Islam

example.

PREFACE

This book seeks to give to the reader the general development of Islam throughout the approximately fourteen centuries of its existence. It is, therefore, primarily informative. But since it aims at presenting, as far as possible, a coherent and meaningful narrative rather than a series of disjointed descriptions of seemingly isolated phenomena or aspects of the development of Islam, the work had to become interpretative in character and could not remain just informative. Indeed, because of its interpretative character, the book assumes, to some extent, that the reader is already acquainted with some of the general literature on Islam that already exists in English.

The second point to be kept in mind is that although the book is basically descriptive and, therefore, necessarily seeks to be objective, in certain parts it is interpretative, not just in a historical sense but in an Islamic sense. This is particularly true of the first two chapters on Muḥammad and the Qur’ān, and of the last chapter. The writer is of the view that it is impossible simply to ‘describe’ a religion and particularly his own faith and fail to convey to the reader anything of that inner intensity of life which constitutes that faith. This book is, therefore, meant equally for Western and Muslim readers. The Muslim should learn to look more objectively at his religious history, particularly at how Islam has fared at his hands, and the non-Muslim should learn to know something of what Islam does to a Muslim from the inside.

My thanks are due to many colleagues and friends at Karachi and McGill who have given me valuable suggestions and criticisms. I am particularly thankful to Mr. A. S. Bazmee Ansari of the Institute of Islamic Research, Karachi, for reading through the proofs and suggesting improvements.

FAZLUR RAHMAN

Karachi

2 December 1965

INTRODUCTION

Professor H. A. R. Gibb, in his admirable book Muhammedanism, in its latest edition of 1961, puts the number of Muslims in the world at approximately one-seventh of its total population, i.e. 300 million (it would be now about 400 million). As against this, the figures issued by the World Muslim Congress at its fifth world meeting in Baghdad in 1962, as amended to date, give the estimate at certainly over 600 million and in the neighbourhood of 650 million people. Confessedly, all these figures are conjectures for lack of reliable total statistics and particularly because the number of Muslims in China is shrouded in mystery and information about several other outlying regions of the Muslim world is also incomplete. At the end of this Introduction, we give figures showing the distribution of the Muslim population in broad outlines. These figures appear to show that the Muslim population of the world cannot be, in any case, less than 500 million.

Yet the question of the actual number of Muslims inhabiting the world is perhaps of secondary importance compared to the phenomenon of the growth of the Muslim world community during the past fourteen centuries or so, and even more important is the nature of this growth which illuminates the character of the inner structure of the Muslim Community. It is to this question that we shall address ourselves here before undertaking a detailed description of the religious history of Islam in the subsequent chapters. Already, before the death of the Prophet, Islam had developed its major characteristic: the establishment of the Community (Umma) of the Faithful expressing the moral and spiritual quality of its faith through a variety of institutions backed by a governmental organization. But at the same time, in this entire complex, the Community remained as something more basic than either the state organization or, indeed, the institutions themselves. What constitutes the Community is the conscious acceptance of its status as the primary bearer of the Will of God, the ‘Command of God for man’ – the Sharī'a (see Chapter VI); this trust being sought to be implemented through its governmental and collective institutions. The Sharī‘a is the constitution of the Muslim Community.

It is this basic constitution that gave to the Muslim conquests outside Arabia their proper character which distinguished them both from the lawless tribal expansions which the Arabs had been experiencing before Islam and from the destructive conquests of the Central Asian Mongols many centuries later. This strength and an unyielding quality exhibited in its outward expansion, together with a strong faith in a higher moral order which kept this expansive thrust on a definite moral plane, had, as we have pointed out, already been bequeathed by the Prophet himself. It was conducive to the expansion of Islam outside Arabia during an astonishingly rapid series of conquests which within a century put Muslims in charge of a vast territory from Spain in the West, across deep into Central Asia and up to the River Indus in the East, and later confirmed it.

There is little doubt that the inner weakness of the gigantic empires of Byzantium and Persia, exhausted by incessant mutual wars and corroded from within by a spiritual and moral stagnation, hastened the progress of the spectacular Muslim advance. Yet this phenomenon of dazzling expansion cannot be explained entirely by this factor and due importance must be assigned to the fresh and virile character of the Islamic movement. A great odium of controversy has hung around the real character of this expansion and the issues have been clouded by the critics of Islam and, it must be owned, by the apologetic of the modern Muslims themselves. Whereas it is a travesty of facts to insist that Islam was propagated ‘by the sword’, it is also a distortion of facts to say that Islam spread in the same way as, say, Buddhism or even Christianity, despite the fact that from time to time the latter used the arm of the state. The real explanation lies in the very structure of Islam as a religious and political complex. Whereas the Muslims did not spread their faith through the sword, it is, nevertheless, true that Islam insisted on the assumption of political power since it regarded itself as the repository of the Will of God which had to be worked on earth through a political order. From this point of view, Islam resembles the Communist structure which, even if it does not oblige people to accept its creed, nevertheless insists on the assumption of the political order. To deny this fact would be both to violate history and to deny justice to Islam itself. To us there is little doubt that this fact, coupled with the inherent Islamic features of egalitarianism and broad humanitarianism, hastened the process of Islamization among the conquered peoples.

With the expansion of the Arab Empire outside Arabia, the Muslims set themselves the task of elaborating a system of law and administration wherein they assimilated Byzantine and Persian institutions and other local elements into an Islamic framework. It is this system (of which the detailed development will be elaborated in the subsequent chapters of this book) which conferred upon the Islamic civilization its distinctive character and which, expressing the fundamental moral ethos of Islam, has provided the real constitution, as it were, of the Muslim state and defined its limits. Within a century of Muslim conquests the Muslims were thus able to develop their peculiar intellectual life and had founded the specifically Arab Islamic sciences of tradition, law and history. This immensely rapid intellectual development, which was a result of the interaction of the Hellenistic tradition in Syria and the basic structure of ideas supplied by the Arabic Qur’ān, remains one of the marvels of the intellectual history of mankind.

This development was facilitated by the shift of the capital of the Islamic Empire from Medina to Damascus in the year 660 AD and by the fact that the Umayyad Caliphs at Damascus employed at their court certain eminent Hellenized Christian Arabs such as John of Damascus. At the same time, however, by this change a shift occurred in the relationship between the religion and the state. Although it would not be correct to say that the Umayyad state had become secular and that a full cleavage had occurred between religion and state, nevertheless it is true that the state life no longer possessed that kind of relationship with religious developments which it had had hitherto. Whereas previously the Caliph had enjoyed a religious and moral pre-eminence and his political decisions had been subservient to a religious end, the Umayyads, though their state basically retained the Islamic framework, were largely lay rulers who exercised political authority but lost a large measure of religious prestige. As a result, the specifically religious disciplines developed largely outside the state and, in a certain measure, out of harmony with it. The centre of the religious developments remained Medina, ‘The home of the Prophet’s Sunna’ (for Sunna, ‘model pattern of behaviour’, see Chapter III).

One important result of the interaction of Islam with foreign cultural currents, particularly Hellenism and Hellenized Christianity, was the sudden eruption of conflicts of opinion on matters of theology and theological ethics and the emergence of a large number of heresies and early sects in Islam. This fact and the smouldering opposition to the Umayyad rule on the part of the non-Arabs, notably the Persians, subsequently resulted in the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate and the installation of the ‘Abbāsids in Baghdad with the help of the Persians in 750 AD. The Umayyad régime had seen the growth of the early Arab religious sciences of Islam and the eruption of the heresies but it had not lasted long enough to see the full-fledged development of the lay intellectualism of Islam.

The ‘Abbāsid Caliphate witnessed two mutually somewhat inconsistent developments both of which were results of deliberate policy. On the one hand, the ‘Abbāsids sought to meet the claims of the dissatisfied religious leadership under the Umayyads and implemented the results of the religious achievements through the state machinery, thus removing the gulf which had largely separated religion from the Umayyad state; on the other hand, they hastened the process of the intellectual awakening of Islam by officially patronizing wholesale translations of Greek philosophy, medicine and science into Arabic and al-Ma’mūn set up an academy known as the Hall of Wisdom for this very purpose. The pure intellectualism that resulted from this activity reacted on the religion of Islam and produced the famous rationalist religious movement of the Mu‘tazila.

Under the ‘Abbāsids, whose civil service was chiefly recruited from the Persian intelligentsia, the Persians regained their national self-consciousness. A long and bitter polemical movement arose between the Arabs and the Persians in a bid to show up their respective spiritual, intellectual and cultural superiority. The protagonists on the Persian side were known as the Shu'ūbīya (the nationalists) whose activities were undoubtedly encouraged by the secretarial classes within the Government. During the 4th/10th and 5th/11th centuries the Persian language reinstated itself as a vehicle of literary expression and satisfied Persian national aspirations, even though religious and other intellectual literature continued to be written in Arabic.

The impetus given to the Arab mind by the impact of the outside cultures worked itself out during the 2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries by the creation of a prosperous and brilliant religious intellectual and material culture. Muslims built up an opulent commerce and industry and, for the first time, scientific skill was harnessed for the actual material development of mankind and put to a practical use. Intellectually, the original Arab sciences of history and literature expanded vastly into general history, geography and belles-lettres. Objective history, including the history of religions, reached a remarkable level of development. Difficult and delicate matters like unbiased description of non-Islamic religions had developed so much that the famous al-Birūnī complains in the introduction to his work on India that while the Muslims had been able to produce fairly objective works on such religions as Judaism and Christianity, they had been unable to do so with regard to Hinduism and that, therefore, he was going to attempt the task. Muslims excelled in geography and, although the contributions of Muslims in this field have begun to be appreciated by modern scholars, full justice has still to be done to their originality and adventurousness in this field. The first social and cultural study of history, i.e. the working of natural historical forces, is also by a Muslim, the celebrated Ibn Khaldūn.

This entire development could not fail to react on religious intellectualism as well, and during the 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries the Mu‘tazila Movement developed rapidly and was in full swing. An account of it will be given in a later place in this work, but it may be said here that it had generally developed under the influence of Hellenic rationalism, thereby creating the first major tension in the religious history of Islam. The leaders of Muslim orthodoxy, representing the old tradition, at first suffered at the hands of this rationalist movement which was raised to the position of a state creed during the time of the Caliph al-Ma’mūn but subsequently, by mustering political strength and by borrowing the very weapons of Greek dialectic, effectively gained the upper hand. Gradually, the orthodox ‘Ulamā’ brought almost all education under their control, and worked out and implemented curricula to realize their own intellectual and spiritual ideals.

The orthodox system of education became so effective that the movement of religious rationalism lost all its strength and its organic entity, although it bloomed still further during the 4th–6th/10th–12th centuries in the works of outstanding individual philosophers whose thought, in turn, reacted on orthodox tradition. Under this new impact, the orthodox created a certain amount of room for intellectualism within their educational disciplines but thereby also effectively checked the development both of a systematic rational philosophy and of sciences.

This relative narrowness and rigidity of education in the madrasas (theological schools) was, indeed, mainly responsible for the subsequent intellectual stagnation of Islam. Particularly unfortunate was the attitude of the ‘Ulamā’ towards ‘secular sciences’, which seemed to stifle the very spirit of enquiry and with it all growth of positive knowledge. The ‘Ulamā’, however, were able to enforce and realize uniformity of mind and bring about a cohesiveness of the Muslim community which, in its own right, is an amazing achievement. The mainstay of this entire system was Islamic Law backed by dogmatic theology. Islamic Law, particularly, thanks to its all-embracing character, dominated the entire outward life of Muslims; and this system, more than anything else, made for Islamic solidarity, despite tremendous differences in the cultures of the lands through which Islam continued to spread throughout medieval times. Since Islamic Law comprehended all facets of human life and individual, social and political conduct, it ensured the unity of the Muslim body social even when the political unity of Islam disintegrated after the savage attacks of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliphate, in 656/1258.

The ‘Ulamā’ system, and particularly the development and status of law, however, did not fail to generate a new and a much more far-reaching tension within Islam than the rationalism of the Hellenizing elements. This was the emergence of Sūfism or Muslim mysticism which began in the cultural centres of Iraq and Persia during the 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries as an ecstatic method of realizing the spirituality of Islam. Confined in the beginning to a purely ecstatic ideal of moral purification and asserting itself as an internal reaction to the legalistic developments and the worldliness of the political forces, Sūfism soon developed the goal of communion with the divine. Until the 4th/10th century, Ṣūfism had remained confined to urban life constituting a somewhat peculiar and individual expression of a form of spirituality which, although it was foreign to the roots of original Islam, nevertheless expressed a type of refinement of spirit which might still be accommodated in the Islamic framework. From the 5th/11th century, however, certain outward developments took place within the Muslim world which changed the character of Ṣūfism and turned it into a religion of the masses, thereby accentuating the tension between this form of spirituality and the orthodox system of the ‘Ulamā’.

With the weakening of the Muslim political centre in Baghdad, the Muslim world witnessed during the 10th/16th and 11th/17th centuries a resurgence of the Bedouin nomadic tribes in North Africa and an infiltration of Turkish barbarian tribesmen from Central Asia into the centre of Islam. The Turkish tribesmen were converted to Islam not through the activity of the ‘Ulamā’, as had been the case with the spread of Islam in its first phase through Iraq, Persia and Egypt, but through the activity of the Ṣūfīs. In order to make Islam acceptable to the mental horizon and the spiritual milieu of the new converts, and, above all, to mellow the harshness of the tribesmen, Islam was administered to them in Ṣūfistic terms. Orthodox Islam for them served largely as an outward symbol, but they were influenced by a type of spirituality which converted Sūfism from a way of life of the selected few in the cities into a vast network of Sūfī brotherhoods. Henceforth, the spread of Islam in India, in Central Asia and Anatolia and in Africa was carried on through Sūfī brotherhoods, and Sūfism in all these zones made compromises with the spiritual milieu already existing. The new challenge before the ‘Ulamā' was this massive tension between the orthodox system and between Ṣūfism as popular religion.

With this fresh injection into Islam of Ṣūfism, the domain of Islam expanded far beyond what it had been since the middle of the 2nd/8th century. Particularly through the reconciliation of orthodox religion with Ṣūfī spirituality brought about by the monumental work and personality of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), a fresh vitality was infused into the Muslim Community. Orthodoxy itself experienced a revival and a new strength, and Bāṭinism, an important subversive heresy, suffered a great loss, while even the Shī‘a following shrank palpably in numbers. On the other hand, vast areas of pagans and even of semi-Christianized tribes were won for Islam. The story of the rhythm of the interplay of tensions between Ṣūfism and orthodox religion will be fully told in the body of this book.

The weakening of the central political control of the Caliph in Baghdad, and the growth of semi-independent Amīrs and Sultans, more or less coincided with the growth of Ṣūfism as a ubiquitous phenomenon in the Muslim world. The Turkish Sultans, although outwardly zealous patrons of orthodoxy, nevertheless paid real homage and honour to the Ṣūfī shaykhs. In general, while the work of the propagation of Islam was henceforth carried on by the Ṣūfīs, as we have indicated earlier, orthodoxy provided the broad legal and dogmatic framework within which the state itself functioned. By the 10th/16th century the two new powerful, gigantic and highly centralized states of the Ottomans, and of the Mughals in India, had established themselves. These states, with their highly skilful and efficient administrative complex, bestowed a new stability on large sections of the Muslim Community. This encouraged the blossoming of newer Islamic culture which may be described as Perso-Islamic. In Iran itself the Ṣafavid rule presently established itself which, however, had the effect of isolating Iran both culturally and in religion, from the rest of the Muslim world by deliberate policies of antagonizing other Muslim powers and by raising Shī'ism to the position of the state creed. While the outward framework of this new culture remained the orthodox law represented by the ‘Ulamā’, its content, largely constituted by the new Islamic Persian art and poetry, represented a liberal trend shot through with the Ṣūfī structure of ideas, and in, more or less, conscious opposition to classical orthodox culture. This culture enveloped the Mughal empire as well as the Ottoman court until the impact of modern Western forces.

During the 12th/18th century both the Mughal and Ottoman empires declined. While the Mughal power was replaced by British power in India, the Ottomans managed to resuscitate themselves by adopting Western military techniques and other reforms until their defeat in World War I. The whole nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the political disintegration of the world of Islam. But Islam as a religious and social force remained not only alive but experienced a revitalization which has, in the past decades, substantially helped its political rehabilitation as well. In culture and identity, however, the impact of the modern forces is still felt in Muslim society which is in a transition stage at present.

During the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries Islam spread to the Malay Archipelago largely through Arab traders. After its extension into Sumatra and Java by peaceful penetration, it also spread into the Malay Peninsula. But Islam had hardly established its nascent kingdoms in this region when it came under the military and administrative onslaught and control of Western Europe. Islam in Indonesia has, therefore, to a large extent remained as a kind of overlay on a social and cultural substructure which is still pagan in certain important aspects. However, during the present century there has been fresh influence from the Middle East, first from the Arabian Peninsula and then from Egypt, resulting in the formation of active groups of orthodox ‘Ulamā’ engaged in the Islamization of society.

It cannot yet be said with certainty how and when Islam spread into China, but it is believed by scholars to have secured firm footholds during Mongol times, although the Chinese assert that the entry of Muslims into China dates back to the very earliest times of Islam. This question can be settled only by a closer and deeper study of the documents pertaining to Chinese history and an actual analysis of the evolution of Chinese Muslim society. We have already remarked that it was through the Ṣūfī movement that Islam had spread into Central Asia and into Anatolia. The story of the penetration of Islam into Black Africa, south of the Sahara, also awaits a connected and comprehensive treatment. In East Africa it seems that Islam was able to make little headway primarily because of the slave trade, but as soon as slavery was banned Muslim missions became active in the interior. In West Africa, again, the active spread of Islam through various jihād movements occurred during the nineteenth century. One outstanding characteristic of the spread of Islam into Africa has been the combination of Ṣūfī missions with the orthodox concept of jihād, possibly because of the tribal organization of African society. At present, Islam appears to make rapid progress among Black Africans in opposition to the Christian missions, partly because of political feelings against the Christian West. In South Africa Islam is largely represented by immigrants from the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, but it is at present making progress among the Negro population because of the sharp racial policies of the White South African Government. There are also sizeable Muslim communities in Eastern Europe. In Western Europe and America Islam has entered in the form of Muslim emigrants, while there is also a growing White Muslim population through conversion. An interesting and astonishing development of the recent decades is the growth of an active Negro Muslim population in the United States known as the ‘Black Muslims’. Originally a reaction to social and political conditions, this movement seems to be partly influenced by the spread of Islam in Negro Africa itself.

We shall sketch out the interaction of modern Western education and ideas and traditional Muslim culture in the lands of Islam, and the results of this interaction, in the last two chapters of this work; it is important to notice here that, after the recent political emancipation of the Muslim countries from the domination of the West, there seem to be emerging various regional groupings of Muslim states for purposes of joint economic and cultural development and political action. The Arabs of the Middle East, although they have so far been unable to form any definite cohesive unity, nevertheless seem to be heading towards some community of purpose. Although the existence of Israel is a factor in this process, nevertheless the process itself seems to be the result of internal forces. The recent Istanbul Pact (June 1964) between Pakistan, Iran and Turkey known as ‘Regional Co-operation for Development’ is an important step in this direction. We may well witness in the very near future the coming into existence of other similar zonal or regional groupings. In the heart of the Muslim all over the earth there is an undeniably strong desire for a united Muslim world. Only time can reveal whether this can become possible and in what form. It is obvious enough that any such development would have very great importance for the whole