Orthodoxy and Shiasm    

SIDE BY side with the elaboration of the logical framework of 1aw which has been described in the previous chapter went the elaboration of orthodox theology. This also was the work of many generations. Islam, as we have seen, came out of Arabia as a coherent doctrine, but its theological formulation was still in a fluid state, and it may be that the very extent of territory over which it spread contributed to keep it plastic for a longer time than might otherwise have been required, owing to the varieties of religious thought and experience upon which it acted and which reacted upon it in their turn.

            In all the provinces of Western Asia we see Islam at first assuming more or less distinct features, according to the degree of influence which was exerted by the local environment. In the cities of the Hijaz it tended to set in the moulds of the first generations of practical unspeculative piety; in Syria it began to be influenced by Hellenistic Christian thought; in Iraq it became infected with various Gnostic doctrines; amongst the unsettled Arab tribesmen of the borderlands it became an instrument of nomadic cupidity and love of plunder, sublimated into fanaticism; in certain districts of Persia it was adopted as the cloak of a modified dualism. It would have been difficult for a contemporary to prophesy which of all these multifarious forms would emerge as the definitively orthodox or ‘official’ version of the Islamic faith, more especially as all, with the exception of the fanatical doctrines of the tribesmen, were at first tolerated in greater or less degree, and no man who proclaimed the sole divinity of Allah and the prophetic mission of Mohammed was excluded from the Muslim fold.

            The establishment of an orthodox system was thus a gradual process, in which political considerations and political action played a large part (as always in the establishment of orthodox systems), though more often by consolidating than by determining the leading tendencies. The first factor which contributed towards it was the enormous moral preponderance of the Arabs in the Islamic Empire, a moral preponderance which long survived their political preponderance. Here and there voices might be raised against the Arabs, but in the field of religious thought they were ine8ective against the weight of  Araberthum, the Arab idea. The inner history of the Islamic civilization cannot be understood unless that fact is fully realized and given its due place.

            Now the centre of this   Araberthum was Medina, the nucleus whence Islam had spread, and moreover the home of all the earliest religious studies in Islam. It was in Medina that the Quran received its final form, that the Tradition was first collected, and that the earliest application of linguistic and historical studies to the sources of the Muslim religion was made. From the very earliest times students from all countries, whether Muslim-born or converts, Arabs or non-Arabs, flocked to Medina, and received there from the lips of the actual contemporaries of the Prophet, and from those who had lived in the closest intimacy with those contemporaries, the pure doctrine of the new religion. The schools in other countries had a purely local significance; Medina alone was the universal school.

            This pre-eminence was strengthened by another factor as well. In the religious theory of Islam, Church and State were one and indivisible; but in fact the delicate moral and religious ties by which the early Caliphs had exercised authority over the Muslim body-politic were roughly snapped in the fourth decade after the Hijra, and in their place was substituted the authority of the military power. Thus Church and State were in practice disjoined; but at Medina the fact was never admitted, and it remained the headquarters of the religious opposition, denouncing the betrayal of its theocratic ideal and the usurpation of power by worldly rulers. The great bulk of scholastic religious opinion in the Empire shared this feeling, and the stand made by the scholars of Medina raised their prestige, even amongst those who did not fully share their theological conservatism.

            By these means, the school of Medina effectively contributed to maintain a general uniformity amongst the lesser local schools of Arab theologians, the most important of which was that in Iraq. Moreover, it stamped upon this nascent universal Church its own practical and pietistic ethos, so determining its fundamental characteristics, to which all later developments had ultimately to conform. And perhaps, a matter of scarcely less importance, by thus dissociating the religion of Islam from the political organization, it maintained religion above the sphere of politics and did not involve Islam in the overthrow  of Arab political supremacy.

            The doctors of Medina reaped their reward when the new Abbasid dynasty established  its supremacy and removed the capital of the Empire to Iraq. Orthodoxy, of the Medinian brand, became one of the planks in their platform, and they made it their business to give their moral support at least to the teachings of Medina. Some went farther even than giving merely moral support, by beginning a species of active persecution of the most heretical forms of Islam and more especially the gnostic and dualistic perversions. Gradually the definition of orthodoxy was thus being tightened up. Already the fanatical interpretation of the tribesmen (the extremer Kharijite doctrine) had been rejected as heresy–now the extremer gnostic and dualistic interpretations were equally rejected. Both of these survived, but as definitely heretical sects, and we shall return to them later. There still remained other interpretations and in particular one interpretation, which was infinitely more difficult to isolate and combat. This was the Hellenistic interpretation, maintained by the Mu’tazilite school, and for some two centuries more the struggle between these two conceptions occupied the central place in orthodox Islam.

            The points at issue were at bottom metaphysical. Oriental philosophy had never appreciated the fundamental idea of justice in Greek philosophy, and it was this which the representatives of the Hellenistic interpretation were attempting to accommodate within Islam. The stricter schools held to the Oriental conceptions of God as Infinite Power and Infinite Love and Mercy; the Mu’tazilites conceived of God as Infinite Justice. This their opponents regarded as setting limitations upon the Power of God–arbitrary limitations because the requirements of absolute justice were expressed in terms derived from human reason. The argument crystallized out from the philosophical into the theological plane in the problem of Free Will and Predestination, a question on which both sides could point to texts in the Quran to support their case, as was shown in a previous chapter.

            In the second place, the Hellenistic school, with its more developed philosophical training, regarded the orthodox doctrine of the Attributes of God (Hearing, Speech, Sight, Willing, etc.) as endangering, if not actually contradicting His Unity. Here again the argument became centred on one point, the Speech of God, and since the Quran  is the Speech of God in one sense, it took the (at first sight) strange theological form of affirming on the orthodox side, and denying on the other, that the Quran  was uncreated and eternal, with the still more curious result that the opponents of Hellenistic philosophy reaffirmed without realizing it the Hellenistic  doctrine of the Logos.

            In the majority of modern textbooks, the Mu’tazilites are described as Rationalists or even as Free-thinkers  (Freidenker). But this  is now recognized to be a serious misrepresentation. Until recently, our information about them  was derived exclusively from orthodox (i.e. hostile) sources, and they have been regarded in consequence as merely an opposition theological party of no great importance except as the source of these dogmatic conflicts. The recovery of a few Mu’tazilite works is beginning to show them in a new light, as a group of thinkers and teachers who rendered invaluable services to the cause of Islam amongst the peoples of the lands conquered by the Arabs. Between the simple doctrines of Medinian piety and the long tradition of Hellenistic culture and gnosticism in Western Asia there was a gap which it was difficult to bridge over. It was the existence of this gap which was responsible for the great outcrop of strange heresies (especially in Iraq) during the first and second centuries, and it was this gap which was eventually closed by the early Mu’tazilites, who were at once sincere Muslims and able to formulate the Islamic faith in terms which were acceptable to the educated non-Arabs.

            The Mu’tazilite movement began, indeed, at the end of the first century as an ethical reaction against the doctrinal and practical excesses of the fanatical Kharijites, on the one hand, and against the ethical laxity of the political conformists (known as the Murji’ites) on the other. Their first doctrinal position  is described in consequence,  as ‘the intermediate position’. While they rejected the Kharijite insistence of ‘works’ as the sole criterion of faith, they stressed the responsibility of the Believer as against the Murji’ite emphasis on the sufficiency of faith, irrespective of ‘works’. This also led them to lay greater stress on those passages of the Quran which assert man’s responsibility and power of choice, since it was precisely in the doctrine of predestination that the Murji’ites took refuge. In its beginnings, therefore, the leaders of the Mu’tazila were rigid puritans, rather than rationalists; their teachings were perfectly compatible with (and indeed based upon) the Quran, and we shall probably not be far wrong in regarding them as the most active and vigorous section among the orthodox Sunni teachers in Iraq. It has, indeed, sometimes been a source of embarrassment to later orthodox opponents of the Mu’tazila that both the great saint al-Hasan of Basra and the great jurist Abu Hanifa show more than a hint of what were later called Mu’tazilite leanings in their doctrine.

              During the second century we catch little more than glimpses of the Mu’tazilites. But these glimpses are revealing, for they display them to us as the leaders in an intense missionary movement, directed especially against the dualist or Manichaean heresies which were still widespread amongst both the old-established Arab population and the Aramaeans of Iraq. It was partly due, in all probability, to this struggle with the dualists that the Mu’tazilites were brought into contact with Greek logic and philosophy. The great movement of translation of Greek works into Arabic followed, and was especially active at the beginning of the third century, when for twenty-five years Mu’tazilite influence was dominant at the Court. All the Mu’tazilite philosophical schools belong to the third century, and were obviously the outcome of this activity.

            This  is the aspect of Mu’tazilism with which we are most familiar, and from which it has acquired the appearance of a rationalist movement. Yet the change in its essential character was not as great as it might appear. It was still, in ethics and practice, a puritan school, becoming, indeed, more positive and rigid in  its attitude as controversy with the predestinarians increased in violence. For after the fall of the Umayyads the dispute over predestination began to lose its immediate political importance and to take on a more theological character, with the majority leaning towards it and against the Mu’tazilite position.

            As for the philosophical schools, it would seem that most or all of them were composed of small groups of disciples of individual theologians, who did not necessarily represent any general body of doctrine. These thinkers developed, by the aid of Greek logic, new theological systems in order to defend their dogmatic positions, and as time went on they advanced more and more boldly into the field of metaphysics. They carried the advanced wing of orthodox scholarship part of the way with them, but the latter stopped short when the Mu’tazilite extremists began to force Muslim doctrines into the mould of Greek concepts and to derive their theology speculatively from Greek metaphysics instead of the Quran.

            It could be argued very plausibly that the causes of the successful reaction of the orthodox against the Mu’tazilites had little to do in fact with the external slogans of Predestination and the Uncreated Quran. It was the lengths to which they pushed their three principal doctrines that led to their undoing. The first, called the doctrine of Promise and Threat, governed their practical ethical teaching in regard to individual responsibility. By their dogmatic intolerance and their attempt to use coercion to gain their cause they created a strong current of opposition which was ready to fasten on any pre- text to discredit them. And plenty of pretexts were supplied by the philosophical developments of their two other main dogmas, the doctrines of Unity and Justice. In their endeavours to exclude every shadow of anthropomorphism from the concept of God, Mu’tazilite thinkers were forced either into something very like the Christian hypostases or else into a system of abstract negations which left nothing for ordinary Believers to fasten on, and contrasted strongly with the vividly personal figure of Allah presented by the Quran.

            Thrown into the wide sea and utter freedom of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the bursting-point and, more even than 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.[1]

More especially by their exaltation of the principle of justice they seemed to erect an  a priori concept into an absolute even over Allah.

            So the breaking-point was reached. In the daily practice of religion they had shown themselves harshly dogmatic, lacking the human charity, tolerance, and broadmindedness of the simple Muslim faith, even to the extent of persecuting their opponents in the day of their power. In their theology they had produced a vacuum and–far worse–had accorded to the products of human reason an absolute value above the Word of God. The orthodox rightly rejected these pretensions, for in religion anthroposophy  is a more insidious solvent than anthropomorphism. The right wing of the Mu’tazilites, who in their search for some synthesis of philosophy with orthodox doctrine had been gradually drawing apart from the rationalist left wing, threw in their lot with the defenders of the Sunna. Applying the methods of Greek dialectic to the support of the Quran and the Hadith, they evolved a new orthodox scholasticism and defeated the Mu’tazilites on their own ground.

            This victory is associated with the names of al-Ash’ari of Baghdad and al-Maturidi of Samarqand at the end of the third century of the Muslim era. On the problem of free-will, al-Ash’ari reconciled the predestinarian dogma with the requirements of justice by founding on certain Quranic texts a doctrine of ‘acquisition’, whereby man ‘acquires’ the responsibility for his actions although they are willed and created by God. In regard to the Divine Attributes, the scholastics maintained the doctrine of their eternity, but only by applying the Mu’tazilite principle of negation of anthropomorphic concepts. The rigour of the Mu’tazilite ethic was softened by laying more stress on the doctrine of intercession, and its utilitarian aspect countered by the reassertion of the absolute freedom of God to punish or reward as He wills. Finally, while admitting that by Divine ‘custom’ certain so-called ‘effects’ normally follow on certain ‘causes’, they removed the limitations set by the doctrine of natural causation upon the absoluteness of God’s power by means of a complex atomic theory which denied any necessary relation between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.

It was probably to the good of Islam that Mu’tazilite rationalism, having done its work but not known where to stop, was defeated. Had it been successful, it is doubtful whether the popular movements out of which, as will be seen in the next chapter, the regeneration  of Islam was to come, could possibly have been tolerated, much  less accommodated, within the framework of orthodoxy. Sooner or later the unity of Islamic culture would have suffered violent disruption and Islam itself might have succumbed under the blows of its enemies. But Mu’tazilism did not at once disappear. Its adherents lingered on,  still distinguished for strictness in their practice of religious duties, chiefly in Basra and in Eastern Persia, and some of its doctrines found fresh scope in the other great heretical community of the Shi'a.  

            Meanwhile the orthodox had themselves split into two camps, the scholastics  (mutakallimun=loquentes) and the ‘people of the Hadith’. Even in the service of orthodoxy philosophy and logic were suspect; the old school of Medina, in its more moderate Malikite and Shafi’ite formulations, and in the extremer and more fanatical wing formed by the disciples of the Baghdad doctor Ahmad ibn Hanbal, still remained hostile to studies tainted by their foreign origin and philosophical associations. In Baghdad itself the scholastics went at times in fear of their lives, until a century and a half later, when, about 1065, the Ash’arite system was established as the main theology of Sunni Islam, largely through the influence (it is thought) of the great Persian vizier Nizam ul-Mulk.

            Yet, perhaps, the traditionalists were wiser than they knew, for one result of the importation of Greek dialectic was to concentrate the labours of scholars and theologians upon dogmas and formulas, to the loss of the vital element of personal religion. Had there been nothing else to rekindle the flame, orthodoxy would surely have perished in  its own victory. But one by-product of the introduction of scholasticism must not pass unnoticed. It made possible the activities of that remarkable series of medieval Arabic philosophers, al-Kindi (d. 873), al-Farabi (d. 950) Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d.1037), Avempace (Ibn Baja, d. 1138), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198)-to mention only a few outstanding names. Though many of them were far from orthodox, their works are among the glories of the Islamic civilization; and there is no need to dwell here upon their services to philosophical thought directly and through the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Europe.

            In turning to deal with sectarian movements, it must be stressed that by ‘sects’ are meant those systems of Islamic doctrines and beliefs which are repudiated by the orthodox generally and by one another as heretical. Within the orthodox community itself there have been and still are a number of different ‘schools’ (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) which are all mutually tolerated (see pp. 69-70 above), and in addition to these somewhat legal divisions there have entered into orthodox Islam many later practices and rituals, though not always without opposition. Yet it may be said that as a general rule, the Sunni principle has been to extend the limits of toleration as widely as possible. No great religious community has ever possessed more fully the catholic spirit or been more ready to allow the widest freedom to its members provided only that they accepted, at least outwardly, the minimum obligations of the faith. It would not be to go too far beyond the bounds of strict truth to say, in fact, that no body of religious sectaries has ever been excluded from the orthodox Islamic community but those who desired such an exclusion and as it were excluded themselves.

            It is this point precisely which distinguished the earliest sect of Islam, the so-called Khawarij or Kharijites (i.e. ‘Seceders’). In their original dogmas they diverged from the Sunni majority on no matter of importance. They broke away merely on a point of practice. It is laid down as the duty of every Muslim to exhort men to do the good and restrain them from doing evil. The orthodox–which  is to say, the community as a whole–accepted this obligation with the proviso that due regard must be given to circumstances in putting it into practice. The Kharijites–who  were mainly nomads and semi-nomads in Mesopotamia and the fringes of Iraq–rejected the condition, and insisted on it as an absolute duty to be pursued in season and out of season, even at the cost of life itself. In other words they were religious extremists, and their fanaticism led them to the conclusion that those Muslims who temporized on this point were backsliders and apostates, indeed no Muslims at all, and that they themselves were the only true Muslims. Armed with this principle, they made open war on the community, and thus put themselves outside the pale of orthodoxy. The fortunes of the early Kharijites do not concern us here, but eventually their more moderate leaders formulated  systems which have survived in small puritanical communities in Southern Algeria, Oman, and Zanzibar. Thus early, Islam rejected the doctrine of religious fanaticism. At a later day, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, we shall find the same lesson enforced on the Wahhabi reformers of Arabia.

            The case of the other main sect in Islam–the only important schismatic sect, in fact–is different. The Shi’a began as a political movement amongst the, Arabs themselves. Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet and fourth Caliph of Islam, had made his capital at Kufa in Iraq. When, on his death, the political centre of Islam was shifted to Syria, the opposition of the Arabs of Kufa to the Arabs of Syria took the form of a legitimist agitation, aiming at the restoration of the house of Ali to the Caliphate. Gradually this political aspiration created for itself a doctrinal basis, opposed to the accepted doctrine of the community, namely, the doctrine of the exclusive right of the house of Ali to the Caliphate. This involved the repudiation of the first three Caliphs, Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman, as usurpers, and this denunciation of three of the most revered Companions has always remained the chief offence of Shiasm in the eyes of orthodox Muslims. But in all other matters of law, as in theology and religious practice, Shiasm had as yet no distinctive doctrine. This early Shiasm has left a memorial to this day in Morocco, which is Shi’ite in its political organization, but orthodox Sunni in its theology and law.

        At a very early stage, however, the Shi’ite name was used to cover a number of totally different activities, and served as a cloak for the introduction into Islam of all sorts of old oriental beliefs, Babylonian, Persian, and even Indian. The conversion of large numbers of the earlier inhabitants of the conquered countries necessarily led to a widespread unsettlement of religious belief, which favoured the spread of esoteric sects, and led to the religious struggles of the early centuries. The Hellenistic elements as a rule attached themselves to the Sunni or majority party, while the older Asiatic beliefs tended rather to attach themselves to the person of Ali. From their very nature, however, such beliefs were held and propagated mainly by non-Arabs, and more especially by the mixed population of Iraq. There are indications also that Shiasm in the early centuries was among the people the standard rather of a social revolt against the Sunni ruling classes than of a theological opposition to the Sunni doctrines. It should be said at once that the still far too prevalent view that Persia was the original home of Shiasm has no foundation at all, and it is noteworthy that converts from Zoroastrianism adopted in general the Sunni rather than the Shi’ite faith.

            The principle which was common to practically all these quasi- Shi’ite sects was that parallel to the outward interpretation of the Quran there existed an occult interpretation and a body of secret knowledge. This was  ex hypothesi transmitted by Mohammed to Ali, and by Ali to his heir. The various sects differed as to who was the heir of Ali, and it is remarkable that hardly any of them attached themselves in this connexion to the line of direct descendants of Mohammed who were the successors of Ali in the view of the legitimist Arab Shiasm of Kufa, but rather to the other descendants of Ali. Moreover, while the Arab Shi’a broke away from the community only on the question of the political headship of Islam, the esoteric sects went much farther in attributing to the Imam–as they styled the head of the Community–a spiritual function which the orthodox theologians always refused to the Caliph. In orthodox Islam the Caliph has no interpretative functions and cannot define dogma; he is simply the political and religious leader of the Community. But for those who held that the occult interpretation of the Quran was known exclusively to the line of Imams, the only authoritative  source of doctrine was the Imam himself. Thus on the one hand their religion was centered on a principle of absolute personal authority, foreign both in politics and religion to the orthodox theory, and on the other hand it permitted a much wider measure of development and adaptation to the circumstances of successive generations under the theoretical guidance of the divinely inspired Imam.

            Gradually this doctrine of the Imamate crystallized into definite theological form. The Imams acquire a superhuman character, by virtue of the supernatural qualities which they possess. In accordance with the old Babylonian Light-philosophy, this is expressed by the doctrine that in them is incarnated the Divine Light which has descended through successive generations of Prophets from the time of Adam. Some Shi’ite sects even went so far as to regard Ali and the Imams after him as incarnations of the Godhead itself, but these, though they are still to be found in various parts of the Muslim world, may be disregarded here as exaggerated and unrepresentative views. Similar fragments remain of an opposition doctrine which attributed to the Umayyad Caliphs Yazid and Marwan much the same divine attributes, especially the Yazidi sect in Northern Iraq. Of much greater importance is the consequence which was drawn from the original doctrine, namely, that the Imam is sinless and infallible, for this dogma is one of the fundamental doctrines of the greater body of Shi’ites to the present day.

             It is not yet clear by what stages these two original forms of Shiasm were welded together, the Arab legitimist Shi’a and the esoteric Shiasm. But in the third and fourth centuries of the Muslim era the process was already far advanced. The qualities of the gnostic Imams were transferred to the descendants of the Prophet through Ali and the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, and the gnostic doctrines were adopted as the religious constitution of the Shi’a sect. The majority of the minor sects disappeared, leaving the field to three principal groups of Shi’ites.

            Of these three, the Zaidis, still dominant in the highlands of Yemen, stand closest to the old legitimist Shiasm and to orthodox Sunni Islam. They recognize a continuing series of Imams, to whom no supernatural qualities are ascribed. The majority or Imami sect, now the official religion of Persia and with a following in India, Iraq, and Syria, recognizes twelve Imams; the last of these Mohammed al-Muntazar (‘the Expected One’), disappeared about the year 873, and his return is still looked for. The most extreme group, the Isma’ilis, broke away over the succession to the sixth Imam; they were represented in the Middle Ages by the popular revolutionary movement of the ‘Carmathians’ (Qarmatis), the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt (969-1171), and its offshoot, the ‘Assassins’, whose modern successors still have a following in India and East Africa, under the headship of the Aga Khan.

            In the course of time the Imami system of doctrine and law has diverged very considerably from that of the Sunnis. The Imamis do not, of course, accept the principle of ijma’, and in the absence of the Imam, the leading theologians, called Mujtahids (p. 66), exercise an extensive authority in religious and legal matters. In law their chief peculiarity is the permission of temporary marriage, and in religious practice the doctrine of taqiya or dissimulation, a relic, probably, of medieval persecution. But in regard to the five ‘Pillars of the Faith’ they differ only on a few points of detail, minor in themselves although they have acquired an exaggerated importance from a thousand years of embittered controversy. At various times attempts have been made to heal the schism on the basis of recognition  of the Imami system as a fifth orthodox ‘school’ by the name of ‘Ja’fari’ (after the sixth Imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq, whose authority  is accepted also by the Sunnis), but these attempts have so far always proved unavailing.

            Nevertheless, although its doctrines as a whole were rejected by the orthodox, Shiasm has exercised a powerful influence in several departments of Sunni thought and practice. The Shi’ite veneration for Ali and his descendants is reflected in the sympathetic attitude of Sunni historical tradition towards them. The doctrine of the Divine Light and the sinlessness of the Imam was taken over and applied, not to Ali himself but to Ali’s master, the Prophet Mohammed, and in conjunction with other causes supplied the basis for an enthusiastic veneration of the Prophet, which has ever been one of the strongest spiritual influences in Sunni Islam. The main channel through which these influences, together with other Shi’ite reminiscences , penetrated into the orthodox system was the mystical movement which goes by the name of Sufism. To this we must now turn.  

 

[1] D. B.  Macdonald,  Development  of  Muslim Theology, p. 140.