Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (19 page)

This is where this quarrel among theologians has implications for the development of science, a mode of inquiry that depends on the application of reason without recourse to revelation. The Mu’tazilites were talking about reason as a way of discovering moral and ethical truths, but in this time and place, the principles of human conduct and the principles of nature all belonged to the same big field of inquiry: the quest for absolute truth.

The philosopher scientists generally affiliated themselves with the Mu’tazilite school, no doubt because it validated their mode of inquiry. Some of these philosophers even rated reason above revelation.
The philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi blatantly asserted that the miracles ascribed to prophets of the past were legends and that heaven and hell were mental categories, not physical realities.

You can see how beliefs such as these would put the philosophers and the ulama at odds. For one thing, the precepts of the philosophers implicitly rendered the ulama irrelevant. If any intelligent person could weigh in on whether a law was right or wrong, based on whether it made rational sense, why would anyone need to consult scholars who had memorized every quotation ever ascribed to Prophet Mohammed?

The ulama were in a good position to fight off such challenges. They controlled the laws, education of the young, social institutions such as marriage, and so on. Most importantly, they had the fealty of the masses. But the Mu’tazilites had advantages too—or rather, they had one advantage: the favor of the court, the imperial family, the aristocrats, and the top officials of the government. In fact, the seventh Abbasid khalifa made Mu’tazilite theology the official doctrine of the land. Judges had to pass philosophy tests and would-be administrators had to swear allegiance to reason, in
order to qualify for office.

Then the Mu’tazilites and their supporters went further: they began using the power of government to persecute people who disagreed with them.

Which brings me back to Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, founder of the Hanbali school of law, the last of the orthodox schools to develop, and the most rigidly conservative of them all. Ibn Hanbal was born in Baghdad in 164 AH, just thirty-six years after the Abbasid dynasty began. He came of age amid the disillusionment that must have permeated certain strata of society when people realized that Abbasids were going to be just as worldly as the Umayyads. He captured the imagination of the crowds by preaching that Islam had gone wrong and that the world was headed to hell unless the community cor
rected its course. The only hope of salvation, he said, lay in scraping away all innovations and going back to the ways of the first community, the Medina of Prophet Mohammed’s time. Above all, he declared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul’s safety only by following in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation. The other schools of Islamic law gave analogical reasoning (qiyas) a high place as a way to discover how the shari’a applied to new situatio
ns, but Ibn Hanbal drastically demoted such methods: rely only on Qur’an and hadith, he said.

He was hauled into the imperial court and made to debate a leading theologian on the question of whether the Qur’an was created or uncreated, an issue that contained the whole question of the role of reason in moral inquiry. The philosopher hit Ibn Hanbal with logic, the scholar struck back with scripture. The philosopher tied him up in knots of argument, Ibn Hanbal burst free with invocations to Allah on high. Obviously, no one could really “win” a debate of this sort because the debaters did not agree on terms. When Ibn Hanbal refused to disavow his views, he was physically beaten,
but it didn’t change his mind. He was clapped into prison. Still he clung to his principles: never would he let reason trump revelation, never!

So the authorities ratcheted up the pressure. They beat Ibn Hanbal until his joints popped out of their sockets, bound him in heavy chains, and tossed him into prison for several years. Ibn Hanbal refused to renounce his views. As you might guess, the well-publicized abuse failed to discredit his ideas but instead gave them a certain prestige. Common folks, who already resented the Abbasids for their wealth and pomp, grew restive now; and when the masses grew restive, even the mighty Abbasids had to pay attention because almost every time a khalifa died, a scuffle broke out to dete
rmine his successor, a scuffle in which either side might use the passions of the crowd as artillery. When the aging, aching Ibn Hanbal was released from prison, reverent crowds greeted him and cheered him and carried him home. Seeing this, the imperial court developed some reservations about Islamic philosophy and the Greek ideas from which it derived. The next khalifa demoted the Mu’tazilites and heaped honors upon Ibn Hanbal, which signaled the waning prestige of the Mu’tazilites, and with them the philosophers. And it signaled the rising status of the scholars who maintained the edifice
of orthodox doctrine, an edifice that eventually choked off the ability of Muslim intellectuals to pursue inquiries without any reference to revelation.

Almost from the start, however, as the scholars were codifying the law, some people were asking, “Is this all the revelation comes to in the
end— a set of rules? Because I’m not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?” Instructions from God on high were all very well, but some people longed to experience God as a palpable living presence right now, right down here. What they wanted from the revelations was transformation and transcendence.

A few of these people began to experiment with spiritual exercises that went way beyond the requirements of duty. They read the Qur’an incessantly or spent hours reciting the names of Allah. In Baghdad, for example, there was a man named al-Junayd who habitually performed four hundred units of the Muslim prayer ritual after work every day. In reaction, perhaps, to the luxurious lifestyles of Muslim elite, some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called
suf
in Arabic, for which reason people began to call these people Sufis
.

They professed no new creed, these Sufis. They were not out to launch another sect. Sure, they opposed worldly ambition and corruption and greed, but so did every Muslim, in theory. The Sufis differed from the others only in saying, “How do you purify your heart? Whatever the exactly correct gestures and litanies may be, how do you actually get immersed in Allah to the exclusion of all else?”

They began to work out techniques for eliminating distractions and cravings not just from prayer but from life. Some spoke of engaging in spiritual warfare against their own meanest tendencies. Harking back to a hadith in which Mohammed distinguished between a “greater” and a “lesser” jihad, they declared that the internal struggle to expunge the ego was the real jihad, the greater jihad
.
(The lesser jihad they identified as the struggle against external enemies of the community.)

Gradually a buzz got started about these eccentrics—that some of them had broken through the barriers of the material world to a direct experience of Allah.

In Basra, for example, lived the poet Rabia al-Basri, whose life is now laced with legend. Born in the last years of Umayyad rule, she was a young woman when the Abbasids took over. As a little girl, she had been traveling somewhere with her family when bandits hit the caravan. They killed her parents and sold Rabia into slavery. That’s how she ende
d up in Basra as a slave in some rich man’s household. Her master, the stories say, kept noticing a luminous spirituality about her that made him wonder. . . . One night, when she was lost in prayer, he observed a halo surrounding her body. It struck him suddenly that he had a saint living in his house, and awe took hold of him. He set Rabia free and pledged to arrange a good marriage for her. He would get her connected to one of the best families in the city, he vowed. She had only to name the man she wanted to marry, and he would open up negotiations at once.

But Rabia said she could not marry any man, for she was already in love.

“In love?” gasped her recent master. “With whom?”

“With Allah!” And she began to pour forth poetry of such rapturous passion that her former owner became her first and lifelong disciple. Rabia entered upon a life of ascetic contemplation, mystic musings that frequently erupted into a love poetry so intensely emotional it sounded almost carnal, except that the “lover” she addressed was Allah:

How much poetry she poured forth, I don’t know. The canon that survives is slight, but in her day, her fame was great: many journeyed to Basra just to see Rabia for themselves. Many came away convinced that she had found the key to union with Allah. To her, the key was not fear but love, utterly abandoned, reckless, and unlimited love.

Easy enough to say but how could one actually fall into such love? Hungry seekers hung around with the charismatic mystic herself, hoping to catch her passion like a fever. Some did catch it, they said, which of course brought more seekers to her gates. I don’t call them students, because no books were involved, no scholarship, no study. Rabia of Basra did not teach. She simply radiated, and people in her vicinity changed. This became the pattern in Sufism: direct transmission of techniques leading to enlightenment from master to
mureed,
as would-be Sufis were called.

Until this time, most Muslim mystics were “sober” Sufis, rigorously devoted to rituals and recitation. Their devotions focused on fear (of God). Rabia Basri put love at the center and helped spawn a long tradition of “God-intoxicated Sufis.” Let’s be clear, though: all of these people were Muslims first and Sufis next. I state this caveat simply because today lots of people call themselves Sufis when they’re really just singing and dancing themselves into a state of euphoria. The Sufis were not after a mere emotion. They weren’t trying to get high. Their spiritual practices began with the
known devotions of Islam and then added more on top.

People flocked to Sufis with a definite goal in mind. They hoped to “get somewhere.” Working with a Sufi master smacked of learning a methodology. Indeed, what Sufis did came to be labeled the
tariqa,
the “method.” Those who entered upon the method expected to move through distinct stages to annihilation of their egos and immersion in God.

The jurists and the orthodox scholars did not look kindly on the Sufis, especially the God-intoxicated variety. The language employed by these saints began to sound a bit heretical. Their claims grew ever more extravagant. Common folks began to ascribe magical powers to the most famous Sufis. The hostilities came to a head in the late tenth century CE with a Persian Sufi named al-Hallaj.

Hallaj
means “cotton carder.” This was his father’s profession, and he too started out in the family trade; but the longing for union with God sank talons into his heart, and he abandoned his home to search for a master who would initiate him into Sufi secrets. At one point, he spent an entire year standing motionless in front of the Ka’ba, never uttering a sound. One year! Imagine the attention this might have drawn to him. Later, he went traveling to India and to Central Asia, and everywhere he went he spouted poetry and gave strange speeches, and he attracted countless followers.

But the sober Sufis began to back away from him, because Hallaj was saying things like, “My turban is wrapped around nothing but God.” And again, “Inside my clothes you’ll find nothing but God.” And finally, in case someone didn’t get his point, “I am God.” Well, actually, he said, “I am Truth,” but “Truth” was famously one of the ninety-nine names of God and given Hallaj’s recent history, no one could miss what he was getting at.

This was too much. The orthodox scholars demanded action. The Abbasid khalifa wanted to appease the scholars so they would get
off his back about the philosophers. He therefore had Hallaj clapped in prison for eleven years, but Hallaj was so lost to the world by this time, he didn’t care. Even in his cell he kept spouting his God-intoxicated utterances, sometimes associating himself with Jesus Christ, and often mentioning martyrdom. One thing was for sure: he recanted nothing. Finally, the orthodox establishment decided they had run out of options. They would have to pressure the state to apply the time-tested, never-fail method of discrediting a message: kill the messenger.

The authorities did not just execute Hallaj. They hung him, cut off his limbs, decapitated him, and finally burned his corpse. Oddly enough, it didn’t work. Hallaj was gone, but Sufism continued to proliferate. Charismatic individuals kept emerging, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all across the civilized world. Some were “sober” Sufis like Junayd and some were the God-intoxicated variety, like Rabia Basri and Hallaj.

In sum, by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on three great cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians, philosopher-scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and law in full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a technique for achieving personal union with God. Yes, the three groups overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing directions, and their intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes bloody political and financial stakes. At this juncture, one of the intellectu
al giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the province of Khorasan. His name was Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali.

By his early twenties, Ghazali had already earned acclaim as one of the foremost ulama of his age. No matter how many hadith you knew, he knew more. In his day, some ulama had elaborated a theology to compete with that of the Mu’tazilites. The Asharite school, as it was called, insisted that faith could never be based on reason, only on revelation. Reason’s function was only to support revelation. Asharite theologians were constantly squaring off against prominent Mu’tazilites in public debates, but the Mu’tazilites knew fancy Greek tricks for winning arguments, such as logic and rhetoric,
so they were constantly making the Asharites look confused.