hath decreed cannot be reckoned and the things which He
knoweth have no end.

We witness that He knoweth all the things that can be known,

comprehending that which happeneth from the bounds of the earths unto
the topmost heavens; no grain in the earth or the heavens is distant from
His knowledge. Yea, He knows the creeping of the black ant upon the
rugged rock in a dark night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in
the midst of the air; He knows the secret and the concealed and has
knowledge of the suggestions of the minds and the movements of the
thoughts and the concealed things of the inmost parts, by a knowledge
which is prior from eternity; He has not ceased to be describable by it, from
the ages of the ages, not by a knowledge which renews itself and arises in
His essence by arrival and removal.

We witness that He is a Willer of the things that are, a Director of the things
that happen; there does not come about in the world, seen or unseen, little
or much, small or great, good or evil, advantage or disadvantage,. faith or
unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or loss, increase or diminution,
obedience or rebellion, except by His will. What He wills is, and what He wills
not is not. Not a glance of one who looks, or a slip of one who thinks is
outside of His will: He is the Creator, the Bringer back, the Doer of that
which He wills. There is no opponent of His command and no repeater of His
destiny and no refuge for a creature from disobeying Him, except by His
help and His mercy, and no strength to a creature to obey Him except by His
will. Even though mankind and the Jinn and the Angels and the Shaytans
were to unite to remove a single grain in the world or to bring it to rest
without His will, they would be too weak for that. His will subsists in His
essence as one of His qualities; He hath not ceased to be described through
it as a Willer, in His infinity, of the existence of things at their appointed
times which He hath decreed. So they come into existence at their
appointed times even as He has willed in His infinity without precedence or
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sequence. They happen according to the agreement of His knowledge and

His will, without exchange or change in planning of things, nor with
arranging of thoughts or awaiting of time, and therefore one thing does not
distract Him from another.

And we witness that He is a Hearer and a Seer. He hears and sees, and no
audible thing is distant from His hearing, and no visible thing is far from His
seeing, however fine it may be. Distance does not curtain off His hearing and
darkness does not dull His seeing; He sees without eyeball or eyelid, and
hears without earholes or ears, just as He knows without a brain and seizes
without a limb and creates without an instrument, since His qualities do not
resemble the qualities of created things, just as His essence does not
resemble the essences of created things.

And we witness that He speaks, commanding, forbidding, praising,

threatening, with a speech from all eternity, prior, subsisting in His essence
not resembling the speech of created things. It is not a sound which
originates through the slipping out of air, or striking of bodies; nor is it a
letter which is separated off by closing down a lip or moving a tongue. And
the Qur’an and the Tawrat [the Law of Moses] and the Injil [the Gospel] and
the Zabbur [the Psalms] are His book revealed to His Apostles. And the
Qur’an is repeated by tongues, written in copies, preserved in hearts: yet it,
in spite of that, is prior, subsisting in the essence of God, not subject to
division and separation through being transferred to hearts and leaves. And
Musa heard the speech of God without a sound and without a letter, just as
the pious see the essence of God, in the other world, without a substance or
an attribute.

And since He has those qualities, He is Living, Knowing, Powerful, a Willer, a

Hearer, a Seer, a Speaker, through Life, Power, Knowledge, Will, Hearing,
Seeing, Speech, not by a thing separated from His essence.

We witness that there is no entity besides Him, except what is originated

from His action and proceeds from His justice, after the most beautiful and
perfect and complete and just of ways. He is wise in His actions, just in His
determinations; there is no analogy between His justice and the justice of
creatures, since tyranny is conceivable in the case of a creature, when he
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deals with the property of some other than himself, but tyranny is not
conceivable in the case of God. For He never encounters any property in
another besides Himself, so that His dealing with it might he tyranny.
Everything besides Him, consisting of men and Jinn and Angels and Shaytans
and the heavens and the earth and animals and plants and inanimate things
and substance and attribute and things perceived and things felt, is an
originated thing, which He created by His power, before any other had
created it, after it had not existed, and which He invented after that it had
not been a thing, since He in eternity was an entity by Him-self, and there
was not along with Him any other than He. So He originated the creation
thereafter, by way of manifestation of His power, and verification of that
which had preceded of His Will, and of that which existed in eternity of His
Word; not because He had any lack of it or need of it. And He is gracious in
creating and in making for the first times and in imposing of duty--not of
necessity--and He is generous in benefiting; and well-doing and gracious
helping belong to Him, since He is able to bring upon His creatures different
kinds of punishment and to test them with different varieties of pains and
ailments. And if He did that, it would be justice on His part, and would not be
a vile action or tyranny in Him. He rewardeth His believing creatures for their
acts of obedience by a decision which is of generosity and of promise and
not of right and of obligation, since no particular action toward anyone is
incumbent upon Him, and tyranny is inconceivable in Him, and no one
possesses a right against Him. And His right to acts of obedience is binding
upon the creatures because He has made it binding through the tongues of
His prophets, not by reason alone. But f e sent apostles and manifested their
truth by plain miracles, and they brought His commands and forbiddings and
promisings and threatenings. So, belief in them as to what they have
brought is incumbent upon the creation.

THE SECOND WORD OF WITNESSING is witnessing that the apostolate

belongs to the apostle, and that God sent the unlettered Qurayshite
prophet, Muhammad, with his apostolate to the totality of Arabs and
foreigners and Jinn and men. And He abrogated by his law the other laws,
except so much of them as He confirmed; and made him excellent over the
rest of the prophets and made him the Lord of Mankind and declared
incomplete the Faith that consists in witnessing the Unity, which is saying,
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"There is no god except God," so long as there is not joined to that a

witnessing to the Apostle, which is saying, "Muhammad is the Apostle of
God." And He made obligatory upon the creation belief in him, as to all
which he narrated concerning the things of this world and the next. And
that He would not accept the faith of a creature, so long as he did not
believe in that which the Prophet narrated concerning things after death.
The first of that is the question of Munkar and Nakir; these are two awful
and terrible beings who will cause the creature to sit up in his grave,
complete, both soul and body; and they will ask him, "Who is thy Lord, and
what is thy religion (din), and who is thy Prophet?" They are the two testers
in the grave and their questioning is the first testing after death. And that he
should believe in the punishment of the grave--that it is a Verity and that its
judgment upon the body and the soul is just, according to what God wills.
And that he should believe in the Balance--it with the two scales and the
tongue, the magnitude of which is like unto the stages of the heavens and
the earth. In it, deeds are weighed by the power of God Most High; and its
weights in that day will be of the weight of motes and mustard seeds, to
show the exactitude of its justice. The leaves of the good deeds will be
placed in a beautiful form in the scale of light; and then the Balance will be
weighed down by them according to the measure of their degree with God,
by the grace of God. And the leaves of the deeds will be cast in a vile form
into the scale of darkness, and the Balance will be light with them, through
the justice of God. And that he should believe that the Bridge (as-sirat) is a
Verity; it is a bridge stretched over the back of Hell (jahannam), sharper than
a sword and finer than a hair. The feet of the unbelievers slip upon it, by the
decree of God, and fall with them into the Fire. But the feet of believers
stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass into the Abiding
Abode. And that he should believe in the Tank (hawd), to which the people
shall go down, the Tank of Muhammad from which the believers shall drink
before entering the Garden and after passing the Bridge. Whoever drinks of
it a single draught will never thirst again thereafter. Its breadth is a journey
of a month; its water is whiter than milk and sweeter than honey; around it
are ewers in numbers like the stars of heaven; into it flow two canals
from al-Kawthar (Qur. 108). And that he should believe in the Reckoning and
in the distinctions between men in it, him with whom it will go hard in the
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Reckoning and him to whom compassion will be shown therein, and him
who enters the Garden without any reckoning,--these are the honored
(muqarrab). God Most High will ask whomsoever He will of the prophets,
concerning the carrying of His message, and whomsoever He will of the
unbelievers, concerning the rejection of the messengers; and He will ask the
innovators (mubtadi‘s) concerning the Sunna; and the Muslims concerning
works. And that he should believe that the attestors of God's Unity
(muwahhids) will be brought forth from the Fire, after vengeance has been
taken on them, so that there will not remain in Hell an attestor of God's
Unity. And that he should believe in the intercession (shafa‘a) of the
prophets, next of the learned (ulama), next of the martyrs, next of the rest
of the believers--each according to his dignity and rank with God Most High.
And he who remains of the believers, and has no intercessor, shall be
brought forth of the grace of God, whose are Might and Majesty. So there
shall not abide eternally in the Fire a single believer, but whoever has in his
heart the weight of a single grain of faith shall be brought forth therefrom.
And that he should confess the excellence of the Companions--May God be
well pleased with them!--and their rank; and that the most excellent of
mankind, after the Prophet, is Abu Bakr, next Umar, next Uthman, next Ali--
May God be well pleased with them! And that he should think well of all the
Companions and should praise them like as he praises God, whose are Might
and Majesty, and His Apostles. All this is of that which has been handed
down in traditions from the Prophet and in narratives from the followers. He
who confesses all this, relying upon it, is of the People of the Truth and the
Company of the Sunna, and hath separated himself from the band of error
and the sect of innovation (bid‘a). So we ask from God perfection of
certainty and firm standing in the Faith (din) for us and for all Muslims
through His compassion.--lo! He is the Most Compassionate!--and may the
blessing of God be upon our Lord Muhammad and upon every chosen
creature.
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5. ARTICLES OF BELIEF OF NAJM AD-DIN ABU HAFS AN-NASAFI

[A Mataridite who d. A.H. 537. This creed is still used as a text-book in

schools. It is translated from Cureton's edition (London, 1843) with the
assistance of at-Taftazani's commentary (Constantinople, A.H. 1310). The
asterisks mark the points on which al-Mataridi differed from al-Ash‘ari.]

In the name of God, the merciful Compassionator.

The Shaykh, the Imam, Najm ad-Din Abu Hafs Umar ibn Muhammad ibn
Ahmad an-Nasafi--may God have mercy upon him!--said;--The People of
Verity, contradicting the Sceptics [Sufistiqiya, i.e., Sophists] say that the real
natures of things are validly established and that the science of them is
certain.

Further, that the sources of knowledge for mankind are three: the sound
Senses, true Narration (khabar), and Reason (aql). As for the Senses, they
are five: Hearing, Sight, Smell, Taste and Touch, and by each sense you are
informed concerning that for which it is appointed. True Narration, again, is
of two kinds. The one is Narration handed down along a large number of
lines of tradition (mutawatir); that is, it is established by the tongues of a
number of people of whom we cannot imagine that they would agree in a
lie. It compels a knowledge which is of necessity (daruri), such as the
knowledge of departed kings in past times and of distant countries. And the
second is Narration by the Apostle (rasul) aided by miracle [i.e.,
Muhammad], and it compels deduced knowledge (istidlali), and the
knowledge established by it resembles in certainty and fixity the knowledge
established by necessity.

Then as for Reason, it is a cause of knowledge also; and whatever is

established by intuition (badaha) is of necessity, as the knowledge that
everything is greater than its parts; and whatever is established by inference
is acquired knowledge (iktisabi), as the existence of fire from the
 206

appearance of smoke. And the Inner Light (ilham) with the People of Verity
is not one of the causes of knowledge as to the soundness of anything. 5

Further, the world in the totality of its parts is a thing originated (muhdath),
in that it consists of Substances (ayns) and Attributes (arads). The
Substances are what exist in themselves, and a substance is either a
compound, that is a body (jism), or not compounded like an essence
(jawhar), namely a division that is not further divided. And the attributes are
what do not exist in themselves but have a dependent existence in bodies
or essences, such as colors, tastes, conditions (kawns), odors.

The Originator (Muhdith) of the world is God Most High, the One, the
Eternal, the Decreeing, the Knowing, the Hearing, the Seeing, the Willing. He
is not an attribute, nor a body, nor an essence, nor a thing formed, nor a
thing bounded, nor a thing numbered, nor a thing divided, nor a thing
compounded, nor a thing limited; and He is not described by quiddity
(mahiya), nor by modality (kayfiya), and He does not exist in place or time,
and there is nothing that resembles Him and nothing that is outwith His
knowledge and power.

He has qualities (sifat) from all eternity (azali) existing in His essence. They
are not He nor are they any other than He. They are Knowledge and Power
and Life and Strength and Hearing and Seeing and Doing and Creating and
Sustaining and Speech (kalam).

And He, whose Majesty is majestic, speaks with a Word (kalam). This Word is
a quality from all eternity, not belonging to the genus of letters and sounds,
a quality that is incompatible with coming to silence and that has no
weakness.

God Most High speaks with this Word, commanding and prohibiting and
narrating. And the Qur’an is the untreated Word of God, repeated by our
tongues, heard by our ears, written in our copies, preserved in our hearts,
yet not simply a transient state (hal) in these [i.e., the tongues, ears, etc.].

5
This is not the normal doctrine of Islam and the commentators have to explain this passage away. Consult
in the chapters on theology, the whole Sufi development and especially the views of al-Ghazzali. Al-
Mataridi was greatly influenced by Abu Hanifa, who was hostile to mystics. Notice, too, the philosophical
basis and beginning of this creed.
 207

And Creating (takwin) is a quality of God Most High from all eternity, and it is
the Creating of the world and of every one of its parts at the time of its
becoming existent, and this quality of Creating is not the thing created,
according to our opinion.* And Willing is a quality of God Most High from all
eternity, existing in His essence.

And that there is a Vision (ru’ya) of God Most High is allowed by reason and
certified by tradition (naql). A proof on authority has come down with the
affirmation that believers have a Vision of God Most High in Paradise and
that He is seen, not in a place or in a direction or by facing or the joining of
glances or the placing of a distance between him who sees and God Most
High.

And God Most High is the Creator of all actions of His creatures, whether of
unbelief or belief, of obedience or of rebellion; all of them are by the will of
God and His sentence and His conclusion and His decreeing.

And to His creatures belong actions of choice (ikhtiyar),* for which they are
rewarded or punished, and the good in these is by the good pleasure of God
(rida) and the vile in them is not by His good pleasure.*

And the ability to do the action (istita‘a) goes along with the action and is
the essence of the power (qudra) by which the action takes place, and this
word "ability" means the soundness of the causes and instruments and
limbs. And the validity of the imposition of the task (taklif) is based upon this
ability,* and the creature has not a task imposed upon him that is not in his
power.

And the pain which is found in one who is beaten as a consequence of being
beaten by any man, and the state of being broken in glass as a consequence
of its being broken by any man, and such things, all that is created by God
Most High, and the creature has no part in its creation and a slain man is
dead because his appointed time (ajal) has come; and death exists in a slain
man and is created by God Most High, and the appointed time is one. 6

6
A sect of the Mu‘tazilites held that a man could have two ajals, one his end by a natural death appointed
by God, the other his end by a violent death, not so appointed. The "Philosophers" are said to have held
that one ajal would be when the mechanism of the body ceased to work through the failing of its essential
moisture and heat, and another ajal might come through sicknesses and accident generally.
 208

And that which is forbidden (haram) is still Sustenance (rizq), and each one
receives his own Sustenance whether it consists of permitted or of
forbidden things; and let no one imagine that a man shall not eat his
Sustenance or that another than he shall eat his Sustenance.

And God leadeth astray whom He wills and guideth aright whom He wills,
and it is not incumbent upon God Most High to do that which may be best
(aslah) for the creature.

The punishment of the grave for unbelievers and for some rebellious ones of
the believers, and the bliss of the obedient in the grave, and the questioning
by Munkar and Nakir are established by proofs of authority. And the
Quickening of the Dead (ba‘th) is a Verity, and the Weighing is a Verity, and
the Book is a Verity and the Tank (hawd) is a Verity, and the Bridge, as-Sirat,
is a Verity, and the Garden is a Verity, and the Fire is a Verity, and they are
both created, existing, continuing; they shall not pass away and their people
shall not pass away.

A great sin (kabira) does not exclude the creature who believes from the
Belief (iman) and does not make him an unbeliever. And God does not
forgive him who joins another with Himself, but He forgives anything
beneath that to whom He wills, of sins small (saghira) or great.

And there may be punishment for a small and pardon for a great one, if it be
not of the nature of considering lawful what is forbidden, for that is unbelief
(kufr). And the intercession (shafa‘a) of the Apostles and of the excellent on
behalf of those who commit great sins is established.

And those believers who commit great sins do not remain eternally in the
Fire although they die without repentance.

Belief (iman) is assent (tasdiq) to that which comes from God and
confession (iqrar) of it. Then, as for Works (amal), they are acts of obedience
and gradually increase of themselves, but Belief does not increase and does
not diminish. And Belief and al-Islam are one.* And whenever assent and
confession are found in a creature, it is right that he should say, "I am a
believer in truth." And it is not fitting that he should say, "I am a believer if
God will." *
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The happy one sometimes becomes miserable and the miserable one
sometimes becomes happy,* and the changing is in happiness and misery,
and not in making happy and making miserable: for those are both qualities
of God Most High, and there is no changing in Him nor in His qualities.

And in the sending of Apostles (rasuls) is an advantage and God has sent
Apostles of flesh unto flesh with good tidings, warning and explaining to
men the things of the world and of faith, of which they have need. And He
has aided them with miracles (mu‘jizat) which break the order of nature. The
first of the Prophets (nabis) was Adam and the last is Muhammad, Upon
both of them be Peace! A statement of their number has been handed down
in several traditions, but the more fitting course is that there should be no
limiting to a number in naming them; God Most High has said, "Of them are
those concerning whom We have recited to thee, and of them are those
concerning whom We have not recited to thee." And there is no security in a
statement of number against there being entered among them some that
are not of them, or of there being excluded from them some that are of
them. They all give intelligence concerning God Most High, are veracious
and sincere, and the most excellent of the Prophets is Muhammad--Upon
him be Peace!

The Angels are servants of God and work according to His commands. They
are not described as masculine or feminine.

And God has books which He has revealed to His Prophets, and in them are
His commands and His promises.

The Night Journey (mi‘raj) of the Apostle of God--Upon whom be Blessing

and Peace! while awake, in the body, to Heaven, then to what place God
Most High willed of the Exalted Regions, is a Verity.

The Wonders (karamat) of the Saints (walis) are a Verity. And a Wonder on
the part of a Saint appears by way of a contradiction of the ordinary course
of nature, such as passing over a great distance in a short time, and the
appearing of meat and drink and clothing at a time of need, and walking
upon the water and in the air, and the speech of stones and of beasts, and
the warding off of an evil that is approaching, and the guarding of him who
is anxious from enemies, and other things of the same kind. And such a
 210

thing is to be reckoned as an evidentiary miracle (mu‘jiza) on behalf of the

Apostle followed by the Saint on whose part the wonder appears. For it is
evident by it that he is a Saint and he could never be a Saint unless he were
right in his religion and worship and in abiding by the message committed to
his Apostle.

The most excellent of mankind after the Prophets are Abu Bakr, the Very
Veracious (as-Siddiq), then Umar, the Divider (al-Faruq), then Uthman, he of
the Two Lights (Dhu-n-Nurayn), then Ali--The good-will of God be upon them!
Their Khalifates were in this order, and the Khalifate extended to thirty
years; then, thereafter, came kings and princes.

The Muslims cannot do without a leader (Imam) who shall occupy himself
with the enforcing of their decisions, and in maintaining their boundaries
and guarding their frontiers, and equipping their armies, and receiving their
alms, and putting down robberies and thieving and highwaymen, and
maintaining the Friday services and the Festivals, and removing quarrels that
fall between creatures, and receiving evidence bearing on legal claims, and
marrying minors, male and female, and those who have no guardians, and
dividing booty. And it is necessary that the leader should be visible, not
hidden and expected to appear (muntazar), and that he should be of the
tribe of Quraysh and not of any other. And he is not assigned exclusively to
the sons of Hashim nor to the children of Ali. And it is not a condition that he
should be protected by God from sin (isma), nor that he should be the most
excellent of the people of his time, but it is a condition that he should have
administrative ability, should be a good governor and be able to carry out
decrees and to guard the restrictive ordinances (hadds) of Islam and to
protect the wronged against him who wrongs him. And he is not to be
deposed from the leadership on account of immorality or tyranny.

Prayer is allowable behind anyone whether pure or a sinner. And we give the
salutation of Peace to the pure and to the sinner.

And we abstain from the mention of the Companions (sahibs) of the

Prophet except with good.
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And we bear witness that Paradise is for the ten to whom the Prophet--God
bless him and give him Peace!--gave good tidings of Paradise (al-asharatu-l-
mubashshara).

And we approve the wiping (mash) of the inner-shoes (khuffs) both at home
and when on a journey.

And we do not regard nabidh as forbidden.

And the Saint does not reach the level of the Prophets. And the creature
does not come to a point where commands and prohibitions and the details
of the statutes in their out-ward sense (zahir) fall away from him; and the
turning aside from these to the views which the People of the Inner
Meaning (batin) assert is a deviation (ilhad) through unbelief.

And feeling safe from God is unbelief. And despairing of God is unbelief. And
rejection of the statutes and contempt for the law is unbelief. And believing
a diviner (kahin) in what he tells of the Unseen (ghayb) is unbelief. And what
does not exist (ma‘dum) is known of God Most High just as what exists
(mawjud) is known of Him and it [i.e., what does not exist] is neither a thing
(shay) nor an object of vision (mar’an).

And in prayer of the living for the dead, and in alms offered for them there is
an advantage to them. And God Most High answers prayers and supplies
needs.

And what the Prophet has reported of the conditions of the last day (as-
sa‘a), of the appearance of ad-Dajjal and of the beast of the earth [cf.
Revelations xiii, 11 ff.] and of Yajuj and Majuj and the descent of Isa from
heaven and the rising of the sun in the west, that is verity.

And the Mujtahids sometimes err and sometimes hit the mark. And the
Apostles of mankind are more excellent than the Apostles of the angels; and
the Apostles of the angels are more excellent than the generality of
mankind; and the generality of mankind of the true believers is more
excellent than the generality of the angels.
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6. THE CREED CALLED THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE COMMONALTY IN

THE SCIENCE OF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY, BY MUHAMMAD AL-
FUDALI

[Translated from the Arabic text of Cairo, A.H. 1315, with the commentary of
al-Bayjuri.]

In the name of God, the merciful Compassionator. Praise belongeth unto

God who alone bringeth into existence, and blessing and peace be upon our
Lord Muhammad, his family and companions, possessors of beauty and
guidance.

To proceed: The creature who stands in need of the mercy of his exalted
Lord, Muhammad ibn ash-Shafi‘i al-Fudali says: One of the brethren asked
me that I should compose a tractate on the divine unity (tawhid), and I
agreed to that, following the example of the most learned Shaykh, as-
Sanusi, [d. 895,] in the establishing of proofs, except that I adduced each
proof (dalil) in connection with the doctrine that was to be proved, and
added to it an exposition on account of my knowledge of the limitations of
that student. So, in the ascription of praise to God Most High, it became a
tractate, useful and excellent for the establishing of that which is in it. And I
called it, THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE PEOPLE IN THAT WHICH IS NECESSARY
TO THEM OF THE SCIENCE OF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY (kalam). And I pray
God Most High that He will make it useful, for He is my sufficiency, and
excellent is the Guardian.

Know that it is incumbent upon every Muslim that he should know fifty
articles of belief (aqidas), and for each article that he should know a proof,
general (ijmali) or detailed (tafsili). Some say that it is required that he
should know a detailed proof, but the common opinion is that a general
proof suffices for each article of the fifty. An example of a detailed proof is
when someone says, "What is the proof of the existence (wujud) of God?"
that the answer should be, "These created things." That the asker should
then say, "Do the created things prove the existence of God on the side of
their possibility or on the side of their existence after non-existence
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(adam)?" and that his question should be answered. And if the further
question is not answered, but the only answer is, "These created things,"
and the answerer does not know whether it is on the side of their possibility
or of their existence after non-existence, then the proof is said to be
general; but it is sufficient according to the common position. And with
regard to taqlid (blind acceptance), which is that fifty articles are known but
no proof of then is known, either general or detailed, the learned differ.
Some say that it does not suffice, and that the mukallad (blind accepter) is
an unbeliever (kafir). Ibn al-Arabi [d. 543] held this and as-Sanusi, and the
latter gave in his commentary on his kubra a lengthy refutation of those who
hold that taqlid is sufficient. Yet there is a report that he retired from this
position, and acknowledged the sufficiency of taqlid; but I have never seen
in his books anything but the opinion that it does not suffice.

INTRODUCTION

Know that an understanding of the fifty following articles must be based

upon three things--the necessary (wajib), the impossible (mustahil), and the
possible (ja’iz). The necessary is that the non-existence of which cannot be
apprehended by the intellect (aql), that is, the intellect cannot affirm its non-
existence, as boundary to a body (jirm), i.e., its taking up a certain measure
of space (faragh). An example of a body is a tree or a stone. Then, whenever
a person says to you, that a tree, for example, does not take up room
(mahall) in the earth, your intellect cannot affirm that, for its taking up room
is a necessary thing, the absence of which your intellect cannot affirm. The
impossible is that the existence of which cannot be apprehended; that is,
the intellect cannot affirm its existence. Then, whenever anyone says that
such a body is bare of motion and rest at the same time, your intellect
cannot affirm that, because being bare of motion and rest at the same time
is an impossibility, the occurrence and existence of which the intellect
cannot affirm, and whenever it is said that weakness (ajz) is impossible in
God, the meaning is that the occurrence or existence of weakness in God is
unthinkable. So, too, with the other impossibilities. And the possible is that
the existence of which at one time, and the non-existence at another, the
intellect can affirm, as the existence of a child of Zayd's. When, then,
someone says that Zayd has a child, your intellect acknowledges the
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possibility of the truth of that; and whenever he says that Zayd has no child,
your intellect acknowledges the possibility of the truth of that. So the
existence and the non-existence of a child of Zayd is possible; the intellect
can believe in its existence or in its non-existence. And whenever it is said
that God's sustaining Zayd with a dinar is a possibility, the meaning is that
the intellect assents to the existence of that sustaining (rizq) at one time
and to its non-existence at another.

On these three distinctions, then, is based the science of the articles of

belief; and these three are necessary for every mukallaf [one who has a task
imposed upon him; in this case of religious duty], male and female, for that
upon which the necessary is based is necessary. The Imam al-Haramayn (d.
478) even held that an understanding of these three constituted reason
itself and that he who did not know the meaning of necessary, impossible
and possible, was not a reasoning being. So, whenever it is said here that
Power is necessary (wajib) in God, the meaning is that the intellect cannot
affirm its non-existence, because the necessary is that the non-existence of
which the intellect cannot affirm, as has preceded. But necessary (wajib,
incumbent) in the sense of that the not doing of which is punished, is an
idea which does not enter into the science of the divine Unity. So, do not let
the matter be confused for you. It is true that if one says that belief in the
Power of God is incumbent (wajib) on the mukallaf, the meaning is that he is
rewarded for that and punished for omitting that. Thus there is a distinction
between saying that belief in such and such is incumbent and that the
knowledge, for example, is necessary. For when it is said that knowledge is
necessary in God, the meaning is that the intellect cannot affirm the non-
existence of knowledge in God. But when it is said that belief in that
knowledge is incumbent, the meaning is that belief in it is rewarded and lack
of belief punished. So, apply thyself to the distinction between the two and
be not of those who regard taqlid in the articles of Religion as right, that so
your faith (iman) should differ from the truth and you should abide in the
Fire, according to those who hold that taqlid does not suffice. As-Sanusi
said, "A person is not a Believer when he says, 'I hold by the Articles and will
not abandon them though I be cut in pieces;' nay, he is not a Believer until
he knows each Article of the fifty, along with its proof." And this science of
theology must be studied first of all sciences, as may be gathered from the
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commentary [by at-Taftazani, d. 791] on as-Sanusi's Articles; for he made this

science a foundation on which other things are built. So a judgment as to
anyone's ceremonial ablution (wudu) or prayer is not valid unless the person
in question knows these articles or, on the other hand, holds them without
proof.

Now, let us state to you the fifty articles shortly, before stating them in
detail. Know, then, that twenty qualities are necessary in God Most High,
that twenty are impossible in Him and that one is possible. This makes up
forty-one. And in the case of the Apostles, four qualities are necessary, four
impossible and one possible. This makes up the fifty. And there shall come
an accurate account of doctrines along with the statement of them, if it be
the will of God Most High.

The first of the qualities necessary in God is existence (wujud); and there is a
difference of opinion as to its meaning. All except the Imam al-Ash‘ari and
his followers hold that existence is the state (hal) necessary to the essence
so long as the essence abides; and this state has no cause (illa). And the
meaning of it being a state is that it does not attain to the degree of an
entity (mawjud) and does not fall to the degree of a non-entity (ma‘dum), so
that it should be non-existence pure, but is half way between an entity and a
non-entity. So the existence of Zayd, for example, is a state necessary to his
essence; that is, it cannot be separated from his essence. And when it is said
that it has no cause, the meaning is that it does not originate in anything, as
opposed to Zayd's potentiality (qadir, powerful), for example, which
originates in his power (qudra). So Zayd's potentiality and his existence are
two states which subsist in his essence, un-perceived by any of the five
senses; only, the first has a cause in which it originates, and it is power, and
the second has no cause. This is the description of a personal state (hal
nafsi) and every state subsisting in an essence, without a cause, is a personal
quality (sifa nafsiya). It is that without which the essence is unthinkable; that
is, the essence cannot be apprehended by the intellect and comprehended
except through its personal quality, like limitation for a body. For, if you
apprehend and comprehend a body, you have comprehended that it is
limited. So, according to this doctrine--that existence is a state--the essence
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of God is not His existence and the essences of the created things are not
their existences. But al-Ash‘ari and his followers hold that existence is the
self (ayn) of an entity, and according to their view the existence of God is
the self of His essence and not an addition to it externally, and the existence
of a created thing is the self of its essence. And, on this view, it is not clear
how existence can be reckoned as a quality, because existence is the self of
the essence, and a quality, on the other hand, as we have seen already, is
something else than the essence. But if he makes existence a quality, then
the thing is plain and the meaning that existence is necessary in God,
according to the first view, is that the personal quality is a state established
in God; and its meaning, on the second view, is that the essence of God is an
entity with external reality, so that if the veil were removed from us we
would see it. The essence of God, then, is a reality; only, its existence is
something else than it, on the one view, and is it, on the other.

And the proof of the existence of God is the origin (huduth) of the world;
that is, its existence after non-existence. The world consists of bodies (jirms)
like essences; and accidents (arads) like motion, and rest and colors. And the
origin of the world is a proof of the existence of God only because it is not
sound reasoning that it should originate through itself without someone
bringing it into existence. Before it existed, its existence equalled its non-
existence; then, when it entered existence and its non-existence ceased, we
know that its existence overbalanced its non-existence. But this existence
had previously equalled the non-existence; and it is not sound reasoning
that it could overbalance the non-existence through itself; so that it is clear
that there must have been one who caused the overbalancing, other than
itself, and it is He that brought it into existence; for it is impossible that one
of two equal things could overbalance the other without an overbalancer.
For example, before Zayd exists it is possible that he may come into
existence in such and such a year and also that he may remain in non-
existence. So, his existence is equal to his non-existence. So, then, when he
exists and his non-existence ceases, in the time in which he exists, we know
that his existence is by a bringer-into-existence and not through himself. The
proof, in short, is that you say:--The world, consisting of bodies and
accidents, is a thing originated (hadith), i.e., an entity after non-existence.
 217

And every originated thing cannot help but have an originator (muhdith).
Therefore, the world must have had an originator.

This is what can be gained by an intellectual proof. But as for the Originator
being named by the Glorious and Lofty Expression [i.e., Allah, God] or the
other Names (asma), knowledge of that is to be gained from the Prophets
only. So note this point carefully and also the proof which has preceded,
that the originating of the world is a proof of the existence of Him Most
High.

But as for the proof that the world has had an origin, know that the world
consists of bodies and accidents only, as has preceded. And the accidents,
like motion and rest, are originated, because you observe their changing
from existence to non-existence and from non-existence to existence. You
see it is so in the motion of Zayd. His motion is lacking if he is at rest; and his
rest is lacking if he is in motion. Then his rest, which comes after his motion,
exists after that it has been lacking through motion; and his motion, which
comes after his rest, exists after that it has been lacking through his rest.
And existence after non-existence means having an origin. And bodies are
inseparable from attributes, because they are never free from either motion
or rest. And whatever is inseparable from a thing having origin must have
origin; i.e., must be an entity after non-existence. So, the bodies are
originated also, like the attributes. The proof, in short, is that you say: Bodies
are inseparable from attributes and these have an origin; everything that is
inseparable from that which has an origin, itself has an origin; therefore,
bodies have an origin. And the origin of the two things--bodies and
attributes--that is their existence after non-existence, is a proof of the
existence of Him Most High, because everything having an origin must have
an originator, and there is no originator of the world save God Most High
alone, who has no partner (sharik) as shall be shown in the proof of His
Unity. This, then, is the general proof, a knowledge of which is incumbent
upon every mukallaf, male and female, according to the opinion of Ibn al-
Arabi and as-Sanusi, who hold those who do not know it to be unbelievers.
So, beware lest there be a contradiction in your faith.

The second Quality necessary in God is Priority (qidam); its meaning is lack of
beginning. And the meaning of God's being Prior (qadim) is that there was
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no beginning to His existence, as opposed to Zayd, for example. Zayd's

existence had a beginning and it was the creation from the drop from which
he was created. And there is a difference of opinion whether Prior
and Azali (eternal with respect to past time) mean the same or not. Those
who hold that they mean the same, define them as that which has no
beginning, and explain "that which" by thing (shay). That is, prior
and azali are the thing which has no beginning; so the essence of God and
His qualities are included. And those who hold that their meaning is different
define prior as the entity which had no beginning and azali as that which had
no beginning, covering thus both entity and nonentity, So azali is broader
than prior, but they both come together in the essence of God and His
existential qualities. The essence of God is azali and His Power (qudra)
is azali. But only azali is said of the states (hals) like God's being powerful, in
accordance with the doctrine of the states. For God's being powerful is
called azali, in accordance with that doctrine, and is not called prior, because
in prior there must be existence, and "being powerful" does not rise to the
level of existence [to being an entity], but is only a state (hal).

And the proof of God's Priority is that if He were not Prior He would be a
thing originated (hadith), because there is no medium between the prior
and the thing originated; to everything of which priority is denied, origin
belongs. But if God were a thing originated, He would need an originator,
and His originator would need an originator, and so on. Then, if the
originators did not coincide, there would be the Endless Chain (tasalsul),
that is a sequence of things, one after another to infinity; and the Endless
Chain is impossible. And if the series of originators comes to an end by it
being said that the originator of God was originated by Him, then we have
the Circle (dawr) and it is that one thing depends on another thing which
again depends on the first. For if God had an originator, He would depend
on this originator; but the hypothesis is that God originated this originator
and so the originator depends on Him. But the Circle is impossible; that is, its
existence is unthinkable. And that which leads to the Circle and to the Chain,
both being impossible, involves the originating of God. So, the originating of
God is impossible; for what involves an impossibility is impossible. The proof,
in short, is that you say, "If God were other than Prior, through being a thing
originated, He would have need of an originator. Then the Circle or the
 219

Chain would be unavoidable; but they are both impossible. So, the
originating of God is impossible and His Priority is established; and that is
what has been sought." This is the general proof of the Priority of God, and
by it the mukallaf escapes from the noose of taqlid, the remainer in which
will abide eternally in the Fire, according to the opinion of Ibn al-Arabi and
as-Sanusi, as has preceded.

The third Quality necessary in God is Continuance (baqa). The meaning of it

is lack of termination of the existence; and the meaning of God's being
continuing is that there is no end to His existence. And the proof of God's
continuance is that if it were possible that any lack could be joined to Him,
then He would be a thing originated and would need an originator and then
the Circle or the Chain would necessarily follow. A definition of each one of
these two has preceded in the proof of Priority and in the explanation that
to a thing with which non-existence is possible, priority must be denied. For
the existence of everyone to whom non-existence is joined is possible, and
everything whose existence is possible is a thing originated, and everything
originated requires an originator. But Priority has been established for God
by the preceding proof, and non-existence is impossible for everything for
which Priority has been established. So the proof of Continuance in God is
the same as the proof of Priority. That proof, in short, is that you say, "If
Continuance is not necessary in Him, then Priority must be negated of Him.
But Priority cannot be negated on account of the preceding proof." This is
the general proof of Continuance, a knowledge of which is incumbent on
every individual. And similarly a knowledge of every article is necessary and
of its general proof. Then, if some of the articles are known with their
proofs, and the rest are not known with their proofs, that is not sufficient
according to the opinion of those who do not regard taqlid as sufficient.

The fourth Quality necessary in God is difference (mukhalafa) from

originated things. That is, from created things (makhluqat), for God is
different from every created thing, men, Jinn, angels and the rest; and it is
not good that He should be described with the descriptions which apply to
created things, as walking, sitting, having members of the body, for He is far
removed (munazzah) from members of the body, as mouth, eye, ear and the
like. Then, from everything that is in your mind of length and breadth and
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shortness and fatness, God is different; He has removed Himself far from all
descriptions which apply to the creation. And the proof of the necessity of
this difference in God is that if any originated thing resembled Him, that is, if
it were laid down that God could be described with any of the things with
which an originated thing is described, then He would be an originated
thing. And if God were an originated thing, then He would need an
originator, and His originator, another originator, and so we would come
necessarily to the circle or the chain, and both of these are impossible. This
proof, in short, is that you say, "If God resembles a created thing in anything,
He is an originated thing, because what is possible in one of two things
resembling each other, is possible in the other. But that God should be
originated is impossible, for priority is necessary in Him. And when being
originated is denied in Him, His difference from created things stands fast
and there is absolutely no resemblance between Him and the originated
things. This is the general proof, the knowledge of which is necessary, as has
preceded.

The fifth Quality necessary in God is self-subsistence (qiyam bin-nafs). That is

in the essence; and its meaning is that there is independence of
a locus (mahall, subject) and a specifier (mukhassis). The locus is the essence
and the specifier is the bringer-into-existence (mujid); then the meaning of
God's subsisting in Himself is that He is independent of an essence in which
He may subsist, or of a bringer-into-existence; for He is the bringer-into-
existence of all things. The proof that He subsists in Himself is that you say,
"If God had need of a locus, that is an essence, in which He might subsist, as
whiteness has need of an essence in which it may subsist, He would be a
quality, as whiteness, for example, is a quality. But it is not sound to say of
Him that He is a quality, for He is described by qualities, and a quality is not
described by qualities, so He is not a quality. And if He had need of a bringer-
into-existence, He would be an originated thing, and His originator would be
an originated thing also, and the Circle or the Chain would necessarily
follow. Then it stands fast that He is the absolutely independent, that is, He
is independent of everything. But the created thing that is independent is
independent in a limited sense only; that is, of one thing in place of another.
And may God rule thy guidance.
 221

The sixth Quality in God is Unity (wihdaniya). It is unity in essence and

qualities and acts in the sense of absence of multiplicity. And the meaning of
God's being one in His essence is that His essence is not compounded of
parts, and this compounding is called internal quantity (kamm muttasil). And
in the sense that there is not in existence or in possibility an essence which
resembles the essence of God, this impossibility of resemblance is called
external quantity (kamm munfasil). The unity, then, in the essence denies
both quantities, external and internal. And the meaning of God's Oneness in
qualities is that He has not two qualities agreeing in name and meaning, like
two Powers, or two Knowledges or two Wills--for He has only one Power
and one Will and one Knowledge, in opposition to Abu Sahl, who held that
He had knowledges to the number of the things known. And this, I mean
multiplicity in qualities, is called internal quantity in qualities. Or the sense is,
that no one has a quality resembling a quality of God. And this, I mean
anyone possessing a quality, etc., is called external quantity in qualities.
Oneness, then, in qualities, negates quantity in them, internal and external.
And the meaning of God's Oneness in acts is that no created thing possesses
an act, for God is the creator of the acts of created things, prophets, angels
and the rest. And as for what happens when an individual dies or falls into
pain on opposing himself to a saint (wali), that is by the creation of God,
who creates it when the saint is angry with the man who opposes him. Do
not then explain Oneness in acts by saying that no other than God has an act
like God's act, for that involves that some other than God has an act, but
that it is not like the act of God. That is false. God it is who is the creator of
all acts. What comes from you by way of movement of the hand, when you
strike Zayd, for example, is by the creation of God. He has said (Qur. 37, 99),
"God created you, and what do ye do?" And another than God being
possessor of an act is called external quantity in acts.

So the unity necessary in God denies the five impossible quantities. Internal
quantity in the essence makes the essence a compound of parts; external
quantity means that there is an essence which resembles it. Internal
quantity in the qualities is that God has two Powers, for example; external
quantity in them means that someone else has a quality which resembles
one of His qualities. External quantity in acts means that some other than
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God possesses an act. These five quantities deny the unity necessary in God.
The meaning of quantity is number (adad).

The proof that Unity is necessary in God is the existence of the world. If God
had a partner (sharik) in divinity (uluhiya), the case could not be in doubt.
Either they would agree on the existence of the world, in that one of them
would say, "I will cause the world to exist," and the other would say, "I will
cause it to exist along with thee, that we may help one another in it." Or
they would disagree, and one of them would say, "I will cause the world to
exist by my power," and the other, "I will that the existence be lacking."
Then, if they agreed upon the existence of the world in that both of them
together caused it to exist, and it existed through their action, that would
necessarily involve the coincidence of two impressors upon one impression,
which is impossible. And if they disagreed, it is plain that the will of one
either would be carried out or it would not be carried out. If the will of one,
rather than the other, is carried out, then the other whose will is not carried
out must be weaker. But our hypothesis was that he was equal in divinity to
the one whose will was carried out. So whenever weakness is established in
the case of the one, it is established in the case of the other, for he is like the
other. And if the wills of both are not carried out, they are both weak. And
upon every alternative, that they agree or differ, the existence of a single
thing of the world is impossible; because if they agree on its existence, there
necessarily follows the coincidence of two impressers upon one impression
if their will is carried out, and that is impossible. So the carrying out of their
will is not affected, and it is not possible that a single thing of the world
should come into existence then. And if they disagree and the will of one of
them is carried out, the other is weak. But he is his like. So it is not possible
that there should come into existence a single thing of this world, for he is
weak. So the God is not except one. And if they differ and their will is not
carried out, they are weak and not able to cause the existence of a thing of
the world. But the world exists, by common witness (mushahada). So it
stands fast that the God is one; and that was what was sought. So the
existence of the world is proof of the Unity of God and that He has no
partner in any act, and no second cause in an action. He is the independent
(al-Ghani), the absolutely independent.
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And from this proof it may be known that there is no impression, by fire or a
knife or eating, upon anything, consisting of burning or cutting or satiety,
but God makes the being burnt in a thing which fire touches, when it
touches it, and being cut in a thing with which a knife is brought into
contact, when it is brought into contact with it, and satiety at eating and
satisfaction at drinking. And he who holds that fire burns by its nature (tab),
and water satisfies by its nature, and so on, is an unbeliever (kafir) by
agreement (ijma). And he who holds that it burns by a power (quwa)
created in it by God, is ignorant and corrupt, because he knows not the true
nature (haqiqa) of Unity.

This is the general proof a knowledge of which is incumbent upon every

individual, male and female: and he who knows it not is an unbeliever,
according to as-Sanusi and al-Arabi. And may God rule thy guidance.

And Priority and Continuance and Difference from originated things and
Self-Subsistence and Unity are negative qualities (sifat salabiya), that is, their
meaning is negation and exclusion, for each of them excludes from God
what does not be-seem Him.

The seventh Quality necessary in God is Power (qudra). It is a quality which

makes an impression on a thing that is capable of existence or non-
existence. So it comes into connection (ta‘allaqa) with a non-entity and
makes it an entity, as it came into connection with you before you existed.
And it comes into connection with an entity and reduces it to a non-entity,
as it comes into contact with a body which God desires should become a
non-entity, that is, a not-thing (la shay). This connection is called
accomplished (tanjizi) in the sense that it is actual (bil-fi‘l), and this
accomplished connection is a thing that takes place (hadith). But this quality
has also an eternal, potential connection (saluhi qadim), and it is its
potentiality from eternity of bringing into existence. It is potential in eternity
to make Zayd tall or short or broad, or give him knowledge; but its
accomplished connection is conditioned by the state in which Zayd is. So it
has two connections; one eternal, potential, which has been described, and
one accomplished, happening. The last is its connection with a non-entity,
when it makes it an entity; and with an entity, when it makes it a non-entity.
And this, I mean its connection with an entity or a non-entity, is a real
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(haqiqi) connection. But it has also a figurative (majazi) connection. That is,
its connection with an entity after it has become so and before it has
become a non-entity, as it is connected with us after we have come to exist
and before we have ceased to exist. It is called the connection of grasping
(ta‘alluqu-l-qabdati) in the sense that the entity is in the grasp (qabda) of the
Power of God. If God will, He makes it remain an entity; and if He will, He
reduces it to non-entity. And its connection with the non-entity before that
God wills its existence is like its connection with Zayd at the time of the
Flood (tufan), for example; it also is a connection of grasping in the sense
that the non-entity is in the grasp of the Power of God. If God wills, He
makes it remain in non-existence, and if He wills, He brings it out into
existence. And similar is its connection with us after our death and before
the resurrection (ba‘th). It, too, is called a connection of grasping in the
sense of what has preceded. So the quality of Power has seven connections:
(1) eternal, (2) connection of grasping (that is, its connection with us before
God wills our existence), (3) actual connection (that is, God's bringing the
thing into existence), (4) connection of grasping (that is, connection with a
thing after existence and before God has willed non-existence), (5) actual
connection (that is, God's making a thing a non-entity), (6) connection of
grasping after non-existence and before the resurrection, (7) actual
connection (that is, God's making us exist on the day of resurrection).

But the real connections of these are two; God's bringing into existence and
bringing into non-existence. This is a detailed statement; and a general
statement would be that God's Power has two connections--as is commonly
accepted--a potential and an accomplished; but the accomplished is limited
to actual bringing into existence and non-existence. And the connection of
grasping is not to be described as accomplished, nor as eternal. And what
has preceded about this quality connecting with existence and non-
existence is the opinion of the multitude on the subject. But some hold that
it does not connect with non-existence; that whenever God desires the non-
existence of an individual, He takes away from him the aids (imdadat) which
are the cause of his continuance.

The eighth Quality necessary in God is Will (irada). It is the quality which
specifies the possible with one of the things possible to it. For example,
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tallness and shortness are possible to Zayd; then Will specifies him with
one,--tallness, say. Power brings tallness out of non-existence into existence.
So Will specifies and Power brings out. And the possibilities (mumkinat) with
which Power and Will connect are six: (1) existence, (2) non-existence, (3)
qualities, like tallness and shortness, (4) times, (5) places, (6) directions.

And the possibilities are called "the mutual opposers" (mutaqabilat),

existence opposes non-existence and tallness opposes shortness and
direction upward opposes direction downward, and one place, like Egypt,
opposes another place, like Syria. And this, in short, means that it is possible
in the case of Zayd, for example, that he should remain in non-existence and
also that he should enter existence at this time. Then, whenever he enters
existence, Will has specified existence instead of non-existence, and Power
has brought out existence. And it would have been possible that he might
have entered existence at the time of the Flood (tufan) or at some other
time; so that which specifies his existence at this time instead of any other is
Will. And it is possible that he should be tall or short; then that which
specifies his tallness instead of shortness is Will. And it is possible that he
should be in the direction upward, then that which specifies him in the
direction downward is Will. And Power and Will are two qualities subsisting
in God's essence--two entities; if the veil were removed from us we could
see them. They have connection with the possible only; but none with the
impossible, such as a partner for God. He is far removed from that! Nor with
the necessary, like the essence of God and His qualities. Ignorance is the
saying of those who hold that God has power to take a son (walad); for
Power has no connection with the impossible and taking a son is impossible.
But it should not be said that because He has no power to take a son, He is
therefore weak. We say that weakness would follow only if the impossible
were of that which is allotted to Power. But Power has not been connected
with that, seeing that nothing is allotted to it except the possible. And Will
has two connections, one eternally potential, and it is its potentiality to
specify from all eternity. So, in the case of the tall or the short Zayd, it is
possible that he might be otherwise than what he is, so far as relationship to
the potentiality of Will is concerned. For Will is potential that Zayd should be
a Sultan or a scavenger, so far as the potential connection is concerned. And
Will has also an eternal accomplished connection, and it is the specifying by
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God of a thing with a quality which it possesses. So God specified Zayd from
all eternity by His Will with the knowledge that he possesses. And his being
specified with knowledge, for example, is eternal and is called an eternal
accomplished connection. And the potentiality of Will to specify him with
knowledge, etc., in relationship to the essence of Will, cutting off all
consideration of actual specifying, is called an eternal potential connection.
And some say that Will has also a temporal, accomplished connection. It is,
for example, the specifying of Zayd with tallness, when he is actually
brought into existence. According to this view, Will has three connections;
but the truth is that this third is not a connection but is the making manifest
of the eternal, accomplished connection.

And the connection of Power and Will is common to every possible thing to
the extent that the affections of the mind (khatarat) which arise in the mind
of an individual are specified by the Will of God and created by His Power as
the Shaykh al-Malawi [Ahmad al-Malawi, d. 1181] has said in some of his
books. But know that the attributing of specifying to Will and of bringing
out into existence to Power is only metaphorical; for the true specifier is
God by His Will and the true producer and bringer-into-existence is God by
His Power. Then, in the case of the saying of the common people that Power
does such and such to so and so, if it is meant that the doing belongs to
Power actually, or to it and to the essence of God, that is unbelief (kufr).
Rather, the doing belongs to the essence of God by His Power.

The ninth Quality necessary in God is Knowledge (ilm). It is an eternal quality

subsisting in the essence of God, an entity by which what is known is
revealed with a revealing of the nature of complete comprehension (ihata),
without any concealment having preceded. It is connected with the
necessary, the possible and the impossible. He knows His own essence and
qualities by His Knowledge. And He knows impossibilities in the sense that
He knows that a partner is impossible to Him and that, if one existed,
corruption would accrue from it. And Knowledge has an eternal,
accomplished connection only. For God knows these things that have been
mentioned from all eternity with a complete knowledge that is not by way
of opinion (zann) or doubt (shakk); because opinion and doubt are
impossibilities in God. And the meaning of the saying, "without any
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concealment having preceded," is that He knows things eternally; He is not

first ignorant of them and then knowing them. But an originated being
(hadith) is ignorant of a thing and then knows it. And God's Knowledge has
no potential connection in the sense that there is a potentiality that such
and such should be revealed by it, because that involves that the thing in
question has not been actually revealed, and lack of actual revealing of it is
ignorance.

The tenth Quality necessary in God is Life (hayah). It is a quality which in him
in whom it subsists validates perception, as knowledge and hearing and
seeing: that is, it is valid that he should be described therewith. But being
characterized by actual perception does not necessarily follow from
possessing the quality, Life. And it is not connected with anything, entity or
non-entity.

The proof that Knowledge and Power and Will and Life are necessary is the
existence of the created things. Because, if any one of these four is denied,
why does the created world exist? So, since the created things exist, we
know that God is to be described by these qualities. And the reason of the
existence of the created things depending on these four is this. He who
makes a thing does not make it except when he knows the thing. Then he
wills the thing which he would make and, after his willing, he busies himself
with making it by his power. Further, it is known that the maker cannot but
be living. And Knowledge and Will and Power are called qualities of
impression (sifat at-ta’thir), for making an impression depends upon them.
Because he who wills a thing must have knowledge of it before he aims at it;
then, after he has aimed at it, he busies himself with doing it. For example,
when there is something in your house and you wish to take it, your
knowledge precedes your wish to take it, and after your wish to take it, you
take it actually. The connection of these qualities, then, is in a certain order,
in the case of an originated being; first comes the knowledge of the thing,
then the aiming at it, then the doing. But in the case of God, on the other
hand, there is no sequence in His qualities, except in our comprehension; in
that, Knowledge comes first, then Will, then Power. But as for the making of
an impression externally, there is no sequence in the qualities of God. It is
not said that Knowledge comes into actual connection, then Will, then
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Power; because all that belongs to originated beings. Order is only

according to our comprehensions.

The eleventh and twelfth Qualities of God are Hearing (sam) and Seeing
(basar). These are two qualities subsisting in the essence of God and
connected with every entity; that is, by them is revealed every entity,
necessary or possible. And Hearing and Seeing are connected with the
essence of God and His qualities.; that is, His essence and qualities are
revealed to Him by His Seeing and Hearing, besides the revealing of His
Knowledge. And God hears the essences of Zayd and Amr and a wall and He
sees them. And He hears the sound of the possessor of a sound and He sees
it, that is the sound. Then, if you say, "Hearing a sound is plain, but hearing
the essence of Zayd and the essence of a wall is not plain; so, too, the
connection of seeing with sounds, for sounds are heard only," we reply,
"Belief in this is incumbent upon us because these two qualities are
connected with every entity; but the how (kayfiya) of the connection is
unknown to us. God hears the essence of Zayd, but we do not know how
hearing is connected with that essence. And it is not meant that He hears
the walking of the essence of Zayd, for the hearing of his walking enters into
the hearing of all the sounds (sawt), but what is meant is that He hears the
essence of Zayd and his body (juththa), besides hearing his walking. But we
do not know how the hearing of God is connected with the person (nafs) of
the essence. This is what is binding upon every individual, male and female--
Our trust is in God!

The proof of Hearing and Seeing is the saying of God that He is a Hearer and
Seer. And know that the connection of Hearing and Seeing in relation to
originated things is an eternal, potential connection before the existence of
these, and after their existence it is a temporal, accomplished connection.
That is, after their existence, they are revealed to God by His Hearing and
Seeing besides the revealing of His Knowledge. So they have two
connections. And in relation to God and His qualities, the connection is
eternal, accomplished, in the sense that His essence and His qualities are
revealed to Him from all eternity through His Hearing and Seeing. So, God
hears His essence and all His existential qualities [all except the states and
the negative qualities], Power, Hearing, and all the rest; but we do not know
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how the connection is, and He sees His essence and His qualities of
existence, Power, Seeing and the rest, but again we do not know how the
connection is. The preceding statement that Hearing and Seeing are
connected with every entity is the opinion of as-Sanusi and those who
follow him; it is the preponderating one. But it is said, also, that Hearing is
only connected with sounds and Seeing with objects of vision. And God's
Hearing is not with ear or ear-hole, and His Seeing is not with eyeball or
eyelid.

The thirteenth Quality of God is Speech (kalam). It is an eternal quality,

subsisting in God's essence, not a word or sound, and far removed from
order of preceding and following, from inflection and structure, opposed to
the speech of originated beings. And by the Speech that is necessary to God
is not meant the Glorious Expressions (lafz) revealed to the Prophet,
because these are originated and the quality that subsists in the essence of
God is eternal. And these embrace preceding and following, inflection and
chapters and verses; but the eternal quality is bare of all these things. It has
no verses or chapters or inflections, because such belong to the speech
which embraces letters and sounds, and the eternal quality is far removed
from letters and sounds, as has preceded. And those Glorious Expressions
are not a guide to the eternal quality in the sense that the eternal quality can
be understood from them. What is understood from these expressions
equals what would be understood from the eternal quality if the veil were
removed from us and we could hear it. In short, these expressions are a
guide to its meaning, and this meaning equals what would be understood
from the eternal Speech which subsists in the essence of God. So meditate
this distinction, for many have erred in it. And both the Glorious Expressions
and the eternal quality are called Qur’an and the Word (kalam) of God. But
the Glorious Expressions are created and written on the Preserved Tablet
(al-lawh-al-mahfuz); Jibril brought them down [i.e., revealed them] to the
Prophet after that they had been brought down in the Night of Decree
(laylatu-l-qadr; Qur. 97, 1) to the Mighty House (baytu-l-izza), a place in the
Heaven nearest to the earth; it was written in books (sahifas) and placed in
the Mighty House. It is said that it was brought down to the Mighty House
all at once and then brought down to the Prophet in twenty years, and some
say, in twenty-five. And it is also said that it was brought down to the Mighty
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House only to the amount that was to be revealed each year and not all at
once.

And that which was brought down to the Prophet was expression and
meaning. And it is said also that only the meaning was brought down to him.
There is a conflict of opinion on this; some say that the Prophet clothed the
meaning with expressions of his own, and others, that he who so clothed
the meaning, was Jibril. But the truth is that it was sent down in expressions
and meaning. In short, the quality subsisting in the essence of God is not a
letter nor a sound. And the Mu‘tazilites called in doubt the existence of a
kind of Speech without letters. But the People of the Sunna answered that
because thoughts in the mind (hadith an-nafs), a kind of speech with which
an individual speaks to himself, are without letter or sound, there exists a
kind of speech without letters or words. By this the People of the Sunna do
not wish to institute a comparison between the Speech of God and thoughts
in the mind; for the Speech of God is eternal and thoughts in the mind are
originated. They wished to disprove the contention of the Mu‘tazilites when
they urged that speech cannot exist without letter or sound.

The proof of the necessity of Speech in God is His saving (Qur. 4, 162); "and
God spoke to Moses." So He has established Speech for Himself. And
Speech connects with that with which Knowledge connects, of necessary
and possible and impossible. But the connection of Knowledge with these is
a connection of revealing, in the sense that they are revealed to God by His
Knowledge; and the connection of Speech with them is a connection of
proof, in the sense that if the veil were taken away from us and we heard
the eternal Speech we would understand these things from it.

The fourteenth Quality subsisting in God is Being Powerful (kawn qadir). It is

a Quality subsisting in His essence, not an entity and not a non-entity. It is
not Power, but between it and Power is a reciprocal inseparability. When
Power exists in an essence, the quality called "Being Powerful" exists in that
essence, equally whether that essence is eternal or originated. So, God
creates in the essence of Zayd Power actual, and He creates also in it the
quality called Zayd's Being Powerful. This quality is called a state (hal) and
Power is a cause (illa) in it in the case of created things. But in the case of
God, Power is not said to be a cause in His Being Powerful; it is only said that
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between Power and God's Being Powerful there is a reciprocal

inseparability. The Mu‘tazilites hold also the reciprocal inseparability
between the Power of an originated being and its Being Powerful. But they
do not say that the second quality is by the creation of God, only that when
God creates Power in an originated being, there proceeds from the Power a
quality called Being Powerful, without creation.

The Fifteenth Quality necessary in God is Being a Willer (kawn murid). It is a

quality subsisting in His essence, not an entity and not a non-entity. It is
called a state (hal) and it is not Will, equally whether the essence is eternal
or created. So, God creates in the essence of Zayd Will actual, and He
creates in it the quality called Zayd's Being a Willer. And what is said above,
about the disagreement between the Mu‘tazilites and the People of the
Sunna on Being Powerful, applies also to Being a Willer.

[The same thing applies exactly to Qualities Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen,

Nineteen and Twenty,--Being a Knower (alim), a Living One (hayy), a Hearer
(sami), a Seer (basir), a Speaker (mutakallim).]

NOTICE. The Qualities, Power, Will, Knowledge, Life, Hearing, Seeing,

Speech, which have preceded, are called, "Qualities consisting of ideas"
(sifat al-ma‘ani, thought-qualities as opposed to active qualities; see below);
on account of the connection of the general with the particular (idafatu-l-
amm lil-khass), or the explanatory connection (al-idafatu-l-bayaniya). And
those which follow these, God's Being Powerful, etc., are called "Qualities
derived from ideas" (sifat ma‘ nawiya), by way of derivation (nisba) from the
"Qualities consisting of ideas," because they are inseparable from them in a
thing eternal and proceed from them in a thing originated, according to
what has preceded.

And the Mataridites added to the "Qualities consisting of Ideas," an Eighth

Quality and called it, Making to Be (takwin). It is a quality and an entity like
the rest of the "Qualities consisting of Ideas"; if the veil were removed from
us we would see it, just as we would see the other "Qualities consisting of
Ideas" if the veil were removed from us. But the Ash‘arites opposed them
and urged that there was no advantage in having a quality, Making to Be,
besides Power, because the Mataridites said that God brought into
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existence and out of existence by the quality of Making to Be. Then these
replied that Power prepared the possibility for existence, that is, made it
ready to receive existence after it had not been ready; that thereafter
Making to Be brought it into existence actually. The Ash‘arites replied that
the possible was ready for existence without anything further. And on
account of their having added this quality, they said that the active qualities
(sifat al-af‘al), such as Creating (khalq), Bringing to Life (ihya), Sustaining
(razq), Bringing to Death (imata), were eternal, because these expressions
are names of the quality Making to Be, which is a quality and an entity,
according to them. But it is eternal; therefore these active qualities are
eternal. But according to the Ash‘arites, the active qualities are originated,
because they are only names of the connections of Power. So Bringing to
Life is a name for the connection of Power with Life, and Sustaining is a
name for the connection of Power with the creature to be sustained, and
Creating is a name for its connection with the thing to be created, and
Bringing to Death, a name for its connection with death. And the
connections of Power, according to them, are originated.

And among the Fifty Articles are twenty which express the opposites of the
twenty above. They are Non-existence, the opposite to Existence.

The Second, Origin (huduth), is the opposite of Priority.

The Third, Transitoriness (fana), is the opposite of Continuance.

The Fourth, Resemblance (mumathala), is the opposite of Difference. It is

impossible that God should resemble originated things in any of those
things with which they are described; time has no effect upon Him and He
has not a place or movement or rest; and He is not described with colors or
with a direction; it is not said with regard to Him that He is above such a
body, or on the right of such a body. And He is no direction from Him. So it is
not said, "I am under God." And the saying of the commonalty, "I am under
our Lord," and "My Lord is over me," is to be disapproved. Unbelief is to be
feared on the part of him who holds the use of it to be an article of his faith.

The Fifth is having need of a locus (ihtiyaz ila mahall), that is, an essence in
which He may subsist, or a Specifier, that is a bringer-into-existence. This is
the opposite of Self-subsistence.
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The Sixth is Multiplicity (ta‘addud), in the sense of combination in the

essence or the qualities, or the existence of a being similar in essence or
qualities or acts. This is the opposite of Unity.

The Seventh is Weakness (ajz) and it is the opposite of Power. So, being
unequal to any possibility is impossible in God.

The Eighth is Unwillingness (karaha, lit. dislike). It is the opposite of Will, and
it is impossible in God that He should bring into existence anything of the
world, along with Unwillingness toward it, that is, lack of Will. Entities are
possibilities which God brought into existence by His Will and Choice
(ikhtiyar). And it is derived from the necessity of Will in God, that the
existence of created things is not through causation (ta‘lil), or by way of
nature (tab). Amt the difference between the two is that the entity which
exists through causation is whatever exists whenever its cause exists,
without dependence on another thing. The movement of the finger is the
cause of the movement of the ring; when the one exists, the second exists,
without dependence on anything else. And the entity which exists, by way
of nature, depends upon a condition and upon the nullifying of a hindrance.
So, fire does not burn except on the condition of contact with wood and the
nullifying of moistness which is the hindrance of its burning. For fire burns
by its nature according to those who hold the doctrine of nature--Whom
may God curse!--But the truth is, that God creates the being burned in the
wood when it is in contact with the fire, just as He creates the movement of
the ring when movement of the finger exists. And there is no such thing as
existence through causation or nature. So it is an impossibility in God that
there should be a cause in the world which proceeds from Him without His
choice, or that there should be a course of nature and that the world should
exist thereby.

The Ninth is Ignorance (jahl). Ignorance of any possible thing is impossible in

God, equally whether it is simple, that is, lack of knowledge of a thing; or
compound, that is, perception of a thing as different from what it really is.
And Inattention (ghafala) and Neglect (dhuhul) are impossible in God. This is
the opposite of Knowledge.

The Tenth is Death (mawt). It is the opposite of Life.

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The Eleventh is Deafness (samam). It is the opposite of Hearing.

The Twelfth is Blindness (ama). It is the opposite of Seeing.

The Thirteenth is Dumbness (kharas). In it is the idea of Silence (bakam) and

it is the opposite of Speech.

The Fourteenth is God's Being Weak (kawn ajiz). It is the opposite of His
Being Powerful.

The Fifteenth is His Being an Unwilling One (kawn karih). It is the opposite of
His Being a Willer.

The Sixteenth is His Being an Ignorant One (kawn jahil). It is the opposite of
His Being a Knower.

The Seventeenth is His Being a Dead One (kawn mayyit). It is the opposite of
His Being a Living One.

The Eighteenth is His Being Deaf (asamm). It is the opposite of His Being a
Hearer.

The Nineteenth is His Being Blind (a‘ma). It is the opposite of His Being a
Seer.

The Twentieth is His Being Silent (abkam). In it is the idea of Dumbness

(kharas) and it is the opposite of His Being a Speaker.

All those twenty are impossible in God. And know that the proof of each one
of the twenty qualities necessary in God establishes the existence of that
quality in Him and denies to Him its opposite And the proofs of the seven
thought-qualities are proofs of the seven derived from these. Thus, there
are Forty Articles; twenty of them are necessary in God; twenty are denied in
Him; and there are twenty general proofs, each proof establishing a quality
and annulling its opposite.

NOTICE. Some say that things are four, entities, non-entities, states and
relations (i‘tibarat). The entities are like the essence of Zayd which we see;
the non-entities are like your child before it is created; the states are like
Being Powerful; and so, too, the relations, like the establishing of standing in
Zayd. This--I mean that things are four--is the view which as-Sanusi follows in
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his Sughra, for he asserts in it the existence of states and makes the
necessary qualities to be twenty. But elsewhere, he follows the opinion
which denies states, and that is the right view.

According to that view, the Qualities are thirteen in number, because the
seven derived qualities--God's Being Powerful, etc., drop out. God has no
quality called Being Powerful, because the right view is denial that states are
things. According to this, then, things are three:--entities, non-entities and
relations. Then when the seven derived qualities drop out from the twenty
necessary qualities, seven drop also from the opposites, and there is no
quality called, Being Weak, etc., and there is no need to number these
among the impossibilities. So, the impossibilities are thirteen also; at least, if
existence is reckoned as a quality. That it should be is the opinion of all
except al-Ash‘ari. But the opinion of al-Ash‘ari was that Existence is the self
(ayn) of an entity. So, the existence of God is the self of His essence and not
a quality. The necessary qualities, on that view, are twelve. Priority and
Continuance and Difference and Self-subsistence--expressed also as
Absolute Independence--and Unity and Power and Will and Knowledge and
Life and Hearing and Seeing and Speech; and the derived qualities drop out,
because their existence is based upon the view that there are things called
states; but the right view is the opposite.

And if you wish to instruct the commonalty in the qualities of God, then
state them as names (asma) derived from the qualities just mentioned. So it
is said that God is an Entity, Prior, Different from originated things,
Independent of everything, One, Powerful, a Willer, a Knower, Living, a
Hearer, a Seer, a Speaker. And they should knew their opposites.

And know that some of the Shaykhs distinguish between states and
relationships and say of both that they are not entities and also not non-
entities. But each has a reality in itself, except that a state has a connection
with and a subsistence in an essence, and a relation has no connection with
an essence. And it is said that a relation has a reality outside of the mind. But
to this it is opposed. that a relation is a quality, and if it has no connection
with an essence and has a reality outside of the mind, where is the thing
qualified by it? A quality does not subsist in itself, but must needs have a
thing which it qualifies. So the truth is that relations have no reality except in
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the mind. And they are of two kinds; the invented relation (i‘tibara ikhtira‘i),
it is that which has no ground in existence, as your making a generous man
niggardly; and second, the apprehended relation (intiza‘i, claiming), it is that
which has ground outside of your mind, as asserting the subsistence of
Zayd, for that may be claimed from your saying, "Zayd subsists"; so the
describing of Zayd as subsisting is existent outside of your mind.

The forty-first Article is Possibility in the case of God. It is incumbent upon

every mukallaf that he should believe that it is possible for God to create
good and evil, to create Islam in Zayd and unbelief in Amr, knowledge in one
of them and ignorance in the other. And another of the things, belief in
which is incumbent upon every mukallaf, is that the good and the bad of
things is by Destiny (qada) and Decree (qadar). And there is a difference of
opinion as to the meaning of destiny and decree. It is said that destiny is the
will of God and the eternal (azali) connection of that will; and decree is God's
bringing into existence the thing in agreement with the will. So the Will of
God which is connected eternally with your becoming a learned man or a
Sultan is destiny; and the bringing knowledge into existence in you, after
your existence, or the Sultanship, in agreement with the Will, is decree. And
it is said that destiny is God's eternal knowledge and its connection with the
thing known; and decree is God's bringing things into existence in
agreement with His knowledge. So, God's knowing that which is connected
eternally with a person's becoming a learned man after he enters existence
is destiny, and the bringing knowledge into existence in that man after he
enters existence is decree. And according to each of those two views,
destiny is prior (qadim), because it is one of the qualities of God, whether
Will or Knowledge; and decree is originated, because it is bringing into
existence, and bringing into existence is one of the connections of Power,
and the connections of Power are originated.

And the proof that possibly things are possible in the case of God is that
there is general agreement on their possibility. If the doing of any possible
thing were incumbent upon God, the possible would be turned into a
necessary thing. And if the doing of a possible thing were hindered from
Him, the possible would be turned into an impossible. But the turning of the
possible into a necessary or an impossible is false. By this, you may know
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that there is nothing incumbent upon God, against the doctrine of the
Mu‘tazilites, who say that it is incumbent upon God to do that which is best
(salah) for the creature. So, it would be incumbent upon Him that He should
sustain the creature, but this is falsehood against Him and a lie from which
He is far removed. He creates faith in Zayd, for example, and gives him
knowledge out of His free grace, without there being any necessity upon
Him. And one of the arguments which may be brought against the
Mu‘tazilites is that afflictions come upon little children, such as ailments and
diseases. And in this there is not that which is best for them. So, if doing that
which is best is incumbent upon Him, why do afflictions descend upon little
children? For they say that God could not abandon that which is incumbent
upon Him, for abandoning it would be defect, and God is far removed from
defect, by Agreement. And God's rewarding the obedient is a grace from
Him, and His punishing the rebellious is justice from Him. For obedience
does not advantage Him, nor rebellion injure Him; He is the Advantager and
the Injurer. And these acts of obedience or rebellion are only signs of God's
rewarding or punishing those described by them. Then him whom He wills
to draw near to Himself, He helps to obedience: and in him whose
abandoning and rejection He wills, He creates rebellion. And all acts of good
and bad are by the creation of God, for He creates the creature and that
which the creature does, as He has said (Qur. 37, 94), "and God hath created
you and that which ye do."

And the belief is also incumbent that God may be seen in the Other World by
believers, for He has joined the seeing (ru’ya) of Him with the standing fast
of the mountain in His saying (Qur. 7, 139), "And if it standeth fast in its
place, thou wilt see Me." And the standing fast of the mountain was
possible: then, that which is connected with it of seeing must also have been
possible; because what is connected with the possible is possible. But our
seeing God must be without inquiring how (bila kayfa); it is not like our
seeing one another. God is not seen in a direction, nor in a color, nor in a
body; He is far removed from that. And the Mu‘tazilites--may God make
them vile!--deny the seeing of God. That is one of their perverse and false
articles of belief. And another of their corrupt articles is their saying that the
creature creates his own actions. For this, they are called Qadarites, because
they say that the actions of the creature are by his own qudra (power), just
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as the sect which holds that the creature is forced to the action he does, is
called Jabrite, derived from their holding a being forced (jabr) on the part of
the creature, and a being compelled. It, too, is a perverse article. And the
truth is that the creature does not create his own actions and is not forced,
lull. that God creates the actions which issue from the creature, along with
the creature's having a free choice (ikhtiyar) in them. As-Sa‘d [Sa‘d ad-Din at-
Taftazani, see above] said, in his commentary on the Articles, "It is not
possible to render this free choice by any expression, but the creature finds
a difference between the movement of his baud when he moves it himself
and when the wind moves it against his will."

And to that which is possible in God belongs also the sending of a number of
Apostles (rasuls). And God's sending them is by His grace, and by way of
necessity, as has preceded.

And it is necessary to confess that the most excellent of created beings,

absolutely, is our Prophet [Muhammad], and there follow him in excellency
the rest of the Endowed with Earnestness and Patience (ulu-l-azm; see Qur.
46, 34); they are our Lord Ibrahim, our Lord Musa, our Lord Isa, and our Lord
Nuh; and this is their order in excellency. And that they are five along with
our Prophet, and four after him is the correct view. And it is said. too, that
the Endowed with Earnestness and Patience are more numerous. And there
follow them in excellency the rest of the Apostles. Then, the rest of the
Prophets (nabis), then the Angels.

And it is necessary to confess that God has aided them with miracles
(mu‘jizat) and that He has distinguished our Prophet in that he is the seal of
the Apostles, and that leis law (shar) will not be abrogated till time is
fulfilled. And Isa, after his descent, will judge according to the law of our
Prophet. It is said that he will take it from the Qur’an and the Sunna. It is said
also that he will go to the Glorious Tomb [of Muhammad] and learn from
him. And know that he will abrogate one part of the law of our Prophet with
a later part, just as the waiting period of a woman after the death of her
husband was changed from a year to four months and ten days. And in this
there is no defect.
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And it is necessary also that every mukallaf, male and female, should know in
detail the Apostles who are mentioned in the Qur’an, and should believe in
them in detail. As for the other Prophets, belief is necessary in them as a
whole. As-Sa'd handed down an authority in his commentary on
the Maqasid that belief in all the Prophets as a whole suffices, but he was
not followed.

And someone put them into verse as follows:

"There is imposed upon every mukallaf a knowledge

Of Prophets in detail, who have been named
In that document of ours [i.e., the Qur’an]. Of them are eight
After ten [i.e., eighteen]. And there remain seven who are
Idris, Hud, Shu‘ayb, Salih, and similarly,
Dhu-l-Kifl, Adam, with the Chosen One [Muhammad] they close."

And it is necessary to confess that the Companions (sahibs) of the Prophet

are the most excellent of the generations. Then their followers (tabi‘s); then
the followers of their followers. And the most excellent of the Companions
is Abu Bakr, then Umar, then Uthman, then Ali--in this order. But al-Alqami
said that our Lady Fatima and her brother, our Lord Ibrahim, were absolutely
more excellent than the Companions, including the Four [Khalifas]. And our
Lord Malik [ibn Anas] was wont to say, "There is none more excellent than
the children of the Prophet." This is that the confession of which is
incumbent; and we will meet God confessing it, if it is His Will.

And of that the confession of which is also necessary, is that the Prophet
was born in Mecca and died in al-Madina. It is incumbent on fathers that
they teach that to their children. Al-Ajhuri said, "It is incumbent on the
individual that he know the genealogy of the Prophet on his father's side
and on his mother's." A statement of it will come in our Conclusion, if God
will. The learned have said, "Every individual ought to know the number of
the children of the Prophet and the order in which they were born, for an
individual ought to know his Lords, and they are the Lords of the People."
But they do not explain, in what I have seen, whether that is required
(mawjub) or desired (mandub); the analogy (qiyas) of things similar to it
would say it was required. His children were seven, three male and four
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female, according to the right view. Their order of birth was: al-Qasim, he
was the first of his children, then Zaynab, then Ruqayya, then Fatima, then
Umm Kulthum, then Abd Allah, he had the to-names (laqab) at-Tayyib and
at-Tahir, which are to-names of Abd Allah, not names of two other different
persons. These were all children of our Lady Khadija. And the seventh was
our Lord Ibrahim, born of Mariya, the Copt. So it stands. Let us now return
to the conclusion of the Articles.

The Forty-second is the Veracity (sidq) of the Apostles in all their sayings.

The Forty-third is their trustworthiness (amana), that is, their being

preserved (isma) from falling into things forbidden (muharram) or disliked
(makruh).

The Forty-fourth is their Conveying (tabligh) to the creatures that which they
were commanded to convey. The Forty-fifth is intelligence (fatana). These
four things are necessary in the Apostles in the sense that the lack of them is
unthinkable. And Faith depends on the knowledge of these, according to
the controversy between as-Sanusi and his opponents.

The opposites of these four are impossible in the Apostles, that is, Lying
(kidhb), Unfaithfulness (khiyana) in a thing forbidden or disliked,
Concealment (kitman) of a thing they have been commanded to convey, and
Stupidity (balada). These four are impossible in them, in the sense that the
existence of them is unthinkable. And Faith depends upon the knowledge of
these, as has preceded.

These are Nine and Forty Articles and the Fiftieth is the possibility of the
occurrence of such fleshly accidents in them as do not lead to defect in their
lofty rank.

And the proof of the existence of Veracity in them is that if they were to lie,
then information from God would he a lie, for He has guaranteed the claim
of the Apostles by the manifestation of miracles at their hands. For the
miracle is revealed in place of an utterance from God, "My servant is truthful
in all that he brings from Me." That is, whenever an Apostle comes to his
people and says, "I am an Apostle to you from God," and they say to him,
"What is the proof of your apostolate?" then he shall say, "The splitting of
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this mountain," for example. And when they say to him, "Bring what you
say," God will split that mountain at their saying, as a guarantee of the claim
of the Apostle to the apostolate. So, God's splitting the mountain is sent
down in place of an utterance from God, "My servant is truthful in all which
he brings to you from Me." And if the Apostle were lying, this information
would be lying. But lying is impossible in the case of God, so lying on the part
of the Apostles is impossible. And whenever lying is denied in them, Veracity
is established.

And as for the proof of the Trustworthiness, that is, their being preserved
internally and externally from forbidden and disliked things; if they were
unfaithful in committing such things, we would be commanded to do the
like. But it is impossible that we could be commanded to do a forbidden or
disliked thing, "for God does not command a vile thing" (Qur. 7, 27). And it is
evident that they did nothing except obedience, whether required or
desired, and "permitted" (mubah) things entered among their actions only
to show, whenever they did a "permitted" thing, that it was allowable (ja’iz.)

And as for the proof of Intelligence, if it were failing in them, how would
they be able to establish an argument against an adversary? But the Qur’an
indicates in more than one place, that they must establish arguments
against adversaries. And such establishing of arguments is only possible with
intelligence.

And the proof that fleshly accidents do befall them is that they do not cease
to ascend in their lofty rank; for the occurrence of such accidents is in them
for increase in their lofty rank, for example, and that others may be
consoled, and that the thoughtful may know that the world is not a place of
recompense for the lovers of God; since if it were, why should aught of the
defilements of the world befall the Apostles? The Blessing of God be upon
them and upon their Mighty Head, our Lord Muhammad, and upon his
family and companions and descendants, all!

The Fifty Articles are completed with their Glorious Proofs.

Let us mention to you now somewhat of that which must be held of the
things whose proofs are authority (sam‘i): Know that it must be believed
that our Prophet has a Tank (hawd); and ignorance as to whether it is on one
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side or the other of the Bridge (as-sirat) does not hurt. On the Day of
Resurrection (yawm al-qiyama) the creatures will go down to drink of it. It is
different from al-Kawther, which is a River in the Garden.

And it must also be believed that he will make intercession (shafa‘a) on the
Day of Resurrection in the midst of the Judgment, when we shall stand and
long to depart, even though it be into the Fire. Then he shall intercede that
they may depart from the Station (mawqif); and this intercession belongs to
him only.

And it mast also be believed that falling into great sins (kabiras), other than
Unbelief (kufr), does not involve Unbelief, but repentance (tawba) from the
sin is necessary at once; and if the sin be a small one (saghira) repentance is
necessary to him who is liable to fall into it. And repentance is not injured by
returning to sin; but for the new sin a new repentance is necessary.

And it is incumbent upon the individual that he set aside arrogance (kibr)
and jealousy (hasad) and slander (ghiba) on account of what the Prophet
has said, "The gates of the Heavens have curtains which reject the works of
the people of arrogance, jealousy and slander." That is, they prevent them
from rising, and so they are not received. Jealousy is a desiring that the well-
being of another should pass away, equally whether it is desired that it
should come to the jealous one or not. And arrogance is considering the
truth to be falsehood and rejecting it, and despising God's creation. And it is
incumbent also upon him that he should not spread malicious slanders
among the people, for a tradition has come down, "A slanderer (qattat)
shall not enter the Garden." And jealousy is forbidden, as is said above,
when the well-being does not lead its possessor to transgression, and if it
does, then desire that the well-being should pass away is allowable.

It is necessary also to hold that some of those who commit great sins will be
punished, though it is only one of them.

CONCLUSION. Faith (iman), in the usage of the language, is

acknowledgment that something is true (tasdiq), in general. In that way it is
used by God, when he reports the words of the sons of Ya’qub (Qur. 12, 17).
"But thou dost not believe us [art not a believer (mu’min) in us]." Legally, it
is belief in all that the Prophet has brought. But there is a difference of
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opinion as to the meaning of belief, when used in this way. Some say that it
means knowledge (ma‘rifa) and that everyone who knows what the Prophet
has brought is a believer (mu’min). But this interpretation is opposed by the
fact that the unbeliever (kafir) knows, but is not a believer.

Nor does this interpretation agree with the common saying, that
the muqallad is a believer, although he does not know. And the right view as
to the interpretation of belief is that it is a mental utterance (hadith an-nafs)
following conviction, equally whether it is conviction on account of proof,
which is called knowledge, or on account of acceptance on authority
(taqlid). This excludes the unbeliever because he does not possess the
mental utterance, the idea of which is that you say, "I am well pleased with
what the Prophet has brought." The mind of the unbeliever does not say
this. And it includes the muqallad; for he possesses the mental utterance
following conviction, though the conviction is not based on a proof.

And of that which must be believed is the genealogy of the Prophet, both
on his father's side and on his mother's. On his father's side he is our Lord,
Muhammad, son of Abd Allah, son of Abd al-Muttalib, son of Hashim, son of
Abd Manaf, son of Qusay, son of Kilab, son of Murra, son of Ka‘b, son of
Lu’ay, or Luway, son of Ghalib, son of Fihr, son of Malik, son of Nadr, son of
Kinana, son of Khuzayma, son of Mudrika, son of Alyas, son of Mudar, son of
Nizar, son of Ma‘add, son of Adnan. And the Agreement (ijma) unites upon
this genealogy up to Adnan.

But after him to Adam there is no sure path in that which has been handed
down. And as to his genealogy on his mother's side, she is Amina, daughter
of Wahb, son of Abd Manaf, son of Zuhra--this Abd Manaf is not the same as
his ancestor on the other line--son of Kilab, who is already one of his
ancestors. So the two lines of descent join in Kilab.

And it is necessary also to know that he was of mixed white and red
complexion, according to what some of them have said.

This is the last of that which God has made easy by His grace. His Blessing be
upon our Lord Muhammad and upon his family and his Companions and his
descendants, so long as the mindful are mindful of him and the heedless are
 244

heedless of the thought of him. And Praise belongeth unto God, the Lord of
the Worlds.
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7. ANALYSIS OF THE TAQRIB OF ABU SHUJA AL-ISPAHANI

See in bibliography, S. Keijzer, Précis, etc. Much help as to details of religious ritual and law
will be found in Hughes's Dictionary of Islam, Sachau's Muhammedanisches Recht,
Lane's Modern Egyptians, and commentary to his translation of the Arabian Nights,
Burton's Pilgrimage, and Sell's Faith of Islam.

Book I. Of Ceremonial Purity (Tahara)

1. The water which may be used for ceremonial ablutions.

2. Legal materials for utensils; what can be purified and what cannot.

3. The use of the toothpick.

4. Description of the different stages of a ceremonial ablution (wudu).

5. On cleansing from excrement and its ritual generally.

6. The five things which require a fresh wudu.

7. The six things which require a complete ablution of the whole body
(ghusl) and its ritual.

8. The seventeen occasions on which a ghusl is prescribed.

9. When it is allowable to wash the inner shoes (khuffs) instead of the feet.

10. The conditions and ritual for the use of sand (tayammum) instead of
water.

11. On uncleannesses (najasat) and how and how far they can be removed.

12. On ailments of women; duration of pregnancy and their conditions.

Book II. Of Prayer

1. The times of prayer (salat).

2. Upon whom prayer is incumbent, and

3. On what occasions.

4. The antecedent requirements of prayer.

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5. The eighteen essential parts of prayer.

6. The four things in which the prayer of a woman differs from that of a
man.

7. The eleven things which nullify prayer.

8. A reckoning of the occurrences of certain frequently repeated elements in

prayer.

9. On omissions in prayer.

10. The five occasions on which prayer is not allowable.

11. The duty and ritual of congregational prayer.

12. The prayer of a traveller.

13. The conditions under which congregational prayer is required and those
under which it is lawful.

14. The requirements in congregational prayer.

15. The prayers of the Two Festivals and their ritual.

16. The prayers on occasion of an eclipse.

17. Prayer for rain.

18. Prayer in presence of the enemy.

19. What is forbidden of clothing.

20. The ritual of the dead.

Book III. Of Rates for the Poor, etc.

1. The condition of the rate (zakat) and of the rate-payer; what it is levied on
and consists of.

2. On camels.

3. On cattle.

4. On sheep.
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5. How it affects partners.

6. On gold and silver.

7. On grain-stuff.

8. On merchandise.

9. The conditions and nature of the rate to be paid at the end of the fast.

10. Uses to which the rate may be applied.

Book IV. Of the Fast

1. The conditions for the fast (siyam); its description; what breaks it.

2. What is meritorious in fasting; when and for whom it is forbidden; how

breaking the fast must be expiated.

3. The conditions and nature of religious retreat (i‘tikaf).

Book V. Of the Pilgrimage

1. The conditions of pilgrimaging (hajj); its essentials and other elements.

2. The ten things forbidden on pilgrimage.

3. The five sacrifices of the pilgrimage.

Book VI. Of Barter and Other Business Transactions

1. Conditions and kinds of barter (bay); what may be bartered and what not.

2. Description and conditions of the bargain with payment in advance

(salam).

3. Of pledging (rahn).

4. Of those who are not to be permitted to administer their own property

(hajar as-safih).

5. Of bankruptcy and composition and common rights in a highway (sulh).

6. The conditions for the transfer of debts and credits (hawala).

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7. Of security for debts (daman).

8. Of personal security for debts (kafala).

9. Of partnership (shirka).

10. Of agency (wakala).

11. Of confession (iqrar).

12. Of loans (i‘ara).

13. Of illegal seizure and use of property; indemnity for it and its damage
(ghasb).

14. Of right of pre-emption (shuf‘a).

15. The conditions of advancing capital with participation in the profits

(qirad).

16. Of the letting of date-palms and vines (musaqat).

17. Of hiring a thing out (ijara).

18. Of reward for return of a thing lost (ja‘ala).

19. That land may not be let for a fixed amount of its produce (mukhabara).

20. Of irrigation of waste lands (ihya al-mawat).

21. Of foundations in mortmain (waqf).

22. Of gifts (hiba).

23. Of found property (luqta).

24. Of foundlings (laqit).

25. Of deposits (wadi‘a).

Book VII. Of Inheritance and Wills

1. Of legal heirs (warith).

2. The conditions and proportions of inheritance (farida).

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3. Of legacies (wasiya).

Book VIII. Of Marriage and Related Subjects

1. The conditions of marriage (nikah). What women a man may see and to
what extent.

2. The form of a legal marriage.

3. The conditions of asking (khitba) and giving in marriage; whom a man may
not marry; conditions for nullity of marriage.

4. The settlement (mahr) on a wife by her husband.

5. On the wedding feast (walima).

6. On the equality of the rights of the wives and the authority of the
husband.

7. On divorce for incompatibility (khul).

8. The forms of divorce (talaq).

9. On taking a wife back and the three-fold divorce.

10. The oath not to cohabit (ila).

11. The temporary separation by the formula, zihar Qur. 58.

12. The form of accusation of adultery and the defence (li‘an).

13. The period during which a previously married woman cannot remarry
(idda).

14. Of relations with female slaves.

15. The support and behavior of a woman, divorced or a widow; mourning.

16. Law of relationship through suckling (irda).

17. The support (nafaqa) due to a wife.

18. The support due to children and parents, slaves and domestic animals.

19. Of the custody of children (hidana).

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Book IX. Of Crimes of Violence to the Person (jinaya)

1. On murder, homicide and chance medley.

2. The lax talionis (qisas) for murder, and

3. For wounds and mutilations.

4. The blood-wit (diya).

5. Use of weak evidence in case of murder.

6. Personal penance for homicide.

Book X. Of Restrictive Ordinances of God (hadd)

1. Of fornication (zina) of one who. has been or is married (muhsan), and of

one who has not been or is not married.

2. Of accusing of fornication.

3. Of drinking wine or any intoxicating drink.

4. Of theft.

5. Of highway robbery.

6. Of killing in defence.

7. Of rebelling against a just government.

8. Of apostasy.

9. Of abandoning the usage of prayer.

Book XI. Of the Holy War (jihad)

1. The general law of jihad.

2. The distribution of booty taken in the field (ghanima).

3. The law of the tax on unbelievers (fay).

4. The law of the poll-tax on unbelievers (jizya).

Book XII. Of Hunting and the Slaughter of Animals

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1. How an animal may be killed in the chase or otherwise.

2. What flesh may be eaten.

3. The ritual of sacrifice (udhiya).

4. The ritual of sacrifice for a child (aqiqa).

Book XIII. Of Racing and Shooting with the Bow

Book XIV. Of Oaths and Vows (yamin, nadhr)

1. What oaths are allowable and binding; how expiated.

2. Lawful and unlawful vows.

Book XV. Of Judgments and Evidence (qada, shahada)

1. Of the judge (qadi) and court usage.

2. The division (qasm) of property held in common.

3. Of evidence and oaths.

4. The conditions of being a legal witness (adil).

5. The difference of claims (haqq), on the part. of God, and on the part of
man, and their legal treatment.

Book XVI. Of Manumission of Slaves

1. General conditions of manumission (itq).

2. The clientship which follows (wala).

3. Of freeing at death (tadbir).

4. Of the slave buying his freedom (kitaba).

5. Of the slave (umm walad) that has borne a child to her master or to
another and of her children.
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APPENDIX 2: BIBLIOGRAPHY
 253

1. BOOKS AND ARTICLES, GENERAL AND FUNDAMENTAL, FOR THE

STUDY OF ISLAM

The non-Arabist will gain much insight into Muslim life and thought by
reading such translations as that of Ibn Khallikan by De Slane (Paris-London;
1843-71), the Persian Tabari, by Zotenberg (Paris; 1867-74), Ibn Batuta by
Defrémery and Sanguinetti (Paris; 1853-58), Mas‘udi by C. Barbier de
Meynard and Pavet de Courteille (Paris; 1861-77), Ibd
Khaldun's Prolégomènes by De Slane (Paris; 1862-68), ad-Dimishqi by Mehren
(Copenhagen; 1874), al-Beruni's Chronology by Sachau (London; 1879).

The translations and notes in De Sacy's Chrestomathie arabe (Paris; 1826) can
also be used to advantage.

Very many valuable articles will be found scattered through the Zeitschrift of
the German Oriental Society (hereafter ZDMG), the Journal
asiatique (hereafter JA), the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter
JRAS) and the Vienna Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (hereafter
WZ).

It is always worth while to consult the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The best translations of the Qur’an into English are those by E. H. Palmer (2
vols., Oxford; 1880) and J. M. Rodwell (London; 1871). The first more
perfectly represents the spirit and tone, and the second more exactly the
letter. The commentary added by Sale to his version and his introduction are
still useful.

The Thousand and One Nights should be read in its entirety in Arabic or in a
translation by every student of Islam. English translation by Lane
(incomplete but accurate and with very valuable commentary); Burton (last
edition almost complete; 12 vols., London: 1894). Payne's translation is
complete, as is also Burton's privately printed edition; but, while
exceedingly readable, Payne hardly represents the tone of the original.
There is an almost complete and very cheap German version by Henning
published by Reclaim, Leipzig); Mardrus' French version is inaccurate and
 254

free to such an extent as to make it useless. Galland's version is a work of

genius; but it belongs to French and not to Arabic literature.

R. P. A. Dozy: Essai sur l’histoire de l’islamisme. Leyden, 1879. A readable

introduction.

A. MÜLLER: Der Islam im Morgen-und-Abendland. 2 vols. Berlin, 1885, 1887.

The best general history of Islam.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE: The Mohammedan Dynasties; chronological and

genealogical tables with historical introductions. Westminster, 1894. An
indispensable book for any student of Muslim history.

C. BROCKELMANN: Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. 2 vols. Weimar,

1898, 1899. Indispensable for names, dates, and books, but not a history in
any true sense.

T. B. HUGHES: A Dictionary of Islam. London, 1896. Very full of information,

but to be used with caution. Based on Persian sources largely.

E. W. LANE: An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.

First edition, London, 1836; third, 1842. Many others. Indispensable.

C. M. DOUGHTY. Travels in Arabia Deserta 2 vols. Cambridge, 1888. By far the

best book on nomad life in Arabia. Gives the fullest and clearest idea of the
nature and workings of the Arab mind.

J. L. BURCKHARDT: Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys. 2 vols. London,

1831.

T L. BURCKHARDT: Travels in Arabia. 2 vols. London, 1829.

R. F. BURTON: Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah. 2

vols. Last edition, London, 1898. On the Hajj and Muslim life, thought and
studies generally in the middle of the nineteenth century. Readable and
accurate to a degree.

C. SNOUCK HURGRONJE: Mekka. 2 vols. and portfolio of plates. Haag, 1888,

1889. Is somewhat dull beside Burton, but very full and accurate.
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W. ROBERTSON SMITH Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series.

New edition, London, 1894. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. Cambridge,
1885.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Muhammedanische Studien. I, Halle a. S., 1889. II, 1890.

Epoch-marking books; as are all Goldziher's contributions to the history of
Muslim civilization.

ALFRED VON KREMER Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams. Leipzig,
1868.

ALFRED VON KREMER Culturgeschichte des Orients enter den Chalifen. 2 vols.
Wien, 1875-77. Culturgeschichtliche Streifzüge. Leipzig, 1873.

EDWARD G. BROWNE: A Year Among the Persians. London, 1893. A most

valuable account of modern Persian life, philosophy, and theology, and
especially of Sufiism and Babism.

EDWARD G. BROWNE: A Literary History of Persia. New York, 1902. Really

political and religious prolegomena to such a history.

G. A. HERKLOTS: Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of

India. London, 1832.
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2. ON MUSLIM HISTORY AND ON PRESENT CONDITION OF MUSLIM

WORLD

AUGUST MÜLLER: Die Beherrscher der Gläubigen. Berlin, 1882. A very brightly
written sketch based on thorough knowledge.

GUSTAV WEIL: Geschichte der Chalifen. 3 vols. Mannheim, 1846-1851.

SIR WILLIAM MUIR: The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline and Fall. London, 1891.

THEODOR NÖLDEKE: Zur tendentiösen Gestaltung der Urgeschichte des

Islâms. ZDMG, lii, pp. 16 ff. All Nöldeke's papers on the early history of Islam
are worthy of the most careful study.

G. VON VLOTEN: Zur Abbasiden Geschichte. ZDMG, lii, pp. 213 ff. On the early
Abbasids.

R. E. BRÜNNOW: De Charidschiten unter den ersten Omayyaden. Leyden,

1884.

EDUARD SACHAU: Über eine Arabische Chronik aus Zanzibar. Mitth. a.d. Sem.
f. Orient. Sprachen. Berlin, 1898. On Ibadites.

GEORGE PERCY BADGER: History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman, by Salîl-
ibn-Razîk. London: Hakluyt Society, 1871. Valuable for Ibadite history, law
and theology.

M. J. DE GOEJE: Mémoire sur les Carmathes du Bahraïn et les Fatimides.

Leyden, 1886.

JOHN NICHOLSON: An Account of the Establishment of the Fatemite Dynasty

in Africa. Tübingen and Bristol, 1840.

QUATREMÈRE: Mémoires historiques sur la dynastie des Khalifes Fatimites.

JA, 3, ii.

SYLVESTRE DE SACY: Exposé de la religion des Druzes et la vie du Khalife

Hakem-biamr-allah. 2 vols. Paris, 1838.
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F. WÜSTENFELD: Geschichte der Fatimiden-Khalifen. Göttingen, 1881.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE: A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages. New York,

1901. For the origin and founding of the Fatimid Dynasty, the Khalifa al-
Hakim, etc.

H. L. FLEISCHER: Briefwechsel zwischen den Anführern der Wahhabiten und

dem Pasha von Damaskus. Kleinere Schriften, iii, pp. 341 ff. First published in
ZDMG for year 1857.

E. REHATSEK; The History of the Wahhabys in Arabia and In India. Journal of

Asiatic Society of Bengal. No. xxxviii (read January, 1880).

Turkey in Europe, by "Odysseus." London, 1900. The present situation, with

its historical antecedents in European Turkey and the Balkans generally.

H. O. DWIGHT: Constantinople and its Problems. New York, 1901.

A. S. WHITE: The Expansion of Egypt. London, 1899. The present situation in

Egypt and its historical antecedents.

W. W. HUNTER: Our Indian Mussulmans. London, 1871.

SIR LEWIS PELLY: The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain. London, 1879.

W. S. BLUNT: The Future of Islam. London, 1880.

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3. ON MUSLIM TRADITIONS AND LAW

The Mishkat, translated by Matthews. Calcutta, 1809. (A collection of

traditions.)

The Hidaya, translated by C. Hamilton. II edition. London, 1870.

N. B. E. BAILLIE: A Digest of Muhammadan Law. Hanifi Code. London, 1865.

The same. Imameea Code. London, 1869. The first volume deals with Sunnite,
the second with Shi‘ite law.

S. KEIJZER: Précis de Jurisprudence Musulmane selon le rite Châfeite par Abu

Chodja; texte arabe avec traduction et annotations. Leyden, 1859. To be used
with caution.

EDUARD SACHAU: Muhammadanisches Recht nach Schafiitischer Lehre.

Stuttgart & Berlin, 1897. Based largely on al-Bajuri's commentary to Abu
Shuja; covers rather less than half the material of a corpus of canon law and
is the best general introduction to the subject.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Die Zâhiriten, ihr Lehrsystem und ihre Geschichte. Leipzig,
1884.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Neue Materialien zur Litteratur des Ueberlieferungswesen

bei den Muhammedanem. ZDMG, I, pp. 465 ff. Deals with Musnad of Ahmad
ibn Hanbal.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Zur Litteratur des Ichtilâf al-madhâhíb. ZDMG, xxxviii, pp.
669 ff. Contains a notice of ash-Sha‘rani.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER; Uber eine Formel in der judischen Responsen-litteratur.

ZDMG, liii, pp. 645 ff. On fatwas and ijtihad.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Das Princip des Istishab in muham. Gesetzwissenschaft.

WZ, i, pp. 228 ff.

EDUARD SACHAU: Muhammedanisches Erbrecht nach, der Lehre der

Ibaditischen Araber von Zanzibar und Ostafrika. Sitzungsberichte der kön.
preuss. Akad., 1894.
 259

EDUARD SACHAU: Zur ältesten Geschichte des muhammedanischen Rechts.

Wien. Akad., 1870.

SNOUCK HURGRONJE: Le droit musulman. Revue de l’histoire des religions,

xxxvii, pp. 1 ff, and 174 ff.

SNOUCK HURGRONJE: Muhammedanisches Recht nach schafiitischer Lehre

von Eduard Sachau; Anzeige, ZDMG, liii, pp. 125 ff.

S. K. KEUN DE HOOGERWOERD: Studien zur Einführung in das Recht des

Islam. Erlangen, 1901. Contains introduction and part of section on law of
marriage. Gives a good but miscellaneous bibliography and is written from a
Persian point of view; transliteration is peculiarly eccentric and Arabic
scholarship is unsound.

J. WELLHAUSEN: Medina vor dem Islam. Muhammad's Gemeindeordnung von

Medina. In "Skizzen und Vorarbeiten," Viertes Heft. Berlin, 1889.

HUART: Les Zindîqs en droit musulman. Eleventh Congress of Orientalists,

part iii, pp. 69 ff.

D. B. MACDONALD: The Emancipation of Slaves under Muslim Law. American

Monthly Review of Reviews, March, 1900.
 260

4. ON MUSLIM THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM

THEODOR HAARBRÜCKER: Asch-Schahrastâni's Religionsparteien und

Philosophenschulen übersetzt und erklärt, 2 vols. Halle, 1850-51. The Arabic
text, without which Haarbrücker's German is sometimes hardly intelligible,
was published by Cureton, London, 1846.

T. J. DE BOER: Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam. Stuttgart, 1901.

Unsatisfactory but the best that there is. It is only a sketch and takes hardly
sufficient account of theology and mysticism.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE: Studies in a Mosque. II edition. London, 1893.

Miscellaneous essays, lightly written but trustworthy.

KREHL: Beiträge zur Characteristik der Lehre vom Glauben in Islam. Leipzig,
1877.

G. VON VLOTEN: Les Hachwia et Nabita. Eleventh Congress of Orientalists,

part iii, pp. 99 ff. On early religious sects.

G. VON VLOTEN: Irdja. ZDMG, xiv, pp. 181 ff. On the Murji’ites.

EDUARD SACHAU: Uber de religiosen Anschauungen der ibaditischen

Muhammedaner in Oman und Ostafrica. Mitth. a. d. Sem. f. Orient. Sprachen.
Berlin, 1899.

H. STEINER: Die Mu‘taziliten oder die Freidenker im Islam. Leipzig, 1865.

WILHELM SPITTA: Zur Geschichte Abu l-Hasan al-Ash‘ari's. Leipzig, 1876. The
best as yet on al-Ash‘ari, but to be used with caution, especially in the
translations of theological texts.

MARTIN SCHREINER: Zur Geschichte des Ash‘aritenthums. In Actes du

huitième Congress International des Orientalistes, I, i, pp. 77 ff. Leiden, 1891.

M. A. F. MEHREN: Exposé de la réforme de l’Islamisme commencée au

troisième siècle de l’Hégire par Abou-l-Hasan Ali el-Ash‘ari et continuée par son
école. Third International Congress of Orientalists, vol. ii.
 261

G. FLÜGEL: Al-Kindi genannt "der Philosoph der Araber." Ein Vorbild seiner Zeit
und seines Volkes. Leipzig, 1857.

SIR WILLIAM MUIR: The Apology of al-Kindy, written at the court of al-
Mâmûn. London, 1882.

E. SELL: The Faith of Islam. London, 1896. II edition. A valuable book, but
from the point of view of an Indian missionary. Hence the tone is polemic
and the technicalities are Persian rather than Arabic.

WALTER M. PATTEN: Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the Mihna. Leyden, 1897. There
is a valuable review by Goldziher in ZDMG. lii, pp. 155 ff. It traces connection
of Hanbalites with Ibn Taymiya and Wahhabites.

HEINRICH RITTER: Ueber unsere Kenntniss der Arabischen Philosophie.

Göttingen, 1844.

FRIEDRICH DIETERICI: Alfarabi's phitosophische Abhandlungen

herausgegeben. Leiden, 1890. Aus den arabischen übersetzt. Leiden, 1892.

AL-FARABI: Der Musterstaat. Herausgegeben und Übersetzt von Frdr. Dieterici.

Leiden, 1900.

G. FLÜGEL: Ueber Inhalt und Verfasser der arabisehen Encyclopädie der

Ikhwan as-Safa. ZDMG, xiii, pp. 1 ff. See, too, an excellent article by August
Müller in Ersch und Gruber, ii, 42, pp. 272 ff., and Stanley Lane-Poole in
his Studies in a Mosque.

FRIEDRICH DIETERICI: Die Philosophie der Araber im X. Jahrhundert n. Chr.

aus der Schriften der lauteren Brüder herausgegeben. Berlin and Leipzig, 1861-
1879.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Materialien zur Entwickelungs-geschichte des Sufismus.

WZ, xiii, pp. 35 ff.

THEODOR NÖLDEKE: Sufi. ZDMG, xlviii, pp. 45 ff. On the derivation and early
usage of the name Sufi.

ADELBERT MERX: Idee und Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Geschichte der

Mystik. Heidelberg, 1893.
 262

JOHN P. BROWN: The Derwishes or Oriental Spiritualism. London, 1868. A

valuable but uncritical description of modern Turkish and Persian Darwishes.

SIR JAMES REDHOUSE: The Mesnevi of Jelal eddin ar-rumi translated into
English. Book I. London, 1881. See, too, a translation by Whinfield, London,
1887, and an edition of selected ghazels from the Diwan with translation and
valuable introduction by R. A. Nicholson, Cambridge University Press, 1898.

E. J. W. GIBB: A History of Ottoman Poetry. Vol. i. London, 1900. A valuable

statement of the later Persian and Turkish mysticism and metaphysic on pp.
13-70.

E. H. PALMER: Oriental Mysticism. Cambridge, 1867.

CARRA DE VAUX: Avicenne. Paris, 1900. Contains an introductory sketch of

philosophy and theology up to the time of Ibn Sina. Algazali. Paris, 1902. A
continuation of the first.

A. VON KREMER: Uber die philosophischen Gedichte des Abul Ala Ma‘arry.
Wien, 1888.

A. VON KREMER: Gedichte des Abu-i-Ala Ma‘arri. ZDMG, xxix, 304; xxx, 40;
xxxi, pp. 471 ff.; xxxviii, 499 ff.

ABU-L-ALA AL-MA'ARRI: Letters Arabic and English, with notes, etc., edited by
D. S. Margoliouth. Oxford, 1898. See, too, papers by R. A. Nicholson in JRAS,
October, 1900, ff.; and by Margoliouth, for April, 1902.

E. FITZGERALD: The Ruba‘iyat of Omar Khayyam. With a commentary by H. M.

Batson and a biographical Introduction by E. D. Ross. New York, 1900. The
biography by Ross is the only at all adequate treatment of the life and times
of Umar which yet exists. Of the Ruba‘iyat themselves there are several
adequate translations, e.g. by Whinfield, Payne and Mrs. Cadell.

MARTIN SCHREINER: Zur Geschichte der Polemik zwischen Juden und

Muhammedanem. ZDMG, xlii, pp. 591 ff. Deals with Ibn Hazm and Fakhr ad-
Din ar-Razi.
 263

MARTIN SCHREINER: Beiträge zur Geschichte der theologischen Bewegungen

in Islam. ZDMG, lii, pp 463 ff.; 513 ff.; liii, pp. 51 ff. A most valuable collection
of materials with considerable gaps and imperfect digestion.

D. B. MACDONALD: The Life of al-Ghazzali. In the Journal of the American

Oriental Society, vol. xx, pp. 71-132.

D. B. MACDONALD: Emotional Religion in Islam as affected by Music and

Singing. Being a translation of a book of the Ihya of al-Ghazzali. In JRAS for
April and October, 1901, and January, 1902.

MIGUEL ASIN PALACIOS: Algazel, dogmatica, moral, ascetica. Zaragoza, 1901.

C. BARBIER DE MEYNARD: Traduction nouvelle du Traité de Ghazzali,

intitulé Le Preservatif de l’Erreur. In JA, vii, 9, pp. 5 ff.

T. J. DE BOER: Die Widersprüche der Philosophie nach al-Ghazzali und ihr

Ausgleich durch Ibn. Roshd. Strassburg, 1894.

A translation of al-Ghazzali's Tahafut has been begun by Carra de Vaux in Le

Muséon, xxviii, p. 143 (June, 1899).

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Materialien zur Kenntniss des Almohadenbewegung in

Nordafrika. ZDMG, xli, pp. 30 ff.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Die Bekenntnissformeln der Almohaden. ZDMG, xliv, pp.

168 ff.

ROBERT FLINT: Historical Philosophy in France and French Belgium and

Switzerland. New York, 1894. Contains an excellent estimate of Ibn Khaldun
as a philosophical historian.

A. VON KREMER: Ibn Chaldun and seine Culturgeschichte der islamischen

Reiche. Wien, 1879.

ERNEST RENAN: Averroes et l’Averroisme. III edition. Paris, 1861. Reviewed

by Dozy in JA, 5, ii, pp. 93 ff. This review contains a curious description of a
Parliament of Religions at Baghdad about A.D. 1000.

Philosophie end Theologie von Averroes. Aus dem Arabischen übersetzt von
M.J. Müller. München, 1875. The Arabic text was published by Müller in 1859.
 264

LEON GAUTHIER: Ibn Thofail-Hayy ben Yaqdhan, roman philosophique. Texte

arabe . . . et traduction française. Alger, 1900. There is an earlier edition of Ibn
Tufayl's romance by the younger Pocock with a Latin version. Oxford, 1671.

M. A. F. MEHREN: Correspondance du Philosophe Soufi Ibn Sa‘bin Abd oul-

Haqq avec l’Empereur Frédéric II. de Hohenstaufen. In JA, vii, 14, pp. 341 ff.

S. GUYARD: Abd ar-Razzaq et son traité de la Prédestination et du libre arbitre.

In JA, vii, 1, pp. 125 ff.

A. DE KREMER: Notice sur Sha’rany. In JA, vi, 11, pp. 253 ff.

G. FLUGEL: Scha‘rani und sein Werk uber die muhammadanische

Glaubenslehre. ZDMG, xx, p. 1 ff.

IGNAZ GOLDZIHER: Beiträge zur Litteraturgeschichte der Shi‘a. Wien, 1874.

JAMES L. MERRICK: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as contained in the

Sheeah Traditions of the Ifyat-ul-Kuloob. Boston, 1850.

J. B. RULING: Beiträge zur Eschatologie des Islam. Leipzig, 1895.

L. GAUTHIER: Ad-dourra al-fakhira; la perle précieuse de Ghazali. Genève,

1878. In Arabic and French; a valuable account of Muslim eschatology.

M. WOLFF: Muhammedanische Eschatologie. Leipzig, 1872. In Arabic and

German; an account of popular Muslim eschatology.

DEPONT ET CAPPOLANI: Les Confréries religieuses Musulmanes. Alger, 1897.

SNOUCK HURGRONJE: Les Confréries religieuses, la Mecque et le

Panislamisme, in Revue de l’histoire des religions, xliv, pp. 262 ff.
 265

APPENDIX 3
 266

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

A.H.

11 M.d.; Abu Bakr Kh.

13 ‘Umar Kh.

14 Battle of al-Qadisiya; fall of Jerusalem; al-Basra founded; fall of

Damascus.

17 Al-Kufa founded; Syria and Mesopotamia conquered.

20 Conquest of Egypt.

21 Battle of Nahawand; Persia conquered.

23 ‘Uthman Kh.

30 Final redaction of the Qur’an.

35 ‘Ali Kh.

36 Battle of Carmel.

40 ‘Ali d.

41 Mu'awiya I. Kh.; Herat.

49 ‘Al-Hasan d.

56 Samarqand.

60 Schism of Ibadites from Kharijites.

61 Karbala & d. of al-Husayn.

73 Storm of Mecca & d. of ‘Abd Allah b. Az-Zubayr.

74 Carthage.

80 Ma‘bad executed.

81 M. b. al-Hanafiya d.
 267

93 Toledo.

99-101 ‘Umar II. Kh.

110 Hasan al-Basri d.

114 Charles the Hammer at Tours (A. D. 732).

121 Zayd b. Zayn al-‘Abidin d.

124 Az-Zuhri d.

127-132 Marwan II. Kh.

130 Jahm b. Safwan killed?

131 Wasil b. ‘Ata d.

132 Fall of Umayyads; as-Saffah first ‘Abbasid Kh.

134 First Ibadite Imam.

135 Rabi‘a d.

136-158 Al-Mansur Kh.

138-422 Umayyads of Cordova.

140 Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ killed.

143 Halley's comet.

144 ‘Amr b. ‘Ubayd d.?

145 Baghdad founded; ‘A’isha d. of Ja‘far as-Sadiq d.

147 Homage to al-Mahdi as successor in Kh.

148 Ja‘far as-Sadiq d.

150 Abu Hanifa d.; trace of Sufi monastery in Damascus.

157 Al-Awza‘i d.

158-169 Al-Mahdi Kh.; John of Damascus d.?

 268

161 Sufyan ath-Thawri d.; Ibrahim b. Adham d.

165 Da’ud b. Nusayr d.

167 Bashshar b. Burd killed.

170-193 Harun ar-Rashid Kh.

172-375 Idrisids.

179 Malik b. Anas d. 68

A.H.

182 The Qadi Abu Yusuf d.

187 Fall of Barmecides; al-Fudayl b. ‘Iyad d.

189 M. b. al-Hasan d.

198-218 Al-Ma’mun Kh.

200 Ma‘ruf of al-Karkh d.; trace of Sufi monastery in Khurasan.

204 Ash-Shafi‘i d.

208 Abu ‘Ubayda d.; the Lady Nafisa d.

211 Theodorus Abucara d.

212 Decree that the Qur’an is created.

213 Thumama b. Ashras d.

215 Abu Sulayman of Damascus d.; 2nd decree.

218-234 The Mihna; Al-Mu‘tasim Kh.

220 Ma‘mar b. ‘Abbad.

223 Fatima of Naysabur d.

226 Abu Hudhayl M. al-‘Allaf d.

227 Bishr al-Hafi d.; al-Wathiq Kh.

 269

231 An-Nazzam d.

232 Al-Mutawakkil Kh.

234 Decree that Qur‘an is uncreated; Scotus Erigena transl. pseudo-

Dionysius, A. D. 850.

240 Ibn Abi Duwad d.

241 Ahmad b. Hanbal d.

243 Al-Harith al-Muhasibi d.

245 Dhu-n-Nun d.; al-Karabisi d.

250-316 ‘Alids of Zaydite branch in north Persia.

255 Al-Jahiz d.

256 Ibn Karram d.

257 Al-Bukhari d.; Sari as-Saqati d.

260 Al-Kindi d.? M. b. al-Hasan al-Mutazar vanished.

261 Muslim d.; Abu Yazid al-Bistami d.

270 Da’ud az-Zahiri d.

273 Ibn Maja d.

275 Abu Da’ud as-Sijistani d.

277 Qarmatians hold fortress in Arab ‘Iraq.

279 At-Tirmidhi d.

280 Zaydite Imams at as-Sa‘da and San‘a.

289 ‘Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi in North Africa.

295-320 Al-Muqtadir ‘Abbasid Kh.

297 First Fatimid Kh.; al-Junayd d.

300 Return of al-Ash‘ari.

 270

303 An-Nasa’i d.; Al-Jubba‘i d.

309 Al-Hallaj executed.

317 Umayyads of Cordova take title of Commander of the Faithful;

Qarmatians in Mecca.

320-447 Buwayhids; al-Ash‘ari d.?

322 Ibn ash-Shalmaghani.

331 At-Tahawi d.

332 Al-Mataridi d.

333-356 Sayf ad-Dawla.

334 Buwayhids in Baghdad; ash-Shibli d.

339 Return of Black Stone by Qarmatians; al-Farabi d.

356 Fatimids conquer Egypt; Cairo founded.

360 Ikhwan as-Safa fl.

362 Ibn Hani d.

381-422 Al-Qadir Kh.

386 Abu Talib al-Makki d.

388-421 Mahmud of Ghazna.

403 Al-Baqilani d.

408 Persecution of Mu‘tazilites under al-Qadir.

A.H.

411 Al-Hakim Fatimid Kh. vanished; Firdawsi d.

428 Ibn Sina d.

434 Abu Dharr d.

440 Al-Beruni d.
 271

447 Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, in Baghdad.

449 Abu-l-‘Ala al-Ma'arri d.

450 Persecution of Ash‘arites.

455 Alp-Arslan; Nizam al-Mulk Wazir; end of persecution of Ash‘arites.

456 Ibn Hazm az-Zahiri d.

465 Al-Qushayri d.

478 Imam al-Haramayn d.

481 Nasir b. Khusraw d.

483 Hasan b. as-Sabbah seizes Alamut.

485 Nizam al-Mulk assass.

488 Al-Ghazzali leaves Baghdad.

505 Al-Ghazzali d.

515 ‘Umar al-Khayyam d.

516 Al-Baghawi d.

524 Ibn Tumart al-Mahdi d.

524-558 ‘Abd al-Mu'min.

524-667 The Muwahhids.

533 Abu Bakr b. Bajja d.

537 Abu Hafs an-Nassfi d.

538 Az-Zamakhshari d.

540 Yehuda Halevi d. = A.D. 1145.

546 Abu Bakr b. al-‘Arabi d.

548 Ash-Shahrastani d.
 272

558 ‘Abd al-Mu'min the Muwahhid d.

558 ‘Adi al-Hakkari d.

558-580 Abu Ya‘qub the Muwahhid.

561 ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, founder of order of darwishes, d.

567 Conquest of Egypt by Saladin and end of Fatimids.

576 Order of Rifa‘ites founded.

580 Abu Ya‘qub d.

580-596Abu Yusuf al-Mansur.

581 Ibn Tufayl d.

587 As-Suhrawardi executed.

589 Saladin d.

590 Abu Shuja‘ d.?

595 Ibn Rushd d.; Abu Yusuf al-Mansur the Muwahhid d.

601 Maimonides d. = A.D. 1204.

606 Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi d.

620 Abu-l-Hajjaj b. Tumlus d.; Fakhr ad-Din b. ‘Asakir d.; St. Francis of
Assisi d. = A. D. 1226.

625-941 Hafsids at Tunis.

630-640 Ar-Rashid the Muwahhid.

632 ‘Umar b. al-Farid.

638 Ibn ‘Arabi d.

648 Frederick II. d. = A.D. 1250.

654 End of Assassins by Mongols; Ash-Shadhili, founder of order of

darwishes, d.
 273

667 Ibn Sab‘in d.; end of Muwahhids.

672 Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi d.

675 Ahmad al-Badawi, founder of order of darwishes, d.

681 Ibn Khallikan d.

685 Al-Baydawi d.

693, 698-708, 709-741 Muhammad An-Nasir, Mamluk Sultan, reg.

719 An-Nasr al-Manbiji d.?

724 Ibn Rushd is still studied at Almeria.

728 Ibn Taymiya d.; Meister Eckhart d. = A.D. 1328.

730 'Abd ar-Razzaq d.

756 Al-‘Iji d; Heinrich Suso d.

791 At-Taftazani d.; an-Naqshbandi, founder of order of darwishes, d.

A.H.

808 Ibn Khaldun d.

857 Capture of Constantinople by Ottomans and office of Shaykh al-

Islam created = A.D. 1453. Thomas á Kempis d. = A. D. 1471.

895 M. b. Yusuf as-Sanusi d.

907 Accession of Safawids.

922 Conquest of Egypt by Ottoman Turks.

945 Death of al-Mutawakkil, last ‘Abbasid.

951 Beginning of Sharifs of Morocco.

973 Ash-Sha‘rani d.

1201 ‘Abd al-Wahhab d. = A. D. 1787.

1205 Sayyid Murtada d.; al-Fudali fl. circ. 1220.

 274

1252 Foundation of Brotherhood of as-Sanusi = A.D, 1837.

1260 Ibrahim al-Bajuri d.; Decree of Porte that apostate Muslims should
not be put to death.

1275 Death of founder of Brotherhood of as-Sanusi = A.D. 1859.