Islām
religion
Main
major world religion belonging to the Semitic family; it was promulgated
by the Prophet Muḥammad in Arabia in the 7th century ad. The Arabic term
islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental religious idea
of Islām—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of
islām) accepts “surrender to the will of Allāh (Arabic: God).” Allāh is
viewed as the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world.
The will of Allāh, to which man must submit, is made known through the
sacred scriptures, the Qurʾān (Koran), which Allāh revealed to his
messenger, Muḥammad. In Islām Muḥammad is considered the last of a
series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and
others), and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the
“revelations” attributed to earlier prophets.
Retaining its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism and a strict
adherence to certain essential religious practices, the religion taught
by Muḥammad to a small group of followers spread rapidly through the
Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay
Peninsula, and China. Although many sectarian movements have arisen
within Islām, all Muslims are bound by a common faith and a sense of
belonging to a single community.
This article deals with the fundamental beliefs and practices of
Islām and with the connection of religion and society in the Islāmic
world. The history of the various peoples who embraced Islām is covered
in the article Islāmic world.
The foundations of Islām » The legacy of Muḥammad
From the very beginning of Islām, Muḥammad had inculcated a sense of
brotherhood and a bond of faith among his followers, both of which
helped to develop among them a feeling of close relationship that was
accentuated by their experiences of persecution as a nascent community
in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the Qurʾānic revelation
and the conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islāmic religious practices
cemented this bond of faith. In ad 622, when the Prophet migrated to
Medina, his preaching was soon accepted, and the community-state of
Islām emerged. During this early period, Islām acquired its
characteristic ethos as a religion uniting in itself both the spiritual
and temporal aspects of life and seeking to regulate not only the
individual’s relationship to God (through his conscience) but human
relationships in a social setting as well. Thus, there is not only an
Islāmic religious institution but also an Islāmic law, state, and other
institutions governing society. Not until the 20th century were the
religious (private) and the secular (public) distinguished by some
Muslim thinkers and separated formally in certain places such as Turkey.
This dual religious and social character of Islām, expressing itself
in one way as a religious community commissioned by God to bring its own
value system to the world through the jihād (“exertion,” commonly
translated as “holy war” or “holy struggle”), explains the astonishing
success of the early generations of Muslims. Within a century after the
Prophet’s death in ad 632, they had brought a large part of the
globe—from Spain across Central Asia to India—under a new Arab Muslim
empire.
The period of Islāmic conquests and empire building marks the first
phase of the expansion of Islām as a religion. Islām’s essential
egalitarianism within the community of the faithful and its official
discrimination against the followers of other religions won rapid
converts. Jews and Christians were assigned a special status as
communities possessing scriptures and were called the “people of the
Book” (ahl al-kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious autonomy.
They were, however, required to pay a per capita tax called jizyah, as
opposed to pagans, who were required to either accept Islām or die. The
same status of the “people of the Book” was later extended to
Zoroastrians and Hindus, but many “people of the Book” joined Islām in
order to escape the disability of the jizyah. A much more massive
expansion of Islām after the 12th century was inaugurated by the Ṣūfīs
(Muslim mystics), who were mainly responsible for the spread of Islām in
India, Central Asia, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa (see below).
Besides the jihād and Ṣūfī missionary activity, another factor in the
spread of Islām was the far-ranging influence of Muslim traders, who not
only introduced Islām quite early to the Indian east coast and South
India but also proved to be the main catalytic agents (besides the
Ṣūfīs) in converting people to Islām in Indonesia, Malaya, and China.
Islām was introduced to Indonesia in the 14th century, hardly having
time to consolidate itself there politically before coming under Dutch
colonial domination.
The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islām (estimated
total 1.1 to 1.2 billion persons worldwide) has produced important
internal differences. All segments of Muslim society, however, are bound
by a common faith and a sense of belonging to a single community. With
the loss of political power during the period of Western colonialism in
the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of the Islāmic community
(ummah), instead of weakening, became stronger. The faith of Islām
helped various Muslim peoples in their struggle to gain political
freedom in the mid-20th century, and the unity of Islām contributed to
later political solidarity.
The foundations of Islām » Sources of Islāmic doctrinal and social views
Islāmic doctrine, law, and thinking in general are based upon four
sources, or fundamental principles (uṣūl): (1) the Qurʾān, (2) the
sunnah (“traditions”), (3) ijmāʿ (“consensus”), and (4) ijtihād
(“individual thought”).
The Qurʾān (literally, “Reading” or “Recitation”) is regarded as the
verbatim word, or speech, of God delivered to Muḥammad by the angel
Gabriel. Divided into 114 sūrahs (chapters) of unequal length, it is the
fundamental source of Islāmic teaching. The sūrahs revealed at Mecca
during the earliest part of Muḥammad’s career are concerned mostly with
ethical and spiritual teachings and the Day of Judgment. The sūrahs
revealed at Medina at a later period in the career of the Prophet are
concerned for the most part with social legislation and the
politico-moral principles for constituting and ordering the community.
Sunnah (“a well-trodden path”) was used by pre-Islāmic Arabs to denote
their tribal or common law; in Islām it came to mean the example of the
Prophet—i.e., his words and deeds as recorded in compilations known as
Ḥadīth.
Ḥadīth (literally, “Report”; a collection of sayings attributed to
the Prophet) provide the written documentation of the Prophet’s words
and deeds. Six of these collections, compiled in the 3rd century ah (9th
century ad), came to be regarded as especially authoritative by the
largest group in Islām, the Sunnites. Another large group, the Shīʾah,
has its own Ḥadīth contained in four canonical collections.
The doctrine of ijmāʿ, or consensus, was introduced in the 2nd
century ah (8th century ad) in order to standardize legal theory and
practice and to overcome individual and regional differences of opinion.
Though conceived as a “consensus of scholars,” ijmāʿ was in actual
practice a more fundamental operative factor. From the 3rd century ah
ijmāʿ has amounted to a principle of stability in thinking; points on
which consensus was reached in practice were considered closed and
further substantial questioning of them prohibited. Accepted
interpretations of the Qurʾān and the actual content of the sunnah
(i.e., Ḥadīth and theology) all rest finally on the ijmāʿ in the sense
of the acceptance of the authority of their community.
Ijtihād, meaning “to endeavour” or “to exert effort,” was required to
find the legal or doctrinal solution to a new problem. In the early
period of Islām, because ijtihād took the form of individual opinion
(raʾy), there was a wealth of conflicting and chaotic opinions. In the
2nd century ah ijtihād was replaced by qiyās (reasoning by strict
analogy), a formal procedure of deduction based on the texts of the
Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth. The transformation of ijmāʿ into a conservative
mechanism and the acceptance of a definitive body of Ḥadīth virtually
closed the “gate of ijtihād” in Sunni Islam while ijtihād continued in
Shiʿism. Nevertheless, certain outstanding Muslim thinkers (e.g.,
al-Ghazālī in the 11th–12th century) continued to claim the right of new
ijtihād for themselves, and reformers in the 18th to 20th centuries,
because of modern influences, have caused this principle once more to
receive wider acceptance.
The Qurʾān and Ḥadīth are discussed below. The significance of ijmāʿ
and ijtihād are discussed below in the contexts of Islāmic theology,
philosophy, and law.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » God
The doctrine about God in the Qurʾān is rigorously monotheistic: God is
one and unique; he has no partner and no equal. Trinitarianism, the
Christian belief that God is three persons in one substance, is
vigorously repudiated. Muslims believe that there are no intermediaries
between God and the creation that he brought into being by his sheer
command: “Be.” Although his presence is believed to be everywhere, he is
not incarnated in anything. He is the sole creator and sustainer of the
universe, wherein every creature bears witness to his unity and
lordship. But he is also just and merciful: his justice ensures order in
his creation, in which nothing is believed to be out of place, and his
mercy is unbounded and encompasses everything. His creating and ordering
the universe is viewed as the act of prime mercy for which all things
sing his glories. The God of the Qurʾān, described as majestic and
sovereign, is also a personal God; he is viewed as being nearer to man
than man’s jugular vein, and, whenever a person in need or distress
calls him, he responds. Above all, he is the God of guidance and shows
everything, particularly man, the right way, “the straight path.”
This picture of God—wherein the attributes of power, justice, and
mercy interpenetrate—is related to the Judeo-Christian tradition and
also differs radically from the concepts of pagan Arabia, to which it
provided an effective answer. The pagan Arabs believed in a blind and
inexorable fate over which man had no control. For this powerful but
insensible fate the Qurʾān substituted a powerful but provident and
merciful God. The Qurʾān carried through its uncompromising monotheism
by rejecting all forms of idolatry and eliminating all gods and
divinities that the Arabs worshipped in their sanctuaries (ḥarams), the
most prominent of which was the Kaʿbah sanctuary in Mecca itself.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » The universe
In order to prove the unity of God, the Qurʾān lays frequent stress on
the design and order in the universe. There are no gaps or dislocations
in nature. Order is explained by the fact that every created thing is
endowed with a definite and defined nature whereby it falls into a
pattern. This nature, though it allows every created thing to function
in a whole, sets limits; and this idea of the limitedness of everything
is one of the most fixed points in both the cosmology and theology of
the Qurʾān. The universe is viewed, therefore, as autonomous, in the
sense that everything has its own inherent laws of behaviour, but not as
autocratic, because the patterns of behaviour have been endowed by God
and are strictly limited. “Everything has been created by us according
to a measure.” Though every creature is thus limited and “measured out”
and hence depends upon God, God alone, who reigns unchallenged in the
heavens and the earth, is unlimited, independent, and self-sufficient.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » Man
According to the Qurʾān, God created two apparently parallel species of
creatures, man and jinn, the one from clay and the other from fire.
About the jinn, however, the Qurʾān says little, although it is implied
that the jinn are endowed with reason and responsibility but are more
prone to evil than man. It is with man that the Qurʾān, which describes
itself as a guide for the human race, is centrally concerned. The
Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Adam (the first man) is accepted,
but the Qurʾān states that God forgave Adam his act of disobedience,
which is not viewed in the Qurʾān as original sin in the Christian sense
of the term.
In the story of man’s creation, the angel Iblīs, or Satan, who
protested to God against the creation of man, who “would sow mischief on
earth,” lost in the competition of knowledge against Adam. The Qurʾān,
therefore, declares man to be the noblest of all creation, the created
being who bore the trust (of responsibility) that the rest of creation
refused to accept. The Qurʾān thus reiterates that all nature has been
made subservient to man seen as God’s vice-regent on earth: nothing in
all creation has been made without a purpose, and man himself has not
been created “in sport,” his purpose being service and obedience to
God’s will.
Despite this lofty station, however, the Qurʾān describes human
nature as frail and faltering. Whereas everything in the universe has a
limited nature and every creature recognizes its limitation and
insufficiency, man is viewed as having been given freedom and is
therefore prone to rebelliousness and pride, with the tendency to
arrogate to himself the attributes of self-sufficiency. Pride, thus, is
viewed as the cardinal sin of man, because, by not recognizing in
himself his essential creaturely limitations, he becomes guilty of
ascribing to himself partnership with God (shirk: associating a creature
with the Creator) and of violating the unity of God. True faith (īmān),
thus, consists of belief in the immaculate Divine Unity and Islām in
one’s submission to the Divine Will.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » Satan, sin, and
repentance
In order to communicate the truth of Divine Unity, God has sent
messengers or prophets to men, whose weakness of nature makes them ever
prone to forget or even willfully to reject Divine Unity under the
promptings of Satan. According to the Qurʾānic teaching, the being who
became Satan (Shayṭān or Iblīs) had previously occupied a high station
but fell from divine grace by his act of disobedience in refusing to
honour Adam when he, along with other angels, was ordered to do so.
Since then his work has been to beguile man into error and sin. Satan
is, therefore, the contemporary of man, and Satan’s own act of
disobedience is construed by the Qurʾān as the sin of pride. Satan’s
machinations will cease only on the Last Day.
Judging from the accounts of the Qurʾān, the record of man’s
accepting the prophets’ messages has been far from perfect. The whole
universe is replete with signs of God. The human soul itself is viewed
as a witness of the unity and grace of God. The messengers of God have,
throughout history, been calling man back to God. Yet not all men have
accepted the truth; many of them have rejected it and become
disbelievers (kāfir, plural kuffār: literally “concealing”—i.e., the
blessings of God), and, when man becomes so obdurate, his heart is
sealed by God. Nevertheless, it is always possible for a sinner to
repent (tawbah) and redeem himself by a genuine conversion to the truth.
There is no point of no return, and God is forever merciful and always
willing and ready to pardon. Genuine repentance has the effect of
removing all sins and restoring a person to the state of sinlessness
with which he started his life.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » Prophecy
Prophets are men specially elected by God to be his messengers.
Prophethood is indivisible, and the Qurʾān requires recognition of all
prophets as such without discrimination. Yet they are not all equal,
some of them being particularly outstanding in qualities of
steadfastness and patience under trial. Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus
were such great prophets. As vindication of the truth of their mission,
God often vests them with miracles: Abraham was saved from fire, Noah
from the Deluge, and Moses from the pharaoh. Not only was Jesus born
from the Virgin Mary, but God also saved him from crucifixion at the
hands of the Jews. The conviction that God’s messengers are ultimately
vindicated and saved is an integral part of the Qurʾānic doctrine.
All prophets are human and never part of divinity: they are the most
perfect of humans who are recipients of revelation from God. When God
wishes to speak to a human, he sends an angel messenger to him or makes
him hear a voice or inspires him. Muḥammad is accepted as the last
prophet in this series and its greatest member, for in him all the
messages of earlier prophets were consummated. The angel Gabriel brought
the Qurʾān down to the Prophet’s “heart.” Gabriel is represented by the
Qurʾān as a spirit whom the Prophet could sometimes see and hear.
According to early traditions, the Prophet’s revelations occurred in a
state of trance when his normal consciousness was transformed. This
state was accompanied by heavy sweating. The Qurʾān itself makes it
clear that the revelations brought with them a sense of extraordinary
weight: “If we were to send this Qurʾān down on a mountain, you would
see it split asunder out of fear of God.”
This phenomenon at the same time was accompanied by an unshakable
conviction that the message was from God, and the Qurʾān describes
itself as the transcript of a heavenly “Mother Book” written on a
“Preserved Tablet.” The conviction was of such an intensity that the
Qurʾān categorically denies that it is from any earthly source, for in
that case it would be liable to “manifold doubts and oscillations.”
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » Eschatology
In Islāmic doctrine, on the Last Day, when the world will come to an
end, the dead will be resurrected and a judgment will be pronounced on
every person in accordance with his deeds. Although the Qurʾān in the
main speaks of a personal judgment, there are several verses that speak
of the resurrection of distinct communities that will be judged
according to “their own book.” In conformity with this, the Qurʾān also
speaks in several passages of the “death of communities,” each one of
which has a definite term of life. The actual evaluation, however, will
be for every individual, whatever the terms of reference of his
performance. In order to prove that the resurrection will occur, the
Qurʾān uses a moral and a physical argument. Because not all requital is
meted out in this life, a final judgment is necessary to bring it to
completion. Physically, God, who is all-powerful, has the ability to
destroy and bring back to life all creatures, who are limited and are,
therefore, subject to God’s limitless power.
Some Islāmic schools deny the possibility of human intercession but
most accept it, and in any case God himself, in his mercy, may forgive
certain sinners. Those condemned will burn in hellfire, and those who
are saved will enjoy the abiding joys of paradise. Hell and heaven are
both spiritual and corporeal. Besides suffering in physical fire, the
damned will also experience fire “in their hearts”; similarly, the
blessed, besides corporeal enjoyment, will experience the greatest
happiness of divine pleasure.
The foundations of Islām » Doctrines of the Qurʾān » Social service
Because the purpose of the existence of man, as of every other creature,
is submission to the Divine Will, God’s role in relation to man is that
of the commander. Whereas the rest of nature obeys God automatically,
man alone possesses the choice to obey or disobey. With the deep-seated
belief in Satan’s existence, man’s fundamental role becomes one of moral
struggle, which constitutes the essence of human endeavour. Recognition
of the unity of God does not simply rest in the intellect but entails
consequences in terms of the moral struggle, which consists primarily in
freeing oneself of narrowness of mind and smallness of heart. One must
go out of oneself and expend one’s possessions for the sake of others.
The doctrine of social service, in terms of alleviating suffering and
helping the needy, constitutes an integral part of Islāmic teaching.
Praying to God and other religious acts are deemed to be incomplete in
the absence of active service to the needy. In regard to this matter,
the Qurʾānic criticisms of human nature become very sharp: “Man is by
nature timid; when evil befalls him, he panics, but when good things
come to him he prevents them from reaching others.” It is Satan who
whispers into man’s ears that by spending for others he will become
poor. God, on the contrary, promises prosperity in exchange for such
expenditure, which constitutes a credit with God and grows much more
than the money people invest in usury. Hoarding of wealth without
recognizing the rights of the poor is threatened with the direst
punishment in the hereafter and is declared to be one of the main causes
of the decay of societies in this world. The practice of usury is
forbidden.
With this socioeconomic doctrine cementing the bond of faith, there
emerges the idea of a closely knit community of the faithful who are
declared to be “brothers unto each other.” Muslims are described as “the
middle community bearing witness on mankind,” “the best community
produced for mankind,” whose function it is “to enjoin good and forbid
evil” (Qurʾān). Cooperation and “good advice” within the community are
emphasized, and a person who deliberately tries to harm the interests of
the community is to be given exemplary punishment. Opponents from within
the community are to be fought and reduced with armed force, if issues
cannot be settled by persuasion and arbitration.
Because the mission of the community is to “enjoin good and forbid
evil” so that “there is no mischief and corruption” on earth, the
doctrine of jihād is the logical outcome. For the early community it was
a basic religious concept. The lesser jihād, or holy striving, means an
active struggle using armed force whenever necessary. The object of
jihād is not the conversion of individuals to Islām but rather the
gaining of political control over the collective affairs of societies to
run them in accordance with the principles of Islām. Individual
conversions occur as a by-product of this process when the power
structure passes into the hands of the Muslim community. In fact,
according to strict Muslim doctrine, conversions “by force” are
forbidden, because after the revelation of the Qurʾān “good and evil
have become distinct,” so that one may follow whichever one may prefer
(Qurʾān), and it is also strictly prohibited to wage wars for the sake
of acquiring worldly glory, power, and rule. With the establishment of
the Muslim empire, however, the doctrine of the lesser jihād was
modified by the leaders of the community. Their main concern had become
the consolidation of the empire and its administration, and thus they
interpreted the teaching in a defensive rather than in an expansive
sense. The Khārijite sect, which held that “decision belongs to God
alone,” insisted on continuous and relentless jihād, but its followers
were virtually destroyed during the internecine wars in the 8th century.
Besides a measure of economic justice and the creation of a strong
idea of community, the Prophet Muḥammad effected a general reform of
Arab society, in particular protecting its weaker segments—the poor, the
orphans, women, and slaves. Slavery was not legally abolished, but
emancipation of slaves was religiously encouraged as an act of merit.
Slaves were given legal rights, including the right of acquiring their
freedom in return for payment, in installments, of a sum agreed upon by
the slave and his master out of his earnings. A slave woman who bore a
child by her master became automatically free after her master’s death.
The infanticide of girls that was practiced among certain tribes in
pre-Islāmic Arabia—out of fear of poverty or a sense of shame—was
forbidden.
Distinction and privileges based on tribal rank or race were
repudiated in the Qurʾān and in the celebrated “Farewell Pilgrimage
Address” of the Prophet shortly before his death. All men are therein
declared to be “equal children of Adam,” and the only distinction
recognized in the sight of God is to be based on piety and good acts.
The age-old Arab institution of intertribal revenge (called
thaʾr)—whereby it was not necessarily the killer who was executed but a
person equal in rank to the slain person—was abolished. The pre-Islāmic
ethical ideal of manliness was modified and replaced by a more humane
ideal of moral virtue and piety.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars
During the earliest decades after the death of the Prophet, certain
basic features of the religio-social organization of Islām were singled
out to serve as anchoring points of the community’s life and formulated
as the “Pillars of Islām.” To these five, the Khawārij sect added a
sixth pillar, the jihād, which, however, was not accepted by the general
community.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars » The shahādah, or profession of faith
The first pillar is the profession of faith: “There is no deity but God,
and Muḥammad is the messenger of God,” upon which depends membership in
the community. The profession of faith must be recited at least once in
one’s lifetime, aloud, correctly, and purposively, with an understanding
of its meaning and with an assent from the heart. From this fundamental
belief are derived beliefs in (1) angels (particularly Gabriel, the
Angel of Revelation), (2) the revealed Books (the Qurʾān and the sacred
books of Judaism and Christianity), (3) a series of prophets (among whom
figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition are particularly eminent,
although it is believed that God has sent messengers to every nation),
and (4) the Last Day (Day of Judgment).
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars » Prayer
The second pillar consists of five daily canonical prayers. These
prayers may be offered individually if one is unable to go to the
mosque. The first prayer is performed before sunrise, the second just
after noon, the third in the late afternoon, the fourth immediately
after sunset, and the fifth before retiring to bed.
Before a prayer, ablutions, including the washing of hands, face, and
feet, are performed. The muezzin (one who gives the call for prayer)
chants aloud from a raised place (such as a tower) in the mosque. When
prayer starts, the imām, or leader (of the prayer), stands in the front
facing in the direction of Mecca, and the congregation stands behind him
in rows, following him in various postures. Each prayer consists of two
to four genuflection units (rakʿah); each unit consists of a standing
posture (during which verses from the Qurʾān are recited—in certain
prayers aloud, in others silently), as well as a genuflection and two
prostrations. At every change in posture, “God is great” is recited.
Tradition has fixed the materials to be recited in each posture.
Special congregational prayers are offered on Friday instead of the
prayer just after noon. The Friday service consists of a sermon
(khuṭbah), which partly consists of preaching in the local language and
partly of recitation of certain formulas in Arabic. In the sermon, the
preacher usually recites one or several verses of the Qurʾān and builds
his address on it, which can have a moral, social, or political content.
Friday sermons usually have considerable impact on public opinion
regarding both moral and sociopolitical questions.
Although not ordained as an obligatory duty, nocturnal prayers
(called tahajjud) are encouraged, particularly during the latter half of
the night. During the month of Ramaḍān (see below Fasting), lengthy
prayers, called tarāwīḥ, are offered congregationally before retiring.
In strict doctrine, the five daily prayers cannot be waived even for
the sick, who may pray in bed and, if necessary, lying down. When on a
journey, the two afternoon prayers may be followed one by the other; the
sunset and late evening prayers may be combined as well. In practice,
however, much laxity has occurred, particularly among the modernized
classes, although Friday prayers are still very well attended.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars » The zakāt
The third pillar is the obligatory tax called zakāt (“purification,”
indicating that such a payment makes the rest of one’s wealth
religiously and legally pure). This is the only permanent tax levied by
the Qurʾān and is payable annually on food grains, cattle, and cash
after one year’s possession. The amount varies for different categories.
Thus, on grains and fruits it is 10 percent if land is watered by rain,
5 percent if land is watered artificially. On cash and precious metals
it is 21/2 percent. Zakāt is collectable by the state and is to be used
primarily for the poor, but the Qurʾān mentions other purposes:
ransoming Muslim war captives, redeeming chronic debts, paying tax
collectors’ fees, jihād (and by extension, according to Qurʾān
commentators, education and health), and creating facilities for
travellers.
After the breakup of Muslim religio-political power, payment of zakāt
became a matter of voluntary charity dependent on individual conscience.
In the modern Muslim world it has been left up to the individual, except
in some countries (such as Saudi Arabia) where the Sharīʿah (Islāmic
law) is strictly maintained.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars » Fasting
Fasting during the month of Ramaḍān (ninth month of the Muslim lunar
calendar), laid down in the Qurʾān (2:183–185), is the fourth pillar of
the faith. Fasting begins at daybreak and ends at sunset, and during the
day eating, drinking, and smoking are forbidden. The Qurʾān (2:185)
states that it was in the month of Ramaḍān that the Qurʾān was revealed.
Another verse of the Qurʾān (97:1) states that it was revealed “on the
Night of Power,” which Muslims generally observe on the night of 26–27
Ramaḍān. For a person who is sick or on a journey, fasting may be
postponed until “another equal number of days.” The elderly and the
incurably sick are exempted through the daily feeding of one poor person
if they have the means.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » The five pillars » The ḥajj
The fifth pillar is the annual pilgrimage (ḥajj) to Mecca prescribed for
every Muslim once in a lifetime—“provided one can afford it” and
provided a person has enough provisions to leave for his family in his
absence. A special service is held in the Sacred Mosque on the 7th of
the month of Dhū al-Ḥijjah (last in the Muslim year). Pilgrimage
activities begin by the 8th and conclude on the 12th or 13th. All
worshippers enter the state of iḥrām; they wear two seamless garments
and avoid sexual intercourse, the cutting of hair and nails, and certain
other activities. Pilgrims from outside Mecca assume iḥrām at specified
points en route to the city. The principal activities consist of walking
seven times around the Kaʿbah, a shrine within the mosque; the kissing
and touching of the Black Stone (Ḥajar al-Aswad); and the ascent of and
running between Mount Ṣafā and Mount Marwah (which are now, however,
mere elevations) seven times. At the second stage of the ritual, the
pilgrim proceeds from Mecca to Minā, a few miles away; from there he
goes to ʿArafāt, where it is essential to hear a sermon and to spend one
afternoon. The last rites consist of spending the night at Muzdalifah
(between ʿArafāt and Minā) and offering sacrifice on the last day of
iḥrām, which is the ʿīd (“festival”) of sacrifice.
Many countries have imposed restrictions on the number of outgoing
pilgrims because of foreign-exchange difficulties. Because of the
improvement of communications, however, the total number of visitors has
greatly increased in recent years. By the early 1990s the number of
visitors was estimated to be about two million, approximately half of
them from non-Arab countries. All Muslim countries send official
delegations on the occasion, which is being increasingly used for
religio-political congresses. At other times in the year, it is
considered meritorious to perform the lesser pilgrimage (ʿumrah), which
is not, however, a substitute for the ḥajj pilgrimage.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » Sacred places and days
The most sacred place for Muslims is the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca, the
object of the annual pilgrimage. It is much more than a mosque; it is
believed to be the place where the heavenly bliss and power touches the
earth directly. According to Muslim tradition, the Kaʿbah was built by
Abraham. The Prophet’s mosque in Medina is the next in sanctity.
Jerusalem follows in third place in sanctity as the first qiblah (i.e.,
direction in which the Muslims offered prayers at first, before the
qiblah was changed to the Kaʿbah) and as the place from where Muḥammad,
according to tradition, made his ascent (miʿrāj) to heaven. For the
Shīʿah, Karbalāʾ in Iraq (the place of martyrdom of ʿAlī’s son, Ḥusayn)
and Meshed in Iran (where Imām ʿAlī ar-Riḍā is buried) constitute places
of special veneration where the Shīʿah make pilgrimages.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » Sacred places and days » Shrines of Ṣūfī saints
For the Muslim masses in general, shrines of Ṣūfī saints are particular
objects of reverence and even veneration. In Baghdad the tomb of the
greatest saint of all, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, is visited every year by
large numbers of pilgrims from all over the Muslim world.
By the late 20th century, the Ṣūfī shrines, which were managed
privately in earlier periods, were almost entirely owned by governments
and were managed by departments of awqāf (plural of waqf, a religious
endowment). The official appointed to care for a shrine is usually
called a mutawallī. In Turkey, where such endowments formerly
constituted a very considerable portion of the national wealth, all
endowments were confiscated by the regime of Atatürk (president
1928–38).
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » Sacred places and days » The mosque
The general religious life of Muslims is centred around the mosque. In
the days of the Prophet and early caliphs, the mosque was the centre of
all community life, and it remains so in many parts of the Islāmic world
to this day. Small mosques are usually supervised by the imām (one who
administers the prayer service) himself, although sometimes also a
muezzin is appointed. In larger mosques, where Friday prayers are
offered, a khaṭīb (one who gives the khuṭbah, or sermon) is appointed
for Friday service. Many large mosques also function as religious
schools and colleges. In the early 21st century, mosque officials were
appointed by the government in most countries. In some countries—e.g.,
Pakistan—most mosques are private and are run by the local community,
although increasingly some of the larger ones have been taken over by
the government departments of awqāf.
The foundations of Islām » Fundamental practices and institutions of
Islām » Sacred places and days » Holy days
The Muslim calendar (based on the lunar year) dates from the emigration
(hijrah) of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in ad 622. The two festive
days in the year are the ʿīds, ʿĪd al-Fiṭr celebrating the end of the
month of Ramaḍān and ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā (the feast of sacrifice) marking the
end of the pilgrimage. Because of the crowds, ʿīd prayers are offered
either in very large mosques or on specially consecrated grounds. Other
sacred times include the “Night of Power” (believed to be the night in
which God makes decisions about the destiny of individuals and the world
as a whole) and the night of the ascension of the Prophet to heaven. The
Shīʿah celebrate the 10th of Muḥarram (the first month of the Muslim
year) to mark the day of the martyrdom of Ḥusayn. The Muslim masses also
celebrate the death anniversaries of various saints in a ceremony called
ʿurs (literally, “nuptial ceremony”). The saints, far from dying, are
believed to reach the zenith of their spiritual life on this occasion.
Fazlur Rahman
Ed.
Islāmic thought
Islāmic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafah) are two traditions of
learning developed by Muslim thinkers who were engaged, on the one hand,
in the rational clarification and defense of the principles of the
Islāmic religion (mutakallimūn) and, on the other, in the pursuit of the
ancient (Greek and Hellenistic, or Greco-Roman) sciences (falāsifah).
These thinkers took a position that was intermediate between the
traditionalists, who remained attached to the literal expressions of the
primary sources of Islāmic doctrines (the Qurʾān, or the Islāmic
scripture, and the Ḥadīth, or the sayings and traditions of Muḥammad)
and who abhorred reasoning, and those whose reasoning led them to
abandon the Islāmic community (the ummah) altogether. The status of the
believer in Islām remained in practice a juridical question, not a
matter for theologians or philosophers to decide. Except in regard to
the fundamental questions of the existence of God, Islāmic revelation,
and future reward and punishment, the juridical conditions for declaring
someone an unbeliever or beyond the pale of Islām were so demanding as
to make it almost impossible to make a valid declaration of this sort
about a professing Muslim. In the course of events in Islāmic history,
representatives of certain theological movements, who happened to be
jurists and who succeeded in converting rulers to their cause, made
those rulers declare in favour of their movements and even encouraged
them to persecute their opponents. Thus there arose in some localities
and periods a semblance of an official, or orthodox, doctrine.
Islāmic thought » Origins, nature, and significance of Islāmic theology
» Early developments
The beginnings of theology in the Islāmic tradition in the second half
of the 7th century are not easily distinguishable from the beginnings of
a number of other disciplines—Arabic philology, Qurʾānic interpretation,
the collection of the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muḥammad
(Ḥadīth), jurisprudence, and historiography. Together with these other
disciplines, Islāmic theology is concerned with ascertaining the facts
and context of the Islāmic revelation and with understanding its meaning
and implications as to what Muslims should believe and do after the
revelation had ceased and the Islāmic community had to chart its own
way. During the first half of the 8th century, a number of
questions—which centred on God’s unity, justice, and other attributes
and which were relevant to man’s freedom, actions, and fate in the
hereafter—formed the core of a more specialized discipline, which was
called kalām (“speech”). This term (kalām) was used to designate the
more specialized discipline because of the rhetorical and dialectical
“speech” used in formulating the principal matters of Islāmic belief,
debating them, and defending them against Muslim and non-Muslim
opponents. Gradually, kalām came to include all matters directly or
indirectly relevant to the establishment and definition of religious
beliefs, and it developed its own necessary or useful systematic
rational arguments about human knowledge and the makeup of the world.
Despite various efforts by later thinkers to fuse the problems of kalām
with those of philosophy (and mysticism), theology preserved its
relative independence from philosophy and other nonreligious sciences.
It remained true to its original traditional and religious point of
view, confined itself within the limits of the Islāmic revelation, and
assumed that these limits as it understood them were identical with the
limits of truth.
Islāmic thought » Origins, nature, and significance of Islāmic theology
» The Hellenistic legacy
The pre-Islāmic and non-Islāmic legacy with which early Islāmic theology
came into contact included almost all the religious thought that had
survived and was being defended or disputed in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and
India. It was transmitted by learned representatives of various
Christian, Jewish, Manichaean (members of a dualistic religion founded
by Mani, an Iranian prophet, in the 3rd century), Zoroastrian (members
of a monotheistic, but later dualistic, religion founded by Zoroaster, a
7th-century-bc Iranian prophet), Indian (Hindu and Buddhist, primarily),
and Ṣābian (star worshippers of Harran often confused with the
Mandaeans) communities and by early converts to Islām conversant with
the teachings, sacred writings, and doctrinal history of the religions
of these areas. At first, access to this legacy was primarily through
conversations and disputations with such men, rather than through full
and accurate translations of sacred texts or theological and philosophic
writings, although some translations from Pahlavi (a Middle Persian
dialect), Syriac, and Greek must also have been available.
The characteristic approach of early Islāmic theology to non-Muslim
literature was through oral disputations, the starting points of which
were the statements presented or defended (orally) by the opponents.
Oral disputation continued to be used in theology for centuries, and
most theological writings reproduce or imitate that form. From such oral
and written disputations, writers on religions and sects collected much
of their information about non-Muslim sects. Much of Hellenistic
(post-3rd century bc Greek cultural), Iranian, and Indian religious
thought was thus encountered in an informal and indirect manner.
From the 9th century onward, theologians had access to an
increasingly larger body of translated texts, but by then they had taken
most of their basic positions. They made a selective use of the
translation literature, ignoring most of what was not useful to them
until the mystical theologian al-Ghazālī (flourished 11th–12th
centuries) showed them the way to study it, distinguish between the
harmless and harmful doctrines contained in it, and refute the latter.
By this time Islāmic theology had coined a vast number of technical
terms, and theologians (e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ) had forged Arabic into a
versatile language of science; Arabic philology had matured; and the
religious sciences (jurisprudence, the study of the Qurʾān, Ḥadīth,
criticism, and history) had developed complex techniques of textual
study and interpretation. The 9th-century translators availed themselves
of these advances to meet the needs of patrons. Apart from demands for
medical and mathematical works, the translation of Greek learning was
fostered by the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs (8th–9th centuries) and their
viziers as additional weapons (the primary weapon was theology itself)
against the threat of Manichaeanism and other subversive ideas that went
under the name zandaqah (“heresy” or “atheism”).
Muhsin S. Mahdi
Ed.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism
Despite the notion of a unified and consolidated community, as taught by
the Prophet, serious differences arose within the Muslim community
immediately after his death. According to the Sunnah, or traditionalist
faction—who now constitute the majority of Islām—the Prophet had
designated no successor. Thus the Muslims at Medina decided to elect a
separate chief. Because he would not have been accepted by the Quraysh,
the ummah, or Muslim community, would have disintegrated. Therefore, two
of Muḥammad’s fathers-in-law, who were highly respected early converts
as well as trusted lieutenants, prevailed upon the Medinans to elect a
single leader, and the choice fell upon Abū Bakr, father of the
Prophet’s favoured wife, ʿĀʾishah. All of this occurred before the
Prophet’s burial (under the floor of ʿĀʾishah’s hut, alongside the
courtyard of the mosque).
According to the Shīʿah, or “Partisans” of ʿAlī, the Prophet had
designated as his successor his son-in-law ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, husband
of his daughter Fāṭimah and father of his only surviving grandsons,
Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. His preference was general knowledge; yet, while ʿAlī
and the Prophet’s closest kinsmen were preparing the body for burial,
Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and Abū ʿUbaydah from Muḥammad’s Companions in the
Quraysh tribe, met with the leaders of the Medinans and agreed to elect
the aging Abū Bakr as the successor (khalīfah, hence “caliph”) of the
Prophet. ʿAlī and his kinsmen were dismayed but agreed for the sake of
unity to accept the fait accompli because ʿAlī was still young
After the murder of ʿUthmān, the third caliph, ʿAlī was invited by
the Muslims at Medina to accept the caliphate. Thus ʿAli became the
fourth caliph (656–661), but the disagreement over his right of
succession brought about a major schism in Islām, between the Shīʿah, or
“legitimists”—those loyal to ʿAlī—and the Sunnah, or “traditionalists.”
Athough their differences were in the first instance political, arising
out of the question of leadership, theological differences developed
over time.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Khawārij
During the reign of the third caliph, ʿUthmān, certain rebellious groups
accused the Caliph of nepotism and misrule, and the resulting discontent
led to his assassination. The rebels then recognized the Prophet’s
cousin and son-in-law, ʿAlī, as ruler but later deserted him and fought
against him, accusing him of having committed a grave sin in submitting
his claim to the caliphate to arbitration. The word khāraju, from which
khārijī is derived, means “to withdraw” and Khawārij were, therefore,
seceders who believed in active dissent or rebellion against a state of
affairs they considered to be gravely impious.
The basic doctrine of the Khawārij was that a person or a group who
committed a grave error or sin and did not sincerely repent ceased to be
Muslim. Mere profession of the faith—“there is no god but God; Muḥammad
is the prophet of God”—did not make a person a Muslim unless this faith
was accompanied by righteous deeds. In other words, good works were an
integral part of faith and not extraneous to it. The second principle
that flowed from their aggressive idealism was militancy, or jihād,
which the Khawārij considered to be among the cardinal principles, or
pillars, of Islām. Contrary to the orthodox view, they interpreted the
Qurʾānic command about “enjoining good and forbidding evil” to mean the
vindication of truth through the sword. The placing of these two
principles together made the Khawārij highly inflammable fanatics,
intolerant of almost any established political authority. They
incessantly resorted to rebellion and as a result were virtually wiped
out during the first two centuries of Islām.
Because the Khawārij believed that the basis of rule was righteous
character and piety alone, any Muslim, irrespective of race, colour, and
sex, could, in their view, become ruler—provided he or she satisfied the
conditions of piety. This was in contrast to the claims of the Shīʿah
(the party of Muḥammad’s son-in-law, ʿAlī) that the ruler must belong to
the family of the Prophet and to the doctrine of the Sunnah (followers
of the Prophet’s way) that the head of state must belong to the
Prophet’s tribe, i.e., the Quraysh.
A moderate group of the Khawārij, the Ibāḍīs, avoided extinction, and
its members are to be found today in North Africa and in Oman and other
parts of East Africa, including Zanzibar Island. The Ibāḍīs do not
believe in aggressive methods and, throughout medieval Islām, remained
dormant. Because of the interest of 20th-century Western scholars in
this sect, the Ibāḍīs have become active and have begun to publish their
classical writings and their own journals.
Although Khārijism is now essentially a story of the past, it has
left a permanent influence on Islām, because of reaction against it. It
forced the religious leadership of the community to formulate a bulwark
against religious intolerance and fanaticism. Positively, it has
influenced the reform movements that have sprung up in Islām from time
to time and that have treated spiritual and moral placidity and status
quo with a quasi-Khawārij zeal and militancy.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Muʿtazilah
The question of whether works are an integral part of faith or
independent of it, as raised by the Khawārij, led to another important
theological question: are human acts the result of a free human choice,
or are they predetermined by God? This question brought with it a whole
series of questions about the nature of God and of man. Although the
initial impetus to theological thought, in the case of the Khawārij, had
come from within Islām, full-scale religious speculation resulted from
the contact and confrontation of Muslims with other cultures and systems
of thought.
As a consequence of translations of Greek philosophical and
scientific works into Arabic during the 8th and 9th centuries and the
controversies of Muslims with Dualists (e.g., Gnostics and Manichaeans),
Buddhists, and Christians, a more powerful movement of rational theology
emerged; its representatives are called the Muʿtazilah (literally “those
who stand apart,” a reference to the fact that they dissociated
themselves from extreme views of faith and infidelity). On the question
of the relationship of faith to works, the Muʿtazilah—who called
themselves “champions of God’s unity and justice”—taught, like the
Khawārij, that works were an essential part of faith but that a person
guilty of a grave sin, unless he repented, was neither a Muslim nor yet
a non-Muslim but occupied a “middle ground.” They further defended the
position, as a central part of their doctrine, that man was free to
choose and act and was, therefore, responsible for his actions. Divine
predestination of human acts, they held, was incompatible with God’s
justice and human responsibility. The Muʿtazilah, therefore, recognized
two powers, or actors, in the universe—God in the realm of nature and
man in the domain of moral human action. The Muʿtazilah explained away
the apparently predeterministic verses of the Qurʾān as being metaphors
and exhortations.
They claimed that human reason, independent of revelation, was
capable of discovering what is good and what is evil, although
revelation corroborated the findings of reason. Man is, therefore, under
moral obligation to do the right even if there were no prophets and no
divine revelation. Revelation has to be interpreted, therefore, in
conformity with the dictates of rational ethics. Yet revelation is
neither redundant nor passive. Its function is twofold. First, its aim
is to aid man in choosing the right, because in the conflict between
good and evil man often falters and makes the wrong choice against his
rational judgment. God, therefore, must send prophets, for he must do
the best for man; otherwise, the demands of divine grace and mercy
cannot be fulfilled. Secondly, revelation is also necessary to
communicate the positive obligations of religion—e.g., prayers and
fasting—which cannot be known without revelation.
God is viewed by the Muʿtazilah as pure Essence, without eternal
attributes, because they hold that the assumption of eternal attributes
in conjunction with Essence will result in a belief in multiple
coeternals and violate the pure, unadulterated unity of God. God knows,
wills, and acts by virtue of his Essence and not through attributes of
knowledge, will, and power. Nor does he have an eternal attribute of
speech, of which the Qurʾān and other earlier revelations were effects;
the Qurʾān was, therefore, created in time and was not eternal.
The promises of reward that God has made in the Qurʾān to righteous
people and the threats of punishment he has issued to evildoers must be
carried out by him on the Day of Judgment. For promises and threats are
viewed as reports about the future, and if not fulfilled exactly those
reports will turn into lies, which are inconceivable of God. Also, if
God were to withhold punishment for evil and forgive it, this would be
as unjust as withholding reward for righteousness. There can be neither
undeserved punishment nor undeserved reward; otherwise, good may just as
well turn into evil and evil into good. From this position it follows
that there can be no intercession on behalf of sinners.
When, in the early 9th century, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn raised
Muʿtazilism to the status of the state creed, the Muʿtazilite
rationalists showed themselves to be illiberal and persecuted their
opponents. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855), an eminent orthodox figure and
founder of one of the four orthodox schools of Islāmic law, was
subjected to flogging and imprisonment for his refusal to subscribe to
the doctrine that the Qurʾān, the word of God, was created in time.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Sunnah
In the 10th century a reaction began against the Muʿtazilah that
culminated in the formulation and subsequent general acceptance of
another set of theological propositions, which became Sunnī, or
“orthodox” theology.
The issues raised by these early schisms and the positions adopted by
them enabled the Sunnī orthodoxy to define its own doctrinal positions
in turn. Much of the content of Sunnī theology was, therefore, supplied
by its reactions to those schisms. The term sunnah, which means a
“well-trodden path” and in the religious terminology of Islām normally
signifies “the example set by the Prophet,” in the present context
simply means the traditional and well-defined way. In this context, the
term sunnah usually is accompanied by the appendage “the consolidated
majority” (al-jamāʿah). The term clearly indicates that the traditional
way is the way of the consolidated majority of the community as against
peripheral or “wayward” positions of sectarians, who by definition must
be erroneous.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Sunnah » The way of
the majority
With the rise of the orthodoxy, then, the foremost and elemental factor
that came to be emphasized was the notion of the majority of the
community. The concept of the community so vigorously pronounced by the
earliest doctrine of the Qurʾān gained both a new emphasis and a fresh
context with the rise of Sunnism. Whereas the Qurʾān had marked out the
Muslim community from other communities, Sunnism now emphasized the
views and customs of the majority of the community in contradistinction
to peripheral groups. An abundance of tradition (Ḥadīth) came to be
attributed to the Prophet to the effect that Muslims must follow the
majority’s way, that minority groups are all doomed to hell, and that
God’s protective hand is always on (the majority of) the community,
which can never be in error. Under the impact of the new Ḥadīth, the
community, which had been charged by the Qurʾān with a mission and
commanded to accept a challenge, now became transformed into a
privileged one that was endowed with infallibility.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Sunnah » Tolerance
of diversity
At the same time, while condemning schisms and branding dissent as
heretical, Sunnism developed the opposite trend of accommodation,
catholicity, and synthesis. A putative tradition of the Prophet that
says “differences of opinion among my community are a blessing” was
given wide currency. This principle of toleration ultimately made it
possible for diverse sects and schools of thought—notwithstanding a wide
range of difference in belief and practice—to recognize and coexist with
each other. No group may be excluded from the community unless it itself
formally renounces Islām. As for individuals, tests of heresy may be
applied to their beliefs, but, unless a person is found to flagrantly
violate or deny the unity of God or expressly negate the prophethood of
Muḥammad, such tests usually have no serious consequences. Catholicity
was orthodoxy’s answer to the intolerance and secessionism of the
Khawārij and the severity of the Muʿtazilah. As a consequence, a formula
was adopted in which good works were recognized as enhancing the quality
of faith but not as entering into the definition and essential nature of
faith. This broad formula saved the integrity of the community at the
expense of moral strictness and doctrinal uniformity.
On the question of free will, Sunnī orthodoxy attempted a synthesis
between man’s responsibility and God’s omnipotence. The champions of
orthodoxy accused the Muʿtazilah of quasi-Magian Dualism
(Zoroastrianism) insofar as the Muʿtazilah admitted two independent and
original actors in the universe: God and man. To the orthodox it seemed
blasphemous to hold that man could act wholly outside the sphere of
divine omnipotence, which had been so vividly portrayed by the Qurʾān
but which the Muʿtazilah had endeavoured to explain away in order to
make room for man’s free and independent action.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Sunnah » Influence
of al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī
The Sunnī formulation, however, as presented by al-Ashʿarī and
al-Māturīdī, Sunnī’s two main representatives in the 10th century, shows
palpable differences despite basic uniformity. Al-Ashʿarī taught that
human acts were created by God and acquired by man and that human
responsibility depended on this acquisition. He denied, however, that
man could be described as an actor in a real sense. Al-Māturīdī, on the
other hand, held that although God is the sole Creator of everything,
including human acts, nevertheless, man is an actor in the real sense,
for acting and creating were two different types of activity involving
different aspects of the same human act.
In conformity with their positions, al-Ashʿarī believed that man did
not have the power to act before he actually acted and that God created
this power in him at the time of action; and al-Māturīdī taught that
before the action man has a certain general power for action but that
this power becomes specific to a particular action only when the action
is performed, because, after full and specific power comes into
existence, action cannot be delayed.
Al-Ashʿarī and his school also held that human reason was incapable
of discovering good and evil and that acts became endowed with good or
evil qualities through God’s declaring them to be such. Because man in
his natural state regards his own self-interest as good and that which
thwarts his interests as bad, natural human reason is unreliable.
Independently of revelation, therefore, murder would not be bad nor the
saving of life good. Furthermore, because God’s Will makes acts good or
bad, one cannot ask for reasons behind the divine law, which must be
simply accepted. Al-Māturīdī takes an opposite position, not materially
different from that of the Muʿtazilah: human reason is capable of
finding out good and evil, and revelation aids human reason against the
sway of human passions.
Despite these important initial differences between the two main
Sunnī schools of thought, the doctrines of al-Māturīdī became submerged
in course of time under the expanding popularity of the Ashʿarite
school, which gained wide currency particularly after the 11th century
because of the influential activity of the Ṣūfī theologian al-Ghazālī.
Because these later theologians placed increasing emphasis on divine
omnipotence at the expense of the freedom and efficacy of the human
will, a deterministic outlook on life became characteristic of Sunnī
Islām—reinvigorated by the Ṣūfī world view, which taught that nothing
exists except God, whose being is the only real being. This general
deterministic outlook produced, in turn, a severe reformist reaction in
the teachings of Ibn Taymīyah, a 14th-century theologian who sought to
rehabilitate human freedom and responsibility and whose influence has
been strongly felt through the reform movements in the Muslim world
since the 18th century.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Shīʿah
The Shīʿah are the only important surviving sect in Islām. As noted
above, they owe their origin to the hostility between ʿAlī (the fourth
caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet) and the Umayyad dynasty (661–750).
After ʿAlī’s death, the Shīʿah (Party; i.e., of ʿAlī) demanded the
restoration of rule to ʿAlī’s family, and from that demand developed the
Shīʿite legitimism, or the divine right of the holy family to rule. In
the early stages, the Shīʿah used this legitimism to cover the protest
against the Arab hegemony under the Umayyads and to agitate for social
reform.
Gradually, however, Shīʿism developed a theological content for its
political stand. Probably under Gnostic (esoteric, dualistic, and
speculative) and old Iranian (dualistic) influences, the figure of the
political ruler, the imām (exemplary “leader”), was transformed into a
metaphysical being, a manifestation of God and the primordial light that
sustains the universe and bestows true knowledge on man. Through the
imām alone the hidden and true meaning of the Qurʾānic revelation can be
known, because the imām alone is infallible. The Shīʿah thus developed a
doctrine of esoteric knowledge that was adopted also, in a modified
form, by the Ṣūfīs, or Islāmic mystics (see Ṣūfism). The orthodox Shīʿah
recognize 12 such imāms, the last (Muḥammad) having disappeared in the
9th century. Since that time, the mujtahids (i.e., the Shīʿī divines)
have been able to interpret law and doctrine under the putative guidance
of the imām, who will return toward the end of time to fill the world
with truth and justice.
On the basis of their doctrine of imamology, the Shīʿah emphasize
their idealism and transcendentalism in conscious contrast with Sunnī
pragmatism. Thus, whereas the Sunnīs believe in the ijmāʿ (“consensus”)
of the community as the source of decision making and workable
knowledge, the Shīʿah believe that knowledge derived from fallible
sources is useless and that sure and true knowledge can come only
through a contact with the infallible imām. Again, in marked contrast to
Sunnism, Shīʿism adopted the Muʿtazilite doctrine of the freedom of the
human will and the capacity of human reason to know good and evil,
although its position on the question of the relationship of faith to
works is the same as that of the Sunnīs.
Parallel to the doctrine of an esoteric knowledge, Shīʿism, because
of its early defeats and persecutions, also adopted the principle of
taqīyah, or dissimulation of faith in a hostile environment. Introduced
first as a practical principle, taqīyah, which is also attributed to
ʿAlī and other imāms, became an important part of the Shīʿah religious
teaching and practice. In the sphere of law, Shīʿism differs from Sunnī
law mainly in allowing a temporary marriage, called mutʿah, which can be
legally contracted for a fixed period of time on the stipulation of a
fixed dower.
From a spiritual point of view, perhaps the greatest difference
between Shīʿism and Sunnism is the former’s introduction into Islām of
the passion motive, which is conspicuously absent from Sunnī Islām. The
violent death (in 680) of ʿAlī’s son, Ḥusayn, at the hands of the
Umayyad troops is celebrated with moving orations, passion plays, and
processions in which the participants, in a state of emotional frenzy,
beat their breasts with heavy chains and sharp instruments, inflicting
wounds on their bodies. This passion motive has also influenced the
Sunnī masses in Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, who participate
in passion plays called taʿziyahs. Such celebrations are, however,
absent from Egypt and North Africa.
Although the Shīʿah number only about 40,000,000 (Shīʿism has been
the official religion in Iran since the 16th century), Shīʿism has
exerted a great influence on Sunnī Islām in several ways. The veneration
in which all Muslims hold ʿAlī and his family and the respect shown to
ʿAlī’s descendants (who are called sayyids in the East and sharīfs in
North Africa) are obvious evidence of this influence.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Shīʿah » Ismāʿīlīs
Besides the main body of Twelver (Ithnā ʿAsharīyah) Shīʿah, Shīʿism has
produced a variety of more or less extremist sects, the most important
of them being the Ismāʿīlī. Instead of recognizing Mūsā as the seventh
imām, as did the main body of the Shīʿah, the Ismāʿīlīs upheld the
claims of his elder brother Ismāʿīl. One group of Ismāʿīlīs, called
Seveners (Sabʿīyah), considered Ismāʿīl the seventh and last of the
imāms. The majority of Ismāʿīlīs, however, believed that the imamate
continued in the line of Ismāʿīl’s descendants. The Ismāʿīlī teaching
spread during the 9th century from North Africa to Sind, in India, and
the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimid dynasty succeeded in establishing a prosperous
empire in Egypt. Ismāʿīlīs are subdivided into two groups—the Nizārīs,
headed by the Aga Khan, and the Mustaʿlīs in Bombay, with their own
spiritual head. The Ismāʿīlīs are to be found mainly in East Africa,
Pakistan, India, and Yemen.
In their theology, the Ismāʿīlīs have absorbed the most extreme
elements and heterodox ideas. The universe is viewed as a cyclic
process, and the unfolding of each cycle is marked by the advent of
seven “speakers”—messengers of God with Scriptures—each of whom is
succeeded by seven “silents”—messengers without revealed scriptures; the
last speaker (the Prophet Muḥammad) is followed by seven imāms who
interpret the Will of God to man and are, in a sense, higher than the
Prophet because they draw their knowledge directly from God and not from
the Angel of Revelation. During the 10th century, certain Ismāʿīlī
intellectuals formed a secret society called the Brethren of Purity,
which issued a philosophical encyclopaedia, The Epistles of the Brethren
of Purity, aiming at the liquidation of positive religions in favour of
a universalist spirituality.
The late Aga Khan III (1887–1957) had taken several measures to bring
his followers closer to the main body of the Muslims. The Ismāʿīlīs,
however, still have not mosques but jamāʿat khānahs (“gathering
houses”), and their mode of worship bears little resemblance to that of
the Muslims generally.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Shīʿah » Related
sects
Several other sects arose out of the general Shīʿite movement—e.g., the
Nuṣayrīs, the Yazīdīs, and the Druzes—which are sometimes considered as
independent from Islām. The Druzes arose in the 11th century out of a
cult of deification of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim.
During a 19th-century anticlerical movement in Iran, a certain ʿAlī
Moḥammad of Shīrāz appeared, declaring himself to be the Bāb (“Gate”;
i.e., to God). At that time the climate in Iran was generally favourable
to messianic ideas. He was, however, bitterly opposed by the Shīʿah
ʿulamāʾ (council of learned men) and was executed in 1850. After his
death, his two disciples, Ṣobḥ-e Azal and Bahāʾ UllāḤ, broke and went in
different directions. Bahāʾ Ullāh eventually declared his
religion—stressing a humanitarian pacificism and universalism—to be an
independent religion outside Islām. The Bahāʾī faith won a considerable
number of converts in North America during the early 20th century (see
also Druze and Bahāʾī faith).
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » The Shīʿah » The ṢūfīĨ
Islāmic mysticism, or Ṣūfism, emerged out of early ascetic reactions on
the part of certain religiously sensitive personalities against the
general worldliness that had overtaken the Muslim community and the
purely “externalist” expressions of Islām in law and theology. These
persons stressed the Muslim qualities of moral motivation, contrition
against overworldliness, and “the state of the heart” as opposed to the
legalist formulations of Islām.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » Other groups » The
Aḥmadīyah
In the latter half of the 19th century in Punjab, India, Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad claimed to be an inspired prophet. At first a defender of Islām
against Christian missionaries, he then later adopted certain doctrines
of the Indian Muslim modernist Sayyid Ahmad Khan—namely, that Jesus died
a natural death and was not assumed into heaven as the Islāmic orthodoxy
believed and that jihād “by the sword” had been abrogated and replaced
with jihād “of the pen.” His aim appears to have been to synthesize all
religions under Islām, for he declared himself to be not only the
manifestation of the Prophet Muḥammad but also the Second Advent of
Jesus, as well as Krishna for the Hindus, among other claims. He did not
announce, however, any new revelation or new law.
In 1914 a schism over succession occurred among the Aḥmadīyah. One
group that seceded from the main body, which was headed by a son of the
founder, disowned the prophetic claims of Ghulam Ahmad and established
its centre in Lahore (in modern Pakistan). The main body of the
Aḥmadīyah (known as the Qadiani, after the village of Qadian, birthplace
of the founder and the group’s first centre) evolved a separatist
organization and, after the partition of India in 1947, moved their
headquarters to Rabwah in what was then West Pakistan.
Both groups are noted for their missionary work, particularly in the
West and in Africa. Within the Muslim countries, however, there is
fierce opposition to the main group because of its claim that Ghulam
Ahmad was a prophet (most Muslim sects believe in the finality of
prophethood with Muḥammad) and because of its separatist organization.
Restrictions were imposed on the Aḥmadīyah in 1974 and again in 1984 by
the Pakistani government, which declared that the group was not Muslim
and prohibited them from engaging in various Islāmic activities.
Islāmic thought » Theology and sectarianism » Other groups » The
“Black Muslims”
After World War II an Islāmic movement arose among blacks in the United
States; members called themselves the Nation of Islam, but they were
popularly known as Black Muslims. Although they adopted some Islāmic
social practices, the group was in large part a black separatist and
social protest movement. Their leader, Elijah Muhammad, who claimed to
be an inspired prophet, interpreted the doctrine of Resurrection in an
unorthodox sense as the revival of oppressed (“dead”) peoples. The
popular leader and spokesman Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) broke
with Elijah Muhammad and adopted more orthodox Islāmic views. He was
assassinated in 1965. After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, the
group was renamed World Community of Islam in the West and officially
abandoned its separatist aims. The name was again changed in the late
1970s, to American Muslim Mission.
Fazlur Rahman
Ed.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy
The origin and inspiration of philosophy in Islām are quite different
from those of Islāmic theology. Philosophy developed out of and around
the nonreligious practical and theoretical sciences; it recognized no
theoretical limits other than those of human reason itself; and it
assumed that the truth found by unaided reason does not disagree with
the truth of Islām when both are properly understood. Islāmic philosophy
was not a handmaid of theology. The two disciplines were related,
because both followed the path of rational inquiry and distinguished
themselves from traditional religious disciplines and from mysticism,
which sought knowledge through practical, spiritual purification.
Islāmic theology was Islāmic in the strict sense: it confined itself
within the Islāmic religious community, and it remained separate from
the Christian and Jewish theologies that developed in the same cultural
context and used Arabic as a linguistic medium. No such separation is
observable in the philosophy developed in the Islāmic cultural context
and written in Arabic: Muslims, Christians, and Jews participated in it
and separated themselves according to the philosophic rather than the
religious doctrines they held.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers »
Background and scope of philosophical interest in Islām
The background of philosophic interest in Islām is found in the earlier
phases of theology. But its origin is found in the translation of Greek
philosophic works. By the middle of the 9th century, there were enough
translations of scientific and philosophic works from Greek, Pahlavi,
and Sanskrit to show those who read them with care that scientific and
philosophic inquiry was something more than a series of disputations
based on what the theologians had called sound reason. Moreover, it
became evident that there existed a tradition of observation,
calculation, and theoretical reflection that had been pursued
systematically, refined, and modified for over a millennium.
The scope of this tradition was broad: it included the study of
logic, the sciences of nature (including psychology and biology), the
mathematical sciences (including music and astronomy), metaphysics,
ethics, and politics. Each of these disciplines had a body of literature
in which its principles and problems had been investigated by classical
authors, whose positions had been, in turn, stated, discussed,
criticized, or developed by various commentators. Islāmic philosophy
emerged from its theological background when Muslim thinkers began to
study this foreign tradition, became competent students of the ancient
philosophers and scientists, criticized and developed their doctrines,
clarified their relevance for the questions raised by the theologians,
and showed what light they threw on the fundamental issues of
revelation, prophecy, and the divine law.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers »
Relation to the Muʿtazilah and interpretation of theological issues »
The teachings of al-Kindī
Although the first Muslim philosopher, al-Kindī, who flourished in the
first half of the 9th century, lived during the triumph of the
Muʿtazilah of Baghdad and was connected with the ʿAbbāsid caliphs who
championed the Muʿtazilah and patronized the Hellenistic sciences, there
is no clear evidence that he belonged to a theological school. His
writings show him to have been a diligent student of Greek and
Hellenistic authors in philosophy and point to his familiarity with
Indian arithmetic. His conscious, open, and unashamed acknowledgment of
earlier contributions to scientific inquiry was foreign to the spirit,
method, and purpose of the theologians of the time. His acquaintance
with the writings of Plato and Aristotle was still incomplete and
technically inadequate. He improved the Arabic translation of the
“Theology of Aristotle” but made only a selective and circumspect use of
it.
Devoting most of his writings to questions of natural philosophy and
mathematics, al-Kindī was particularly concerned with the relation
between corporeal things, which are changeable, in constant flux,
infinite, and as such unknowable, on the one hand, and the permanent
world of forms (spiritual or secondary substances), which are not
subject to flux yet to which man has no access except through things of
the senses. He insisted that a purely human knowledge of all things is
possible, through the use of various scientific devices, learning such
things as mathematics and logic, and assimilating the contributions of
earlier thinkers. The existence of a “supernatural” way to this
knowledge in which all these requirements can be dispensed with was
acknowledged by al-Kindī: God may choose to impart it to his prophets by
cleansing and illuminating their souls and by giving them his aid, right
guidance, and inspiration; and they, in turn, communicate it to ordinary
men in an admirably clear, concise, and comprehensible style. This is
the prophets’ “divine” knowledge, characterized by a special mode of
access and style of exposition. In principle, however, this very same
knowledge is accessible to man without divine aid, even though “human”
knowledge may lack the completeness and consummate logic of the
prophets’ divine message.
Reflection on the two kinds of knowledge—the human knowledge
bequeathed by the ancients and the revealed knowledge expressed in the
Qurʾān—led al-Kindī to pose a number of themes that became central to
Islāmic philosophy: the rational–metaphorical exegesis of the Qurʾān and
the Ḥadīth; the identification of God with the first being and the first
cause; creation as the giving of being and as a kind of causation
distinct from natural causation and Neoplatonic emanation; and the
immortality of the individual soul.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers »
Relation to the Muʿtazilah and interpretation of theological issues »
The teachings of Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī
The philosopher whose principal concerns, method, and opposition to
authority were inspired by the extreme Muʿtazilah was the physician Abū
Bakr ar-Rāzī (flourished 9th–10th centuries). He adopted the
Muʿtazilah’s atomism and was intent on developing a rationally
defensible theory of creation that would not require any change in God
or attribute to him responsibility for the imperfection and evil
prevalent in the created world. To this end, he expounded the view that
there are five eternal principles—God, Soul, prime matter, infinite, or
absolute, space, and unlimited, or absolute, time—and explained creation
as the result of the unexpected and sudden turn of events (faltah).
Faltah occurred when Soul, in her ignorance, desired matter and the good
God eased her misery by allowing her to satisfy her desire and to
experience the suffering of the material world, and then gave her reason
to make her realize her mistake and deliver her from her union with
matter, the cause of her suffering and of all evil. Ar-Rāzī claimed that
he was a Platonist, that he disagreed with Aristotle, and that his views
were those of the Ṣābians of Harran and the Brahmins (Hindu teachers).
Ismāʿīlī theologians became aware of the kinship between certain
elements of his cosmology and their own. They disputed with him during
his lifetime and continued afterward to refute his doctrines in their
writings. According to their account of his doctrines, he was totally
opposed to authority in matters of knowledge, believed in the progress
of the arts and sciences, and held that all reasonable men are equally
able to look after their own affairs, equally inspired and able to know
the truth of what earlier men had taught, and equally able to improve
upon it. Ismāʿīlī theologians were incensed, in particular, by his
wholesale rejection of prophecy, particular revelation, and divine laws.
They were likewise opposed to his criticisms of religion in general as a
device employed by evil men and a kind of tyranny over men that exploits
their innocence and credulity, perpetuates ignorance, and leads to
conflicts and wars.
Although the fragmentary character of al-Kindī’s and ar-Rāzī’s
surviving philosophic writings does not permit passing firm and
independent judgment on their accomplishments, they tend to bear out the
view of later Muslim students of philosophy that both lacked competence
in the logical foundation of philosophy, were knowledgeable in some of
the natural sciences but not in metaphysics, and were unable to narrow
the gap that separated philosophy from the new religion, Islām.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of al-Fārābī » Political philosophy and the study of religion
The first philosopher to meet this challenge was al-Fārābī (flourished
9th–10th centuries). He saw that theology and the juridical study of the
law were derivative phenomena that function within a framework set by
the prophet as lawgiver and founder of a human community. In this
community, revelation defines the opinions the members of the community
must hold and the actions they must perform if they are to attain the
earthly happiness of this world and the supreme happiness of the other
world. Philosophy could not understand this framework of religion as
long as it concerned itself almost exclusively with its truth content
and confined the study of practical science to individualistic ethics
and personal salvation.
In contrast to al-Kindī and ar-Rāzī, al-Fārābī recast philosophy in a
new framework analogous to that of the Islāmic religion. The sciences
were organized within this philosophic framework so that logic, physics,
mathematics, and metaphysics culminated in a political science whose
subject matter is the investigation of happiness and how it can be
realized in cities and nations. The central theme of this political
science is the founder of a virtuous or excellent community. Included in
this theme are views concerning the supreme rulers who follow the
founder, their qualifications, and how the community must be ordered so
that its members attain happiness as citizens rather than isolated human
beings. Once this new philosophical framework was established, it became
possible to conduct a philosophical investigation of all the elements
that constituted the Islāmic community: the prophet-lawgiver, the aims
of the divine laws, the legislation of beliefs as well as actions, the
role of the successors to the founding legislator, the grounds of the
interpretation or reform of the law, the classification of human
communities according to their doctrines in addition to their size, and
the critique of “ignorant” (pagan), “transgressing,” “falsifying,” and
“erring” communities. Philosophical cosmology, psychology, and politics
were blended by al-Fārābī into a political theology whose aim was to
clarify the foundations of the Islāmic community and defend its reform
in a direction that would promote scientific inquiry and encourage
philosophers to play an active role in practical affairs.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of al-Fārābī » Interpretation of Plato and Aristotle
Behind this public, or exoteric, aspect of al-Fārābī’s work stood a
massive body of more properly philosophic or scientific inquiries, which
established his reputation among Muslims as the greatest philosophical
authority after Aristotle, a great interpreter of the thought of Plato
and Aristotle and their commentators, and a master to whom almost all
major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers
turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome, and
intricate questions of philosophy. Continuing the tradition of the
Hellenistic masters of the Athenian and Alexandrian philosophical
schools, al-Fārābī broadened the range of philosophical inquiry and
fixed its form. He paid special attention to the study of language and
its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s
logical works, he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire
range of the scientific and nonscientific forms of argument and
established the place of logic as an indispensable prerequisite for
philosophic inquiry. His writings on natural science exposed the
foundation and assumptions of Aristotle’s physics and dealt with the
arguments of Aristotle’s opponents, both philosophers and scientists,
pagan, Christian, and Muslim.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of al-Fārābī » The analogy of religion and philosophy
Al-Fārābī’s theological and political writings showed later Muslim
philosophers the way to deal with the question of the relation between
philosophy and religion and presented them with a complex set of
problems that they continued to elaborate, modify, and develop in
different directions. Starting with the view that religion is analogous
or similar to philosophy, al-Fārābī argued that the idea of the true
prophet-lawgiver ought to be the same as that of the true
philosopher-king. Thus, he challenged both al-Kindī’s view that prophets
and philosophers have different and independent ways to the highest
truth available to man and ar-Rāzī’s view that philosophy is the only
way to that knowledge. That a man could combine the functions of
prophecy, lawgiving, philosophy, and kingship did not necessarily mean
that these functions were identical; it did mean, however, that they all
are legitimate subjects of philosophic inquiry. Philosophy must account
for the powers, knowledge, and activities of the prophet, lawgiver, and
king, which it must distinguish from and relate to those of the
philosopher. The public, or political, function of philosophy was
emphasized. Unlike Neoplatonism, which had for long limited itself to
the Platonic teaching that the function of philosophy is to liberate the
soul from the shadowy existence of the cave—in which knowledge can only
be imperfectly comprehended as shadows reflecting the light of the truth
beyond the cave (the world of senses)—al-Fārābī insisted with Plato that
the philosopher must be forced to return to the cave, learn to talk to
its inhabitants in a manner they can comprehend, and engage in actions
that may improve their lot.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of al-Fārābī » Impact on Ismāʿīlī theology
Although it is not always easy to know the immediate practical
intentions of a philosopher, it must be remembered that in al-Fārābī’s
lifetime the fate of the Islāmic world was in the balance. The Sunnī
caliphate’s power hardly extended beyond Baghdad, and it appeared quite
likely that the various Shīʿī sects, especially the Ismāʿīlīs, would
finally overpower it and establish a new political order. Of all the
movements in Islāmic theology, Ismāʿīlī theology was the one that was
most clearly and massively penetrated by philosophy. Yet, its
Neoplatonic cosmology, revolutionary background, antinomianism
(antilegalism), and general expectation that divine laws were about to
become superfluous with the appearance of the qāʾim (the imam of the
“resurrection”) all militated against the development of a coherent
political theory to meet the practical demands of political life and
present a viable practical alternative to the Sunnī caliphate.
Al-Fāİābī’s theologico-political writings helped point out this basic
defect of Ismāʿīlī theology. Under the Fāṭimids in Egypt (969–1171),
Ismāʿīlī theology modified its cosmology in the direction suggested by
al-Fārābī, returned to the view that the community must continue to live
under the divine law, and postponed the prospect of the abolition of
divine laws and the appearance of the qāʾim to an indefinite point in
the future.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of Avicenna » The “Oriental Philosophy”
Even more indicative of al-Fārābī’s success is the fact that his
writings helped produce a philosopher of the stature of Avicenna
(flourished 10th–11th centuries), whose versatility, imagination,
inventiveness, and prudence shaped philosophy into a powerful force that
gradually penetrated Islāmic theology and mysticism and Persian poetry
in eastern Islām and gave them universality and theoretical depth. His
own personal philosophic views, he said, were those of the ancient sages
of Greece (including the genuine views of Plato and Aristotle), which he
had set forth in the “Oriental Philosophy,” a book that has not survived
and probably was not written or meant to be written. They were not
identical with the common Peripatetic (Aristotelian) doctrines and were
to be distinguished from the learning of his contemporaries, the
Christian “Aristotelians” of Baghdad, which he attacked as vulgar,
distorted, and falsified. His most voluminous writing, Kitāb ash-shifāʾ
(“The Book of Healing”), was meant to accommodate the doctrines of other
philosophers as well as hint at his own personal views, which are
elaborated elsewhere in more imaginative and allegorical forms.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of Avicenna » Distinction between essence and existence and
the doctrine of creation
Avicenna had learned from certain hints in al-Fārābī that the exoteric
teachings of Plato regarding “forms,” “creation,” and the immortality of
individual souls were closer to revealed doctrines than the genuine
views of Aristotle, that the doctrines of Plotinus and later Neoplatonic
commentators were useful in harmonizing Aristotle’s views with revealed
doctrines, and that philosophy must accommodate itself to the divine law
on the issue of creation and of reward and punishment in the hereafter,
which presupposes some form of individual immortality. Following
al-Fārābī’s lead, Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the
question of being, in which he distinguished between essence and
existence. He argued that the fact of existence cannot be inferred from
or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and
matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the
universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence
must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts,
gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an
existing thing and coexist with its effect. The universe consists of a
chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and
responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an
actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole
must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence
is its very existence, and therefore is self-sufficient and not in need
of something else to give it existence. Because its existence is not
contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and
eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating
cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of
contingent existing things.
All creation is necessarily and eternally dependent upon God. It
consists of the intelligences, souls, and bodies of the heavenly
spheres, each of which is eternal, and the sublunary sphere, which is
also eternal, undergoing a perpetual process of generation and
corruption, of the succession of form over matter, very much in the
manner described by Aristotle.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of Avicenna » The immortality of individual souls
There is, however, a significant exception to this general rule: the
human rational soul. Man can affirm the existence of his soul from
direct consciousness of his self (what he means when he says “I”); and
he can imagine this happening even in the absence of external objects
and bodily organs. This proves, according to Avicenna, that the soul is
indivisible, immaterial, and incorruptible substance, not imprinted in
matter, but created with the body, which it uses as an instrument.
Unlike other immaterial substances (the intelligences and souls of the
spheres), it is not pre-eternal but is generated, or made to exist, at
the same time as the individual body, which can receive it, is formed.
The composition, shape, and disposition of its body and the soul’s
success or failure in managing and controlling it, the formation of
moral habits, and the acquisition of knowledge all contribute to its
individuality and difference from other souls. Though the body is not
resurrected after its corruption, the soul survives and retains all the
individual characteristics, perfections or imperfections, that it
achieved in its earthly existence and in this sense is rewarded or
punished for its past deeds. Avicenna’s claim that he has presented a
philosophic proof for the immortality of generated (“created”)
individual souls no doubt constitutes the high point of his effort to
harmonize philosophy and religious beliefs.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Eastern philosophers » The
teachings of Avicenna » Philosophy, religion, and mysticism
Having accounted for the more difficult issues of creation and the
immortality of individual souls, Avicenna proceeded to explain the
faculty of prophetic knowledge (the “sacred” intellect), revelation
(imaginative representation meant to convince the multitude and improve
their earthly life), miracles, and the legal and institutional
arrangements (acts of worship and the regulation of personal and public
life) through which the divine law achieves its end. Avicenna’s
explanation of almost every aspect of Islām is pursued on the basis of
extensive exegesis of the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth. The primary function of
religion is to assure the happiness of the many. This practical aim of
religion (which Avicenna saw in the perspective of Aristotle’s practical
science) enabled him to appreciate the political and moral functions of
divine revelation and account for its form and content. Revealed
religion, however, has a subsidiary function also—that of indicating to
the few the need to pursue the kind of life and knowledge appropriate to
rare individuals endowed with special gifts. These men must be dominated
by the love of God to facilitate the achievement of the highest
knowledge. In many places Avicenna appears to identify these men with
the mystics. The identification of the philosopher as a kind of mystic
conveyed a new image of the philosopher as a member of the religious
community who is distinguished from his coreligionists by his
otherworldliness, dedicated to the inner truth of religion, and consumed
by the love of God.
Avicenna’s allegorical and mystical writings are usually called
“esoteric” in the sense that they contain his personal views cast in an
imaginative, symbolic form. The esoteric works must, then, be
interpreted. Their interpretation must move away from the explicit
doctrines contained in “exoteric” works such as the Shifāʾ and recover
“the unmixed and uncorrupted truth” set forth in the “Oriental
Philosophy.” The “Oriental Philosophy,” however, has never been
available to anyone, and it is doubtful that it was written at all. This
dilemma has made interpretation both difficult and rewarding for Muslim
philosophers and modern scholars alike.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers »
Background and characteristics of the Western Muslim philosophical
tradition
Andalusia (in Spain) and western North Africa contributed little of
substance to Islāmic theology and philosophy until the 12th century.
Legal strictures against the study of philosophy were more effective
than in the east. Scientific interest was channelled into medicine,
pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, and logic. More general questions
of physics and metaphysics were treated sparingly and in symbols, hints,
and allegories. By the 12th century, however, the writings of al-Fārābī,
Avicenna, and al-Ghazālī had found their way to the west. A
philosophical tradition emerged, based primarily on the study of
al-Fārābī. It was critical of Avicenna’s philosophic innovations and not
convinced that al-Ghazālī’s critique of Avicenna touched philosophy as
such, and it refused to acknowledge the position assigned by both to
mysticism. The survival of philosophy in the west required extreme
prudence, emphasis on its scientific character, abstention from meddling
in political or religious matters, and abandonment of the hope of
effecting extensive doctrinal or institutional reform.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Ibn Bājjah » Theoretical science and intuitive knowledge
Ibn Bājjah (died 1138) initiated this tradition with a radical
interpretation of al-Fārābī’s political philosophy that emphasized the
virtues of the perfect but nonexistent city and the vices prevalent in
all existing cities. He concluded that the philosopher must order his
own life as a solitary individual, shun the company of nonphilosophers,
reject their opinions and ways of life, and concentrate on reaching his
own final goal by pursuing the theoretical sciences and achieving
intuitive knowledge through contact with the Active Intelligence. The
multitude live in a dark cave and see only dim shadows. Their ways of
life and their imaginings and beliefs consist of layers of darkness that
cannot be known through reason alone. Therefore, the divine law has been
revealed to enable man to know this dark region. The philosopher’s duty
is to seek the light of the sun (the intellect). To do so, he must leave
the cave, see all colours as they truly are and see light itself, and
finally become transformed into that light. The end, then, is contact
with Intelligence, not with something that transcends Intelligence (as
in Plotinus, Ismāʿīlism, and mysticism), a doctrine criticized by Ibn
Bājjah as the way of imagination, motivated by desire, and aiming at
pleasure. Philosophy, he claimed, is the only way to the truly blessed
state, which can be achieved only by going through theoretical science,
even though it is higher than theoretical science.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Ibn Bājjah » Unconcern of philosophy with reform
Ibn Bājjah’s cryptic style and the unfinished form in which he left most
of his writings tend to highlight his departures from al-Fārābī and
Avicenna. Unlike al-Fārābī, he is silent about the philosopher’s duty to
return to the cave and partake of the life of the city. He appears to
argue that the aim of philosophy is attainable independently from the
philosopher’s concern with the best city and is to be achieved in
solitude or, at most, in comradeship with philosophic souls. Unlike
Avicenna, who prepared the way for him by clearly distinguishing between
theoretical and practical science, Ibn Bājjah is concerned with
practical science only insofar as it is relevant to the life of the
philosopher. He is contemptuous of allegories and imaginative
representations of philosophic knowledge, silent about theology, and
shows no concern with improving the multitude’s opinions and way of
life.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Ibn Ṭufayl » The philosopher as a solitary individual
In his philosophic story Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive Son of Awake”), the
philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl (died 1185) fills gaps in the work of his
predecessor Ibn Bājjah. The story communicates the secrets of Avicenna’s
“Oriental Philosophy” as experienced by a solitary hero, who grows up on
a deserted island, learns about the things around him, acquires
knowledge of the natural universe (including the heavenly bodies), and
achieves the state of “annihilation” (fanāʾ) of the self in the divine
reality. This is the apparent and traditional secret of the “Oriental
Philosophy.” But the hero’s wisdom is still incomplete, for he knows
nothing about other human beings, their way of life, or their laws. When
he chances to meet one of them—a member of a religious community
inhabiting a neighbouring island, who is inclined to reflect on the
divine law and seek its inner, spiritual meanings and who has abandoned
the society of his fellow men to devote himself to solitary meditation
and worship—he does not at first recognize that he is a human being like
himself, cannot communicate with him, and frightens him by his wild
aspect. After learning about the doctrines and acts of worship of the
religious community, he understands them as alluding to and agreeing
with the truth that he had learned by his own unaided effort, and he
goes as far as admitting the validity of the religion and the
truthfulness of the prophet who gave it. He cannot understand, however,
why the prophet communicated the truth by way of allusions, examples,
and corporeal representations or why religion permits men to devote much
time and effort to practical, worldly things.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Ibn Ṭufayl » Concern for reform
His ignorance of the nature of most men and his compassion for them make
the solitary hero insist on becoming their saviour. He persuades his
companion to take him to his coreligionists and help him convert them to
the naked truth by propagating among them “the secrets of wisdom.” His
education is completed when he fails in his endeavour. He learns the
limits beyond which the multitude cannot ascend without becoming
confused and unhappy. He also learns the wisdom of the divine lawgiver
in addressing them in the way they can understand, enabling them to
achieve limited ends through doctrines and actions suited to their
abilities. The story ends with the hero taking leave of these people
after apologizing to them for what he did and confessing that he is now
fully convinced that they should not change their ways but remain
attached to the literal sense of the divine law and obey its demands. He
returns to his own island to continue his former solitary existence.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Ibn Ṭufayl » The hidden secret of Avicenna’s “Oriental
Philosophy”
The hidden secret of Avicenna’s “Oriental Philosophy” appears, then, to
be that the philosopher must return to the cave, educate himself in the
ways of nonphilosophers, and understand the incompatibility between
philosophical life and the life of the multitude, which must be governed
by religion and divine laws. Otherwise, his ignorance will lead him to
actions dangerous to the well-being of both the community and
philosophy. Because Ibn Ṭufayl’s hero had grown up as a solitary human
being, he lacks the kind of wisdom that could have enabled him to pursue
philosophy in a religious community and be useful to such a community.
Neither the conversion of the community to philosophy nor the
philosopher’s solitary life is a viable alternative.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Averroës » Philosophy
To Ibn Ṭufayl’s younger friend Averroës (Ibn Rushd, flourished 12th
century) belongs the distinction of presenting a solution to the problem
of the relation between philosophy and the Islāmic community in the
west, a solution meant to be legally valid, theologically sound, and
philosophically satisfactory. Here was a philosopher fully at home in
what Ibn Bājjah had called the many layers of darkness. His legal
training (he was a judge by profession) and his extensive knowledge of
the history of the religious sciences (including theology) enabled him
to speak with authority about the principles of Islāmic law and their
application to theological and philosophic issues and to question the
authority of al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarīs to determine correct beliefs
and right practices. He was able to examine in detail from the point of
view of the divine law the respective claims of theology and philosophy
to possess the best and surest way to human knowledge, to be competent
to interpret the ambiguous expressions of the divine law, and to have
presented convincing arguments that are theoretically tenable and
practically salutary.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Averroës » The divine law
The intention of the divine law, he argued, is to assure the happiness
of all members of the community. This requires everyone to profess
belief in the basic principles of religion as enunciated in the Qurʾān,
the Ḥādith, and the ijmāʿ (consensus) of the learned and to perform all
obligatory acts of worship. Beyond this, the only just requirement is to
demand that each pursue knowledge as far as his natural capacity and
makeup permit. The few who are endowed with the capacity for the
highest, demonstrative knowledge are under a divine legal obligation to
pursue the highest wisdom, which is philosophy, and they need not
constantly adjust its certain conclusions to what theologians claim to
be the correct interpretation of the divine law. Being dialecticians and
rhetoricians, theologians are not in a position to determine what is and
is not correct interpretation of the divine law so far as philosophers
are concerned. The divine law directly authorizes philosophers to pursue
its interpretation according to the best—i.e., demonstrative or
scientific—method, and theologians have no authority to interfere with
the conduct of this activity or judge its conclusions.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic philosophy » The Western philosophers » The
teachings of Averroës » Theology
On the basis of this legal doctrine, Averroës judged the theologian
al-Ghazālī’s refutation of the philosophers ineffective and
inappropriate because al-Ghazālī did not understand and even
misrepresented the philosophers’ positions and used arguments that only
demonstrate his incompetence in the art of demonstration. He criticized
al-Fārābī and Avicenna also for accommodating the theologians of their
time and for departing from the path of the ancient philosophers merely
to please the theologians. At the other extreme are the multitude for
whom there are no more convincing arguments than those found in the
divine law itself. Neither philosophers nor theologians are permitted to
disclose to the multitude interpretations of the ambiguous verses of the
Qurʾān or to confuse them with their own doubts or arguments. Finally,
there are those who belong to neither the philosophers nor the
multitude, either because they are naturally superior to the multitude
but not endowed with the gift for philosophy or else are students in
initial stages of philosophic training. For this intermediate group
theology is necessary. It is an intermediate discipline that is neither
strictly legal nor philosophic. It lacks their certain principles and
sure methods. Therefore, theology must remain under the constant control
of philosophy and the supervision of the divine law so as not to drift
into taking positions that cannot be demonstrated philosophically or
that are contrary to the intention of the divine law. Averroës himself
composed a work on theology to show how these requirements can be met:
Kitāb al-kashf ʿan manāhij al-adillah (“Exposition of the Methods of
Proofs”). In the Latin West he was best known for his philosophical
answer to al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut at-tahāfut (“Incoherence of the
Incoherence”), and for his extensive commentaries on Aristotle, works
that left their impact on medieval and renaissance European thought.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and mysticism
» Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom » Philosophy
The western tradition in Islāmic philosophy formed part of the Arabic
philosophic literature that was translated into Hebrew and Latin and
that played a significant role in the development of medieval philosophy
in the Latin West and the emergence of modern European philosophy. Its
impact on the development of philosophy in eastern Islām was not as
dramatic, but was important nevertheless. Students of this
tradition—e.g., the prominent Jewish philosopher Maimonides (flourished
12th century) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (flourished 14th
century)—moved to Egypt, where they taught and had numerous disciples.
Most of the writings of Ibn Bājjah, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Averroës found their
way to the east also, where they were studied alongside the writings of
their eastern predecessors. In both regions thinkers who held to the
idea of philosophy as formulated by the eastern and western philosophers
thus far discussed continued to teach. They became isolated and
overwhelmed, however, by the resurgence of traditionalism and the
emergence of a new kind of philosophy whose champions looked on the
earlier masters as men who had made significant contributions to the
progress of knowledge but whose overall view was defective and had now
become outdated.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom »
Traditionalism and the new wisdom
Resurgent traditionalism found effective defenders in men such as Ibn
Taymīyah (13th–14th centuries) who employed a massive battery of
philosophic, theological, and legal arguments against every shade of
innovation and called for a return to the beliefs and practices of the
pious ancestors. These attacks, however, did not deal a decisive blow to
philosophy as such. It rather drove philosophy underground for a period,
only to re-emerge in a new garb. A more important reason for the decline
of the earlier philosophic tradition, however, was the renewed vitality
and success of the program formulated by al-Ghazālī for the integration
of theology, philosophy, and mysticism into a new kind of philosophy
called wisdom (ḥikmah). It consisted of a critical review of the
philosophy of Avicenna, preserving its main external features (its
logical, physical, and, in part, metaphysical structure, and its
terminology) and introducing principles of explanation for the universe
and its relation to God based on personal experience and direct vision.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom »
Characteristic features of the new wisdom
If the popular theology preached by the philosophers from al-Fārābī to
Averroës is disregarded, it is evident that philosophy proper meant to
them what al-Fārābī called a state of mind dedicated to the quest and
the love for the highest wisdom. None of them claimed, however, that he
had achieved this highest wisdom. In contrast, every leading exponent of
the new wisdom stated that he had achieved or received it through a
private illumination, dream (at times inspired by the Prophet), or
vision and on this basis proceeded to give an explanation of the inner
structure of natural and divine things. In every case, this explanation
incorporated Platonic or Aristotelian elements but was more akin to some
version of a later Hellenistic philosophy, which had found its way
earlier into one or another of the schools of Islāmic theology, though,
because of the absence of an adequate philosophic education on the part
of earlier theologians, it had not been either elaborated or integrated
into a comprehensive view. Like their late-Hellenistic counterparts,
exponents of the new wisdom proceeded through an examination of the
positions of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. They also gave special
attention to the insights of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient
Greece and the myths and revelations of the ancient Near East, and they
offered to resolve the fundamental questions that had puzzled earlier
philosophers. In its basic movement and general direction, therefore,
Islāmic philosophy between the 9th and the 19th centuries followed a
course parallel to that of Greek philosophy from the 5th century bc to
the 6th century ad.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom » Critiques
of Aristotle in Islāmic theology
The critique of Aristotle that had begun in Muʿtazilī circles and had
found a prominent champion in Abū Bakr ar-Rāzī was provided with a more
solid foundation in the 10th and 11th centuries by the Christian
theologians and philosophers of Baghdad, who translated the writings of
the Hellenistic critics of Aristotle (e.g., John Philoponus) and made
use of their arguments in commenting on Aristotle and in independent
theological and philosophic works. Avicenna’s attack on these so-called
Aristotelians and their Hellenistic predecessors (an attack that had
been initiated by al-Fārābī and was to be continued by Averroës) did not
prevent the spread of their theologically based anti-Aristotelianism
among Jewish and Muslim students of philosophy in the 12th century, such
as Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (died c. 1175) and Fakhr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī.
These theologians continued and intensified al-Ghazālī’s attacks on
Avicenna and Aristotle (especially their views on time, movement,
matter, and form, the nature of the heavenly bodies, and the relation
between the intelligible and sensible worlds). They suggested that a
thorough examination of Aristotle had revealed to them, on philosophic
grounds, that the fundamental disagreements between him and the
theologies based on the revealed religions represented open options and
that Aristotle’s view of the universe was in need of explanatory
principles that could very well be supplied by theology. This critique
provided the framework for the integration of philosophy into theology
from the 13th century onward.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Philosophy, traditionalism, and the new wisdom » Synthesis
of philosophy and mysticism
Although it made use of such theological criticisms of philosophy, the
new wisdom took the position that theology did not offer a positive
substitute for and was incapable of solving the difficulties of
“Aristotelian” philosophy. It did not question the need to have recourse
to the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth to find the right answers. It insisted (on
the authority of a long-standing mystical tradition), however, that
theology concerns itself only with the external expressions of this
divine source of knowledge. The inner core was reserved for the adepts
of the mystic path whose journey leads to the experience of the highest
reality in dreams and visions. Only the mystical adepts are in
possession of the one true wisdom, the ground of both the external
expressions of the divine law and the phenomenal world of human
experience and thought.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and mysticism
» Primary teachers of the new wisdom » The teachings of as-Suhrawardī
The first master of the new wisdom, as-Suhrawardī (12th century), called
it the “Wisdom of Illumination.” He rejected Avicenna’s distinction
between essence and existence and Aristotle’s distinction between
substance and accidents, possibility and actuality, and matter and form,
on the ground that they are mere distinctions of reason. Instead, he
concentrated on the notion of being and its negation, which he called
“light” and “darkness,” and explained the gradation of beings as
gradation of their mixture according to the degree of “strength,” or
“perfection,” of their light. This gradation forms a single continuum
that culminates in pure light, self-luminosity, self-awareness,
self-manifestation, or self-knowledge, which is God, the light of
lights, the true One. The stability and eternity of this single
continuum result from every higher light overpowering and subjugating
the lower, and movement and change in it result from each of the lower
lights desiring and loving the higher.
As-Suhrawardī’s “pan-lightism” is not particularly close to
traditional Islāmic views concerning the creation of the world and God’s
knowledge of particulars. The structure of his universe remains largely
that of the Platonists and the Aristotelians. And his account of the
emanation process avoids the many difficulties that had puzzled
Neoplatonists as they tried to understand how the second hypostasis
(reality) proceeds from the One. He asserted that it proceeds without in
any way affecting the One and that the One’s self-sufficiency is enough
to explain the giving out that seems to be both spontaneous and
necessary. His doctrine is presented in a way that suggests that it is
the inner truth behind the exoteric (external) teachings of Islām as
well as Zoroastrianism, indeed the wisdom of all ancient sages,
especially Iranians and Greeks, and the revealed religions as well. This
neutral yet positive attitude toward the diversity of religions, which
was not absent among Muslim philosophers and mystics, was to become one
of the hallmarks of the new wisdom. Different religions were seen as
different manifestations of the same truth, their essential agreement
was emphasized, and various attempts were made to combine them into a
single harmonious religion meant for all of mankind.
As-Suhrawardī takes an important step in this direction through his
doctrine of imaginative-bodily “resurrection.” After their departure
from the prison of the body, souls that are fully purified ascend
directly to the world of separate lights. The ones that are only
partially purified or are evil souls escape to a “world of images”
suspended below the higher lights and above the corporeal world. In this
world of images, or forms (not to be confused with the Platonic forms,
which as-Suhrawardī identifies with higher and permanent intelligible
lights), partially purified souls remain suspended and are able to
create for themselves and by their own power of imagination pleasing
figures and desirable objects in forms more excellent than their earthly
counterparts and are able to enjoy them forever. Evil souls become dark
shadows, suffer (presumably because their corrupt and inefficient power
of imagination can create only ugly and frightening forms), and wander
about as ghosts, demons, and devils. The creative power of the
imagination, which as a human psychological phenomenon was already used
by the philosophers to explain prophetic powers, was seized upon by the
new wisdom as “divine magic.” It was used to construct an eschatology,
to explain miracles, dreams, and other saintly theurgic (healing)
practices, to facilitate the movement between various orders of being,
and for literary purposes.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Primary teachers of the new wisdom » The teachings of Ibn
al-ʿArabī
The account of the doctrines of Ibn al-ʿArabī (12th–13th centuries)
belongs properly to the history of Islāmic mysticism. Yet his impact on
the subsequent development of the new wisdom was in many ways far
greater than was that of as-Suhrawardī. This is true especially of his
central doctrine of the “unity of being” and his sharp distinction
between the absolute One, which is undefinable Truth (ḥaqq), and his
self-manifestation (ẓuhūİ), or creation (khalq), which is ever new
(jadīd) and in perpetual movement, a movement that unites the whole of
creation in a process of constant renewal. At the very core of this
dynamic edifice stands nature, the “dark cloud” (ʿamāʾ) or “mist”
(bukhār), as the ultimate principle of things and forms: intelligence,
heavenly bodies, and elements and their mixtures that culminate in the
“perfect man.” This primordial nature is the “breath” of the Merciful
God in his aspect as Lord. It “flows” throughout the universe and
manifests Truth in all its parts. It is the first mother through which
Truth manifests itself to itself and generates the universe. And it is
the universal natural body that gives birth to the translucent bodies of
the spheres, to the elements, and to their mixtures, all of which are
related to that primary source as daughters to their mother.
Ibn al-ʿArabī attempted to explain how Intelligence proceeds from the
absolute One by inserting between them a primordial feminine principle,
which is all things in potentiality but which also possesses the
capacity, readiness, and desire to manifest or generate them first as
archetypes in Intelligence and then as actually existing things in the
universe below. Ibn al-ʿArabī gave this principle numerous names,
including prime “matter” (ʿunṣur), and characterized it as the principle
“whose existence makes manifest the essences of the potential worlds.”
The doctrine that the first simple originated thing is not Intelligence
but “indefinite matter” and that Intelligence was originated through the
mediation of this matter was attributed to Empedocles, a 5th-century-bc
Greek philosopher, in doxographies (compilations of extracts from the
Greek philosophers) translated into Arabic. It represented an attempt to
bridge the gulf between the absolute One and the multiplicity of forms
in Intelligence. The Andalusian mystic Ibn Masarrah (9th–10th centuries)
is reported to have championed pseudo-Empedoclean doctrines, and Ibn
al-ʿArabī (who studied under some of his followers) quotes Ibn Masarrah
on a number of occasions. This philosophic tradition is distinct from
the one followed by the Ismāʿīlī theologians, who explained the
origination of Intelligence by the mediation of God’s will.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Primary teachers of the new wisdom » The teachings of
Twelver Shīʿism and the school of Eṣfahān
After Ibn al-ʿArabī, the new wisdom developed rapidly in intellectual
circles in eastern Islām. Commentators on the works of Avicenna,
as-Suhrawardī, and Ibn al-ʿArabī began the process of harmonizing and
integrating the views of the masters. Great poets made them part of
every educated man’s literary culture. Mystical fraternities became the
custodians of such works, spreading them into Central Asia and the
Indian subcontinent and transmitting them from one generation to
another. Following the Mongol khan Hülagü’s entry into Baghdad (1258),
the Twelver Shīʿah were encouraged by the Il Khanid Tatars and Naṣīr
ad-Dīn aṭ-Ṭūsī (the philosopher and theologian who accompanied Hülagü as
his vizier) to abandon their hostility to mysticism. Muʿtazilī doctrines
were retained in their theology. Theology, however, was downgraded to
“formal” learning that must be supplemented by higher things, the latter
including philosophy and mysticism, both of earlier Shīʿī (including
Ismāʿīlī) origin and of later Sunnī provenance. Al-Ghazālī,
as-Suhrawardī, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and Avicenna were then eagerly studied and
(except for their doctrine of the imamate) embraced with little or no
reservation. This movement in Shīʿī thought gathered momentum when the
leaders of a mystical fraternity established themselves as the Ṣafavid
dynasty (1501–1732) in Iran, where they championed Twelver Shīʿism as
the official doctrine of the new monarchy. During the 17th century, Iran
experienced a cultural and scientific renaissance that included a
revival of philosophic studies. There, Islāmic philosophy found its last
creative exponents. The new wisdom as expounded by the masters of the
school of Eṣfahān radiated throughout eastern Islām and continued as a
vital tradition until modern times.
The major figures of the school of Eṣfahān were Mīr Dāmād (Muḥammad
Bāqir ibn ad-Dāmād, died 1631/32) and his great disciple Mullā Ṣadrā
(Ṣadr ad-Dīn ash-Shīrāzī, c. 1571–1640). Both were men of wide culture
and prolific writers with a sharp sense for the history and development
of philosophic ideas.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Primary teachers of the new wisdom » The teachings of
Twelver Shīʿism and the school of Eṣfahān » The teachings of Mīr Dāmāẖ
Mīr Dāmād was the first to expound the notion of “eternal origination”
(ḥudūth dahrī) as an explanation for the creation of the world. Muslim
philosophers and their critics had recognized the crucial role played by
the question of time in the discussion of the eternity of the world. The
proposition that time is the measure of movement was criticized by Abū
al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, who argued that time is prior to movement and
rest, indeed to everything except being. Time is the measure or
concomitant of being, lasting and transient, enduring and in movement or
rest. It characterizes or qualifies all being, including God. God works
in time, incessantly willing and directly creating everything in the
world: his persistent will creates the eternal beings of the world, and
his ever-renewed will creates the transient beings. The notion of a God
who works in time was of course objectionable to theology, and Fakhr
ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī refused to accept this solution despite its attractions.
Ar-Rāzī also saw that it leads to the notion (attributed to Plato) that
time is a self-subsistent substance, whose relation to God would further
compromise his unity. Finally, ar-Rāzī explained that this
self-subsistent substance will have to be related to different beings in
different ways. It is called “everlastingness” (sarmad) when related to
God and the Intelligences (angels) that are permanent and do not move or
change in any way, “eternity” (dahr) when related to the totality of the
world of movement and change, and “time” (zamān) when related to
corporeal beings that make up the world of movement and change.
Mīr Dāmād returned to Avicenna and sought to harmonize his views with
those of as-Suhrawardī on the assumption that what Avicenna meant by his
“Oriental” (mashriqīyah) philosophy was identical with as-Suhrawardī’s
wisdom of “illumination” (ishrāĪ), which he interpreted as a Platonic
doctrine that asserted the priority of essence (form) over being
(existence). Time, for Mīr Dāmād, was neither a mere being of reason nor
an accident of existing things. It belongs to the essence of things and
describes their mode and rank of being. It is a “relation” that beings
have to each other because of their essential nature. There must,
therefore, be three ranks of order of time corresponding to the three
ranks of order of being. Considered as the relation of God to the divine
names and attributes (Intelligences or archetypes), the relation is
“everlastingness.” Considered as the relation between the Intelligences,
or archetypes, and their reflections in the mutable things of the world
below, the relation is “eternity.” And considered as the relation
between these mutable things, the relation is “time.” Creation, or
origination, is this very relation. Thus, the origination of the
immutable Intelligences, or archetypes, is called “everlasting
creation,” the origination of the world of mutable beings as a whole is
called “eternal creation,” and the generation of mutable things within
the world is called “temporal creation.”
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism » Primary teachers of the new wisdom » The teachings of
Twelver Shīʿism and the school of Eṣfahān » The teachings of Mullā Ṣadrā
Mullā Ṣadrā superimposed Ibn al-ʿArabī’s mystical thought (whose
philosophic implications had already been exposed by a number of
commentators) on the “Aristotelian”–Illuminationist synthesis developed
by Mīr Dāmāad. Against his master, he argued with the Aristotelians for
the priority of being (existence) over essence (form), which he called
an abstraction; and, with Ibn al-ʿArabī, he argued for the “unity of
being” within which beings differ only according to “priority and
posteriority,” “perfection and imperfection,” and “strength and
weakness.” All being is thus viewed as a graded manifestation, or
determination, of absolute, or pure, Being, and every level of being
possesses all the attributes of pure Being, but with varying degrees of
intensity or perfection.
Mullā Ṣadrā considered his unique contribution to Islāmic philosophy
to be his doctrine of nature, which enabled him to assert that
everything other than God and his knowledge—i.e., the entire corporeal
world, including the heavenly bodies—is originated “eternally” as well
as “temporally.” This doctrine of nature is an elaboration of the last
manifestation of Ibn al-ʿArabī’Ĩ “nature” or prime “matter,” articulated
on philosophic grounds and within the general framework of Aristotelian
natural science and defended against every possible philosophic and
theological objection.
Nature for Mullā Ṣadrā is the “substance” and “power” of all
corporeal beings and the direct cause of their movement. Movement (and
time, which measures it) is therefore not an accident of substance or an
accompaniment of some of its accidents. It signifies the very change,
renewal, and passing of being—itself being in constant “flow,” or flux.
The entire corporeal world, both the celestial spheres and the world of
the elements, constantly renews itself. The “matter” of corporeal things
has the power to become a new form at every instant; and the resulting
matter–form complex is at every instant a new matter ready for,
desiring, and moving toward another form. Men fail to observe this
constant flux and movement in simple bodies not because of the endurance
of the same form in them but because of the close similarity between
their ever-new forms. What the philosophers call “movement” and “time”
are not, as they believed, anchored in anything permanent—e.g., in what
they call “nature,” “substance,” or “essence”; essence is permanent only
in the mind, and nature and substance are permanent activity. Nature as
permanent activity is the very being of natural things and identical
with their substance. Because nature is “permanent” in this sense, it is
connected to a permanent principle that manifests activity in it
permanently. Because nature constantly renews itself, all renewed and
emergent things are connected to it. Thus, nature is the link between
what is eternal and what is originated, and the world of nature is
originated both eternally and temporarily.
Mullā Ṣadrā distinguishes this primary “movement-in-substance”
(al-ḥarakah fī al-jawhar) from haphazard, compulsory, and other
accidental movements that lack proper direction, impede the natural
movement of substance, or reverse it. Movement-in-substance is not
universal change or flux without direction, the product of conflict
between two equally powerful principles, or a reflection of the nonbeing
of the world of nature when measured against the world of permanent
forms. It is, rather, the natural beings’ innate desire to become more
perfect, which directs this ceaseless self-renewal, self-origination, or
self-emergence into a perpetual and irreversible flow upward in the
scale of being—from the simplest elements to the human body–soul complex
and the heavenly body–soul complex (both of which participate in the
general instability, origination, and passing of being that
characterizes the entire corporeal world). This flow upward, however, is
by no means the end. For the indefinite “matter” (Ibn al-ʿArabī’s
“cloud” and the mystics’ “created Truth”) is the “substratum” of
everything other than its Creator, the mysterious pure Truth. It
“extends” beyond the body–soul complex to the Intelligences (divine
names) that are Being’s first, highest, and purest actualization or
activity. This “extension” unites everything other than the Creator into
a single continuum. The human body–soul complex and the heavenly
body–soul complex are not moved externally by the Intelligences. Their
movement is an extension of the process of self-perfection. Having
reached the highest rank of order of substance in the corporeal world,
they are now prepared, and still moved by their innate desire, to flow
upward and transform themselves into pure intelligence.
Islāmic thought » The new wisdom: synthesis of philosophy and mysticism
» Impact of modernism
The new wisdom lived on during the 18th and 19th centuries, conserving
much of its vitality and strength but not cultivating new ground. It
attracted able thinkers such as Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi and Hādī
Sabzevārī and became a regular part of the program of higher education
in the cultural centres of the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Indian
subcontinent, a status never achieved by the earlier tradition of
Islāmic philosophy. In collaboration with its close ally Persian
mystical poetry, the new wisdom determined the intellectual outlook and
spiritual mood of educated Muslims in the regions where Persian had
become the dominant literary language.
The wholesale rejection of the new wisdom in the name of simple,
robust, and more practical piety (which had been initiated by Ibn
Taymīyah and which continued to find exponents among jurists) made
little impression on its devotees. To be taken seriously, reform had to
come from their own ranks and be espoused by such thinkers as the
eminent theologian and mystic of Muslim India Aḥmad Sirhindī (flourished
16th–17th centuries)—a reformer who spoke their language and attacked
Ibn al-ʿArabī’s “unity of being” only to defend an older, presumably
more orthodox form of mysticism. Despite some impact, however, attempts
of this kind remained isolated and were either ignored or reintegrated
into the mainstream, until the coming of the modern reformers. The 19th-
and 20th-century reformers Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, and
Muḥammad Iqbāl were initially educated in this tradition, but they
rebelled against it and advocated radical reforms.
The modernists attacked the new wisdom at its weakest point; that is,
its social and political norms, its individualistic ethics, and its
inability to speak intelligently about social, cultural, and political
problems generated by a long period of intellectual isolation that was
further complicated by the domination of the European powers. Unlike the
earlier tradition of Islāmic philosophy from al-Fārābī to Averroës,
which had consciously cultivated political science and investigated the
political dimension of philosophy and religion and the relation between
philosophy and the community at large, the new wisdom from its inception
lacked genuine interest in these questions, had no appreciation for
political philosophy, and had only a benign toleration for the affairs
of the world.
None of the reformers was a great political philosopher. They were
concerned with reviving their nations’ latent energies, urging them to
free themselves from foreign domination, and impressing on them the need
to reform their social and educational institutions. They also saw that
all this required a total reorientation, which could not take place so
long as the new wisdom remained not only the highest aim of a few
solitary individuals but also a social and popular ideal as well. Yet,
as late as 1917, Iqbāl found that “the present-day Muslim prefers to
roam about aimlessly in the valley of Hellenic-Persian mysticism, which
teaches us to shut our eyes to the hard reality around, and to fix our
gaze on what is described as ‘illumination.’ ” His reaction was harsh:
“To me this self-mystification, this nihilism, i.e., seeking reality
where it does not exist, is a physiological symptom, giving me a clue to
the decadence of the Muslim world.”
To arrest the decadence and infuse new vitality in a society in which
they were convinced religion must remain the focal point, the modern
reformers advocated a return to the movements and masters of Islāmic
theology and philosophy antedating the new wisdom. They argued that
these, rather than the “Persian incrustation of Islām,” represented
Islām’s original and creative impulse. The modernists were attracted, in
particular, to the views of the Muʿtazilah: affirmation of God’s unity
and denial of all similarity between him and created things; reliance on
human reason; emphasis on man’s freedom; faith in man’s ability to
distinguish between good and bad; and insistence on man’s responsibility
to do good and fight against evil in private and public places. They
were also impressed by the traditionalists’ devotion to the original,
uncomplicated forms of Islām and by their fighting spirit, and by the
Ashʿarīs’ view of faith as an affair of the heart and their spirited
defense of the Muslim community. In viewing the scientific and
philosophic tradition of eastern and western Islām prior to the Tatar
and Mongol invasions, they saw an irrefutable proof that true Islām
stands for the liberation of man’s spirit, promotes critical thought,
and provides both the impetus to grapple with the temporal and the
demonstration of how to set it in order. These ideas initiated what was
to become a vast effort to recover, edit, and translate into the Muslim
national languages works of earlier theologians and philosophers, which
had been long neglected or known only indirectly through later accounts.
The modern reformers insisted, finally, that Muslims must be taught
to understand the real meaning of what has happened in Europe, which in
effect means the understanding of modern science and philosophy,
including modern social and political philosophies. Initially, this
challenge became the task of the new universities in the Muslim world.
In the latter part of the 20th century, however, the originally wide gap
between the various programs of theological and philosophic studies in
religious colleges and in modern universities narrowed considerably.
Muhsin S. Mahdi
Ed.
Islāmic thought » Social and ethical principles » Family life
A basic social teaching of Islām is the encouragement of marriage, and
the Qurʾān regards celibacy definitely as something exceptional—to be
resorted to only under economic stringency. Thus, monasticism as a way
of life was severely criticized by the Qurʾān. With the appearance of
Ṣūfism, however, many Ṣūfīs preferred celibacy, and some even regarded
women as an evil distraction from piety, although marriage remained the
normal practice also with Ṣūfīs.
Polygamy, which was practiced in pre-Islāmic Arabia, was permitted by
the Qurʾān, which, however, limited the number of simultaneous wives to
four, and this permission was made dependent upon the condition that
justice be done among co-wives. The Qurʾān even suggests that “You shall
never be able to do justice among women, no matter how much you desire.”
Medieval law and society, however, regarded this “justice” to be
primarily a private matter between a husband and his wives, although the
law did provide redress in cases of gross neglect of a wife. Right of
divorce was also vested basically in the husband, who could unilaterally
repudiate his wife, although the woman could also sue her husband for
divorce before a court on certain grounds.
The virtue of chastity is regarded as of prime importance by Islām.
The Qurʾān advanced its universal recommendation of marriage as a means
to ensure a state of chastity (iḥṣān), which is held to be induced by a
single free wife. The Qurʾān states that those guilty of adultery are to
be severely punished with 100 lashes. Tradition has intensified this
injunction and has prescribed this punishment for unmarried persons, but
married adulterers are to be stoned to death. A false accusation of
adultery is punishable by 80 lashes.
The general ethic of the Qurʾān considers the marital bond to rest on
“mutual love and mercy,” and the spouses are said to be “each other’s
garments.” The detailed laws of inheritance prescribed by the Qurʾān
also tend to confirm the idea of a central family—husband, wife, and
children, along with the husband’s parents. Easy access to polygamy
(although the normal practice in Islāmic society has always been that of
monogamy) and easy divorce on the part of the husband led, however, to
frequent abuses in the family. In recent times, most Muslim countries
have enacted legislation to tighten up marital relationships.
Rights of parents in terms of good treatment are stressed in Islām,
and the Qurʾān extols filial piety, particularly tenderness to the
mother, as an important virtue. A murderer of his father is
automatically disinherited. The tendency of the Islāmic ethic to
strengthen the immediate family on the one hand and the community on the
other at the expense of the extended family or tribe did not succeed,
however. Muslim society, until the encroachments upon it of modernizing
influences, has remained basically one composed of tribes or
quasi-tribes. Despite urbanization, tribal affiliations offer the
greatest resistance to change and development of a modern polity. So
strong, indeed, has been the tribal ethos that, in most Muslim
societies, daughters are not given their inheritance share prescribed by
the sacred law in order to prevent disintegration of the joint family’s
patrimony.
Islāmic thought » Social and ethical principles » The state
Because Islām draws no distinction between the religious and the
temporal spheres of life, the Muslim state is by definition religious.
The main differences between the Sunnī, Khawārij, and Shīʿī concepts of
rulership have already been pointed out above. It should be noted that,
although the office of the Sunnī caliph (khalīfah, one who is successor
to the Prophet in rulership) is religious, this does not imply any
functions comparable to those of the pope. The caliph has no authority
either to define dogma or, indeed, even to legislate. He is the chief
executive of a religious community, and his primary function is to
implement the sacred law and work in the general interests of the
community. He himself is not above the law and if necessary can even be
deposed, at least in theory.
Sunnī political theory is essentially a product of circumstance—an
after-the-fact rationalization of historical developments. Thus, between
the Shīʿah legitimism that restricts rule to ʿAlī’s family and the
Khawārij democratism that allowed rulership to anyone, even to “an
Ethiopian slave,” Sunnism held the position that “rule belonged to the
Quraysh” (the Prophet’s tribe)—the condition that actually existed.
Again, in view of the extremes represented by the Khawārij, who demanded
rebellion against what they considered to be unjust or impious rule, and
Shīʿites, who raised the imām to a metaphysical plane of infallibility,
Sunnites took the position that a ruler has to satisfy certain
qualifications but that rule cannot be upset on small issues. Indeed,
under the impact of civil wars started by the Khawārij, Sunnism drifted
to more and more conformism and actual toleration of injustice.
The first step taken in this direction by the Sunnites was the
enunciation that “one day of lawlessness is worse than 30 years of
tyranny.” This was followed by the principle that “Muslims must obey
even a tyrannical ruler.” Soon, however, the sultan (ruler) was declared
to be “shadow of God on earth.” No doubt, the principle was also
adopted—and insisted upon—that “there can be no obedience to the ruler
in disobedience of God”; but there is no denying the fact that the Sunnī
doctrine came more and more to be heavily weighted on the side of
political conformism. This change is also reflected in the principles of
legitimacy. Whereas early Islām had confirmed the pre-Islāmic democratic
Arab principle of rule by consultation (shūrā) and some form of
democratic election of the leader, those practices soon gave way to
dynastic rule with the advent of the Umayyads. The shūrā was not
developed into any institutionalized form and was, indeed, soon
discarded. Soon the principle of “might is right” came into being, and
later theorists frankly acknowledged that actual possession of effective
power is one method of the legitimization of power.
In spite of this development, the ruler could not become absolute
because a basic restraint was placed upon him by the Sharīʿah law under
which he held his authority and which he dutifully was bound to execute
and defend. When, in the latter half of the 16th century, the Mughal
emperor Akbar in India wanted to arrogate to himself the right of
administrative–legal absolutism, the strong reaction of the orthodox
thwarted his attempt. In general, the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars)
jealously upheld the sovereign position of the Sharīʿah against the
political authority.
The effective shift of power from the caliph to the sultan was,
again, reflected in the redefinition of the functions of the caliph. It
was conceded that, if the caliph administered through wazīrs (viziers or
ministers) or subordinate rulers (amīrs), it was not necessary for him
to embody all the physical, moral, and intellectual virtues
theoretically insisted upon earlier. In practice, however, the caliph
was no more than a titular head from the middle of the 10th century
onward, when real power passed to self-made and adventurous amīrs and
sultans, who merely used the caliph’s name for legitimacy.
Islāmic thought » Social and ethical principles » Education
Muslim educational activity began in the 8th century, primarily in order
to disseminate the teaching of the Qurʾān and the sunnah of the Prophet.
The first task in this endeavor was to record the oral traditions and
collect the written manuscripts. This information was systematically
organized in the 2nd century ah, and in the following century a sound
corpus was agreed upon. This vast activity of “seeking knowledge” (ṭalab
al-ʿilm) resulted in the creation of specifically Arab sciences of
tradition, history, and literature.
When the introduction of the Greek sciences—philosophy, medicine, and
mathematics—created a formidable body of lay knowledge, a creative
reaction on the traditional religious base resulted in the rationalist
theological movement of the Muʿtazilah. Based on that Greek legacy, from
the 9th to the 12th century ad a brilliant philosophical movement
flowered and presented a challenge to orthodoxy on the issues of the
eternity of the world, the doctrine of revelation, and the status of the
Sharīʿah.
The orthodox met the challenges positively by formulating the
religious dogma. At the same time, however, for fear of heresies, they
began to draw a sharp distinction between religious and secular
sciences. The custodians of the Sharīʿah developed an unsympathetic
attitude toward the secular disciplines and excluded them from the
curriculum of the madrasah (college) system.
Their exclusion from the Sunnī system of education proved fatal, not
only for those disciplines but, in the long run, for religious thought
in general because of the lack of intellectual challenge and
stimulation. A typical madrasah curriculum included logic (which was
considered necessary as an “instrumental” science for the formal
correctness of thinking procedure), Arabic literature, law, Ḥadīth,
Qurʾān commentary, and theology. Despite sporadic criticism from certain
quarters, the madrasah system remained impervious to change.
One important feature of Muslim education was that primary education
(which consisted of Qurʾān reading, writing, and rudimentary arithmetic)
did not feed candidates to institutions of higher education, and the two
remained separate. In higher education, emphasis was on books rather
than on subjects and on commentaries rather than on original works.
This, coupled with the habit of learning by rote (which was developed
from the basically traditional character of knowledge that encouraged
learning more than thinking), impoverished intellectual creativity still
further.
Despite these grave shortcomings, however, the madrasah produced one
important advantage. Through the uniformity of its religio-legal
content, it gave the ʿulamāʾ the opportunity to effect that overall
cohesiveness and unity of thought and purpose that, despite great
variations in local Muslim cultures, has become a palpable feature of
the world Muslim community. This uniformity has withstood even the
serious tension created against the seats of formal learning by Ṣūfism
through its peculiar discipline and its own centres.
In contrast to the Sunnī attitude toward it, philosophy continued to
be seriously cultivated among the Shīʿah, even though it developed a
strong religious character. Indeed, philosophy has enjoyed an unbroken
tradition in Persia down to the present and has produced some highly
original thinkers. Both the Sunnī and the Shīʿah medieval systems of
learning, however, have come face to face with the greatest challenge of
all—the impact of modern education and thought.
Organization of education developed naturally in the course of time.
Evidence exists of small schools already established in the first
century of Islām that were devoted to reading, writing, and instruction
in the Qurʾān. These schools of “primary” education were called kuttābs.
The well-known governor of Iraq at the beginning of the 8th century, the
ruthless al-Ḥajjāj, had been a schoolteacher in his early career. When
higher learning in the form of tradition grew in the 8th and 9th
centuries, it was centred around learned men to whom students travelled
from far and near and from whom they obtained a certificate (ijāzah) to
teach what they had learned. Through the munificence of rulers and
princes, large private and public libraries were built, and schools and
colleges arose. In the early 9th century a significant incentive to
learning came from the translations made of scientific and philosophical
works from the Greek (and partly Sanskrit) at the famous bayt al-ḥikmah
(“house of wisdom”) at Baghdad, which was officially sponsored by the
caliph al-Maʾmūn. The Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim set up a dār alḥikmah
(“hall of wisdom”) in Cairo in the 10th–11th centuries. With the advent
of the Seljuq Turks, the famous vizier Niẓām al-Mulk created an
important college at Baghdad, devoted to Sunnī learning, in the latter
half of the 11th century. One of the world’s oldest surviving
universities, al-Azhar at Cairo, was originally established by the
Fāṭimids, but Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), after ousting the
Fāṭimids, consecrated it to Sunnī learning in the 12th century.
Throughout subsequent centuries, colleges and quasi-universities (called
madrasah or dār al-ʿulūm) arose throughout the Muslim world from Spain
(whence philosophy and science were transmitted to the Latin West)
across Central Asia to India.
In Turkey a new style of madrasah came into existence; it had four
wings, for the teaching of the four schools of Sunnī law. Professorial
chairs were endowed in large colleges by princes and governments, and
residential students were supported by college endowment funds. A myriad
of smaller centres of learning were endowed by private donations.
Islāmic thought » Social and ethical principles » Cultural diversity
Underneath the legal and creedal unity, the world of Islām harbours a
tremendous diversity of cultures, particularly in the outlying regions.
The expansion of Islām can be divided into two broad periods. In the
first period of the Arab conquests, the assimilative activity of the
conquering religion was far-reaching. Although Persia resurrected its
own language and a measure of its national culture after the first three
centuries of Islām, its culture and language had come under heavy Arab
influence. Only after Ṣafavid rule installed Shīʿism as a distinctive
creed in the 16th century did Persia regain a kind of religious
autonomy. The language of religion and thought, however, continued to be
Arabic.
In the second period, the spread of Islām was not conducted by the
state with ʿulamāʾ influence but was largely the work of Ṣūfī
missionaries. The Ṣūfīs, because of their latitudinarianism, compromised
with local customs and beliefs and left a great deal of the pre-Islāmic
legacy in every region intact. Thus, among the Central Asian Turks,
shamanistic practices were absorbed, while in Africa the holy man and
his barakah (an influence supposedly causing material and spiritual
well-being) are survivors from the older cults. In India there are large
areas geographically distant from the Muslim religio-political centre of
power in which customs are still Hindu and even pre-Hindu and in which
people worship a motley of saints and deities in common with the Hindus.
The custom of satī, under which a widow burned herself alive along with
her dead husband, persisted in India even among some Muslims until late
into the Mughal period. The 18th- and 19th-century reform movements
exerted themselves to “purify” Islām of these accretions and
superstitions.
Indonesia affords a striking example of this phenomenon. Because
Islām reached there late and soon thereafter came under European
colonialism, the Indonesian society has retained its pre-Islāmic world
view beneath an overlay of Islāmic practices. It keeps its customary law
(called adat) at the expense of the Sharīʿah; many of its tribes are
still matriarchal; and culturally the Hindu epics Rāmāyaṇa and
Mahābhārata hold a high position in national life. Since the 19th
century, however, orthodox Islām has gained steadily in strength because
of fresh contacts with the Middle East.
Apart from regional diversity, the main internal division within
Islāmic society is brought about by urban and village life. Islām
originally grew up in the two cities of Mecca and Medina, and as it
expanded, its peculiar ethos appears to have developed in urban areas.
Culturally, it came under a heavy Persian influence in Iraq, where the
Arabs learned the ways and style of life of their conquered people, who
were culturally superior to them. The custom of veiling women (which
originally arose as a sign of aristocracy but later served the purpose
of segregating women from men—the pardah), for example, was acquired in
Iraq.
Another social trait derived from outside cultures was the disdain
for agriculture and manual labour in general. Because the people of the
town of Medina were mainly agriculturists, this disdain could not have
been initially present. In general, Islām came to appropriate a strong
feudal ethic from the peoples it conquered. Also, because the Muslims
generally represented the administrative and military aristocracy and
because the learned class (the ʿulamāʾ) was an essential arm of the
state, the higher culture of Islām became urban based.
This city orientation explains and also underlines the traditional
cleavage between the orthodox Islām of the ʿulamāʾ and the folk Islām
espoused by the Ṣūfī orders of the countryside. In the modern period,
the advent of education and rapid industrialization threatened to make
this cleavage still wider. With the rise of a strong and widespread
fundamentalist movement in the second half of the 20th century, this
dichotomy has decreased.
Islāmic thought » Religion and the arts » The visual arts
The Arabs before Islām had hardly any art except poetry, which had been
developed to full maturity and in which they took great pride. As with
other forms of culture, the Muslim Arabs borrowed their art from Persia
and Byzantium. Whatever elements the Arabs borrowed, however, they
Islāmized in a manner that fused them into a homogeneous
spiritual-aesthetic complex. The most important principle governing art
was aniconism; i.e., the religious prohibition of figurization and
representation of living creatures. Underlying this prohibition is the
assumption that God is the sole author of life and that a person who
produces a likeness of a living being seeks to rival God. The tradition
ascribed to the Prophet that a person who makes a picture of a living
thing will be asked on the Day of Judgment to infuse life into it,
whether historically genuine or not, doubtless represents the original
attitude of Islām. In the Qurʾān (3:49, 5:113), reflecting an account in
a New Testament apocryphal work, it is counted among the miracles of
Jesus that he made likenesses of birds from clay “by God’s order,” and,
when he breathed into them, they became real birds, again, “by God’s
order.”
Hence, in Islāmic aniconism two considerations are fused together:
(1) rejection of such images that might become idols (these may be
images of anything) and (2) rejection of figures of living things. Plato
and Plotinus, Greek philosophers, had also dismissed representative art
as an “imitation of nature”; i.e., as something removed from reality.
The Islāmic attitude is more or less the same, with the added element of
attributing to the artist a violation of the sanctity of the principle
of life. The same explanation holds for the Qurʾānic criticism of a
certain kind of poetry, namely, free indulgence in extravagant image
mongering: “They [poets] recklessly wander in every valley” (26:225).
This basic principle has, however, undergone modifications. First,
pictures were tolerated if they were confined to private apartments and
harems of palaces. This was the case with some members of the Umayyad
and ʿAbbāsid dynasties, Turks, and Persians—in particular with the
Shīʿah, who have produced an abundance of pictorial representations of
the holy family and of the Prophet himself. Second, in the field of
pictorial representation, animal and human figures are combined with
other ornamental designs such as fillets and arabesques—stressing their
ornamental nature rather than representative function. Third, for the
same reason, in plastic art they appear in low relief. In other regions
of the Muslim world—in North Africa, Egypt, and India (except for Mughal
palaces)—representational art was strictly forbidden. Even in paintings,
the figures have little representational value and are mostly decorative
and sometimes symbolic. This explains why plastic art is one of the most
limited areas of Islāmic art. The only full-fledged plastic figures are
those of animals and a few human figures that the Seljuqs brought from
eastern Turkistan.
Much more important than plastic art were paintings, particularly
frescoes and later Persian and Perso-Indian miniatures. Frescoes are
found in the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid palaces and in Spain, Iran, and in the
harem quarters of the Mughal palaces in India. Miniature paintings,
introduced in Persia, assumed much greater importance in the later
period in Mughal India and Turkey. Miniature painting was closely
associated with the art of book illumination, and this technique of
decorating the pages of the books was patronized by princes and other
patrons from the upper classes. (Miniature painting is also discussed
below; see Illustration of myth and legend.)
Islāmic thought » Religion and the arts » Music
Instrumental music was forbidden by the orthodox in the formative stages
of Islām. As for vocal music, its place was largely taken by a
sophisticated and artistic form of the recitation of the Qurʾān known as
tajwīd. Nevertheless, the Muslim princely courts generously patronized
and cultivated music. Arab music was influenced by Persian and Greek
music. Al-Fārābī, a 10th-century philosopher, is credited with having
constructed a musical instrument called the arghanūn (organ). In India,
Amīr Khosrow, a 14th-century poet and mystic, produced a synthesis of
Indian and Persian music and influenced the development of later Indian
music.
Among the religious circles, the Ṣūfīs introduced both vocal and
instrumental music as part of their spiritual practices. The samāʿ, as
this music was called, was opposed by the orthodox at the beginning, but
the Ṣūfīs persisted in this practice, which slowly won general
recognition. The great Ṣūfī poet Jalāl ad-Dīn ar-Rūmī (died
1273)—revered equally by the orthodox and the Ṣūfīs—heard the divine
voice in his stringed musical instrument when he said “Its head, its
veins (strings) and its skin are all dry and dead; whence comes to me
the voice of the Friend?”
Islāmic thought » Religion and the arts » Literature
In literature, drama and pure fiction were not allowed—drama because it
was a representational art and fiction because it was akin to lying.
Similar constraints operated against the elaboration of mythology (see
below Islāmic myth and legend). Story literature was tolerated, and the
great story works of Indian origin—The Thousand and One Nights and
Kalīlah wa Dimnah—were translated from the Persian, introducing secular
prose into Arabic. Didactic and pious stories were used and even
invented by popular preachers. Much of this folklore found its way back
into enlarged editions of The Thousand and One Nights and, through it,
has even influenced later history writing. Because of the ban on
fictional literature, there grew a strong tendency in later literary
compositions—in both poetry and prose—toward hyperbole (mubālaghah), a
literary device to satisfy the need of getting away from what is starkly
real without committing literal falsehood, thus often resulting in the
caricature and the grotesque. Poetry lent itself particularly well to
this device, which was freely used in panegyrics, satires, and lyrics.
As a form of effective expression, poetry is eminently characteristic of
the East. The Arab genius is almost natively poetical with its strong
and vivid imagination not easily amenable to the rigorous order that
reason imposes upon the mind. This borderline attitude between the real
and the unreal was particularly favourable to the development, in all
medieval Islāmic literatures of the Middle East, of the lyric and
panegyric forms of poetry wherein every line is a self-contained unit.
Much more importantly, it afforded a specially suitable vehicle for a
type of mystic poetry in which it is sometimes impossible to determine
whether the poet is talking of earthly love or spiritual love. For the
same reason, poetry proved an effective haven for thinly veiled
deviations from and even attacks on the literalist religion of the
orthodox.
Islāmic thought » Religion and the arts » Architecture
Architecture is by far the most important expression of Islāmic art,
particularly the architecture of mosques. It illustrates both the
diversity of cultures that participated in the Islāmic civilization and
the unifying force of Islāmic monotheism represented by the spacious
expanse of the mosque—a veritable externalization of the all-enveloping
divine unity, heightened by the sense of infinity of the arabesque
design. The arabesque, though ornately decorative, spiritually
represents the infinite vastness of God.
Among the earliest monuments are the mosque of ʿAmr built in Egypt in
641–642 and the famous Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem (finished in 691),
which, however, is not a mosque but a monument, a concentric-circular
structure consisting of a wooden dome set on a high drum and resting on
four tiers and 12 columns. The Umayyad ruler al-Walīd (died 715) built
the great mosque at Damascus and al-Aqṣā Mosque at Jerusalem with two
tiers of arcades in order to heighten the ceiling. The early
Syro-Egyptian mosque is a heavily columned structure with a prayer niche
(miḥrāb) oriented toward the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca.
In Spanish and North African architecture these features are combined
with Roman-Byzantine characteristics, the masterpieces of Spanish
architecture being the famous Alhambra Palace at Granada and the Great
Mosque of Córdoba. In the famous Persian mosques, the characteristic
Persian elements are the tapered brick pillars, the arches (each
supported by several pillars), the huge arcades, and the four sides
called eyvāns. With the advent of the Seljuqs in the 11th century,
faience decoration (glazed earthenware) of an exquisite beauty was
introduced, and it gained further prominence under the Timurids
(14th–16th centuries).
In the number and greatness of mosques, Turkey has the pride of first
place in the Muslim world. Turkey began with a Persian influence and
then later Syrian in the 13th and 14th centuries, but Turkey developed
its own cupola domes and monumental entrances. The Turkish architects
accomplished symmetry by means of one large dome, four semidomes, and
four small domes among them. In the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, Muslim
architecture first employed Hindu architectural features (e.g.,
horizontal rather than arcuate, or bowlike, arches and Hindu
ornamentation), but later the Persian style predominated.
Fazlur Rahman
Ed.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend
The strict monotheism of Islām does not allow for much mythological
embellishment, and only reluctantly were the scriptural revelations of
the Qurʾan elaborated and enlarged by commentators and popular
preachers. Thus, in the first three centuries, a number of ideas from
the ancient Near East, from Hellenistic and especially from
Judeo-Christian traditions were absorbed into Islām and given at least
partial sanction by the theologians. At the same time, legends were
woven around the Prophet Muḥammad and the members of his family. Though
inconsistent with historical reality, these legends formed for the
masses the main sources of inspiration about the famous figures of the
past.
Since early times Islāmic theologians have sought to disregard the
Qurʾānic interpretation of both storytellers and mystics. The quṣṣāṣ, or
storytellers, made the Qurʾānic revelation more understandable to the
masses by filling in the short texts with detailed descriptions that
were not found in scripture. Though the mystics tried to maintain the
purity of the divine word, they also attempted a spiritualization of
both the Qurʾān and the popular legends that developed around it. Their
way of giving to the Qurʾānic words a deeper meaning, however, and
discovering layer after layer of meaning in them, sometimes led to new
quasi-mythological forms. Later Islāmic mystical thinkers built up
closed systems that can be called almost mythological (e.g., the
angelology—theory of angels—of Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl, executed 1191). An
interesting development is visible in poetry, especially in the
Persian-speaking areas, where mythological figures and pious legend
often were turned into secular images that might awaken in the reader a
reminiscence of their religious origin. Such images contribute to the
iridescent and ambiguous character of Persian poetry.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Sources and variations » The
Qurʾān and non-Islāmic influences
The sources of Islāmic mythology are first of all the Qurʾānic
revelations. Since, for the Muslims, the Qurʾān is the uncreated word of
God (the text revealed to Muḥammad considered an earthly manifestation
of the eternal and uncreated original in heaven), it contains every
truth, and whatever is said in it has been the object of meditation and
explanation through the centuries. Thus, since the 9th century,
commentators on the Qurʾān have been by far the most important witnesses
for Islāmic “mythology.” They wove into their explanations various
strands of Persian and ancient oriental lore and relied heavily on
Jewish tradition. For example, the Jewish convert, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār brought
much of the Isrāʾīliyāt (things Jewish) into Islāmic tradition. Later
on, the mystics’ commentaries expressed some gnostic (a dualistic
viewpoint in which spirit is viewed as good and matter as evil) and
Hellenistic concepts, of which the Hellenistic idea of the Perfect
Man—personified in Muḥammad—was to gain greatest prominence.
Commentaries written in the border areas of Islāmic countries now and
then accepted a few popular traditions from their respective areas;
however, the formative period was finished quite early. Traditions about
the life and sayings of the Prophet grew larger and larger and are
interesting for the study of the adoption of foreign mythological
material. A valuable source for Islāmic legends are the qiṣaṣ
al-anbiyāʾ—stories of the prophets, such as those by Thaʿālibī (born
1035) and Kisāʾī (11th century)—traditions concerning the prophets of
yore in which a large number of pre-Islāmic and non-Islāmic ideas were
incorporated.
While the classical mythology of Islām, as far as it can be properly
called so, is spread over the whole area of Islām, the miracles and
legends around a particular Muslim saint are found chiefly in the area
of his special influence (especially where his order is most popular).
Even if the names of the saints differ, the legends woven around them
are very similar to each other and almost interchangeable. In the area
where Persian was read—from Ottoman Turkey to India—the mythological
concepts of Ferdowsī’s Shāh-nāmeh are found side by side with the
legends taken from ʿAṭṭār’s and Rūmī’s works.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Sources and variations »
The mystics
From the 11th century onward, the biographies of the mystics often show
interesting migrations of legendary motifs from one culture to another.
For the Persian-speaking countries the Taẓkerat ol-Owlīyāʾ (“Memoirs of
the Saints”) of Farīd od-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (died c. 1220) has become the
storehouse of legendary material about the early Ṣūfī mystics. ʿAṭṭār’s
Persian epics (especially his Manṭeq ot-ṭḥyr, the “Birds’ Conversation”)
also contain much material that was used by almost every writer after
him. The Mas̄navī (a sort of poetic encyclopaedia of mystical thought in
26,000 couplets) of Jalāl od-Dīn Rūmī (died 1273) is another important
source for legends of saints and prophets. For the Iranian world view,
Ferdowsī’s (died c. 1020) Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”) gave a poetical
account of the mythology of old Iran, and its heroes became models for
many poets and writers. The whole mythological and legendary heritage is
condensed in allusions found in lyrical and panegyrical poetry. The
Persian poet Ebrāhim ebn ʿAlī Khāqānī’s (c. 1121–c. 1199) works,
qaṣīdahs (“Odes”), are typical. The close connection of the Ṣūfī orders
with the artisans’ lodges and guilds was instrumental in the
dissemination of legendary material, especially about the alleged
founder, or patron, of the guild (such as Ḥallāj as patron of
cottoncarders and Idrīs as patron of the tailors).
Muslim historians interested in world history often began their works
with mythological tales; central Asian traditions were added in Iran
during the Il-Khanid period (ad 1256–1335). Folk poetry, in the
different languages spoken by Muslims, provides a popular representation
of traditional material, be it in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, the Indian
and Pakistani languages (Urdu, Bengali, Sindhi, Panjabi, Baluchi, etc.),
or the African languages; in all of them allusions to myth and legend
are found down to the level of riddles and lullabies. Typical of the
legendary tradition of the Shīʿah are the taʿziyas (“passion-plays”) in
Iran, commemorating the death of Husayn ibn ʿAlī in Karbalāʾ (680) and
the mars̄īyehs (threnodies or elegies for the dead), which form an
important branch of the Urdu poetry of India and Pakistan. A proper
study of the distribution of most aspects of mythology in the various
Muslim areas has not been undertaken, since much of the popular material
is rarely available in print or is written in less-known languages—a
good example is the extremely rich collections of legends and popular
pious works in the Pakistani language, Sindhi.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend »
Cosmogony and eschatology
The world was created by God’s word kun (“Be”) out of nothing; after the
creation of the angelic beings from light, Adam was formed from clay and
destined to be God’s vicegerent, khalīfah. All of the angels obeyed
God’s order to prostrate themselves before Adam, except Iblīs (Satan),
who refused and was cursed; due to Iblīs’ instigation Adam ate the
forbidden fruit (or grain) and was driven out of paradise. Questions of
original sin or of Eve’s role do not arise in the Muslim version of
creation. Satan’s disobedience has been explained by the mystics as
actually an expression of his obedience to the divine will that does not
allow worship of any but the Lord and that conflicted with the order
that Satan prostrate himself before Adam.
Before the creation, God addressed the posterity of Adam: “Am I not
your Lord,” alastu birabbikum, and they answered “Yes” (Qurʾān, sūrah
7:172). This pre-eternal covenant is the favourite topic of mystical
poetry, especially in the Persian-speaking areas for expressing
pre-eternal love between God and man, or the unchangeable fate that was
accepted that very day, the Yesterday as contrasted to the Tomorrow of
resurrection. Angels and jinns (genies) are living powers that become
visible in human life; they are accepted as fully real.
Every destiny is written on the “well-preserved tablet,” and now “the
pen has dried up”—a change in destiny is not possible. Later mystics
have relied on an extra-Qurʾānic revelation in which God attests: “I was
a hidden treasure” and have seen the reason for creation in God’s
yearning to be known and loved. For them, creation is the projection of
divine names and qualities onto the world of matter.
The central event of Islām is death and resurrection. The dead will
be questioned by two terrible angels (that is why the profession of
faith is recited to the dying); only the souls of martyrs go straight to
heaven where they remain in the crops of green birds around the divine
throne (green is always connected with heavenly bliss). The end of the
world will be announced by the coming of the mahdī (literally, “the
directed or guided one”)—a messianic figure who will appear in the last
days and is not found in the Qurʾān but developed out of Shīʿah
speculations and sometimes identified with Jesus. The mahdī will slay
the Dajjāl, the one-eyed evil spirit, and combat the dangerous enemies,
Yājūj and Mājūj, who will come from the north of the earth. The trumpet
of Isrāfīl, one of the four archangels, will awaken the dead for the day
of resurrection, which is many thousands of years long and the name of
which has come to designate a state of complete confusion and turmoil.
The eschatological inventory as described in the Qurʾān was
elaborated by the commentators: the scales on which the books or deeds
are weighed (an old Egyptian idea), the book in which the two recording
angels have noted down man’s deeds, and the narrow bridge that is said
to be sharper than a sword and thinner than a hair and leads over hell
(an Iranian idea). The dreadful angels of hell and the horrors of that
place are as thoroughly described by theologians as the pleasures of
paradise, with its waters and gardens and the houris who are permanent
virgins. Pious tradition promises space in heavenly mansions, filled
with everything beautiful, to those who repeat certain prayer formulas a
certain number of times, or for similar rewarding deeds, whereas the
mystic longs not “for houris some thousand years old” but for the vision
of God, who will be visible like the full moon. In the concept of the
sidrah tree as the noblest place in paradise a remnant may be found of
the old tree of life. God’s throne is on the waters (Qurʾān, sūrah 11:9)
in the highest world, surrounded by worshipping angels. The created
world, the earth, is surrounded by the mountain Qāf and enclosed by two
oceans that are separated by a barrier. Mecca is the navel of the earth,
created 2,000 years before everything else, and the deluge did not reach
to proto-Kaʿbah. Often the world is conceived as a succession of seven
heavens and seven earths, and a popular tradition says that the earth is
on water, on a rock, on the back of a bull, on a kamkam (meaning
unknown), on a fish, on water, on wind, on the veil of darkness—hence
the Persian expression az māh tā māhī, from the moon to the fish; i.e.,
throughout the whole world.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Tales and legends concerning religious figures
The majority of popular legends concern the leading personalities of
Islām.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Tales and legends concerning religious figures » Muḥammad
Muḥammad, whose only miracle, according to his own words, was the
bringing of the Qurʾān, is credited with innumerable miracles and
associated with a variety of miraculous occurrences: his finger split
the moon, the cooked poisoned meat warned him not to touch it, the palm
trunk sighed, the gazelle spoke for him; he cast no shadow; from his
perspiration the rose was created, etc. His ascension to heaven (miʿrāj)
is still celebrated: he rode the winged horse Burāq in the company of
the angel Gabriel through the seven spheres, meeting the other prophets
there, until he reached the divine presence, alone, even without the
angel of inspiration. Muḥammad-mysticism proper was developed in the
late 9th century; he is shown as the one who precedes creation, his
light is pre-eternal, and he is the reason for and goal of creation. He
becomes the perfect man, uniting the divine and the human sphere as dawn
is between night and day. His birth was surrounded by miracles, and his
birthday (12. Rabīʾ I) became a popular holiday on which numerous poems
were written to praise his achievements. The hope for him who has been
sent as “mercy for the worlds” and will intercede for his community on
Doomsday is extremely strong, especially among the masses, where these
legends have completely overshadowed his historical figure.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Tales and legends concerning religious figures » Other Qurʾānic
figures
In addition to Muḥammad himself, his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī, the
Shīʿah hero, has been surrounded by legends concerning his bravery, his
miraculous sword, Dhūaʾl-fiqār, and his wisdom. ʿAlī’s son, Ḥusayn, is
the subject of innumerable poems that concern the day of his final fight
in Karbalāʾ.
Almost every figure mentioned in the Qurʾān has become the centre of
a circle of legends, be it Yūsuf, the symbol of overwhelming beauty, or
Jesus with the life-giving breath, the model of poverty and asceticism.
Of special interest is Khiḍr, identified with the unnamed companion of
Moses (Qurʾān, sūrah 20). He is the patron saint of the wayfarers,
connected with green, the colour of heavenly bliss, appearing whenever a
pious person is in need, and immortal since he drank from the fountain
of life, which is hidden in the darkness. In many respects, he is the
Islāmic counterpart of Elijah. Strong influences of the Alexander
romances (a widely distributed literary genre dealing with the
adventures of Alexander the Great) are visible in his figure.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Tales and legends concerning religious figures » Mystics and other
later figures
The great religious personalities have become legendary, especially the
martyr-mystic Ḥallāj (executed in Bagdad, 922). His word anā al-Ḥaqq, “I
am the Creative Truth,” became the motto of many later mystics. His
death on the gallows is the model for the suffering of lovers, and
allusions to his fate are frequent in Islāmic literature. An earlier
mystic, Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (died 874), was the first to speak about
the ascension of the mystic to heaven, which is a metaphor for higher
unitive, mystical experience. A variation of the Buddha legend has been
transferred onto the person of the first Ṣūfī (mystic) who practiced
absolute poverty and trust in God, the Central Asian Ibrāhīm ibn Adham
(died c. 780). The founders of mystical orders were credited by their
followers with a variety of miracles, such as riding on lions, healing
the sick, walking on water, being present at two places at the same
time, and cardiognosia (which is the knowledge of what is in another’s
heart, or thought reading). ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (died 1166), the
founder of the widespread Qādirīyah order of mystics, and many others
have attracted upon themselves a large number of popular stories that
formerly had been told about pre-Islāmic saints or about some
divinities, and these motifs can easily be transferred from one person
to the other. In this sphere the survival of pre-Islāmic customs and
legends is most visible. The idea of the hierarchy of saints,
culminating in the quṭb, the pole or axis, thanks to whose activities
the world keeps going, belongs to the mythology of Ṣūfism (Islāmic
mysticism).
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Mythologization of secular tales
A feature of Islāmic mythology is the transformation of unreligious
stories into vehicles of religious experience. The old hero of romantic
love in Arabic literature, Majnūn, “the demented one,” became a symbol
of the soul longing for identification with God, and in the Indus Valley
the tales of Sassui or Sohnī, the girls who perish for their love, and
other romantic figures, have been understood as symbols of the soul
longing for union with God through suffering and death.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Types of myth and legend
» Tales and beliefs about numbers and letters
Many Muslim tales, legends, and traditional sayings are built upon the
mystical value of numbers, such as the threefold or sevenfold repetition
of a certain rite. This is largely explained by examples from the life
of a saintly or pious person, often the Prophet himself, who used to
repeat this or that formula so and so many times. The number 40, found
in the Qurʾān (as also in the Bible) as the length of a period of
repentance, suffering, preparation, and steadfastness, plays the same
role in Islām where it is connected, for example, with the 40 days’
preparation and meditation, or fasting, of the novice in the mystical
brotherhood. To each number, as well as to each day of the week, special
qualities are attributed through the authority of both actual and
alleged statements of the Prophet. Many pre-Islāmic customs were thus
justified. The importance given to the letters of the Arabic alphabet is
peculiar to Muslim pious thought. Letters of the alphabet were assigned
numerical values: the straight alif (numerical value one), the first
letter of the alphabet, becomes a symbol of the uniqueness and unity of
Allāh; the b (numerical value two), the first letter of the Qurʾān,
represents to many mystics the creative power by which everything came
into existence; the h (numerical value five) is the symbol of huwa, He,
the formula for God’s absolute transcendence; the m (numerical value 40)
is the “shawl of humanity” by which God, the One (al-Aḥad), is separated
from Aḥmad (Muḥammad). M is the letter of human nature and hints at the
40 degrees between man and God. The sect of the Ḥurūfīs developed these
cabalistic interpretations of letters, but they are quite common in the
whole Islāmic world and form almost a substitute for mythology.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Illustration of myth and
legend
Since the art of representation is opposed in Islām, illustrations of
mythological and legendary subjects are rarely found. Miniature painting
developed only in the Persian and, later on, in the Turkish and
Indo-Muslim areas. Books such as Zakarīyāʾ ebn Moḥammad al-Qazvīnī’s
Cosmography contain in some manuscripts a few pictures of angels, like
Isrāfīl with the trumpet, and histories of the world or histories of the
prophets, written in Iran or Turkey, also contain in rare manuscripts
representations of angels or of scenes as told in the Qurʾān, especially
the story of Yūsuf and Zalīkhā, which inspired many poems. The
Shāh-nāmeh has been fairly frequently illustrated. When the Prophet of
Islām is shown at all, his face is usually covered and in several cases
his companions or his family members are also shown with veiled faces.
The only subject from the legends surrounding Muḥammad that has been
treated by miniaturists several times is his ascension to heaven. There
are a number of splendid Persian miniatures depicting this. In poetical
manuscripts that contain allusions to legends of the saints, these
topics were also sometimes illustrated (e.g., Jonah and the great fish
or scenes from the wanderings of Khiḍr). Several miniatures deal with
the execution of the mystic al-Ḥallāj. Mythological themes proper are
found almost exclusively in the paintings of Mughal India; especially in
the period of Jahāngīr, in which the eschatological peace of lion and
lamb lying together is illustrated as well as the myth of the earth
resting on the bull, on the fish, etc. But by that time European
influence was also already visible in Mughal art.
Islāmic thought » Islāmic myth and legend » Significance and modern
interpretations
Mythology proper has only a very small place in official Islām and is
mostly an expression of popular traditions through which pre-Islāmic
influences seeped into Islām. Reformers tried to purge Islām of all
non-Qurʾānic ideas and picturesque elaborations of the texts, whereas
the mystics tried to spiritualize them as far as possible. Modern Muslim
exegesis attempts to interpret many of the mythological strands of the
Qurʾān in the light of modern science, as psychological factors, like
Muḥammad’s ascension to heaven, and especially deprives the
eschatological parts of the Qurʾān of their religious significance.
Cosmic events are interpreted as predictions of modern scientific
research. To some interpreters, jinns and angels are spiritual forces;
to others, jinns are microbes or the like. Thus the religious text is
confused with a textbook of science. Popular legends surrounding the
Prophet and the saints are still found among the masses but are tending
to disappear under the influence of historical research, though many of
them have formed models for the behaviour and spiritual life of the
Muslim believer.
Annemarie Schimmel
