Wahdat-al-Wujud and the politics of polytheism

Wahdat-al-wujud was an idea developed by the inestimable twelfth-century scholar, Ibn Arabi. Translated literally, wahdat-al-wujud means unity of being, but it can also mean unity of finding. The object of this 'finding' is God, and the finder seeks to remove the veils that stand between himself and God so that the perfect level of certainty is reached. This doctrine forms an integral part of traditional Islam, but finds its most explicit expression in the mystical discipline known as Sufism.

The veil is often used as a metaphor for either emotional obstacles or worldly distractions. Even certain Sufi rituals are not spared. For example, poverty is a well-known circumstance that many Sufis choose to place themselves in. Thus, it is often said in Turkey [1]:

Sharia (Islamic Law): yours is yours, mine is mine
Tariqa (The Sufi path): yours is yours, mine is yours too
Marifa (Gnosis): there is neither mine nor thine

However, poverty must not be regarded as a goal in and of itself, or else it becomes a veil along the path toward God. From the outset, wahdat-al-wujud's chief concern has been with God, or more specifically, with attaining an existential awareness of the Divine Unity. Poverty is nothing more than a condition bequeathed by God to test a person's trust in Divine Grace. Some authorities assert that the more God loves a person, the more He will test him. Hence, we find that the Prophets, being nearest to God, are made to suffer the most.

Since the veils relate to the Divine, they are an infinite number of them. The proper attitude of the seeker is that of bewilderment. The state of finding is said to be directly parallel to the state of not finding, since it is humanly impossible to overcome infinity. This kind of paradox is hardly novel, as evident by this saying from Abu Bakr, the first caliph of Islam.

...the incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension. [2]

Because there is a verse in the Quran that states, wherever you turn, there is the face of God [3],  the seeker understands that everything he witnesses and experiences is a divine manifestation of God's Eternal Will. But taking this idea too literally would lead the seeker into anthropomorphism; the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to God. The seeker knows that just as all is God, all is not God.

If such is the case, what does finding God entail? The problem lies in the vagueness of the question. It should instead be re-phrased as: "How do I remove the veils that prevent me from finding God?"

Muslim cosmology is divided into two worlds, the seen and the unseen. The Quran makes it clear that,

With Him are the keys of the Unseen. No one knows them save He. [4]

Hence, none knows God but God Himself. Because of this, our question can be further refined as: "How to remove the veils that prevent me from being God?"

The question is not as radical as it appears. After all, proximity with God has always been an overriding goal of the nominal believer. In a famous hadith, it is striking that the measure of distance is used as a metaphor for the degree of closeness between the believer and God.

If my servant draws nearer to Me by a handsbreadth, I draw nearer to him by an armslength, and if he draws nearer to Me by an armslength, I draw nearer to him by twice that distance. And if he comes walking to meet Me, I come running to meet him. [5]

And the culmination of such a journey has always been understood by scholars to be union with God. For example, Imam al-Ghazali states in his Ihya [6],

I want union with him...

Before Imam al-Ghazali, the great Shaykh Junayd Baghdadi had been even more explicit:

Love between two is not right until the one addresses the other, 'O Thou I' [7].

It would be a grave mistake to dismiss the likes of these scholars as mere pantheists without first understanding what is actually meant by union or wahdat-al-wujud. The latter term does not only have an apparent meaning, but also an inner meaning that cannot be discarded. As mentioned before, wahdat-al-wujud not only means unity of being but also unity of finding. Thus, the ostensibly radical question "How to remove the veils that prevent me from being God?" is in essence, "How to remove the veils that prevent me from finding God?" In an intimate study of Ibn Arabi's thought, William Chittick clarifies that,

Being precedes knowledge as in the world; nothing knows until it first exists. [8]

I wrote this article not because I have a particular affinity with Ibn Arabi's thought, but because I came across another article written by a Muslim who pompously accused wahdat-al-wujud of being polytheistic. In the Islamic sense, polytheism is known as shirik and involves the worship of multiple gods, something that is conspicuously missing in wahdat-al-wujud.

It is not unreasonable to demand restrain where the charge of polytheism is concerned, since history attests that factions like the followers of Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab had been all too ready to use that label to justify the persecution and outright murder of fellow Muslims.

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Notes:
[1] Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p99, The University of North Carolina Press, 1975
[2] William Chittick, Ibn Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination, State University of New York Press, 1989
[3] The Holy Quran, 2:115
[4] The Holy Quran, 6:59
[5] al-Bukhari, Sahih, Book 97, Section 50, Hadith 1
[6] Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ihya 'ulum ad-Din, 4:117
[7] Fariduddin 'Attar, Tadhkirat al-Awliya. Edited by Reynold Nicholson. Reprint, London and Leiden, 1959
[8] William Chittick, Ibn Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination, p4, State University of New York Press, 1989

The Amman Message in light of Imam al-Ghazali's Clear Criterion

By all accounts, the Jordan Initiative was a remarkable achievement- a shining moment in this otherwise troubled age. In 2005, King Abdullah, the latest monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, invited leaders of all Muslim communities to Amman and placed before them a short document. By the end of that conference, those leaders had put their names to a declaration that was ominously titled True Islam and its Role in Modern Society. For the first time, certainly in the modern era, the lines of true belief were carved out in the sand.

While I had argued in an earlier article that the declaration's main goal was to short-circuit the silly habit of extremists to denounce all those who disagree with their peculiar ideology- including Muslims- as apostates, I felt that both my post and the declaration itself had not gone far enough to explain its true import. Since 2005, the Jordan Initiative has come under a lot of fire, due largely to a valid misunderstanding of what the document really means and how its points are to be implemented. Take for example, the declaration's apparent tolerance for differing and often contentious schools of thought. To many people, it was simply unreal, typical of any official announcement coming from a Middle Eastern collaboration. Worse, some might have shrugged it off because they found it reactive, if not downright hypocritical.

But the Jordan Initiative is significant, if only because it exists. What it lacks is a systematic way forward. Let's examine the main points of the declaration.

The Jordan Initiative's primary concern is to define orthodoxy. It makes clear that at the top of this food-chain rests the overwhelming bulk of Muslims who adhere to the canonical schools of both Sunni and Shia Islam. It says,

Whosoever is an adherent of one of the four Sunni Schools of Jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali), the Ja'fari (Shi'i) School of Jurisprudence, the Zaydi School of Jurisprudence, the Ibadi School of Jurisprudence, or the Thahiri School of Jurisprudence is a Muslim.

Founded in the early centuries of Islam, these schools of jurisprudence, or Madhhabs, were the sterling result of brilliant minds working to develop a moral way of life by drawing from the Quran and the Prophetic Sunna. They are canonical because it is accepted that those who adhere to the rulings and culture of the Madhhabs are, by default, on the path of the Quran and the Sunna. It is here that the Jordan Initiative first bares its fangs, by challenging a pet opinion held by most extremists. What this opinion consists of is the belief that the culture of unqualified adherence to a single Madhhab is as wrong as it is sinful. Sunni traditionalism labels such 'follower-ship' taqlid, and the person who adopts taqlid with respect to a single, chosen Madhhab is called a muqallid. Needless to say, those who oppose muqallids make up only a noisy and increasingly sidelined minority. One of the most striking features of this faction is the way they adopt a defensive and reactive method of (re-)interpreting sacred texts. Take the instance where the Prophet Muhammad had famously said,

"My Ummah shall not agree upon error. [1]"

While overwhelming scholarship regard the hadith as a Prophetic promise that "correct" belief will always reside with the majority, the vocal minority advances another meaning; that even in the face of an overwhelming majority of misguided believers, a small regiment of Muslims will always stand up for the truth. Given their marginal status in the umma, the reason for this kind of interpretation is an obvious one.

The Jordan Initiative's next line asserts that:

...it is not possible to declare whosoever subscribes to the Ash'ari creed or whoever practices true Sufism an apostate.

Once again, this is a direct challenge to extremists who hurl suspicion at Muslims based on their adherence to either Imam al-Ashari's theological creed or Sufism, or as is commonly the case, both. This stance is especially bizarre since Imam al-Ashari's creed had not only dominated Islamic intelligentsia in the past, but continues to do so. In all fairness, the Asharite method is not the only one in the Islamic fold. Three are accepted as canonical in the present day: the creed of Imam al-Ashari, the creed of Imam al-Maturidi and lastly, the Athari. But this is where the declaration falls short. More than anything else in the Islamic world, reconciling the differences of competing theologies is a tricky bit of business.

The only good theologian is a dead one
Imam al-Ghazali argues that the problem between theological schools lies not with their respective methods but more on a phenomenon called the rhetoric of transcendence. In other words, it involves a theologian clothing his theological framework with an aura of absolute orthodoxy, so that he has little choice but to declare other frameworks as heretical. Commenting on Imam al-Ghazali's thought [2], Sherman Jackson goes on to clarify that just because theology can never be transcendent does not mean it can never be right or that it can never apprehend the truth.

I must first qualify what I mean by theologians. Ignaz Goldziher once ruminated that the only people free from theology are Prophets [3]. Theology is widely understood to mean "the study of God." In the Islamic sense, theology is known as kalam, and its practitioners are mutakallimun. The mutakallimun frequently use rational analysis and argument to understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote a variety of religious topics. Although theology might be used to help the theologian understand more truly his or her own religious tradition, Imam al-Ghazali strenuously warned that it should only be used for defending the faith from heresy, or for clearing personal doubts, and rarely for anything else.

If we agree with Imam al-Ghazali's contention that the real problem lies with the rhetoric of transcendence, then the next step would be to attempt an understanding of how theology develops. Put simply, kalam cannot be torn from the context of human history. Because kalam in its early days came to be completely associated with excessive use of rationality, it earned sharp criticism from traditionalists who drew their knowledge from transmitted sources instead. It is thus not inconceivable that arch-traditionalists like the esteemed Imam Ahmad Hanbal had opposed kalam only because of how the early Mutazilites had exploited it and then forced it down the throats of the scholars. In many cases, this was accomplished by physical torture, and Imam Ahmad Hanbal himself had been one of the Mutazilite's most tenacious victims. The Mutazilite episode serves as a potent reminder to what can happen when particular fields of knowledge are taken to the extreme. Excessive legalism in Islam's early years, for example, had triggered a populist shift toward Islam's spiritual aspect, thus fueling the eventual maturing of the science of Tasawwuf, or Sufism. It was therefore inevitable that Mutazlism's excesses would usher in a more balanced approach toward the science of kalam. It arrived in the form of Imam al-Ashari (see my brief biography of the distinguished individual here).

It is incorrect to allege that only devotees of rationalism- such as the Asharites- engage in figurative interpretation and traditionalists do not. In the field of jurisprudence (fiqh), Shaykh Muhammad Abu Zuhra mentioned that the difference in the use of 'analogical deduction' between the four jurists- with Imam Abu Hanifa making the most use of it and Imam Ahmad Hanbal the least- amounted to one of degree [4], not of absence. In the field of exegesis (tafsir), Imam al-Ghazali points out that not even a scrupulous traditionalist like Imam Ahmad Hanbal had totally rejected figurative interpretation (tawil) of certain Quranic verses and hadith. He cites the example of the black stone of the Kaba being the right hand of God, or the idea that a believer's heart rests between God's two fingers.

All said, the line between theology and tradition is a dim one. The notion that a Muslim derives his creed from an exclusively 'traditional' source is as much a synthetic and interpretative venture as the path taken by theological reasoning. After all, the past does not pass unprocessed and un-mediated into the present. To be more precise, the age which some modern Muslims like to overstate as a time of unprecedented political, spiritual and ideological correctness because of the presence of the Pious Predecessors (salaf-al-salih) has come down to us through a process of,

...evaluation, amplification, suppression, refinement and assessing the polarity between would-be tradition and/or non-indigenous ideas...[5]

In other words, individuals who make a big fuss about rejecting theology are themselves theologians advocating a different "study of God". That is why it is reckless for factions who reject kalam to profess a kind of condescending resignation over the supremacy of Imam al-Ashari's thought in the Muslim world. Disingenuously, they claim to possess the pure, untainted creed of the Pious Predecessors and then go on to suggest that Imam al-Ashari's kalam could only have become as popular as it is now because of political circumstances.

Love thy neighbor
It should be clear by now that contrary to popular belief, the schools of jurisprudence are not the real barriers to unity in the Muslim world. I disagree with the view that Madhhabs are sects. Again, I would point out that such a stand is only a marginal one that serves nobody else's interest but a narrow ideology. The latter hinges on the hackneyed myth that since Madhhabs are sects, they should be excised from Muslim consciousness. Madhhabs do not create schisms, theological schools do, and this for a simple reason. Theological wrangles are often more profound and far-reaching.

Given that kalam is a source of dispute, how does the Jordan Initiative even begin to broker harmony between Sunni, Shia and more importantly, the Salafi sect, which is mentioned in the last part of the declaration? As it states,

...it is not possible to declare whosoever subscribes to true Salafi thought an apostate.

Presumably, kalam is an indispensable part of both Sunni and Shia sciences, even though the former mainly subscribes to Imam al-Ashari's creed and the latter subscribes to a Mutazilite one. The Salafi sect, on the other hand, adopts an unquestioning devotion to Imam Ahmad Hanbal's opposition to the kalam of his times by extending it to all forms of rational thought, including the dominant Asharite creed. As demonstrated above, however, nobody- including those who claim to reject rationalism for rationalism's sake- is entirely free from the proverbial claws of theology.

Sewing up old wounds
The spirit of the Jordan Initiative is hardly a novel one. Long before it, an eminent scholar of Islam had already produced a document that clearly and concisely refuted the modern Muslim preoccupation with splitting the umma (Muslim community) into neat little US and THEM packages. That man has been famously called Hujjat al-Islam, or Proof of Islam by many, but for the layman bereft of history, we shall simply call him Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. The classical document I am referring to is Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa, which loosely translates into The Clear Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness. Al-Ghazali's treatise not only demonstrates that it is possible for different theological schools, hence sects, to co-exist, but that it is vital that they do so.

Since all theological frameworks must base themselves on two primary sources- the Quran and the Sunna, Imam al-Ghazali proposed a principle for assessing the truth of a particular statement. Central to his method is the understanding that theologians from diverse schools approach the sources in different ways. Depending on the methodology involved, a verse from the Quran- the one describing God mounting His Throne, for example- might either be interpreted literally or figuratively, or somewhere in between.

Al-Ghazali therefore asserted that to consider a statement as true is merely to acknowledge the existence of its referent. Such existence can be perceived across five levels:

1. Ontological (dhati)
2. Sensory (hissi)
3. Conceptual (khayali)
4. Noetic ('aqli), and
5. Analogous (shabahi)

These levels are useful in evaluating how a particular Quranic verse or hadith is to be interpreted, with ontological being literal in the strictest sense, and sensory representing the first level of figurative interpretation. Thus, when interpreting a Prophetic statement, one must begin with the ontological level. Only if a statement cannot be sustained as true on that level can the interpreter descend to the next level, in this case, into the realm of the figurative.

Imam al-Ghazali asserts that as long as a theological framework meets his Qanun al-Tawil, or Rule of Figurative Interpretation, it should not be cast out of the Islamic fold. Of course, this summary is merely a tiny part of Imam al-Ghazali's treatise. I cannot do justice to the elegance of Imam al-Ghazali's thought in this regard and I would highly recommend any earnest student to obtain Dr Sherman Jackson's translation and excellent commentary on Faysal al-Tafriqa.

In a very concrete way, Imam al-Ghazali's treatise perfectly complements the Jordan Initiative by furnishing it with an objective method of discernment. The Qanun also has an added advantage of preventing Muslims from falling into the trap of equating unity with uniformity. In an earlier article, I explained,

No other organized religion has managed to accomplish what the early scholars of Islam did for their religion; that is, create a framework of unity amidst diversity. So resilient has this idea been that for more than a thousand years of Islamic history, there has been no significant sectarian split outside the Sunni-Shia schism. Compare this with the Christian condition, in which three major schisms use three different versions of the Bible. This was because the Fathers of Catholicism, representing the first orthodoxy in Christianity, were more intent on imposing the impossible ideal of uniformity rather than unity. You don't have to venture too far afield to find examples of such regimes in the Islamic world. The short-lived Taliban in Afghanistan precisely mirrors early Catholicism's rabid fear of diversity. A culture of uniformity that is taken to its logical conclusion ensures a totalitarian regime with an arm dedicated solely to theological inquisition.

Uniformity can only come at the expense of unity, so do yourself a favor, endorse the Amman Message now.

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Notes:
[1] Imam Hakim related a Sahih Hadith from the Prophet in the following words: "My Ummah shall not agree upon error."
[2] Sherman Jackson, Translation of Faysal al-Tafriqa.
[3] Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton University Press, 1981
[4] Muhammad Abu Zahra, The Four Imams - Their Lives, Work & Schools of Thought, 2004
[5] Sherman Jackson, Translation of Faysal al-Tafriqa.

Guns, germs and Sufis

I am sometimes astounded by how much mis-information some people, Muslims and non-Muslims, place on the branch of Islam known as Tasawwuf. That's right, no matter what some left or right-wing Muslim evangelicals might insist, Tasawwuf has always been an indispensable part of Islam. Like the other branches of knowledge like jurisprudence (fiqh) or Quranic exegesis (tafsir), 'ilm al Tasawwuf was, in the words of Imam Abu'l-Hasan Bushanji,

...a reality without a name.

In the west, we call the practitioners of Tassawwuf Sufis. But the west also has a bad habit of divorcing Sufism from Islam itself, setting Sufism out to be a peaceful, and more importantly pacifist alternative to oh-so-militant Islam. This is a foolish idea. Sufism did not rise as a response to militarism, but in reaction to excessive legalism; a disease that is familiar to most Christians in the form of the Pharisees described in the Gospels. From the first, Sufism attempted to temper the cold, dispassionate sword of the law with love and mercy, a trait that the Prophet Muhammad, more than anyone else, had embodied. It encouraged Muslims to grasp the inner realities of seemingly monotonous rituals and reach a state of supreme certainty on the all-encompassing unity of God, instead of only going through the motions. In Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Annemarie Schimmel correctly identifies Sufism as nothing more spectacular than an interiorization of Islam.

Nonetheless, pacifism is hardly an attribute I would pin on Sufism. Not so many decades ago, many of the resistance movements against the oppressive colonialists of France (in Algeria) and Russia (in Chechnya) were led by out-and-out Sufis.

The exploits of one Imam Shamil so awed the Russian generals who fought against him, that upon his capture, he was brought to Saint Petersburg to meet the Tsar. The greatest testimony to the Tsar's positive impression of Imam Shamil was in granting Imam Shamil's desire to retire to Mecca. Along this arduous trip to the birthplace of his beloved Prophet, he was acclaimed and hailed by throngs of people. His nobility and fame had spread beyond the mountains he had given up half his life to defend. When he died, he was given the greatest honor of being buried amongst the first martyrs of Islam in the revered Jannatul Baqi cemetery.

I would concede one difference between Sufi 'militants' like Imam Shamil and today's breed. Where the Sufis had rigorously shunned the brutal methods of war employed by their oppressors, today's militants have embraced them in unprecedented and creative ways. 9-11 was merely one example out of a giant cauldron.

Marifah- Knowledge and Realization

Marifah.net has been doing good work, putting out translations of classical works that not only inform, but also refute many of the ideological positions taken up by modern Islamic groups.

For the uninitiated, the word marifah means gnosis. The gnostic discipline exists in almost all religious traditions. In the Islamic sense, the light of gnosis,

...will reveal itself to him such that matters that had been blindly accepted on faith become as if he sees and witnesses them (for himself). This is true gnosis which obtains only after the fetters of formalized doctrine are undone and the bosom is expanded by the light of God the Exalted. [1]

Central to the gnostic belief is that theological and philosophical debate rarely bring about certainty in faith. Doctrines are formulated by men and sometimes present a veil between the receiver of doctrine and God. The greatest testimony of this was in the way Islam spread in the past. New converts flocked to to the Sufis, rarely to theologians or jurists.

Unveiling is realizing the truth behind the message, and this is the ultimate goal of revealed religion. Realization accumulates through direct experience of life itself. The meanings of words might change in the process of discovery, but only in the sense of tearing away their abstractness. Certainty is born.

While the process of unveiling provides insights, the unveiler must never fool himself into thinking that it takes the place of revelation. It does not and never will.

How apt is the name marifah in an age when people have forgotten the power of internalized truths. Their search for certainty expands ever outwards, discarding this ideology and embracing that, never realizing that in the process, they are fleeing further and further from themselves.

Bookmark Marifah.net now.

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Notes:
[1] R. M. Frank, Al-Ghazali and the Asharite School, 1994.

What's that Hadith doing in my computer?

All religions revolve around a source, and for Islam, the sources are the Quran, which is a divine revelation, and the Sunna, which is defined as the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. However, it would be foolhardy to compare the contents and nature of the Quran with the Christian Gospels. The verses in the Quran represent a direct conversation between God and the reader, while the Gospels are narrations of the life, ministry and eventual death of Jesus Christ. In that sense, the Gospels most closely resemble the Hadiths, which are collections of reports detailing, sometimes in contradictory form, the Prophet's Sunna. I would add that the only difference between the Gospels and the Hadiths is one of authenticity. While most of the surviving compilations of Hadiths have gone through a rigorous process of validation and authentication, the Gospels' origins remain dubious at best.

There was a time, early in the history of Islam, when Hadiths were neither authenticated, nor checked for their accuracy. Purported sayings of the Prophet Muhammad were thrown about to justify just about anything. So dangerous was the potential for abuse in the hands of unscrupulous Muslims that Abu Bakr, the first caliph who led the fledgling Muslim community after the Prophet's death, prohibited their transmission. However, as the generation who had witnessed the Prophet's life and mission began to pass on, it became clear that the Sunna they had learnt from the Prophet and taught to the masses had to be preserved in more concrete form. The logic that prompted the early Caliph Uthman to expand the Quranic revelation from its original oral tradition to a textual one was also extended to the Sunna. As the study of religion coalesced onto a written text, the Hadiths too began to take on an increasingly vital role in the transmission of Sunna.

The word 'tradition' means literally handing over, but it also includes the object of handing over, which in our case, is practices and beliefs. The words or deeds of Muhammad and his followers, the Companions (al-Sahaba) and their Followers (tabi'un), were handed down to posterity in a kind of communication called 'hadith' (a tradition, literally a tale or a report)...[1]

While the oral tradition of both the Quran and Sunna never lost their places in Islam, the sacred teachings that had been etched out in writing attained an authority and permanence that was unmatched. What followed was a process of a standardization and consolidation. Then came the increased specialization in both the study and understanding of the sacred texts. This was especially significant since Islam was expanding well beyond the tiny borders of Mecca and Medina, into territories like Persia that had their own mature civilizations and often competing theological tendencies.

The new interest in Hadiths injected fresh impetus to those scholars who rightly feared that they could be abused to introduce heretical teachings. Some scholars undertook dangerous and harrowing journeys to track down Hadiths and their transmitters, right back to the original source. The personalities of each transmitter in the chain, called isnad, were unearthed and evaluated. From a body of millions of Hadiths, these scholars shaved off the untrustworthy ones, applying methods that were well-documented. Only a small number of Hadiths were found to survive the scholars' rigorous sieves. Even so, the number was still considerable. Those Muslims who undertook the memorization of Hadiths, including the meticulous chains of transmission of each one, came to be immensely respected. Yet, Imam Abu Hanifa, the eminent jurist who founded the Hanafi School of Jurisprudence, remarked:

"You (the Scholars of Hadith) are the Pharmacists but we (the Jurists) are the physicians."

This is not merely wanton self-praise or even a case of academic one-upmanship. The apparent debate between the role of Hadith and Fiqh (jurisprudence) in the formulation of Islamic doctrines and law continues even today. Though the distinction between both is ambiguous,  present-day reformists gain from the tactic of driving a wedge between the two. A common refrain amongst reformists is the call for Muslims to return to the Quran and Sunna. Fiqh, especially those emerging from the four canonical Schools of Jurisprudence, is regarded as obsolete and in most cases, unnecessary. Hence, the current overplaying of the person who studies Hadiths exclusively.

Yet, a rote knowledge of the Quran and Hadiths are not enough to define and establish universal doctrines. Without a consistent method of assessing and applying Hadiths, especially those that hopelessly contradict one another, the muhhadith (memorizer of Hadiths) quickly becomes lost in a sea of confusion. Even a man like Ibn Wahb, who had compiled almost 12,000 narrations, was forced to confess:

"Were it not for Malik ibn Anas...I would have perished; I used to think everything that is (authentically) related from the Prophet must be put into practice." [2]

Notably, Imam Malik occupies a place very similar to Mark, the author of the first Gospel, in Christian history. Like Mark, Imam Malik had been one the earliest authorities to systemize interpretative principles that were later scrutinized and more importantly, affirmed and imitated. Ibn Wahb's confession also brings up an issue that is all too easily forgotten- the deceptiveness of self-perception. While compilers of Hadiths like Imam Bukhari and Muslim had been paramount scholars in their own right, with access to tens of thousands of Hadiths; they too had had to submit to the fiqh of the canonical Schools.

Imam Ahmad Hanbal, the founder of one of the Four Schools, had related a narration from Muhammad ibn ibn Yahya al-Qattan that said:

"If one were to follow every rukhsa (dispensation) that is in the hadith, he would become a transgressor." [3]

This was related with good reason, for many of the Hadiths at that time were not only unverified, but also appeared to contradict one another, so that people without knowledge took from these Hadiths teachings and practices that was contradictory. And when they debated one another, it was without basis or recourse to what could ascertain the closest truth. This was where the fiqh of the Four canonical Schools would come to play a major part, for it was fiqh, literally understanding, that formulated the tests, conditions and limits that Hadiths played in delineating the Sunna.

In an apt illustration of this principle, a man who had come to Ibn Ugda asking about a particular Hadith was instead reprimanded:

"Keep such hadiths to a minimum for, truly, they are unsuitable except for those who know their interpretation." [4]

The great scholars of the past had addressed the vainglorious aspirations of some of the Hadith specialists of their time sternly. One of the best examples was the esteemed Sufyan al-Thawri, who used to describe the study and memorization of Hadiths as a disease that preoccupies people. He asserted that the,

"...explanation of the hadith is better than the hadith." [5]

A useful parallel would be the personal computer that sits on our desks. The Hadiths are like the raw binary data that the computer's processor runs. A programmer might memorize strings of printed ones and zeros which make up the binary, so that he might recognize words and phrases. As is the wont of men, he might marvel at his ability to make out what the binary strings say. It impresses his friends and colleagues, but the sad truth is, without the computer's processor, our programmer would never obtain the overall picture, the entire story that the data is trying to impart and how it relates to other data that is furiously coming in. Islam's earliest scholars had warned of the use and application of Hadiths without the contextualization provided by fiqh because they knew, as Shaykh Ismail al-Ansari had once warned [6], that the Sunna is wisdom and wisdom is to place each thing in its right context.

Unfortunately, the mainstay of modernist Muslim thought remains devoted to the reformist agenda of tearing Islam from its historical and intellectual roots, which it blithely considers to be blameworthy and obsolete accretions, and returning it to its so-called roots. The role of fiqh and the Four Schools are considerably diminished. In its place is a steady profusion of individuals, books, tracts, lectures and websites that reach doctrinal conclusions through a criminally unmethodical use of Quranic passages buttressed by a selective reading of the Hadiths. Such attempts almost always result in two extreme positions that the early scholars of Islam had avoided like plague. The first is an overdependence on reason and and its inevitable offspring, the highly elliptical, metaphorical and pretentiously-modern interpretations of scripture which became the downfall of the Mutazilla sect early in Islamic history. The second is the overt literalism that some inheritors of Imam Ahmad Hanbal's School had come into and the isolation and exclusivist behavior that it naturally encouraged amongst its cohorts. The more general effect, however, is the loosening of restrains that had traditionally kept Islam's agenda from being set by deviants and rebels.

The evidence that such a phenomenon has already happened lies in the impressive glut of Muslim groups and factions that all stake their claim on true Islam, and dismiss as belligerents and even apostates those "Muslims" who do not share their ideology. Recent history has shown that the restraints has come off so completely that these rebels even attack and slay fellow Muslims, citing as their justification that wrong belief must be dealt with in the severest manner possible. Without exception, these exclusivist Muslims have an extremely narrow range of scholars from whom they claim to derive their central doctrines. Ibn Taymiyya is an oft-quoted scholar who lived in the thirteenth century, but there is strong reason to believe that where these deviants use him, they have done so in highly-selective and sometimes even in a deliberately misrepresentative manner. The clearest example of such mischief is in the way most of these deviants roundly and unconditionally condemn Sufi Muslims while conveniently forgetting the fact that their "Shaykh al-Islam" had in fact been a committed follower of a Sufi tariqa (path) himself.

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Notes:
1. Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology: Traditionalism and Rationalism
2. Narrated by Ibn Asakir al-Bayhaqi, cf. Ibn Rajab, Sharh al-'Ilal
3. Ahmad, al-'Ilal
4. Narrated by al-Khatib, al-Faqih wal-Mutafaqqih
5. Ibn Abd al-Barr, Jami Bayan al-Ilm
6. As quoted by 'Awwama, Athar

Why we remain but don't wear rags on our heads

One should not live under the impression that American designs on Iraq are entirely benign. Their stated goal is to establish a viable democracy in the once-Baathist regime. To use the neo-conservative lingo; Iraq would be a bastion of transparent and equitable government in a sea of Arab despots. God willing, and this is Bush ruminating, Iraq would expose the error of the despots, and force a popular movement supporting democracy out into the open.

In the meantime, American forces cannot withdraw from the country they helped ravage from the ground up. Just last month, the Democrats mischievously added a caveat to Bush's call for more funds to be released to the American Project in Iraq. A timetable stipulating a deadline for troops to withdraw from Iraq was appended to the bill. As was expected, Bush wielded his Presidential veto to shoot down the bill. There was outrage all round the neo-conservative table. How could the Americans pull out now? Would that not hand victory over to the Iraqi insurgents who had been calling for Americans to leave the country in the first place?

Putting such childish reasons aside, I do agree that pulling the troops out now would lead to disaster. Sectarian hatred, once such a rare thing in Iraq, has been stoked to boiling point, chiefly because of the entry of Salafist-inspired al-Qaeda into the theater of war. Salafists consider all Shia Muslims, which is the dominant group in Iraq, apostates- eminently suited for slaying. Their stance is so extreme that some of the domestic militants, ostensibly Sunni Arabs, have sought to distance themselves from them. While the rabid sectarianism can be laid directly at the door of the Salafist extremists, their entry into Iraq cannot. From the outset, the Bush Administration must have known that a fractured Iraq occupied by American troops would be a tantalizing magnet for such groups, whose members originate from all over the Middle East but chiefly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The logic was, better that the terrorists fight on the soil of the 'ragheads' than the hallowed soil of the homeland.

But there is another reason why America does not want to pull out anytime soon. A sovereign and independent Iraq would spell disaster for American ambitions. The government would not only be dominated by Shia Muslims, it would also be closely connected with Iran, hitherto a pariah state as far as the Bush Administration is concerned. Furthermore, a strong, viable Shia across Iran and Iraq would surely provoke nationalist sentiments in the already-repressed Shia population in Saudi Arabia, which is a mainstay in America's list of allies.

The solution thus far has been an unimaginative pounding together of disparate individuals and parties into a government that can barely function outside the Green Zone, an area heavily guarded by American and Iraqi troops. The latest weapon brought to bear down on the incessant violence going on in the country is a surge in troop levels and a more aggressive approach in the hunt for terrorists suspects. Indeed, it is the Shia militias instead of the more deadly Sunni militants that have borne the brunt of the American crackdown. This in itself should be instructive. American policymakers fear the prospect of an assertive Shia polity more than the suicide bombings (a tactic shunned by the Shia clergy anyway) carried out by Sunni militants. Why bother, when Sunni targets have almost been exclusively Shia Muslims, marketplaces, rituals and shrines?