Chapter 76. Law and Theology: the Madhhabs, Mutazila, Ash’ari, Hanbali and the Philosophers

Between the Abbasid revolution of 750 and the tenth century, Sunni Islam acquired the intellectual architecture it still has today: four recognised schools of law, a dominant theological method (Ash’arism), a philosophical tradition (falsafa) that was pushed out of the official colleges in much of the Arab world but survived and grew in Persia, and a strict traditionalist current, the Hanbali, which produced Ibn Taymiyya and, through him, the Wahhabi movement of the eighteenth century. The library’s sources stress that none of this was purely academic. Karen Armstrong writes that “the philosophy, law and spirituality of Islam were profoundly political” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “The Esoteric Movements”]. The main turning point was a state inquisition, the mihna, through which a caliph tried to impose a theological doctrine and was defeated by popular scholars. This chapter follows that history through Armstrong’s narrative history, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s traditionalist history of Islamic philosophy, Kim Ghattas’s account of modern Saudi Arabia, the Romanian Wikipedia’s survey of the law schools, and the Sourdels’ glossary of classical Islamic civilisation.

The Abbasid demand for a unified law

Armstrong argues that the Abbasids, having “shed” the Shi’i camouflage that had brought them to power, tried to give their absolutist regime “Islamic legitimacy” by sponsoring fiqh (jurisprudence). Under the Umayyads “each town had developed its own fiqh, but the Abbasids pressed the jurists to evolve a more unified system of law.” The result, she says, was a split inside the empire: ordinary people lived under the Shari’a, while the court “adhered to the more autocratic norms of the pre-Islamic period” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Abbasids”]. She describes the Shari’a as a counter-culture: it “restricted the power of the caliph” and “tacitly condemned” court culture “as un-Islamic.” Both Malik ibn Anas and al-Shafi’i, she notes, “had taken part in Shii uprisings against the early Abbasids” and had been imprisoned before caliphs took them up as patrons [Armstrong, #53062].

The first great compiler was Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) of Medina. His al-Muwatta (“The Beaten Path”), in Armstrong’s words, recorded “the customal law and religious practice of Medina, which, Malik believed, still preserved the original sunnah of the Prophet’s community” [Armstrong, #53062]. Muhammad Idris al-Shafi’i (d. 820), “born in poverty in Gaza,” rejected reliance on any single city and grounded jurisprudence in reports (hadith) about the Prophet. Each hadith, however, “had to be reliably supported by a chain (isnad) of devout Muslims leading directly back to the Prophet himself,” and “if any one of its ‘links’ could be shown to be a bad Muslim, the hadith must be rejected.” Armstrong summarises his legal theory thus:

“There were, al-Shafii taught, four ‘roots’ of sacred law (usul al-fiqh): the Quran, the sunnah of the Prophet, qiyas (analogy) and ijmah, the ‘consensus’ of the community. God would not allow the entire ummah to be in error…” [Armstrong, #53062]

She adds a historian’s caveat that the method “was not capable of ensuring the strict historicity of the Prophet’s sunnah, according to modern standards of accuracy,” but that it “provided a blueprint” for a way of life. Al-Shafi’i’s criteria led on to the canonical hadith collections of al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim (d. 878) [Armstrong, #53062].

The four Sunni schools

By the mid-tenth century, Armstrong writes, “there were four recognized law schools, each regarded with Muslim egalitarianism as equally valid: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali schools, the latter preserving the ideals of Ibn Hanbal and the Hadith People. In practice, these four madhhabs did not differ markedly from one another” [Armstrong, #53062]. The Romanian Wikipedia article gives a more detailed profile of each school. It also notes that ijtihad was officially “closed” among Sunnis from the eleventh or twelfth century, and that the Shi’a have their own Ja’fari, Zaydi and Ismaili legal traditions [Wikipedia RO: Școli juridice în islam]. The Sourdels’ glossary sets out the basic division: on one side the partisans of personal judgement (ahl al-ra’y), represented chiefly by the Hanafis; on the other the partisans of Tradition (ahl al-hadith), represented chiefly by the Hanbalis and the Shafi’is [Sourdel & Sourdel-Thomine, Civilizația Islamului clasic, vol. III, #12462, glossary].

Sources for the table: [Armstrong, #53062]; [Wikipedia RO: Școli juridice în islam].

The Romanian article describes the Hanbali school bluntly as the “extreme right of orthodox intransigence.” It records that the conservative scholar al-Tabari was buried at night “for fear of the Hanbalis” because he had not praised Ibn Hanbal enough, and it quotes a Hanbali maxim: “The Sunna is the garment above and the garment below” [Wikipedia RO: Școli juridice în islam].

The co-existence of the schools could be seen in Mecca itself. Kim Ghattas writes that “for centuries, scholars from the four different schools of Islam had taught in the Holy Mosque,” and that “the faithful prayed, at slightly different times, behind their imams; there was a prayer station for each school: Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi, and Hanbali.” After King Abdelaziz took Mecca in 1924, the Wahhabi clerics asked: “If the community of Muslims was one, and the call to prayer was one, why not pray behind one imam?” They won the argument, and from then on a single imam “from Wahhabi circles” led all five prayers. Study circles (halaqas) fell “from several hundred to around thirty-five in the late 1970s” [Ghattas, Black Wave, #72495, Part I, ch. 3].

The Mutazila, the Hadith People and the mihna

Armstrong places the theological conflict inside a dispute about piety. A popular devotion that grew under Harun al-Rashid treated the Quran “as God’s uncreated Word, which had existed with him from all eternity.” She compares this to “the Christian devotion to Jesus.” The Mutazilites were rationalists committed to “the unity and utter simplicity of God,” and the devotion “appalled” them because it “seemed to make the Quran a second divine being.” Its adherents were the ahl al-hadith, the Hadith People. Armstrong calls them “conservatives” who “venerated all the rashidun, and even Muawiyyah,” and who taught that “the rank and file must obey the caliph, whatever his religious credentials” [Armstrong, #53062, “Ibn Hanbal and the Hadith People”]. At first this suited Harun al-Rashid. The Mutazilites fell from favour, and “on occasion, at their request, the government even imprisoned leading Mutazilites.”

Al-Ma’mun (813-33) reversed this policy. Armstrong writes: “An intellectual himself, he felt naturally drawn to the rationalism of the Mutazilites.” He also saw that the populist claim that divine law “was directly accessible to every single Muslim, was not compatible with absolute monarchy.” The Mutazilites then “turned upon the ahl al-hadith,” and “an ‘inquisition’ (mihnah) ensued, in which leading Hadith People, notably the popular Ahmad ibn Hanbal, were imprisoned. Ibn Hanbal became a folk hero. Championing the Mutazilites had done al-Mamun no good; it had simply alienated the masses” [Armstrong, #53062].

In the same years al-Ma’mun named the Eighth Shi’i Imam, Ali al-Rida, as his heir. Armstrong says al-Rida “conveniently died” a few months later, “possibly by foul play” [Armstrong, #53062]. The Sourdels’ glossary is more definite: Ali al-Rida, chosen as heir by al-Ma’mun, then “died poisoned at Tus in 818” [Sourdel & Sourdel-Thomine, #12462, entry “‘Ali al-Rida”]. The philosopher al-Kindi (d. 870) also enjoyed al-Ma’mun’s patronage and, in Armstrong’s account, “worked closely with the Mutazilites in their attempt to rid theology (kalam) of anthropomorphism” [Armstrong, #53062]. The Sourdels name the essayist al-Jahiz (d. 869) as a defender of “the Mu’tazili doctrine” [Sourdel & Sourdel-Thomine, #12462].

Al-Ash’ari’s settlement

The settlement came from Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari (d. 935). Armstrong reconstructs the argument as follows:

“The Mutazilites had been so fearful of anthropomorphic notions of God that they denied that the divine had any ‘human’ attributes at all. How could we say that God ‘spoke’ or ‘sat on a throne,’ as the Quran averred? … The ahl al-hadith retorted that this wariness drained the experience of God of all content, and reduced the divine to a philosophical abstraction with no religious significance. Al-Ashari agreed, but appeased the Mutazilites by saying that God’s attributes were not like human qualities. The Quran was God’s uncreated speech, but the human words which expressed it and the ink and paper of the book itself were created.” [Armstrong, #53062]

Armstrong also attributes to al-Ash’ari a radical occasionalism: “There were, in al-Ashari’s view, no natural laws. The world was ordered at every moment by a direct intervention of God. There was no free will … fire burned not because it was its nature to do so, but because God willed it.” She concludes that “Asharism became the predominant philosophy of Sunni Islam,” which was “obviously not a rationalist creed, but more of a mystical and contemplative discipline” [Armstrong, #53062]. Nasr’s notes point to the specialist literature on “Ash’arite atomism and occasionalism” (Pines, Fakhry). They also observe that this atomism “was not new in Islam,” since certain Mutazilites had already developed it [Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present, #83281, ch. 8 notes].

Politics also shaped the institutions. Nasr records that the teaching of falsafa “came to be banned with the rise of Ash’arite power among the Abbasids and Seljuqs, to the extent that in his will and testament for the trust (waqf) of the Nizamiyyah school system, Khwajah Nizam al-Mulk ordered specifically that the teaching of falsafah be banned.” The ban lasted “in most of the Sunni part of the Arab world afterward except for logic” [Nasr, #83281, ch. 2].

The philosophers and Nasr’s ‘land of prophecy’

Armstrong counts falsafa among the Abbasid-era “esoteric movements.” These were elite paths, alongside Shi’i esotericism and Sufism, whose ideas “were kept secret from the masses” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Esoteric Movements”]. In her account, the Faylasufs believed “rationalism was the highest form of religion.” Al-Kindi treated revelation as “parables of abstract philosophical truths” for the masses, “a ‘poor man’s Falsafah’.” Al-Farabi (d. 950) made religion “a branch of political science,” yet “was a practising Sufi.” Ibn Sina (980-1037) “took religion far more seriously,” making the prophet “the ideal philosopher.” Ibn Rushd (1126-98), whom Renan hailed as a free-thinker, was “in fact … a devout Muslim and a qadi” [Armstrong, #53062].

Nasr rejects the Western narrative in which Islamic philosophy ends with Ibn Rushd. He divides the relation between falsafa and kalam into five periods: (1) Mutazilite dominance and early falsafa up to the ninth century; (2) “intense opposition and often enmity” after the rise of Ash’arism; (3) from al-Juwayni and al-Ghazali to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, when kalam itself “became even more ‘philosophical'”; (4) a “more peaceful relationship” from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century; and (5) Mulla Sadra’s “transcendent theosophy” (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah), which in the Shi’i world “began to eclipse kalam” [Nasr, #83281, ch. 3 “Al-Hikmat al-Ilahiyyah and Kalam”]. He argues that Ash’arism “is too often taken in the West as representing Islamic theology as such,” and that the Quran and Sunna on one side, and Sufi gnosis on the other, “were there to show some of the innate shortcomings of the whole Ash’arite approach” [Nasr, #83281, ch. 3]. He quotes Mulla Sadra’s attack on the theologians: “some of the mutakallimun who have no logic or reason … have made opposition to the Sufis their slogan.” From the Kasr asnam al-jahiliyyah he quotes Sadra’s claim that certainty “is not through discussions of kalam and disputations” but “through the acquiring of inner and intuitive knowledge” [Nasr, #83281, ch. 3].

Nasr also reports the long argument between Sufis and philosophers. Rumi wrote in the Mathnawi that “The leg of the syllogisers is a wooden one.” Mir Damad replied: “Thou hast not distinguished between intellect and fantasy.” He thus maintains that falsafa, joined to illumination (Suhrawardi) and gnosis (Ibn Arabi), “remains to this day in Persia and certain adjacent lands as a living intellectual tradition” [Nasr, #83281, ch. 2]. Armstrong’s A History of God treats the same figures in its chapters “The God of the Philosophers” and “The God of the Mystics” [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999, chs. 6-7].

Medicine belonged to the same culture. Nasr notes that the word hakim “denotes at once a physician, scientist, and philosopher,” and that al-Razi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni were all philosopher-scientists [Nasr, #83281, ch. 2]. John Andrew Morrow names “the Sixth and the Eighth Imams” as the most distinguished herbalists of the Prophet’s household. Ja’far al-Sadiq, he writes, “pioneered the principles, rules, and science of medicine, teaching over 4,000 students.” Ali al-Rida is “the attributed author” of The Golden Treatise on Medicine, though Morrow cites Speziale’s view that this attribution is “weak” and that the text was probably compiled by Muhammad ibn Jumhur. Morrow adds that Shi’i herbalists “operated in a more supportive sphere than many Sunni herbalists, who were hampered by the authorities’ attempts to impose control and ‘orthodoxy’.” He records the opposing view as well: Ibn Khaldun said Prophetic medicine was “definitely not part of divine revelation,” and Bürgel called it “quackery piously disguised.” Morrow himself rejects both claims [Morrow, Encyclopedia of Islamic Herbal Medicine, #42235, Introduction, “Early Islamic Herbalists”].

Esoteric readings: Guénon and Vâlsan

The Traditionalist school places all of this inside a scheme of outer and inner. René Guénon takes the image of “the bark and the kernel” (el-qishr wa el-lobb), the title of a treatise by Ibn Arabi, for exoterism (shari’a) and esoterism (haqiqa). The tariqa, the “way,” is the radius that leads from the circumference to the centre [Guénon, Aperçus sur l’ésotérisme islamique et le taoïsme, #68713, chs. I-II]. Guénon insists that Sufism “is not at all something ‘superadded’ to the Islamic doctrine” but “an essential part” of it, without which the doctrine would be “incomplete from above.” He calls theories of a Greek, Persian or Indian origin “gratuitous,” and declares that Sufism “is Arab like the Quran itself.” He also argues that the scholars of the shari’a, ‘ulama ez-zahir, are competent only in the exoteric domain, and that by the numerical value of its letters the word sufi equals El-Hekmah el-ilahiyah, “Divine Wisdom.” He rejects “mysticism” as a Christian, passive category foreign to Islam, against initiation, which he sees as active and transmitted through a silsila [Guénon, #68713, ch. I]. Michel Vâlsan’s L’Islam et la fonction de René Guénon is the Guénonian school’s statement of Guénon’s role in relation to Islam. The library’s copy is a page-image scan with no extractable text, so it can be cited here only as a work of record [Vâlsan, L’Islam et la fonction de René Guénon, #64067].

The Hanbali line to Ibn Taymiyya and Wahhabism

Armstrong describes Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) of Damascus, from “an old family of ulama who belonged to the Hanbali madhhab,” as the archetypal mujaddid (renewer). He declared that the converted Mongols “were in fact infidels and apostates, because they had promulgated the Yasa instead of the Shariah.” He attacked “Shiism, Sufism and Falsafah” as inauthentic. At the same time he demanded ijtihad in place of textbook fiqh: “reactionary,” Armstrong says, “but it was also revolutionary.” He died in prison, and “his funeral became a massive demonstration of popular acclaim” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Mongols”]. She places Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92) “in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyyah” [Armstrong, #53062].

Ghattas draws the same lineage more sharply. Ibn Abdelwahhab “had been inspired by the dogmatic teachings of a literalist, medieval theologian, Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, who belonged to the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, the strictest of the four Islamic schools.” Ibn Taymiyya, she writes, “would be quoted mostly for his edicts allowing war against a Muslim ruler in certain cases” and “would inspire generations of activist and jihadist Salafists who ignored the nuances of his teachings.” Ibn Abdelwahhab “went further still by declaring war against anyone who didn’t follow his teachings,” and “was so extreme that his own father and brother denounced him.” The scholars of al-Zaytuna in Tunis refuted him “one by one.” His pact with Muhammad ibn Saud at Dir’iya joined preaching and raiding [Ghattas, #72495, Part I, ch. 3]. Chapter 8.10 and Part 9 follow that alliance into the modern state.

Key points

• Armstrong presents the Shari’a as a scholarly counter-culture to Abbasid absolutism. Al-Shafi’i’s four roots (Quran, sunna, analogy, consensus) and his isnad requirement gave Sunni law its method [Armstrong, #53062].
• By the tenth century four schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) were mutually recognised. Ghattas records their four prayer stations in the Holy Mosque until the Wahhabi single-imam rule after 1924 [Armstrong, #53062; Ghattas, #72495].
• The mihna was a state-imposed theology. Al-Ma’mun backed the Mutazilite created-Quran doctrine and imprisoned the Hadith People, and Ibn Hanbal became a “folk hero” [Armstrong, #53062].
• Al-Ash’ari’s compromise (an uncreated divine speech in created words and ink, attributes “not like human qualities,” occasionalism) became the Sunni mainstream [Armstrong, #53062].
• Nasr argues that Islamic philosophy did not end with Ibn Rushd but grew into Mulla Sadra’s hikmat muta’aliyah. He criticises the “shortcomings of the whole Ash’arite approach” and records Nizam al-Mulk’s ban on falsafa in the Nizamiyya colleges [Nasr, #83281].
• Philosophy, medicine and the Imams’ teaching belonged to one scholarly culture. Morrow credits Ja’far al-Sadiq and Ali al-Rida as herbalists and records the scholarly disputes over Prophetic medicine [Morrow, #42235].
• Guénon reads tasawwuf as the “kernel” inside the shari’a’s “bark,” Arab in origin and initiatory rather than “mystical” [Guénon, #68713].
• The Hanbali line runs through Ibn Taymiyya, whom Armstrong calls a reformer and Ghattas a “literalist,” to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the Saudi state [Armstrong, #53062; Ghattas, #72495; Wikipedia RO: Școli juridice în islam].