Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (15 page)

At the beginning of the eleventh century, al-Mutawakkil’s policy was revived by one of his descendants, Abbasid caliph al-Qadir, who called on all “innovators,” and especially the Rationalist Mutazilite and Hanafi scholars, to “repent” from their misguided ways. Those who refused were forbidden to do any theological or juridical work. A heavy-handed minion of the caliph, Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of a vast area covering today’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, carried the policy to extremes. He launched a brutal campaign to kill all the Mutazilites and other “heretics” by “crucifying them, imprisoning them, [or] exiling them.” He also “ordered the cursing of them from the pulpits of the Muslims. And he threatened every group from the
ahl al-bida
(innovators) and drove them away from their homes.”
⁴⁷

Back in Baghdad, the caliph soon coped with the tone. He declared that anyone who called the Qur’an created—a cornerstone of Mutazilite theology—would be deemed an infidel and his blood would be shed.
⁴⁸

Besides all this internal bigotry, the most destructive blow to Islamic reason, and actually to Islamdom itself, would be an external threat: the “Mongol catastrophe” of the mid-thirteenth century. The armies of Genghis Khan and his successors stormed the Middle East, conquering everything between Syria and India. All invaders are brutal, but the Mongols’ terror was “unprecedented,” for they “loved destruction for its own sake.”
⁴⁹
As they marched through Islamdom,

Again and again, almost the entire populace of a city was massacred without regard to sex or age, only skilled artisans being saved and transported away; even peasants were involved, being used as a living mass of rubble forced ahead of the army to absorb arrows and fill moats.
⁵⁰

In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad—then the most vibrant and polished city of Islamdom, if not the world. They massacred almost the whole Muslim population, including the caliph, and destroyed the House of Wisdom, with its magnificent collection of the works of the Mutazilites and other intellectuals of Islam. It was said that so many manuscripts were thrown into the Tigris that the river turned black from the ink for days on end.
⁵¹
The Mongols even shattered the irrigation systems of the Middle East, reducing agricultural production to one-tenth of what it had been before.
⁵²
This was colossal destruction that Europe was lucky to have never faced.
⁵³

A similar tragedy would hit Spain, the western edge of Islamdom, three centuries later. The Muslim kingdom there, called al-Andalus, had preserved the intellectual sophistication of the Rationalist school, along with magnificent works of art and architecture and a spirit of
convivencia
—cultural and civic collaboration among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
⁵⁴
As in Baghdad, though, this medieval enlightenment was afflicted first by internal bigotry and then by external invasion. The rich libraries of Muslim Spain were attacked first by the Kharijite-like militant Muslims from North Africa and then by the Spanish
Reconquista
, which expelled all Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.
⁵⁵
When Inquisitor Ximenez de Cisneros ordered the burning of some eighty thousand Muslim books in Granada in 1499, “to sweep away all the traces of the teachings of Islam,” what he was really sweeping away was the best of Islam.
⁵⁶

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The war of ideas between the Traditionists and the Rationalists of Islam was a long and complex one, and we have covered only the headlines of this curious story. The result, in a nutshell, was that the Traditionists won and the Rationalists lost. This was the outcome of a trend that started in the third century of Islam and crystallized in the fifth.

The Traditionist victory had permanent consequences for Muslim thinking. “In the very early period the Muslims interpreted the Qur’an pretty freely,” notes the late Fazlur Rahman, the prominent Muslim modernist theologian. “But after the 2nd century . . . the lawyers neatly tied themselves and the Community down . . . and theology became buried under the weight of literalism.”
⁵⁷
The Traditionists also swept aside the individualist spirit of the Qur’an, for they “cared little for the individual and his personal experience.” Instead, they emphasized “almost exclusively the social content of Islam . . . [and] refused to allow the individual the right of creative thinking.”
⁵⁸

As early as the third century of Islam (tenth century), Traditionists were already arguing that all problems that Muslims could ever face were solved, and there was no need for further inquiry. The gates of
ijtihad
(independent reasoning), they famously claimed, were closed.

The rise of Sufism, the mystical tradition in Islam, as a popular trend in the ninth century and onward was in some ways an effort to find a breath of fresh air outside this narrow and hard legalism and to create room for the individual.
⁵⁹
It might be worthwhile to note that, despite views to the contrary, Sufism had its origin in the Qur’an,
⁶⁰
and it had some common roots with the Mutazilites.
⁶¹

The Traditionists were, however, far from a uniform group; the legacy of the Rationalist school did not disappear entirely and found its way into some Traditionist schools. What emerged at the end of the long controversy between reason and dogma was more of a spectrum of thought rather than a black-and-white division.

The most definitive name in the Traditionist camp, as we have seen, was al-Shafi, whose followers created the Shafi school. Their method became so dominant that soon even the less Hadith-oriented Malikis (followers of Malik) and the formerly Rationalist Hanafis were forced to move closer to the Shafi view. Nonetheless, the Hanafi school, which would later be adopted by the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, remained relatively rational, flexible, and lenient.

In theology, the counterpart of the Shafi attitude was Asharism, created by the tenth-century scholar al-Ashari, a former Mutazilite who “repented” after seeing the Prophet in a dream. In his polemics he used the rational method, but he employed it for opposing Rationalist views and defending Traditionist ones, such as predestination, voluntarism, and occasionalism (i.e., the rejection of natural laws). He insisted that human reason could not find what is right and what is wrong—a view that justified the Traditionist jurists’ efforts to find all answers in the Sunna.

The more rational Hanafi school found its theological complement in the Maturidi school, created by al-Maturidi in the early tenth century. His views show some Mutazilite influence because of the greater credit he gave to human reason and free will. In disagreement with al-Ashari, for example, al-Maturidi argued that human reason, unaided by revelation, could distinguish between right and wrong.
⁶²

Meanwhile, the most radical line in the Traditionist camp, the one led by Imam Hanbal, soon turned into Hanbalism, the most rigid of the four major Sunni schools. Its followers opposed all forms of “innovation” and any form of rational discussion. Theirs was such an impractical doctrine that it remained marginal among Muslims, only to be revitalized during times of crisis, such as the catastrophic Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century.

The eighteenth century would see a surprising revival of the Hanbali school in the Arabian Desert under the leadership of another radical cleric named Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab. His followers, who became known as Wahhabis, started a militant campaign against the Ottoman Empire, which they condemned for Sufism and other “innovations.” The empire kept in check these latter-day Hanbalis—who also had a “Kharijite zeal”—until World War I, when the British Empire decided to destroy Ottoman power and establish Arabia as an independent state.
⁶³

Soon Arabia would become Saudi Arabia, and Wahhabism would be its official doctrine. It would also turn out that the country was sitting on top of the world’s greatest oil reserves—a source that the Saudis could use to evangelize their rigid doctrine in the four corners of the Muslim world. This was a success that Imam Hanbal, who spearheaded “strictness and rigorism,” could never have even imagined.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Desert
Beneath the Iceberg

There is a closer relationship between Islam and its geographical setting, than that of any other of the great monotheistic religions.

—
The Cambridge History of Islam
¹

T
HE DECLINE OF THE
Rationalist school in Islam, and the triumph of the Traditionist one, is a famous story—and there are various explanations for it. Some critics have argued that the Rationalist school was just an alien import from ancient Greece that would inevitably prove “incompatible with a Qur’anic worldview.”
²
Yet, as we have seen, it was not the Qur’anic worldview but the post-Qur’anic tradition that overshadowed Islamic reason. Why was this so?

Some have found an answer by blaming specific individuals, such as the influential Imam al-Ghazali in the twelfth century. His magnum opus,
Incoherence of the Philosophers
, was indeed a severe blow to “philosophy,” a term that then referred to all sources of secular knowledge. Al-Ghazali is also criticized for promoting a religious awareness based on unquestioning obedience rather than critical thinking.
³
But should we see al-Ghazali’s impact as a cause or a result of the stagnation in Islamdom?
⁴
After all, other thinkers, such as the great Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who refuted al-Ghazali and defended “philosophy” in
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
, could have spearheaded a Rationalist victory. Was there a determining factor, then, that favored one of these strains in Islamic thought over the other?

We have seen that the political authority, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, had played an important role in this story by frequently offering their support for the Traditionists. Yet even this might be a superficial explanation, for it leaves us wondering why the political authority acted this way and why its decisions were so definitive.

To put things in perspective, it is worth remembering that the controversy that haunted Islamdom—reason versus dogmatism—also occurred in Christendom. Early Christian theologian Tertullian, who coined the term
Trinity
, was a strong opponent of reason, which he saw as a deviant influence from pagan Greeks. “To us there is no need of curious questioning now that we have Jesus Christ,” he wrote, “nor of enquiry now that we have the Gospel.”
⁵
His insistence on “fideism”—faith devoid of reason—survived as a trend among Catholics even into the nineteenth century.

But at some point in the history of Christianity, the rationalist view became more dominant, whereas the opposite occurred in Islam. The torch, it could even be said, passed from one to the other. While Ibn Rushd’s defense of rational faith had little impact in Islamdom, it greatly influenced St. Thomas Aquinas, whose synthesis of philosophy, science, and faith opened the way to modernity in the West. And al-Farabi’s tenth-century anticipation of a democratic government to secure the rights and freedoms of the individual certainly found its destiny in the West before anywhere else.

So, why did reason and freedom flourish in Christendom while it declined in the lands of Islam?

Could the answer be related to the fact that Islam unfolded into the Orient, whereas Christianity flourished in the Occident?

T
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ONTEXT OF THE
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The doctrines of a religion do not derive just from its sacred texts. Those texts, especially in the “Abrahamic” religions, are of course important. Yet they come into life in the minds, and at the hands, of people. That’s why the same religion takes on different forms in different societies. All Christians read the same New Testament, but those in New York are in many ways different from their coreligionists in, say, the Philippines, where some flagellate and torture themselves during Holy Week to atone for their sins. And all contemporary Christians are dissimilar from their medieval coreligionists, some of whom burnt “witches” at the stake or tortured “heretics” during the Inquisition. Throughout history, all such diverse followers of Christ have given quite different meanings to his gospel, because they understood it within quite different mindsets.