As a cultural movement Islam
rejects the old static view of the universe, and reaches a dynamic
view. As an emotional system of unification it recognizes the worth of
the individual as such, and rejects blood-relationship as a basis of
human unity. Blood-relationship is earth-rootedness. The search for a
purely psycho-logical foundation of human unity becomes possible only
with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin.
Such a perception is creative of fresh loyalties without any
ceremonials to keep them alive, and makes it possible for man to
emancipate himself from the earth. Christianity which had originally
appeared as a monastic order was tried by Constantine as a system of
unification. Its failure to work as such a system drove the Emperor Julian
to return to the old gods of Rome on which he attempted to put
philosophical interpretations. A modern historian of civilization has
thus depicted the state of the civilized world about the time when
Islam appeared on the stage of History:
It seemed then that the great civilization that it had taken four
thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and
that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where
every tribe and sect was against the next, and law and order were
unknown ... The old tribal sanctions had lost their power. Hence the old
imperial methods would no longer operate. The new sanctions created by
Christianity were working division and destruction instead of unity
and order. It was a time fraught with tragedy. Civilization, like a
gigantic tree whose foliage had overarched the world and whose branches
had borne the golden fruits of art and science and literature, stood
tottering, its trunk no longer alive with the flowing sap of devotion
and reverence, but rotted to the core, riven by the storms of war, and
held together only by the cords of ancient customs and laws, that might
snap at any moment. Was there any emotional culture that could be
brought in, to gather mankind once more into unity and to save
civilization? This culture must be something of a new type, for the old
sanctions and ceremonials were dead, and to build up others of the
same kind would be the work of centuries.
The writer then proceeds to tell us that the world
stood in need of a new culture to take the place of the culture of the
throne, and the systems of unification which were based on
blood-relationship. It is amazing, he adds, that such a culture should
have arisen from Arabia just at the time when it was most needed. There
is, however, nothing amazing in the phenomenon. The world-life
intuitively sees its own needs, and at critical moments defines its own
direction. This is what, in the language of religion, we call
prophetic revelation. It is only natural that Islam should have flashed
across the consciousness of a simple people untouched by any of the
ancient cultures, and occupying a geographical position where three
continents meet together. The new culture finds the foundation of
world-unity in the principle of Tawhid.
Islam, as a polity, is only a practical means of making this principle a
living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind. It
demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate
spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s
loyalty to his own ideal nature. The ultimate spiritual basis of all
life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals itself in variety
and change. A society based on such a conception of Reality must
reconcile, in its life, the categories of permanence and change. It
must possess eternal principles to regulate its collective life, for
the eternal gives us a foothold in the world of perpetual change. But
eternal principles when they are understood to exclude all
possibilities of change which, according to the Qur’an, is one of the
greatest “signs” of God, tend to immobilize what is essentially mobile
in its nature. The failure of Europe in political and social sciences
illustrates the former principle, the immobility of Islam during the
last five hundred years illustrates the latter. What then is the
principle of movement in the structure of Islam? This is known as Ijtihād.
The word literally means to exert. In the terminology of Islamic law
it means to exert with a view to form an independent judgement on a
legal question. The idea, I believe, has its origin in a well-known
verse of the Qur’an– “And to those who exert We show Our path.”
We find it more definitely adumbrated in a tradition of the Holy
Prophet. When Ma‘ādh was appointed ruler of Yemen, the Prophet is
reported to have asked him as to how he would decide matters coming up
before him. “I will judge matters according to the Book of God,” said
Ma‘ādh. “But if the Book of God contains nothing to guide you? “Then I
will act on the precedents of the Prophet of God.” “But if the
precedents fail?” “Then I will exert to form my own judgement.”
The student of the history of Islam, however, is well aware that with
the political expansion of Islam systematic legal thought became an
absolute necessity, and our early doctors of law, both of Arabian and
non-Arabian descent, worked ceaselessly until all the accumulated
wealth of legal thought found a final expression in our recognized
schools of Law. These schools of Law recognize three degrees of Ijtihād:
(1) complete authority in legislation which is practically confined to
the founders of the schools, (2) relative authority which is to be
exercised within the limits of a particular school, and (3) special
authority which relates to the determining of the law applicable to a
particular case left undetermined by the founders. In this paper I am concerned with the first degree of Ijtihād only, i.e. complete authority in legislation. The theoretical possibility of this degree of Ijtihād
is admitted by the Sunnīs, but in practice it has always been denied
ever since the establishment of the schools, inasmuch as the idea of
complete Ijtihād is hedged round by conditions which are
well-nigh impossible of realization in a single individual. Such an
attitude seems exceedingly strange in a system of law based mainly on
the groundwork provided by the Qur’an which embodies an essentially
dynamic outlook on life. It is, therefore, necessary, before we proceed
farther, to discover the causes of this intellectual attitude which
has reduced the Law of Islam practically to a state of immobility. Some
European writers think that the stationary character of the Law of
Islam is due to the influence of the Turks. This is an entirely
superficial view, for the legal schools of Islam had been finally
established long before the Turkish influence began to work in the
history of Islam. The real causes are, in my opinion, as follows:
1. We are all familiar with the Rationalist movement which appeared
in the church of Islam during the early days of the Abbasids and the
bitter controversies which it raised. Take for instance the one
important point of controversy between the two camps– the conservative
dogma of the eternity of the Qur’an. The Rationalists denied it because
they thought that this was only another form of the Christian dogma of
the eternity of the Word; on the other hand, the conservative thinkers
whom the later Abbasides, fearing the political implications of
Rationalism, gave their full support, thought that by denying the
eternity of the Qur’an the Rationalists were undermining the very
foundations of Muslim society. Nazzām, for instance, practically rejected the traditions, and openly declared Abū Hurairah to be an untrustworthy reporter.
Thus, partly owing to a misunderstanding of the ultimate motives of
Rationalism, and partly owing to the unrestrained thought of particular
Rationalists, conservative thinkers regarded this movement as a force
of disintegration, and considered it a danger to the stability of Islam
as a social polity.
Their main purpose, therefore, was to preserve the social integrity of
Islam, and to realize this the only course open to them was to utilize
the binding force of Sharī‘ah, and to make the structure of their legal
system as rigorous as possible.
The rise and growth of ascetic Sufism, which gradually developed
under influences of a non-Islamic character, a purely speculative side,
is to a large extent responsible for this attitude. On its purely
religious side Sufism fostered a kind of revolt against the verbal
quibbles of our early doctors. The case of Sufyān Thawrī is an instance
in point. He was one of the acutest legal minds of his time, and was
nearly the founder of a school of law,
but being also intensely spiritual, the dry-as-dust subtleties of
contemporary legists drove him to ascetic Sufism. On its speculative
side which developed later, Sufism is a form of free thought and in
alliance with Rationalism. The emphasis that it laid on the distinction
of zāhir and bātin (Appearance and Reality) created an attitude of indifference to all that applies to Appearance and not to Reality.
This spirit of total other-worldliness in later Sufism obscured men’s
vision of a very important aspect of Islam as a social polity, and,
offering the prospect of unrestrained thought on its speculative side,
it attracted and finally absorbed the best minds in Islam. The Muslim
state was thus left generally in the hands of intellectual
mediocrities, and the unthinking masses of Islam, having no
personalities of a higher calibre to guide them, found their security
only in blindly following the schools.
3. On the top of all this came the destruction of Baghdad– the centre
of Muslim intellectual life– in the middle of the thirteenth century.
This was indeed a great blow, and all the contemporary historians of
the invasion of Tartars describe the havoc of Baghdad with a
half-suppressed pessimism about the future of Islam. For fear of
further disintegration, which is only natural in such a period of
political decay, the conservative thinkers of Islam focused all their
efforts on the one point of preserving a uniform social life for the
people by a jealous exclusion of all innovations in the law of Sharī‘ah
as expounded by the early doctors of Islam. Their leading idea was
social order, and there is no doubt that they were partly right,
because organization does to a certain extent counteract the forces of
decay. But they did not see, and our modern Ulema do not see, that the
ultimate fate of a people does not depend so much on organization as on
the worth and power of individual men. In an over-organized society the
individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole
wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul. Thus a
false reverence for past history and its artificial resurrection
constitute no remedy for a people’s decay. “The verdict of history,” as
a modern writer has happily put it, “is that worn-out ideas have never
risen to power among a people who have worn them out.” The only
effective power, therefore, that counteracts the forces of decay in a
people is the rearing of self-concentrated individuals. Such individuals
alone reveal the depth of life. They disclose new standards in the
light of which we begin to see that our environment is not wholly
inviolable and requires revision. The tendency to over-organization by a
false reverence of the past, as manifested in the legists of Islam in
the thirteenth century and later, was contrary to the inner impulse of
Islam, and consequently invoked the powerful reaction of Ibn Taimīyyah,
one of the most indefatigable writers and preachers of Islam, who was
born in 1263, five years after the destruction of Baghdad.
Ibn Taimiyyah was brought up in Hanbalite tradition. Claiming freedom of Ijtihād
for, himself he rose in revolt against the finality of the schools,
and went back to first principles in order to make a fresh start. Like
Ibn Hazm– the founder of Zahirī school of law– he rejected the Hanafite principle of reasoning by analogy and Ijmā‘ as understood by older legists; for he thought agreement was the basis of all superstition.
And there is no doubt that, considering the moral and intellectual
decrepitude of his times, he was right in doing so. In the sixteenth
century Suyūtī claimed the same privilege of Ijtihād to which he added the idea of a renovator at the beginning of each century.
But the spirit of Ibn Taimīyyah’s teaching found a fuller expression in
a movement of immense potentialities which arose in the eighteenth
century, from the sands of Nejd, described by Macdonald as the
“cleanest spot in the decadent world of Islam.” It is really the first
throb of life in modern Islam. To the inspiration of this movement are
traceable, directly or indirectly, nearly all the great modern
movements of Muslim Asia and Africa, e.g. the Sanūsī movement, the
Pan-Islamic movement,
and the Bābī movement, which is only a Persian reflex of Arabian
Protestantism. The great puritan reformer, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,
who was born in 1700,
studied in Medina, travelled in Persia, and finally succeeded in
spreading the fire of his restless soul throughout the whole world of
Islam. He was similar in spirit to Ghazālī’s disciple, Muhammad Ibn
Tūmart –
the Berber puritan reformer of Islam who appeared amidst the decay of
Muslim Spain, and gave her a fresh inspiration. We are, however, not
concerned with the political career of this movement which was
terminated by the armies of Muhammad ‘Alī Pāshā. The essential thing to
note is the spirit of freedom manifested in it, though inwardly this
movement, too, is conservative in its own fashion. While it rises in
revolt against the finality of the schools, and vigorously asserts the
right of private judgement, its vision of the past is wholly
uncritical, and in matters of law it mainly falls back on the traditions
of the Prophet.
Passing on to Turkey, we find that the idea of Ijtihād,
reinforced and broadened by modern philosophical ideas, has long been
working in the religious and political thought of the Turkish nation.
This is clear from Halim Sabit’s new theory of Muhammadan Law, grounded
on modern sociological concepts. If the renaissance of Islam is a
fact, and I believe it is a fact, we too one day, like the Turks, will
have to re-evaluate our intellectual inheritance. And if we cannot make
any original contribution to the general thought of Islam, we may, by
healthy conservative criticism, serve at least as a check on the rapid
movement of liberalism in the world of Islam.
I now proceed to give you some idea of religio-political thought in Turkey which will indicate to you how the power of Ijtihād
is manifested in recent thought and activity in that country. There
were, a short time ago, two main lines of thought in Turkey represented
by the Nationalist Party and the Party of Religious Reform. The point
of supreme interest with the Nationalist Party is above all the State
and not Religion. With these thinkers religion as such has no
independent function. The state is the essential factor in national
life which determines the character and function of all other factors.
They, therefore, reject old ideas about the function of State and
Religion, and accentuate the separation of Church and State. Now the
structure of Islam as a religio-political system, no doubt, does permit
such a view, though personally I think it is a mistake to suppose that
the idea of state is more dominant and rules all other ideas embodied
in the system of Islam. In Islam the spiritual and the temporal are not
two distinct domains, and the nature of an act, however secular in its
import, is determined by the attitude of mind with which the agent
does it. It is the invisible mental background of the act which
ultimately determines its character.
An act is temporal or profane if it is done in a spirit of detachment
from the infinite complexity of life behind it; it is spiritual if it
is inspired by that complexity. In Islam it is the same reality which
appears as Church looked at from one point of view and State from
another. It is not true to say that Church and State are two sides or
facets of the same thing. Islam is a single unanalysable reality which
is one or the other as your point of view varies. The point is
extremely far-reaching and a full elucidation of it will involve us in a
highly philosophical discussion. Suffice it to say that this ancient
mistake arose out of the bifurcation of the unity of man into two
distinct and separate realities which somehow have a point of contact,
but which are in essence opposed to each other. The truth, however, is
that matter is spirit in space-time reference. The unity called man is
body when you look at it as acting in regard to what we call the
external world; it is mind or soul when you look at it as acting in
regard to the ultimate aim and ideal of such acting. The essence of Tawhid,
as a working idea, is equality, solidarity, and freedom. The state,
from the Islamic standpoint, is an endeavour to transform these ideal
principles into space-time forces, an aspiration to realize them in a
definite human organization. It is in this sense alone that the state
in Islam is a theocracy, not in the sense that it is headed by a
representative of God on earth who can always screen his despotic will
behind his supposed infallibility. The critics of Islam have lost sight
of this important consideration. The Ultimate Reality, according to the
Qur’an, is spiritual, and its life consists in its temporal activity.
The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the
secular. All that is secular is, therefore, sacred in the roots of its
being. The greatest service that modern thought has rendered to Islam,
and as a matter of fact to all religion, consists in its criticism of
what we call material or natural– a criticism which discloses that the
merely material has no substance until we discover it rooted in the
spiritual. There is no such thing as a profane world. All this
immensity of matter constitutes a scope for the self-realization of
spirit. All is holy ground. As the Prophet so beautifully puts it: “The
whole of this earth is a mosque.”
The State, according to Islam, is only an effort to realize the
spiritual in a human organization. But in this sense all state, not
based on mere domination and aiming at the realization of ideal
principles, is theocratic.
The truth is that the Turkish Nationalists assimilated the idea of
the separation of Church and State from the history of European
political ideas. Primitive Christianity was founded, not as a political
or civil unit, but as a monastic order in a profane world, having
nothing to do with civil affairs, and obeying the Roman authority
practically in all matters. The result of this was that when the State
became Christian, State and Church confronted each other as distinct
powers with interminable boundary disputes between them. Such a thing
could never happen in Islam; for Islam was from the very beginning a
civil society, having received from the Qur’an a set of simple legal
principles which, like the twelve tables of the Romans, carried, as
experience subsequently proved, great potentialities of expansion and
development by interpretation. The Nationalist theory of state,
therefore, is misleading inasmuch as it suggests a dualism which does
not exist in Islam.
The Religious Reform Party, on the other hand, led by Sa‘īd Halīm
Pāshā, insisted on the fundamental fact that Islam is a harmony of
idealism and positivism; and, as a unity of the eternal verities of
freedom, equality, and solidarity, has no fatherland. “As there is no
English Mathematics, German Astronomy or French Chemistry,” says the
Grand Vizier, “so there is no Turkish, Arabian, Persian or Indian
Islam. Just as the universal character of scientific truths engenders
varieties of scientific national cultures which in their totality
represent human knowledge, much in the same way the universal character
of Islamic verities creates varieties of national, moral and social
ideals.” Modern culture based as it is on national egoism is, according
to this keen-sighted writer, only another form of barbarism. It is the
result of an over-developed industrialism through which men satisfy
their primitive instincts and inclinations. He, however, deplores that
during the course of history the moral and social ideals of Islam have
been gradually deislamized through the influence of local character,
and pre-Islamic superstitions of Muslim nations. These ideals today are
more Iranian, Turkish, or Arabian than Islamic. The pure brow of the
principle of Tawhid has received more or less an impress of
heathenism, and the universal and impersonal character of the ethical
ideals of Islam has been lost through a process of localization. The
only alternative open to us, then, is to tear off from Islam the hard
crust which has immobilized an essentially dynamic outlook on life, and
to rediscover the original verities of freedom, equality, and
solidarity with a view to rebuild our moral, social, and political
ideals out of their original simplicity and universality. Such are the
views of the Grand Vizier of Turkey. You will see that following a line
of thought more in tune with the spirit of Islam, he reaches
practically the same conclusion as the Nationalist Party, that is to
say, the freedom of Ijtihād with a view to rebuild the laws of Sharī‘ah in the light of modern thought and experience.
Let us now see how the Grand National Assembly has exercised this power of Ijtihād
in regard to the institution of Khilāfat. According to Sunni Law, the
appointment of an Imām or Khalīfah is absolutely indispensable. The
first question that arises in this connexion is this– Should the
Caliphate be vested in a single person? Turkey’s Ijtihād is that
according to the spirit of Islam the Caliphate or Imāmate can be vested
in a body of persons, or an elected Assembly. The religious doctors
of Islam in Egypt and India, as far as I know, have not yet expressed
themselves on this point. Personally, I believe the Turkish view is
perfectly sound. It is hardly necessary to argue this point. The
republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the
spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new
forces that are set free in the world of Islam.
In order to understand the Turkish view let us seek the guidance of
Ibn Khaldūn– the first philosophical historian of Islam. Ibn Khaldūn,
in his famous Prolegomena, mentions three distinct views of the idea of Universal Caliphate in Islam:
(1) That Universal Imamate is a Divine institution, and is
consequently indispensable. (2) That it is merely a matter of
expediency. (3) That there is no need of such an institution. The last
view was taken by the Khawārij.
It seems that modern Turkey has shifted from the first to the second
view, i.e. to the view of the Mu‘tazilah who regarded Universal Imamate
as a matter of expediency only. The Turks argue that in our political
thinking we must be guided by our past political experience which
points unmistakably to the fact that the idea of Universal Imamate has
failed in practice. It was a workable idea when the Empire of Islam was
intact. Since the break-up of this Empire independent political units
have arisen. The idea has ceased to be operative and cannot work as a
living factor in the organization of modern Islam. Far from serving any
useful purpose it has really stood in the way of a reunion of
independent Muslim States. Persia has stood aloof from the Turks in view
of her doctrinal differences regarding the Khilafat; Morocco has
always looked askance at them, and Arabia has cherished private
ambition. And all these rupture in Islam for the sake of a mere symbol
of a power which departed long ago. Why should we not, he can further
argue, learn from experience in our political thinking? Did not Qādī
Abū Bakr Bāqillānī drop the condition of Qarshiyyat in the Khalīfah in
view of the facts of experience, i.e. the political fall of the Quraysh
and their consequent inability to rule the world of Islam? Centuries
ago Ibn Khaldūn, who personally believed in the condition of Qarshīyat
in the Khalīfah, argued much in the same way. Since the power of the
Quraysh, he says, has gone, there is no alternative but to accept the
most powerful man as Imām in the country where he happens to be
powerful. Thus Ibn Khaldūn, realizing the hard logic of facts, suggests
a view which may be regarded as the first dim vision of an
International Islam fairly in sight today. Such is the attitude of the
modern Turk, inspired as he is by the realities of experience, and not
by the scholastic reasoning of jurists who lived and thought under
different conditions of life.
To my mind these arguments, if rightly appreciated, indicate the
birth of an International ideal which, though forming the very essence
of Islam, has been hitherto overshadowed or rather displaced by Arabian
Imperialism of the earlier centuries of Islam. This new ideal is
clearly reflected in the work of the great nationalist poet Ziya whose
songs, inspired by the philosophy of Auguste Comte, have done a great
deal in shaping the present thought of Turkey. I reproduce the
substance of one of his poems from Professor Fischer’s German
translation:
In order to create a really effective political
unity of Islam, all Muslim countries must first become independent: and
then in their totality they should range themselves under one Caliph.
Is such a thing possible at the present moment? If not today, one must
wait. In the meantime the Caliph must reduce his own house to order and
lay the foundations of a workable modern State.
In the International world the weak find no sympathy; power alone deserves respect.
These lines clearly indicate the trend of modern
Islam. For the present every Muslim nation must sink into her own
deeper self, temporarily focus her vision on herself alone, until all
are strong and powerful to form a living family of republics. A true
and living unity, according to the nationalist thinkers, is not so easy
as to be achieved by a merely symbolical overlordship. It is truly
manifested in a multiplicity of free independent units whose racial
rivalries are adjusted and harmonized by the unifying bond of a common
spiritual aspiration. It seems to me that God is slowly bringing home
to us the truth that Islam is neither Nationalism nor Imperialism but a
League of Nations which recognizes artificial boundaries and racial
distinctions for facility of reference only, and not for restricting the social horizon of its members.
From the same poet the following passage from a poem called “Religion
and Science” will throw some further light on the general religious
outlook which is being gradually shaped in the world of Islam today:
“Who were the first spiritual leaders of mankind?
Without doubt the prophets and holy men. In every period religion has
led philosophy; from it alone morality and art receive light. But then
religion grows weak, and loses her original ardour! Holy men disappear,
and spiritual leadership becomes, in name, the heritage of the Doctors
of Law! The leading star of the Doctors of Law is tradition; they drag
religion with force on this track; but philosophy says: “My leading
star is reason: you go right, I go left.”
“Both religion and philosophy claim the soul of man and draw it on either side!”
“When this struggle is going on” pregnant experience delivers up
positive science, and this young leader of thought says, “Tradition is
history and Reason is the method of history! Both interpret and desire
to reach the same indefinable something!”
“But what is this something?”
“Is it a spiritualized heart?”
“Is it a spiritualized heart?”
“If so, then take my last word– Religion is positive science, the purpose of which is to spiritualize the heart of man!”
It is clear from these lines how beautifully the
poet has adopted the Comtian idea of the three stages of man’s
intellectual development, i.e. theological, metaphysical, and
scientific– to the religious outlook of Islam. And the view of religion
embodied in these lines determines the poet’s attitude towards the
position of Arabic in the educational system of Turkey. He says:
The land where the call to prayer resounds in
Turkish; where those who pray understand the meaning of their religion;
the land where the Qur’an is learnt in Turkish; where every man, big
or small, knows full well the command of God; O! Son of Turkey! that
land is thy fatherland!
If the aim of religion is the spiritualization of
the heart, then it must penetrate the soul of man, and it can best
penetrate the inner man, according to the poet, only if its
spiritualizing ideas are clothed in his mother tongue. Most people in
India will condemn this displacement of Arabic by Turkish. For reasons
which will appear later the poet’s Ijtihād is open to grave
objections, but it must be admitted that the reform suggested by him is
not without a parallel in the past history of Islam. We find that when
Muhammad Ibn Tūmart– the Mahdī of Muslim Spain– who was Berber by
nationality, came to power, and established the pontifical rule of the
Muwahhidūn, he ordered for the sake of the illiterate Berbers, that the
Qur’an should be translated and read in the Berber language; that the
call to prayer should be given in Berber; and that all the functionaries of the Church must know the Berber language.
In another passage the poet gives his ideal of womanhood. In his zeal
for the equality of man and woman he wishes to see radical changes in
the family law of Islam as it is understood and practised today:
“There is the woman, my mother, my sister, or my daughter; it is she
who calls up the most sacred emotions from the depths of my life! There
is my beloved, my sun, my moon and my star; it is she who makes me
understand the poetry of life! How could the Holy Law of God regard
these beautiful creatures as despicable beings? Surely there is an
error in the interpretation of the Qur’an by the learned.”
“The foundation of the nation and the state is the family!
As long as the full worth of the woman is not realized, national life remains incomplete.”
“The upbringing of the family must correspond with justice; Therefore
equality is necessary in three things– in divorce, in separation, and
in inheritance.”
“As long as the woman is counted half the man as regards inheritance
and one-fourth of man in matrimony, neither the family nor the country
will be elevated. For other rights we have opened national courts of
justice.”
“The family, on the other hand, we have left in the hands of schools.”
“I do not know why we have left the woman in the lurch?”
“Does she not work for the land? Or, will she turn her needle into a
sharp bayonet to tear off her rights from our hands through a
revolution.”
The truth is that among the Muslim nations of today, Turkey alone has
shaken off its dogmatic slumber, and attained to self-consciousness.
She alone has claimed her right of intellectual freedom; she alone has
passed from the ideal to the real– a transition which entails keen
intellectual and moral struggle. To her the growing complexities of a
mobile and broadening life are sure to bring new situations suggesting
new points of view, and necessitating fresh interpretations of
principles which are only of an academic interest to a people who have
never experienced the joy of spiritual expansion. It is, I think, the
English thinker Hobbes who makes this acute observation that to have a
succession of identical thoughts and feelings is to have no thoughts
and feelings at all. Such is the lot of most Muslim countries today.
They are mechanically repeating old values, whereas the Turk is on the
way to creating new values. He has passed through great experiences
which have revealed his deeper self to him. In him life has begun to
move, change, and amplify, giving birth to new desires, bringing new
difficulties and suggesting new interpretations. The question which
confronts him today, and which is likely to confront other Muslim
countries in the near future is whether the Law of Islam is capable of
evolution– a question which will require great intellectual effort, and
is sure to be answered in the affirmative, provided the world of Islam
approaches it in the spirit of ‘Umar– the first critical and
independent mind in Islam who, at the last moments of the Prophet, had
the moral courage to utter these remarkable words: “The Book of God is
sufficient for us.”
We heartily welcome the liberal movement in modern Islam, but it must
also be admitted that the appearance of liberal ideas in Islam
constitutes also the most critical moment in the history of Islam.
Liberalism has a tendency to act as a force of disintegration, and the
race-idea which appears to be working in modern Islam with greater force
than ever may ultimately wipe off the broad human outlook which Muslim
people have imbibed from their religion. Further, our religious and
political reformers in their zeal for liberalism may overstep the
proper limits of reform in the absence of check on their youthful
fervour. We are today passing through a period similar to that of the
Protestant revolution in Europe, and the lesson which the rise and
outcome of Luther’s movement teaches should not be lost on us. A careful
reading of history shows that the Reformation was essentially a
political movement, and the net result of it in Europe was a gradual
displacement of the universal ethics of Christianity by systems of
national ethics.
The result of this tendency we have seen with our own eyes in the Great
European War which, far from bringing any workable synthesis of the
two opposing systems of ethics, has made the European situation still
more intolerable. It is the duty of the leaders of the world of Islam
today to understand the real meaning of what has happened in Europe,
and then to move forward with self-control and a clear insight into the
ultimate aims of Islam as a social polity.
I have given you some idea of the history and working of Ijtihād
in modern Islam. I now proceed to see whether the history and structure
of the Law of Islam indicate the possibility of any fresh
interpretation of its principles. In other words, the question that I
want to raise is– Is the Law of Islam capable of evolution? Horten,
Professor of Semitic Philology at the University of Bonn, raises the
same question in connexion with the Philosophy and Theology of Islam.
Reviewing the work of Muslim thinkers in the sphere of purely religious
thought he points out that the history of Islam may aptly be described
as a gradual interaction, harmony, and mutual deepening of two
distinct forces, i.e. the element of Aryan culture and knowledge on the
one hand, and a Semitic religion on the other. A Muslim has always
adjusted his religious outlook to the elements of culture which he
assimilated from the peoples that surrounded him. From 800 to 1100,
says Horten, not less than one hundred systems of theology appeared in
Islam, a fact which bears ample testimony to the elasticity of Islamic
thought as well as to the ceaseless activity of our early thinkers.
Thus, in view of the revelations of a deeper study of Muslim literature
and thought, this living European Orientalist has been driven to the
following conclusion:
The spirit of Islam is so broad that it is
practically boundless. With the exception of atheistic ideas alone it
has assimilated all the attainable ideas of surrounding peoples, and
given them its own peculiar direction of development.
The assimilative spirit of Islam is even more
manifest in the sphere of law. Says Professor Hurgronje– the Dutch
critic of Islam:
When we read the history of the development of
Mohammedan Law we find that, on the one hand, the doctors of every age,
on the slightest stimulus, condemn one another to the point of mutual
accusations of heresy; and, on the other hand, the very same people,
with greater and greater unity of purpose, try to reconcile the similar
quarrels of their predecessors.
These views of modern European critics of Islam
make it perfectly clear that, with the return of new life, the inner
catholicity of the spirit of Islam is bound to work itself out in spite
of the rigorous conservatism of our doctors. And I have no doubt that a
deeper study of the enormous legal literature of Islam is sure to rid
the modern critic of the superficial opinion that the Law of Islam is
stationary and incapable of development. Unfortunately, the
conservative Muslim public of this country is not yet quite ready for a
critical discussion of Fiqh, which, if undertaken, is likely
to displease most people, and raise sectarian controversies; yet I
venture to offer a few remarks on the point before us.
- In the first place, we should bear in mind that from the earliest times, practically up to the rise of the Abbasids, there was no written law of Islam apart from the Qur’an.
- Secondly, it is worthy of note that from about the middle of the first century up to the beginning of the fourth not less than nineteen schools of law and legal opinion appeared in Islam. This fact alone is sufficient to show how incessantly our early doctors of law worked in order to meet the necessities of a growing civilization. With the expansion of conquest and the consequent widening of the outlook of Islam these early legists had to take a wider view of things, and to study local conditions of life and habits of new peoples that came within the fold of Islam. A careful study of the various schools of legal opinion, in the light of contemporary social and political history, reveals that they gradually passed from the deductive to the inductive attitude in their efforts at interpretation.
- Thirdly, when we study the four accepted sources of Muhammadan Law and the controversies which they invoked, the supposed rigidity of our recognized schools evaporates and the possibility of a further evolution becomes perfectly clear. Let us briefly discuss these sources.
(a) The Qur’an. The primary source of the
Law of Islam is the Qur’an. The Qur’an, however, is not a legal code.
Its main purpose, as I have said before, is to awaken in man the higher
consciousness of his relation with God and the universe. No doubt, the Qur’an does lay down a few general principles and rules of a legal nature, especially relating to the family –
the ultimate basis of social life. But why are these rules made part
of a revelation the ultimate aim of which is man’s higher life? The
answer to this question is furnished by the history of Christianity
which appeared as a powerful reaction against the spirit of legality
manifested in Judaism. By setting up an ideal of other-worldliness it
no doubt did succeed in spiritualizing life, but its individualism
could see no spiritual value in the complexity of human social
relations. “Primitive Christianity”, says Naumann in his Briefe über Religion,
“attached no value to the preservation of the State, law,
organization, production. It simply does not reflect on the conditions
of human society.” And Naumann concludes: “Hence we either dare to aim
at being without a state, and thus throwing ourselves deliberately into
the arms of anarchy, or we decide to possess, alongside of our
religious creed, a political creed as well.”
Thus the Qur’an considers it necessary to unite religion and state,
ethics and politics in a single revelation much in the same way as
Plato does in his Republic.
The important point to note in this connexion, however, is the
dynamic outlook of the Qur’an. I have fully discussed its origin and
history. It is obvious that with such an outlook the Holy Book of Islam
cannot be inimical to the idea of evolution. Only we should not forget
that life is not change, pure and simple. It has within it elements of
conservation also. While enjoying his creative activity, and always
focusing his energies on the discovery of new vistas of life, man has a
feeling of uneasiness in the presence of his own unfoldment. In his
forward movement he cannot help looking back to his past, and faces his
own inward expansion with a certain amount of fear. The spirit of man
in its forward movement is restrained by forces which seem to be
working in the opposite direction. This is only another way of saying
that life moves with the weight of its own past on its back, and that
in any view of social change the value and function of the forces of
conservatism cannot be lost sight of. It is with this organic insight
into the essential teachings of the Qur’an that modern Rationalism
ought to approach our existing institutions. No people can afford to
reject their past entirely, for it is their past that has made their
personal identity. And in a society like Islam the problem of a
revision of old institutions becomes still more delicate, and the
responsibility of the reformer assumes a far more serious aspect. Islam
is non-territorial in its character, and its aim is to furnish a model
for the final combination of humanity by drawing its adherents from a
variety of mutually repellent races, and then transforming this atomic
aggregate into a people possessing a self-consciousness of their own.
This was not an easy task to accomplish. Yet Islam, by means of its
well-conceived institutions, has succeeded to a very great extent in
creating something like a collective will and conscience in this
heterogeneous mass. In the evolution of such a society even the
immutability of socially harmless rules relating to eating and
drinking, purity or impurity, has a life-value of its own, inasmuch as
it tends to give such society a specific inwardness, and further secures
that external and internal uniformity which counteracts the forces of
heterogeneity always latent in a society of a composite character. The
critic of these institutions must, therefore, try to secure, before he
undertakes to handle them, a clear insight into the ultimate
significance of the social experiment embodied in Islam. He must look
at their structure, not from the standpoint of social advantage or
disadvantage to this or that country, but from the point of view of the
larger purpose which is being gradually worked out in the life of
mankind as a whole.
Turning now to the groundwork of legal principles in the Qur’an, it
is perfectly clear that far from leaving no scope for human thought and
legislative activity the intensive breadth of these principles
virtually acts as an awakener of human thought. Our early doctors of
law taking their clue mainly from this groundwork evolved a number of
legal systems; and the student of Muhammadan history knows very well
that nearly half the triumphs of Islam as a social and political power
were due to the legal acuteness of these doctors. “Next to the Romans,”
says von Kremer, “there is no other nation besides the Arabs which
could call its own a system of law so carefully worked out.” But with
all their comprehensiveness these systems are after all individual
interpretations, and as such cannot claim any finality. I know the
Ulema of Islam claim finality for the popular schools of Muhammadan
Law, though they never found it possible to deny the theoretical
possibility of a complete Ijtihād. I have tried to explain the
causes which, in my opinion, determined this attitude of the Ulema;
but since things have changed and the world of Islam is confronted and
affected today by new forces set free by the extraordinary development
of human thought in all its directions, I see no reason why this
attitude should be maintained any longer. Did the founders of our
schools ever claim finality for their reasoning’s and interpretations?
Never. The claim of the present generation of Muslim liberals to
reinterpret the foundational legal principles, in the light of their
own experience and the altered conditions of modern life is, in my
opinion, perfectly justified. The teachings of the Qur’an that life is a
process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation,
guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be
permitted to solve its own problems.
You will, I think, remind me here of the Turkish poet Ziya whom I
quoted a moment ago, and ask whether the equality of man and woman
demanded by him, equality, that is to say, in point of divorce,
separation and inheritance, is possible according to Muhammadan Law. I
do not know whether the awakening of women in Turkey has created demands
which cannot be met with without a fresh interpretation of
foundational principles. In the Punjab, as everybody knows, there have
been cases in which Muslim women wishing to get rid of undesirable
husbands have been driven to apostasy.
Nothing could be more distant from the aims of a missionary religion.
The Law of Islam, says the great Spanish jurist Imām Shātibī in his Al-Muwāfaqāt, aims at protecting five things– Dīn, Nafs, ‘Aql, Māl, and Nasl. Applying this test I venture to ask: “Does the working of the rule relating to apostasy, as laid down in the Hidāya, tend to protect the interests of the Faith in this country?”
In view of the intense conservatism of the Muslims of India, Indian
judges cannot but stick to what are called standard works. The result
is that while the peoples are moving the law remains stationary.
With regard to the Turkish poet’s demand, I am afraid he does not
seem to know much about the family law of Islam. Nor does he seem to
understand the economic significance of the Qur’anic rule of
inheritance. Marriage, according to Muhammadan Law, is a civil contract.
The wife at the time of marriage is at liberty to get the husband’s
power of divorce delegated to her on stated conditions, and thus
secure equality of divorce with her husband. The reform suggested by the
poet relating to the rule of inheritance is based on a
misunderstanding. From the inequality of their legal shares it must not
be supposed that the rule assumes the superiority of males over
females. Such an assumption would be contrary to the spirit of Islam.
The Qur’an says: “And for women are rights over men similar to those for men over women.” (2: 228).
The share of the daughter is determined not by any
inferiority inherent in her, but in view of her economic opportunities,
and the place she occupies in the social structure of which she is a
part and parcel. Further, according to the poet’s own theory of
society, the rule of inheritance must be regarded not as an isolated
factor in the distribution of wealth, but as one factor among others
working together for the same end. While the daughter, according to
Muhammadan Law, is held to be full owner of the property given to her
by both the father and the husband at the time of her marriage; while,
further, she absolutely owns her dower-money which may be prompt or
deferred according to her own choice, and in lieu of which she can hold
possession of the whole of her husband’s property till payment, the
responsibility of maintaining her throughout her life is wholly thrown
on the husband. If you judge the working of the rule of inheritance
from this point of view, you will find that there is no material
difference between the economic position of sons and daughters, and it
is really by this apparent inequality of their legal shares that the
law secures the equality demanded by the Turkish poet. The truth is
that the principles underlying the Qur’anic law of inheritance– this
supremely original branch of Muhammadan Law as von Kremer describes it–
have not yet received from Muslim lawyers the attention they deserve.
Modern society with its bitter class-struggles ought to set us
thinking; and if we study our laws in reference to the impending
revolution in modern economic life, we are likely to discover, in the
foundational principles, hitherto unrevealed aspects which we can work
out with a renewed faith in the wisdom of these principles.
(b) The Hadīth. The second great source of Muhammadan Law is
the traditions of the Holy Prophet. These have been the subject of
great discussion both in ancient and modern times. Among their modern
critics Professor Goldziher has subjected them to a searching
examination in the light of modern canons of historical criticism, and
arrives at the conclusion that they are, on the whole, untrustworthy!
Another European writer, after examining the Muslim methods of
determining the genuineness of a tradition, and pointing out the
theoretical possibilities of error, arrives at the following
conclusion:
It must be said in conclusion that the preceding
considerations represent only theoretical possibilities and that the
question whether and how far these possibilities have become actualities
is largely a matter of how far the actual circumstances offered
inducements for making use of the possibilities. Doubtless, the latter,
relatively speaking, were few and affected only a small proportion of
the entire sunnah. It may therefore be said that . . . for the most part the collections of sunnah considered by the Moslems as canonical are genuine records of the rise and early growth of Islam (Mohammedan Theories of Finance).
For our present purposes, however, we must
distinguish traditions of a purely legal import from those which are of
a non-legal character. With regard to the former, there arises a very
important question as to how far they embody the pre-Islamic usages of
Arabia which were in some cases left intact, and in others modified by
the Prophet. It is difficult to make this discovery, for our early
writers do not always refer to pre-Islamic usages. Nor is it possible
to discover that usages, left intact by express or tacit approval of
the Prophet, were intended to be universal in their application. Shāh
Wall Allāh has a very illuminating discussion on the point. I reproduce
here the substance of his view. The prophetic method of teaching,
according to Shāh Wall Allāh, is that, generally speaking, the law
revealed by a prophet takes especial notice of the habits, ways, and
peculiarities of the people to whom he is specifically sent. The prophet
who aims at all-embracing principles, however, can neither reveal
different principles for different peoples, nor leaves them to work out
their own rules of conduct. His method is to train one particular
people, and to use them as a nucleus for the building up of a universal
Sharī‘ah. In doing so he accentuates the principles underlying the
social life of all mankind, and applies them to concrete cases in the
light of the specific habits of the people immediately before him. The
Sharī‘ah values (Ahkām) resulting from this application (e.g.
rules relating to penalties for crimes) are in a sense specific to that
people; and since their observance is not an end in itself they cannot
be strictly enforced in the case of future generations.
It was perhaps in view of this that Abū Hanīfah, who had a keen insight
into the universal character of Islam, made practically no use of
these traditions. The fact that he introduced the principle of Istihsān,
i.e. juristic preference, which necessitates a careful study of actual
conditions in legal thinking, throws further light on the motives
which determined his attitude towards this source of Muhammadan Law. It
is said that Abū Hanīfah made no use of traditions because there were
no regular collections in his day. In the first place, it is not true
to say that there were no collections in his day, as the collections of
‘Abd al-Mālik and Zuhrī were made not less than thirty years before
the death of Abū Hanīfah. But even if we suppose that these collections
never reached him, or that they did not contain traditions of a legal
import, Abū Hanīfah, like Mālik and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal after him, could
have easily made his own collection if he had deemed such a thing
necessary. On the whole, then, the attitude of Abū Hanīfah towards the
traditions of a purely legal import is to my mind perfectly sound; and
if modern Liberalism considers it safer not to make any indiscriminate
use of them as a source of law, it will be only following one of the
greatest exponents of Muhammadan Law in Sunnī Islam. It is, however,
impossible to deny the fact that the traditionists, by insisting on the
value of the concrete case as against the tendency to abstract
thinking in law, have done the greatest service to the Law of Islam. And
a further intelligent study of the literature of traditions, if used
as indicative of the spirit in which the Prophet himself interpreted
his Revelation, may still be of great help in understanding the
life-value of the legal principles enunciated in the Qur’an. A complete
grasp of their life-value alone can equip us in our endeavour to
reinterpret the foundational principles.
(c) The Ijmā‘. The third source of Muhammadan Law is Ijmā‘
which is, in my opinion, perhaps the most important legal notion in
Islam. It is, however, strange that this important notion, while
invoking great academic discussions in early Islam, remained
practically a mere idea, and rarely assumed the form of a permanent
institution in any Muhammadan country. Possibly its transformation into a
permanent legislative institution was contrary to the political
interests of the kind of absolute monarchy that grew up in Islam
immediately after the fourth Caliph. It was, I think, favourable to the
interest of the Umayyad and the Abbaside Caliphs to leave the power of Ijtihād to individual Mujtahids
rather than encourage the formation of a permanent assembly which
might become too powerful for them. It is, however, extremely
satisfactory to note that the pressure of new world-forces and the
political experience of European nations are impressing on the mind of
modern Islam the value and possibilities of the idea of Ijmā‘.
The growth of republican spirit and the gradual formation of
legislative assemblies in Muslim lands constitute a great step in
advance. The transfer of the power of Ijtihād from individual
representatives of schools to a Muslim legislative assembly which, in
view of the growth of opposing sects, is the only possible form Ijmā‘
can take in modern times, will secure contributions to legal discussion
from laymen who happen to possess a keen insight into affairs. In this
way alone can we stir into activity the dormant spirit of life in our
legal system, and give it an evolutionary outlook. In India, however,
difficulties are likely to arise for it is doubtful whether a
non-Muslim legislative assembly can exercise the power of Ijtihād.
But there are one or two questions which must be raised and answered in regard to Ijmā‘. Can Ijmā‘
repeal the Qur’an? It is unnecessary to raise this question before a
Muslim audience, but I consider it necessary to do so in view of a very
misleading statement by a European critic in a book called Mohammedan Theories of Finance–
published by the Columbia University. The author of this book says,
without citing any authority, that according to some Hanafī and
Mu‘tazilah writers the Ijmā‘ can repeal the Qur’an.
There is not the slightest justification for such a statement in the
legal literature of Islam. Not even a tradition of the Prophet can have
any such effect. It seems to me that the author is misled by the word Naskh in the writings of our early doctors to whom, as Imām Shātibī points out in Al-Muwāfiqāt, vol. iii, p. 65, this word, when used in discussions relating to the Ijmā‘
of the companions, meant only the power to extend or limit the
application of a Qur’anic rule of law, and not the power to repeal or
supersede it by another rule of law. And even in the exercise of this
power the legal theory, as Āmidī– a Shāfi‘ī doctor of law who died
about the middle of the seventh century, and whose work is recently
published in Egypt– tells us, is that the companions must have been in
possession of a Sharī‘ah value (Hukm) entitling them to such a limitation or extension.
But supposing the companions have unanimously decided a certain
point, the further question is whether later generations are bound by
their decision. Shaukānī has fully discussed this point, and cited the
views held by writers belonging to different schools.
I think it is necessary in this connexion to discriminate between a
decision relating to a question of fact and the one relating to a
question of law. In the former case, as for instance, when the question
arose whether the two small Sūrahs known as Mu‘awwidhatān
formed part of the Qur’an or not, and the companion’s unanimously
decided that they did, we are bound by their decision, obviously
because the companions alone were in a position to know the fact. In
the latter case the question is one of interpretation only, and I
venture to think, on the authority of Karkhī, that later generations
are not bound by the decision of the companions. Says Karkhī: “The
Sunnah of the companions is binding in matters which cannot be cleared
up by Qiyās, but it is not so in matters which can be established by Qiyās.”
One more question may be asked as to the legislative activity of a
modern Muslim assembly which must consist, at least for the present,
mostly of men possessing no knowledge of the subtleties of Muhammadan
Law. Such an assembly may make grave mistakes in their interpretation
of law. How can we exclude or at least reduce the possibilities of
erroneous interpretation? The Persian constitution of 1906 provided a
separate ecclesiastical committee of Ulema– “conversant with the affairs
of the world”– having power to supervise the legislative activity of
the Mejliss. This, in my opinion, dangerous arrangement is probably
necessary in view of the Persian constitutional theory. According to
that theory, I believe, the king is a mere custodian of the realm which
really belongs to the Absent Imām. The Ulema, as representatives of the
Imām, consider themselves entitled to supervise the whole life of the
community, though I fail to understand how, in the absence of an
apostolic succession, they establish their claim to represent the Imām.
But whatever may be the Persian constitutional theory, the arrangement
is not free from danger, and may be tried, if at all, only as a
temporary measure in Sunnī countries.
The Ulema should form a vital part of a Muslim legislative assembly
helping and guiding free discussion on questions relating to law. The
only effective remedy for the possibilities of erroneous
interpretations is to reform the present system of legal education in
Muhammadan countries, to extend its sphere, and to combine it with an
intelligent study of modern jurisprudence.
(d) The Qiyās. The fourth basis of Fiqh is Qiyās,
i.e. the use of analogical reasoning in legislation. In view of
different social and agricultural conditions prevailing in the
countries conquered by Islam, the school of Abū Hanīfah seem to have
found, on the whole, little or no guidance from the precedents recorded
in the literature of traditions. The only alternative open to them was
to resort to speculative reason in their interpretations. The
application of Aristotelian logic, however, though suggested by the
discovery of new conditions in Iraq, was likely to prove exceedingly
harmful in the preliminary stages of legal development. The intricate
behaviour of life cannot be subjected to hard and fast rules logically
deducible from certain general notions. Yet, looked at through the
spectacles of Aristotle’s logic, it appears to be a mechanism pure and
simple with no internal principle of movement. Thus, the school of Abū
Hanīfah tended to ignore the creative freedom and arbitrariness of
life, and hoped to build a logically perfect legal system on the lines
of pure reason. The legists of Hijāz, however, true to the practical
genius of their race, raised strong protests against the scholastic
subtleties of the legists of Iraq, and their tendency to imagine unreal
cases which they rightly thought would turn the Law of Islam into a
kind of lifeless mechanism. These bitter controversies among the early
doctors of Islam led to a critical definition of the limitations,
conditions, and correctives of Qiyās which, though originally
appeared as a mere disguise for the Mujtahid’s personal opinion,
eventually became a source of life and movement in the Law of Islam.
The spirit of the acute criticism of Mālik and Shāfi‘ī on Abū
Hanīfah’s principle of Qiyās, as a source of law, constitutes
really an effective Semitic restraint on the Aryan tendency to seize
the abstract in preference to the concrete, to enjoy the idea rather
than the event. This was really a controversy between the advocates of
deductive and inductive methods in legal research. The legists of Iraq
originally emphasized the eternal aspect of the “notion”, while those
of Hijāz laid stress on its temporal aspect. The latter, however, did
not see the full significance of their own position, and their
instinctive partiality to the legal tradition of Hijāz narrowed their
vision to the “precedents” that had actually happened in the days of the
Prophet and his companions. No doubt they recognized the value of the
concrete, but at the same time they eternalized it, rarely resorting to
Qiyās based on the study of the concrete as such. Their
criticism of Abū Hanīfah and his school, however, emancipated the
concrete as it were, and brought out the necessity of observing the
actual movement and variety of life in the interpretation of juristic
principles. Thus the school of Abū Hanīfah which fully assimilated the
results of this controversy is absolutely free in its essential
principle and possesses much greater power of creative adaptation than
any other school of Muhammadan Law. But, contrary to the spirit of his
own school, the modern Hanafī legist has eternalized the
interpretations of the founder or his immediate followers much in the
same way as the early critics of Abū Hanīfah eternalized the decisions
given on concrete cases. Properly understood and applied, the essential
principle of this school, i.e. Qiyās, as Shāfi‘ī rightly says, is only another name for Ijtihād
which, within the limits of the revealed texts, is absolutely free; and
its importance as a principle can be seen from the fact that,
according to most of the doctors, as Qādī Shaukānī tells us, it was
permitted even in the lifetime of the Holy Prophet. The closing of the door of Ijtihād
is pure fiction suggested partly by the crystallization of legal
thought in Islam, and partly by that intellectual laziness which,
especially in the period of spiritual decay, turns great thinkers into
idols. If some of the later doctors have upheld this fiction, modern
Islam is not bound by this voluntary surrender of intellectual
independence. Zarkashī writing in the eighth century of the Hijrah
rightly observes:
If the upholders of this fiction mean that the
previous writers had more facilities, while the later writers had more
difficulties, in their way, it is, nonsense; for it does not require
much understanding to see that ijtihad for later doctors is
easier than for the earlier doctors. Indeed the commentaries on the
Koran and sunnah have been compiled and multiplied to such an extent
that the mujtahid of today has more material for interpretation than he needs.
This brief discussion, I hope, will make it clear to you that neither
in the foundational principles nor in the structure of our systems, as
we find them today, is there anything to justify the present attitude.
Equipped with penetrative thought and fresh experience the world of
Islam should courageously proceed to the work of reconstruction before
them: This work of reconstruction, however, has a far more serious
aspect than mere adjustment to modern conditions of life. The Great
European War bringing in its wake the awakening of Turkey– the element
of stability in the world of Islam– as a French writer has recently
described her, and the new economic experiment tried in the
neighbourhood of Muslim Asia, must open our eyes to the inner meaning
and destiny of Islam.
Humanity needs three things today– a spiritual interpretation of the
universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic
principles of a universal import directing the evolution of human
society on a spiritual basis. Modern Europe has, no doubt, built
idealistic systems on these lines, but experience shows that truth
revealed through pure reason is incapable of bringing that fire of
living conviction which personal revelation alone can bring. This is the
reason why pure thought has so little influenced men, while religion
has always elevated individuals, and transformed whole societies. The
idealism of Europe never became a living factor in her life, and the
result is a perverted ego seeking itself through mutually intolerant
democracies whose sole function is to exploit the poor in the interest
of the rich. Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the
way of man’s ethical advancement. The Muslim, on the other hand, is in
possession of these ultimate ideas on the basis of a revelation,
which, speaking from the inmost depths of life, internalizes its own
apparent externality. With him the spiritual basis of life is a matter
of conviction for which even the least enlightened man among us can
easily lay down his life; and in view of the basic idea of Islam that
there can be no further revelation binding on man, we ought to be
spiritually one of the most emancipated peoples on earth. Early Muslims
emerging out of the spiritual slavery of pre-Islamic Asia were not in a
position to realize the true significance of this basic idea. Let the
Muslim of today appreciate his position, reconstruct his social life
in the light of ultimate principles, and evolve, out of the hitherto
partially revealed purpose of Islam, that spiritual democracy which is
the ultimate aim of Islam.
Lecture VI: The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam
The Qur’an maintains the divine origin of man by affirming that God breathed of His own spirit unto him as in verses 15: 29; 32: 9; and 38: 72.
The Qur’an maintains the divine origin of man by affirming that God breathed of His own spirit unto him as in verses 15: 29; 32: 9; and 38: 72.
Constantine the Great was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. He was
converted to Christianity, it is said, by seeing a luminous cross in
the sky. By his celebrated Edict of Toleration in 313 he raised
Christianity to equality with the public pagan cults in the Empire. For
his attempt at the unification of Christianity, cf. Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, pp. 655-61, and The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1, chapter i.
Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-363), nephew of Constantine,
traditionally known as Julian the Apostate, ruled the Roman Empire from
361 to 363. Studying in Athens in 355, he frequented pagan
Neoplatonist circles. As emperor, he at once proclaimed himself a
pagan, restored fiefdom of worship for pagans and began a campaign
against the orthodox church. Cf. Alice Gardner, Julian and the Last Struggle of Paganism against Christianity, and Will Durant, The Age of Faith, pp. 10-19.
The principle of Divine Unity is embodied in the Qur’anic proclamation: lā ilāha illa Allāh:
there is no god except God. It is a constant theme of the Qur’an and
is repeatedly mentioned as the basic principle not only of Islam but of
every religion revealed by God.
Reference is to the Qur’anic verse 29: 69. During the course of his
conversation with one of his admirers, Allama Iqbal is reported to have
made the following general observation with reference to this verse:
‘All efforts in the pursuit of sciences and for attainment of
perfections and high goals in life which in one way or other are
beneficial to humanity are man’s exerting in the way of Allah (Malfūzāt-i Iqbāl, ed. and annotated Dr. Abū ’l-Laith Siddīqī, p. 67).
Translating this verse thus: ‘But as for those who strive hard in Our cause– We shall most certainly guide them onto paths that lead unto us’, Muhammad Asad adds in a footnote that the plural ‘paths’ for subul used here is obviously meant to stress the fact– alluded to often in the Qur’an– that there are many paths which lead to a cognizance (ma‘rifah) of God’ (The Message of the Qur’an, p. 616, note 61).
Translating this verse thus: ‘But as for those who strive hard in Our cause– We shall most certainly guide them onto paths that lead unto us’, Muhammad Asad adds in a footnote that the plural ‘paths’ for subul used here is obviously meant to stress the fact– alluded to often in the Qur’an– that there are many paths which lead to a cognizance (ma‘rifah) of God’ (The Message of the Qur’an, p. 616, note 61).
Cf. Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, ‘Aqdiyā’: 11; Tirmidhī, ‘Ahkām’: 3. and Dārimī, Kitāb al-Sunan, I, 60; this hadīth is generally regarded as the very basis of ijtihād in Islam. On the view expressed by certain scholars that this hadīth is to be ranked as al-mursal, cf. ‘Abd al-Qādir, Nazarah ‘Āmmah fī Tārikh al-Fiqh al-Islāmī,
1, 70 and 210, and Sayyid Muhammad Yūsuf Binnorī as quoted by Dr.
Khālid Mas‘ūd, ‘Khutubāt-i Iqbāl men Ijtihād ki Ta‘rīf. Ijtihād kā
Tārīkhī Pas Manzar’, Fikr-o-Nazar, XV/vii-viii (Islamabad, Jan.-Feb. 1978), 50-51. See also Ahmad Hasan (tr.), Sunan Abū Dāwūd, I11, 109, note 3034 based on Shams al-Haqq, ‘Awn al-Ma‘būd li halli Mushkilāt Sunan Abī Dāwūd, III, 331.
These three degrees of legislation in the language of the later jurists of Islam are: ijtihād fi ’l-shar‘, ijtihfid fi ’l-madhhab and ijtihād fi ’l-masā’il; cf. Subhī Mahmasānī, Falsafat al-Tashrī‘ fi ’l-Islām, English trans. F. J. Ziadeh, p. 94, and N. P. Aghnides, Mohammeden Theories of Finance,
pp. 121-22. For somewhat different schemes of gradation of the jurists
(for example the one laid down by the Ottoman scholar and Shaikh
al-Islam Kemāl Pāshazādeh (d. 940/1534) in his Tabaqāt al-Fuqahā’ and minor differences in nomenclature in different schools of law (Hanafis, Shāfi‘ī and others), cf. Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Husn al-Taqādī fī Sīrat al-Imām abī Yūsuf al-Qādī, pp. 24-25.
It is the possibilities anew of the first degree of Ijtihād– complete authority in legislation– that Allama Iqbal proposes to consider in what he calls (and this is to be noted) ‘this paper’ rather than ‘this lecture’ as everywhere else in the present work. This is a manifest reference to a ‘paper on Ijtihād’ that he read on 13 December 1924 at the annual session of Anjuman-i Himāyat-i Islām. Cf. M. Khālid Mas‘ūd, ‘Iqbal’s Lecture on Ijtihād’, Iqbal Review, XIX/iii (October 1978), p. 8. quoting in English the announcement about this Lecture published in the Daily Zamīndār, Lahore, 12 December 1924; and also S. M. Ikram, Modern Muslim India and the Birth of Pakistan, p. 183, note 19 where the worthy author tells us that he ‘was present at this meeting as a young student’.
Among Allama Iqbal’s letters discovered only recently are the four of them addressed to Professor M. Muhammad Shafi‘ of University Oriental College, Lahore (later Chairman: Urdu Encyclopaedia of Islam). These letters dating from 13 March 1924 to 1 May 1924, reproduced with their facsimiles in Dr. Rana M. N. Ehsan Elahie, ‘Iqbal on the Freedom of Ijtihād”, Oriental College Magazine. (Allama Iqbal Centenary Number), LIII (1977), 295-300, throw light, among other things, on the authors and movements that Allama Iqbal thought it was necessary for him to study anew for the writing of what he calls in one of these letters a paper on the ‘Freedom of Ijtihād in Modern Islam’. A few months later when the courts were closed for summer vacation Allama Iqbal in his letter dated 13 August 1924 to M. Sa‘īd al-Dīn Ja‘farī informed him that he was writing an elaborate paper on ‘The Idea of Ijtihād, in the Law of Islam’ (cf. Aurāq-i Gumgashtah, ed. Rahim Bakhsh Shaheen, p. 118). This is the paper which when finally written was read in the above-mentioned session of the Anjuman-i Himāyat-i Islām in December 1924; the present Lecture, it is now generally believed, is a revised and enlarged form of this very paper.
It is the possibilities anew of the first degree of Ijtihād– complete authority in legislation– that Allama Iqbal proposes to consider in what he calls (and this is to be noted) ‘this paper’ rather than ‘this lecture’ as everywhere else in the present work. This is a manifest reference to a ‘paper on Ijtihād’ that he read on 13 December 1924 at the annual session of Anjuman-i Himāyat-i Islām. Cf. M. Khālid Mas‘ūd, ‘Iqbal’s Lecture on Ijtihād’, Iqbal Review, XIX/iii (October 1978), p. 8. quoting in English the announcement about this Lecture published in the Daily Zamīndār, Lahore, 12 December 1924; and also S. M. Ikram, Modern Muslim India and the Birth of Pakistan, p. 183, note 19 where the worthy author tells us that he ‘was present at this meeting as a young student’.
Among Allama Iqbal’s letters discovered only recently are the four of them addressed to Professor M. Muhammad Shafi‘ of University Oriental College, Lahore (later Chairman: Urdu Encyclopaedia of Islam). These letters dating from 13 March 1924 to 1 May 1924, reproduced with their facsimiles in Dr. Rana M. N. Ehsan Elahie, ‘Iqbal on the Freedom of Ijtihād”, Oriental College Magazine. (Allama Iqbal Centenary Number), LIII (1977), 295-300, throw light, among other things, on the authors and movements that Allama Iqbal thought it was necessary for him to study anew for the writing of what he calls in one of these letters a paper on the ‘Freedom of Ijtihād in Modern Islam’. A few months later when the courts were closed for summer vacation Allama Iqbal in his letter dated 13 August 1924 to M. Sa‘īd al-Dīn Ja‘farī informed him that he was writing an elaborate paper on ‘The Idea of Ijtihād, in the Law of Islam’ (cf. Aurāq-i Gumgashtah, ed. Rahim Bakhsh Shaheen, p. 118). This is the paper which when finally written was read in the above-mentioned session of the Anjuman-i Himāyat-i Islām in December 1924; the present Lecture, it is now generally believed, is a revised and enlarged form of this very paper.
Cf. M. Hanīf Nadvī, ‘Mas’alah Khalq-i Qur’an’ in Aqliyāt-i Ibn Taimīyyah (Urdu), pp. 231-53, and A. J. Arberry, Revelation and Reason in Islam, pp. 23-27.
References to this hotly debated issue of the eternity or createdness of the Qur’an are also to be found in Allama Iqbal’s private notes, for example those on the back cover of his own copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, Plate No. 33) or his highly valuable one-page private study notes preserved in Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (cf. Relics of Allama Iqbal: Catalogue, I. 26). It is, however, in one of his greatest poems ‘Iblīs ki Majlis-i Shūra’ (‘Satan’s Parliament’) included in the posthumous Armughān-i Hijāz that one is to find his final verdict on this baseless scholastic controversy:
ہیں کلام اللہ کے الفاظ حادث یا قدیم؟
امّت مرحوم کی ہے کس عقیدے میں نجات
کیا مسلماں کے لیے کافی نہیں اس دور میں
یہ الہٰیات کے ترشے ہوئے لات و منات؟
Are the words of the Qur’an created or untreated?
In which belief does lie the salvation of the ummah?
Are the idols of Lāt and Manāt chiselled by Muslim theology
Not sufficient for the Muslims of today?
References to this hotly debated issue of the eternity or createdness of the Qur’an are also to be found in Allama Iqbal’s private notes, for example those on the back cover of his own copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West (cf. Descriptive Catalogue of Allama Iqbal’s Personal Library, Plate No. 33) or his highly valuable one-page private study notes preserved in Allama Iqbal Museum, Lahore (cf. Relics of Allama Iqbal: Catalogue, I. 26). It is, however, in one of his greatest poems ‘Iblīs ki Majlis-i Shūra’ (‘Satan’s Parliament’) included in the posthumous Armughān-i Hijāz that one is to find his final verdict on this baseless scholastic controversy:
ہیں کلام اللہ کے الفاظ حادث یا قدیم؟
امّت مرحوم کی ہے کس عقیدے میں نجات
کیا مسلماں کے لیے کافی نہیں اس دور میں
یہ الہٰیات کے ترشے ہوئے لات و منات؟
Are the words of the Qur’an created or untreated?
In which belief does lie the salvation of the ummah?
Are the idols of Lāt and Manāt chiselled by Muslim theology
Not sufficient for the Muslims of today?
Cf. Development of Metaphysics in Persia,
p. 54, where it is stated that rationalism ‘tended to disintegrate the
solidarity of the Islamic Church’; also W. M. Watt, ‘The Political
Attitudes of the Mu‘tazilah’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (1962), pp. 38-54.
Cf. Muhammad al-Khudari, Tārikh al-Tashrī‘ al-Islāmī, Urdu trans. ‘Abd al-Salām Nadvī, p. 323; Ibn Qutaibah, Ma‘ārif, p. 217, and J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, p. 242. According to A. J. Arberry, Sufyān al-Thaurī’s school of jurisprudence survived for about two centuries; cf. Muslim Saints and Mystics, p. 129 translator’s prefatory remarks.
On the distinction of zāhir and bātin, see Allama Iqbal’s article “Ilm-i Zāhir wa ‘Ilm-i Bātin” (Anwār-i Iqbāl,
ed. B. A. Dar, pp. 268-77) and also the following passage from Allama
Iqbal’s article captioned as ‘Self in the Light of Relativity’ (Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal,
ed. S. A. Vahid, pp. 113-14): ‘The mystic method has attracted some of
the best minds in the history of man-kind. Probably there is something
in it. But I am inclined to think that it is detrimental to some of
the equally important interests of life, and is prompted by a desire to
escape from the arduous task of the conquest of matter through
intellect. The surest way to realize the potentialities of the world is
to associate with its shifting actualities. I believe that Empirical
Science– association with the visible– is an indispensable stage in the
life of contemplation. In the words of the Qur’an, the Universe that
confronts us is not bātil. It has its uses, and the most
important use of it is that the effort to overcome the obstruction
offered by it sharpens our insight and prepares us for an insertion
into what lies below the surface of phenomena.
The founder of Zāhirī school of law was Dāwūd b. ‘Alī b. Khalaf (c.
200-270/c. 815-884) who flourished in Baghdad; Ibn Hazm
(384-456/994-1064) was its founder in Muslim Spain and its most
illustrious representative in Islam. According to Goldziher, Ibn Hazm
was the first to apply the principles of the Zāhirite school to
dogmatics (The Zāhiris: Their Doctrine and their History, p. 112); cf. also Goldziher’s articles: ‘Dāwūd B. ‘Alī B. Khalf’ and ‘Ibn Hazm’ in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, V, 406 b and VII, 71 a.
Cf. Serajul Haque, ‘Ibn Taimiyya’s Conception of Analogy and Consensus’, Islamic Culture, XVII (1943), 77-78; Ahmad Hasan, The Doctrine of Ijmā‘ in Islam, pp. 189-92, and H. Laoust, ‘Ibn Taymiyya’, Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), III, 954.
Suyūtī, Husn al-Mūhadarah 1, 183; also ‘Abd al-Muta‘āl al-Sa‘idī, Al-Mujaddidūn fi ’l-Islām, pp. 8-12. Cf. also Allama Iqbal’s ‘Rejoinder to The Light’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal. pp. 167-68) wherein, commenting on the tradition that mujaddids
appear at the head of every century (Abū Dawūd, Malāhim: 1), he
observed that the tradition ‘was probably popularised by Jalāl-ud-Dīn
Suyūti in his own interest and much importance cannot be attached to
it.’
Reference may also be made here to Allama’s letter dated 7 April 1932 addressed to Muhammad Ahsan wherein, among other things, he observes that, according to his firm belief (‘aqīdah), all traditions relating to mujaddidiyat are the product of Persian and non-Arab imagination and they certainly are foreign to the true spirit of the Qur’an (cf. Iqbālnāmah, II, 231).
Reference may also be made here to Allama’s letter dated 7 April 1932 addressed to Muhammad Ahsan wherein, among other things, he observes that, according to his firm belief (‘aqīdah), all traditions relating to mujaddidiyat are the product of Persian and non-Arab imagination and they certainly are foreign to the true spirit of the Qur’an (cf. Iqbālnāmah, II, 231).
For Allama Iqbal’s statements issued from time to time in
clarification of meanings and intentions of pan-Islamic movement or
pan-Islamism see: Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 55-57: Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal. p. 237; Guftār-i Iqbāl,
ed. M. Rafīq Afdal, pp. 177-79 and 226– the earliest of these
statements is contained in Allama’s letter dated 22 August 1910 to
Editor: Paisa Akhbār reproduced in Riaz Hussain, ‘1910 Men Dunyā-i Islam ke Hālāt’ (Political Conditions of the Islamic World in 1910), Iqbal Review, XIX/ii (July 1978), 88-90.
In three of these statements Allama Iqbal has approvingly referred to Professor E. G. Browne’s well-grounded views on ‘Pan-Islamism’, the earliest of which were published (s.v.) in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, ed. F. Kirpatrick (Cambridge, 1904).
It may be added that Allama’s article ‘Political Thought in Islam’, Sociological Review, I (1908), 249-61 (reproduced in Speeches, Writings and Statements, pp. 107-21), was originally a lecture delivered by him in a meeting of the Pan-Islamic Society, London, founded by Abdullah Suhrawardy in 1903– the Society also had its own journal: Pan-Islam. Incidentally, there is a mention of Allama’s six lectures on Islamic subjects in London by his biographers (cf. Abdullah Anwar Beg, The Poet of the East, p. 28, and Dr Abdus Salām Khurshīd, Sarguzasht-i Iqbāl, pp. 60-61) which is supported by Allama’s letter dated 10 February 1908 to Khwājah Hasan Nizāmī, listing the ‘topics’ of four of these lectures as (i) ‘Islamic Mysticism’, (ii) ‘Influence of Muslim Thought on European Civilization’, (iii) ‘Muslim Democracy’, and (iv) ‘Islam and Reason’ (cf. Iqbalnāmah, II, 358). Abdullah Anwar Beg, however, speaks of Allama’s extempore lecture on ‘Certain Aspects of Islam’ under the auspices of the Pan-Islamic Society, which, it is said, was reported verbatim in a number of leading newspapers, the next day (ibid.).
In three of these statements Allama Iqbal has approvingly referred to Professor E. G. Browne’s well-grounded views on ‘Pan-Islamism’, the earliest of which were published (s.v.) in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, ed. F. Kirpatrick (Cambridge, 1904).
It may be added that Allama’s article ‘Political Thought in Islam’, Sociological Review, I (1908), 249-61 (reproduced in Speeches, Writings and Statements, pp. 107-21), was originally a lecture delivered by him in a meeting of the Pan-Islamic Society, London, founded by Abdullah Suhrawardy in 1903– the Society also had its own journal: Pan-Islam. Incidentally, there is a mention of Allama’s six lectures on Islamic subjects in London by his biographers (cf. Abdullah Anwar Beg, The Poet of the East, p. 28, and Dr Abdus Salām Khurshīd, Sarguzasht-i Iqbāl, pp. 60-61) which is supported by Allama’s letter dated 10 February 1908 to Khwājah Hasan Nizāmī, listing the ‘topics’ of four of these lectures as (i) ‘Islamic Mysticism’, (ii) ‘Influence of Muslim Thought on European Civilization’, (iii) ‘Muslim Democracy’, and (iv) ‘Islam and Reason’ (cf. Iqbalnāmah, II, 358). Abdullah Anwar Beg, however, speaks of Allama’s extempore lecture on ‘Certain Aspects of Islam’ under the auspices of the Pan-Islamic Society, which, it is said, was reported verbatim in a number of leading newspapers, the next day (ibid.).
Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb’s date of birth is now more generally given as 1115/1703; cf., however, Khair al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, Al-A‘lām, VII, 138 (note) and A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, II, 1446, in support of placing it in 1111/1700.
It is significant to note that whenever Allama Iqbal thought of modernist movements in Islam, he traced them back to the movement of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb; cf. Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 82 and 93. In his valuable article ‘Islam and Ahmadism’ Allama Iqbal observes: ‘Syed Ahmad Khan in India, Syed Jamal-ud-Din Afghani in Afghanistan and Mufti Alam Jan in Russia. These men were probably inspired by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab who was born in Nejd in 1700, the founder of the so-called Wahabi movement which may fitly be described as the first throb of life in modern Islam’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 190). Again, in his letter dated 7 April 1932 to Muhammad Ahsan, Allama Iqbal, explaining the pre-eminent position of Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī in modern Islam, wrote: ‘The future historian of the Muslims of Egypt, Iran, Turkey and India will first of all mention the name of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Najadi and then of Jamāl al-Din Afghānī’ (cf. Iqbālnāmah, II, 231).
It is significant to note that whenever Allama Iqbal thought of modernist movements in Islam, he traced them back to the movement of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb; cf. Letters and Writings of Iqbal, pp. 82 and 93. In his valuable article ‘Islam and Ahmadism’ Allama Iqbal observes: ‘Syed Ahmad Khan in India, Syed Jamal-ud-Din Afghani in Afghanistan and Mufti Alam Jan in Russia. These men were probably inspired by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab who was born in Nejd in 1700, the founder of the so-called Wahabi movement which may fitly be described as the first throb of life in modern Islam’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 190). Again, in his letter dated 7 April 1932 to Muhammad Ahsan, Allama Iqbal, explaining the pre-eminent position of Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī in modern Islam, wrote: ‘The future historian of the Muslims of Egypt, Iran, Turkey and India will first of all mention the name of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Najadi and then of Jamāl al-Din Afghānī’ (cf. Iqbālnāmah, II, 231).
Cf. article ‘Ibn Tumart’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam (New edition), III, 958-60, also in Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam and R. Le Tourneau, The Al-mohad Movement in North Africa in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, by Index.
This is a clear reference to the well-known saying of the Prophet: innama ’l-a‘mālu bi ’l-nniyyāt,
i.e. ‘Actions shall be judged only by intention’. It is to be noted
that this hadīth of great moral and spiritual import has been quoted by
Bukhārī in seven places and it is with this that he opens his Al-Jāmi‘ al-Sahīh.
For this hadīth worded: al-ardu kulluhā masjidun, see Tirmidhī, ‘Salāt’: 119; Nasā’ī, ‘Ghusl’: 26; ‘Masājid’: 3 and 42; Ibn Mājah, ‘Tahārah’: 90, and Dārimī, Siyar: 28 and ‘Salāt’: 111. This superb saying of the Prophet also found expression in Allama’s verse, viz. Kulliyāt-i Iqbāl (Persian), Rumūz-i Bekhudī; p. 114, v. 3, and Pas Chih Bāyad Kard, p. 817, v. 8:
تا ز بخشش ہاے آں سلطان دیں
مسجد ما شد ہمہ روے زمیں
Through the bounty of the ruler of our faith,
the entire earth became our mosque.
مومناں را گفت آں سلطان دیں
مسجد من ایں ہمہ روے زمیں
The King of the Faith said to the Muslims:
‘The whole earth is my mosque’ (trans. B. A. Dar).
تا ز بخشش ہاے آں سلطان دیں
مسجد ما شد ہمہ روے زمیں
Through the bounty of the ruler of our faith,
the entire earth became our mosque.
مومناں را گفت آں سلطان دیں
مسجد من ایں ہمہ روے زمیں
The King of the Faith said to the Muslims:
‘The whole earth is my mosque’ (trans. B. A. Dar).
For the Khawārij’s view of the Caliphate, see Allama Iqbal’s article ‘Political Thought in Islam’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 119-20); also W. Thomson, ‘Kharijitism and the Kharijites’, Macdonald Presentation Volume, pp. 371-89, and E. Tyan, Institutions du droit public musulman, ii, 546-61.
Cf. F. A Tansel (ed). Ziya Gokalp kulliyati: Surler ve halk masallar. p. 129. On Allama’s translation of the passages from Ziya Gokalp’s kulliyati,
Dr. Annemarie Schimmel observes: ‘Iqbal did not know Turkish, has
studied his (Ziya Gökalp’s) work through the German translation of
August Fischer, and it is of interest to see how he (Iqbal) sometimes
changes or omits some words of the translation when reproducing the
verses in the Lecture’ (Gabriel’s Wing, p. 242).
It may be added that these changes or omissions are perhaps more due to August Fischer’s German translation as given in his Aus der religiosen Reformbewegung in der Turkei (Religious Reform Movement in Turkey) than to Allama. The term ‘esri’, for example, has been used by Ziya Gökalp for ‘secular’ and not for ‘modern’ as Fischer has put it. Again, a line from the original Turkish text is missing in the present passage, but this is so in the German translation.
For this comparative study of the German and English translations of passages from Gokalp’s kiilliyati I am very much indebted to Professor S. Qudratullah Fatimi, formerly Director: Regional Cooperation for Development, Islamabad.
It may be added that these changes or omissions are perhaps more due to August Fischer’s German translation as given in his Aus der religiosen Reformbewegung in der Turkei (Religious Reform Movement in Turkey) than to Allama. The term ‘esri’, for example, has been used by Ziya Gökalp for ‘secular’ and not for ‘modern’ as Fischer has put it. Again, a line from the original Turkish text is missing in the present passage, but this is so in the German translation.
For this comparative study of the German and English translations of passages from Gokalp’s kiilliyati I am very much indebted to Professor S. Qudratullah Fatimi, formerly Director: Regional Cooperation for Development, Islamabad.
Cf. Ziya Gökalp kulliyati,
p. 112. According to the Turkish original, the second sentence in this
passage should more fittingly have begun with ‘in this period’ rather
than with ‘in every period’ as rendered by A. Fischer. Again the next,
i.e. the third sentence, may be said to be not so very close to the
text; yet it is quite faithful to its German version.
Cf. ibid., p. 113; also Uriel Heyd, Foundation of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp,
pp. 102-03, and Allama Iqbal’s statement ‘On the Introduction of
Turkish Prayers by Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha’ published in the Weekly Light (Lahore), 16 February 1932, reproduced in Rahim Baksh Shaheen (ed.), Mementos of Iqbal, pp. 59-60.
On Ibn Tumart’s innovation of introducing the call to prayer in the Berber language, cf. Ibn Abī Zar‘, Raud al-Qirtās, Fr. trans. A. Beaumier, Histoire des souverains du Magreb, p. 250; I. Goldziher, ‘Materalien zur Kenntniss der Almohadenbewegung in Nordafrika’, ZDMG, XLI (1887), 71, and D. B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology,
p. 249. This practice, according to Ahmad b. Khālid al-Salāwī, was
stopped and call to prayer in Arabic restored by official orders in
621/1224; cf. his Al-Istiqsā li Akhbār Duwal al-Maghrib ’l-Aqsā, II, 212.
Cf. Ziya Gökalp külliyati,
p. 133. The word ‘sun’ in the second sentence of this passage stands
for Günum in Turkish which, we are told, could as well be translated as
‘day’; some allowance, however, is to be made for translation of
poetical symbols from one language into another.
Cf. ibid.,
p. 161. It is interesting to note how very close is late Professor H.
A. R. Gibb’s translation of this passage as well as of the one
preceding it (Modern Trends in Islam, pp. 91-92), to that of Allama’s, even though his first reference is to the French version of them in F. Ziyaeddin Fahri’s Ziya Gi Gökalp: sa vie et sa sociologie, p. 240.
Cf. Bukhārī, ‘I‘tisām’: 26; ‘Ilm’: 39; ‘Janā’iz’: 32; ‘Maradā’: 17, and Muslim, ‘Janā’iz’: 23 and ‘Wasīyyah’: 22.
For further elucidation of Allama’s observations on Luther and his
movement here as also in a passage in his ‘Statement on Islam and
Nationalism in Reply to a Statement of Maulana Husain Ahmad’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, p. 254), see his most famous and historical ‘All-India Muslim League Presidential Address of 29 December 1930’, ibid., pp. 4-5. Cf. also the closing passages of the article: ‘Reformation’ in An Encyclopaedia of Religion, ed. Vergilius Farm, p. 642.
This acute observation about the development of legal reasoning in
Islam from the deductive to the inductive attitude in interpretation is
further elaborated by Allama Iqbal on pp. 140-41. It may be worthwile
to critically examine in the light of this observation the attempts
made by some of the wellknown western writers on Islamic law to
analytically trace the historical development of legal theory and
practice in Islam, viz. N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, chapters, 3-5; J. Schacht, Introduction to Islamic Law, chapters, 7-9 and his earlier pioneering work: Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, by General Index especially under ‘Medinese’ and ‘Iraqians’.
Cf. Briefe über Religion, pp. 72 and 81. The passages translated here are as under:
Das Urchristentum legte keinen Wert auf die Erhaltung von Staat Recht, Organization, Produktion. Es denkt einfach nicht über die Bedingungen der Existenz der menschlichen Gesellschaft nach.
Also entweder man wagt es, staatslos sein zu woollen, man wirft sich der Anarchie freiwillig in die Arme, oder man entschliesste sich, neben seinem religio-sen Bekenntnis ein politisches bekenntnis zu haben.
Joseph Friedch Naumann (1860-1919), a passage from whose very widely read Briefe über Religion (‘Letters on Religion’) has been quoted in Lecture III, pp. 64-65, was a German Protestant theologian, socialist politician, political journalist and a champion of Mittel- Europa plan. He was on the founders and the first president of German National Socialist Party (1896) which both in its name and its policy in accordeding great importance to the agricultural and working classes in the dveelopement of the state adumbrated Hitler’s Nazi Party (1920). His Mittel-Europa published in 1915 (English translation by C. M. Meredith in 1916) stirred up considerable discussion during World War I as it revived, under the impulse of Pan-Germanism, the idea of a central Europian confederation including Turkey and the Balkan States under Germany’s cultural and economic control. It also contemplated the expansion of the Berlin-Baghdad railway into a grandiose scheme of empire extending from Antwerp in Belgium to the Persian Gulf.
Except for the year 1912-13, Naumann was the member of Reichstag (German Parliament) from 1907 to 1919. Shortly before his death, he was elected as the leader of Democratic Party. Naumann, known for his wide learning, acumen and personal integrity was very influential with German liberal intellectuals of his day. For the life and works of Naumann, cf. the two articles: ‘Naumann, Friedrich’ and ‘National Socialism, German’ by Theodor Heuss in the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, XI, 310 and .225a; also The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Micropaedia), VIII, 561. For some information given in the above note I am deeply indebted to the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and his younger colleague Mr. Harry Mintjes. Mr. Mintjes took all the trouble to find out what he said was the oldest available edition of Briefe über Religion (Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1916, sixth edition) by making a search for it in all the libraries of Amsterdam. Dr. Jan Slomp was kind enough to mark the passages in Briefe quoted by Allama Iqbal in English and mail these to me for the benefit of all Iqbalian scholars.
Das Urchristentum legte keinen Wert auf die Erhaltung von Staat Recht, Organization, Produktion. Es denkt einfach nicht über die Bedingungen der Existenz der menschlichen Gesellschaft nach.
Also entweder man wagt es, staatslos sein zu woollen, man wirft sich der Anarchie freiwillig in die Arme, oder man entschliesste sich, neben seinem religio-sen Bekenntnis ein politisches bekenntnis zu haben.
Joseph Friedch Naumann (1860-1919), a passage from whose very widely read Briefe über Religion (‘Letters on Religion’) has been quoted in Lecture III, pp. 64-65, was a German Protestant theologian, socialist politician, political journalist and a champion of Mittel- Europa plan. He was on the founders and the first president of German National Socialist Party (1896) which both in its name and its policy in accordeding great importance to the agricultural and working classes in the dveelopement of the state adumbrated Hitler’s Nazi Party (1920). His Mittel-Europa published in 1915 (English translation by C. M. Meredith in 1916) stirred up considerable discussion during World War I as it revived, under the impulse of Pan-Germanism, the idea of a central Europian confederation including Turkey and the Balkan States under Germany’s cultural and economic control. It also contemplated the expansion of the Berlin-Baghdad railway into a grandiose scheme of empire extending from Antwerp in Belgium to the Persian Gulf.
Except for the year 1912-13, Naumann was the member of Reichstag (German Parliament) from 1907 to 1919. Shortly before his death, he was elected as the leader of Democratic Party. Naumann, known for his wide learning, acumen and personal integrity was very influential with German liberal intellectuals of his day. For the life and works of Naumann, cf. the two articles: ‘Naumann, Friedrich’ and ‘National Socialism, German’ by Theodor Heuss in the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences, XI, 310 and .225a; also The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Micropaedia), VIII, 561. For some information given in the above note I am deeply indebted to the Dutch scholar the Reverend Dr. Jan Slomp and his younger colleague Mr. Harry Mintjes. Mr. Mintjes took all the trouble to find out what he said was the oldest available edition of Briefe über Religion (Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1916, sixth edition) by making a search for it in all the libraries of Amsterdam. Dr. Jan Slomp was kind enough to mark the passages in Briefe quoted by Allama Iqbal in English and mail these to me for the benefit of all Iqbalian scholars.
Hence, The Introduction of Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act or Indian Act VIII of 1939. Cf. Maulāna Ashraf ‘Ali Thānawī, Al-Hīlat al-Nājizah lil-Halīlat al-‘Ājizah, p. 99 and Asaf A. A. Fyzee, Outlines of Muhammadan Law, pp. 153-61.
Cf. Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal,
p. 194, where, while making an appraisal of Ataturk’s ‘supposed or
real innovations’, Allama Iqbal observes: ‘The adoption of the Swiss
code with its rule of inheritance is certainly a serious error. . . .
The joy of emancipation from the fetters of a long-standing
priest-craft sometimes derives a people to untried courses of action.
But Turkey as well as the rest of the world of Islam has yet to realize
the hitherto unrevealed economic aspects of the Islamic law of
inheritance which von Kremer describes as the supremely original branch
of Muslim law.’ For some recent accounts of the ‘economic significance
of the Qur’anic rule of inheritance’, cf. M. A. Mannan, Islamic Economics, pp. 176-86 and Shaikh Mahmud Ahmad, Economics of Islam, pp. 154-58.
Cf. I. Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, English trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, Muslim Studies, II, 18f. This is the view held also by some other orientalists such as D. S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of Mohammedanism, pp. 79-89, and H. Lammens, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions,
pp. 65-81. Iqbal did not endorse the views of the early Orientalists
on the issue as transpires from his correspondence and the incomplete
projects that he had visualized to refutation of these views.
This is the closing paragraph of chapter III of Mohammedan Theories of Finance: With an Introduction to Mohammedan Law and a Bibliography
by Nicolas P. Aghnides published by Columbia University (New York) in
1916 as one of its Studies in History, Economics and Public Law. A copy
of this work as reported by Dr. M. ‘Abdullāh Chaghatā’i was sent to
Allama Iqbal by Chaudhry Rahmat ‘Ali Khan (President: American Muslim
Association) from the United States and was presented to him on the
conclusion of the thirty-eighth annual session of Anjuman-i Himāyat-i
Islām (Lahore), i.e. on 31 March 1923 or soon after. Dr. Chaghatāi’s
essay: ‘Khutbāt-i Madrās ka Pas Manzar’ in his Iqbāl kī Suhbat Men
and the section: ‘Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious
Thought in Islam’ with useful notes in Dr. Rafi ‘al-Din Hāshimīs Tasānīf i Iqbāl kā Tahqīqī -o-Tauzīhī Mutāli‘ah
throw light on the immediate impact that Aghnides’s book had on
Allama’s mind. It seems that Aghnides’s book did interest Allama and
did play some part in urging him to seek and study some of the
outstanding works on Usūl al-Fiqh such as those by Āmidī, Shātibī, Shāh
Walī Allāh, Shaukānī, and others. This is evident from a number of
Allama’s letters to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī (Iqbālnāmah, I, 128-36, 160-63) as also from his letters from 13 March 1924 to 1 May 1924 to Professor Maulavī M. Shafi’ (Oriental College Magazine,
LIII (1977), 295-300). It is to be noted that besides a pointed
reference to a highly provocative view of Ijmā‘ alluded to by Aghnides,
three passages from part I of Mohammedan Theories of Finance
are included in the last section of the present Lecture, which in this
way may be said to be next only to the poems of Ziya Gökalp exquisitely
translated from Fischer’s German version of them.
This is remarkable though admittedly a summarized English version of
the following quite significant passage from Shah Walī Allāh’s magnum
opus Hujjat Allah al-Bālighah (I, 118):
و هذا الامام الذی يجمع الامم علی ملة واحدة يحتاج الی اصول اخری غير الاصول المذکورة فيما سبق . منها ان يدعو قوما الی السنة الراشدة و يزکيهم و يصلح شانهم ثم يتخذهم بمنزلة جوارحه فيجاهد اهل الارض و يفرقهم فی الافاق و هو قوله تعالی: (کنتم خير امة اخرجت للناس) و ذلک لان هذا الامام نفسه لا يتاتی منه مجاهدة امم غير محصورة و اذاکان کذلک وجب ان تکون مادة شريعته ما هو بمنزلة المذهب الطبيعی لاهل الاقاليم الصالحة عربهم و عجمهم ثم ما عند قومه من العلم و الارتفاقات و يراعی فيه حالهم اکثر من غيرهم ثم يحمل الناس جميعا علی اتباع تلک الشريعة لانه لا سبيل الی ان يفوض الامر الی ائمة کل عصر اذ لا يحصل منه فائدة التشريع اصلا و الا الی ان ينظر ما عند کل قوم و يمارس کلا منهم فيجعل لکل شريعة اذا لاحاطة بعاداتهم و ما عندهم علی اختلاف بلد انهم و تباين اديانهم کالممتنع و قد عجز جمهور الرواة عن رواية شريعة واحدة فما ظنک بشرائع مختلفة و الاکثر انه لا يکون انقياد الاخرين الا بعد عدد و مدد لا يطول عمر النبی اليها کما وقع فی الشرائع الموجودة الان فان اليهود و النصاری والمسلمين ما امن من اوآئلهم الا جمع ثم اصجوا ظاهرين بعد ذلک فلا احسن و لا ايسر من ان يعتبر فی الشعائر و الحدود و الارتفاقات عادة قومه المبعوث فيهم و لا يضيق کل التضييق علی الاخرين الذين ياتون بعد۔
This is the passage quoted also in Shiblī Nu‘mānī’s Al-Kalām (pp. 114-15), a pointed reference to which is made in Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 22 September 1929 addressed to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī. There are in fact three more letters to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī in September 1929, which all show Allama’s keen interest in and perceptive study of Hujjat Allah al-Bālighah at the time of his final drafting of the present Lecture (cf. Iqbālnāmah, pp. 160-63).
From the study of these letters it appears that Allama Iqbal in his interpretation of at least the above passage from Hujjat Allāh al-Bālighah was much closer to Shiblī Nu‘mānī than to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī.
It is to be noted that Allama Iqbal was always keen to seek and study the works of Shāh Walī Allah, whom he considered to be ‘the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit in him’ (Lecture IV, p. 78). Some of these works have been referred to by titles in Allama’s more than 1200 letters and it is noteworthy that their number exceeds that of the works of any other great Muslim thinker; Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Din Rāzī, Jalāl al-Din Rūmī, Ibn Taimīyyah, Ibn Qayyim, Sadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, or any other. In his letter dated 23 September 1936 to Maulavi Ahmad Ridā Bijnōrī (Iqbālnāmah, II, 241-43), Allama reports that he had not received his copies of Shah Walī Alllah’s Al-Khair al-Kathīr and Tajhiināt supposed to have been dispatched to him through some dealer in Lahore. He also expresses in this letter his keen desire to have the services on suitable terms of some competent Muslim scholar, well versed in Islamic jurisprudence and very well read in the works of Shāh Walī Allāh.
و هذا الامام الذی يجمع الامم علی ملة واحدة يحتاج الی اصول اخری غير الاصول المذکورة فيما سبق . منها ان يدعو قوما الی السنة الراشدة و يزکيهم و يصلح شانهم ثم يتخذهم بمنزلة جوارحه فيجاهد اهل الارض و يفرقهم فی الافاق و هو قوله تعالی: (کنتم خير امة اخرجت للناس) و ذلک لان هذا الامام نفسه لا يتاتی منه مجاهدة امم غير محصورة و اذاکان کذلک وجب ان تکون مادة شريعته ما هو بمنزلة المذهب الطبيعی لاهل الاقاليم الصالحة عربهم و عجمهم ثم ما عند قومه من العلم و الارتفاقات و يراعی فيه حالهم اکثر من غيرهم ثم يحمل الناس جميعا علی اتباع تلک الشريعة لانه لا سبيل الی ان يفوض الامر الی ائمة کل عصر اذ لا يحصل منه فائدة التشريع اصلا و الا الی ان ينظر ما عند کل قوم و يمارس کلا منهم فيجعل لکل شريعة اذا لاحاطة بعاداتهم و ما عندهم علی اختلاف بلد انهم و تباين اديانهم کالممتنع و قد عجز جمهور الرواة عن رواية شريعة واحدة فما ظنک بشرائع مختلفة و الاکثر انه لا يکون انقياد الاخرين الا بعد عدد و مدد لا يطول عمر النبی اليها کما وقع فی الشرائع الموجودة الان فان اليهود و النصاری والمسلمين ما امن من اوآئلهم الا جمع ثم اصجوا ظاهرين بعد ذلک فلا احسن و لا ايسر من ان يعتبر فی الشعائر و الحدود و الارتفاقات عادة قومه المبعوث فيهم و لا يضيق کل التضييق علی الاخرين الذين ياتون بعد۔
This is the passage quoted also in Shiblī Nu‘mānī’s Al-Kalām (pp. 114-15), a pointed reference to which is made in Allama Iqbal’s letter dated 22 September 1929 addressed to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī. There are in fact three more letters to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī in September 1929, which all show Allama’s keen interest in and perceptive study of Hujjat Allah al-Bālighah at the time of his final drafting of the present Lecture (cf. Iqbālnāmah, pp. 160-63).
From the study of these letters it appears that Allama Iqbal in his interpretation of at least the above passage from Hujjat Allāh al-Bālighah was much closer to Shiblī Nu‘mānī than to Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī.
It is to be noted that Allama Iqbal was always keen to seek and study the works of Shāh Walī Allah, whom he considered to be ‘the first Muslim who felt the urge of a new spirit in him’ (Lecture IV, p. 78). Some of these works have been referred to by titles in Allama’s more than 1200 letters and it is noteworthy that their number exceeds that of the works of any other great Muslim thinker; Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Din Rāzī, Jalāl al-Din Rūmī, Ibn Taimīyyah, Ibn Qayyim, Sadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, or any other. In his letter dated 23 September 1936 to Maulavi Ahmad Ridā Bijnōrī (Iqbālnāmah, II, 241-43), Allama reports that he had not received his copies of Shah Walī Alllah’s Al-Khair al-Kathīr and Tajhiināt supposed to have been dispatched to him through some dealer in Lahore. He also expresses in this letter his keen desire to have the services on suitable terms of some competent Muslim scholar, well versed in Islamic jurisprudence and very well read in the works of Shāh Walī Allāh.
Cf. Aghnides, op. cit., p. 91. This is the statement which, according to Dr. ‘Abdullah Chaghatā’ī (op. cit., pp. 300-04) and Dr. Rafi ‘al-Dīn Hāshimī (op. cit.,
pp. 313-14) occasioned Allama Iqbal’s fiqhī discussions with a number
of renowned religious scholars which finally led to his writing a paper
on ijtihād in 1924; the present Lecture is said to be only a developed form of that paper. On the impossible question of Ijmā‘s
repealing the Qur’an, one is to note Allama’s two inquiring letters to
Sayyid Sulaimān Nadvī and more importantly a letter also to Maulānā
Abūl Kalām Azād (Iqbālnāmah, 1, 131-35).
Mu‘awwidhatān
are the last two surahs of the Qur’an, i.e. 113 and 114; they are
called so because they teach man how to seek refuge in God and betake
himself to His protection.
This is summing up of Karkhī’s somewhat longer statement as quoted by Aghnides, op. cit., p. 106; cf. also Sarakhsī, Usūl al-Sarakhsī, II, 105.
For Allama’s views on Persian constitutional theory see his articles: ‘Political Thought in Islam’ and ‘Islam and Ahmadism’, Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 118-19 and 195.
For Allama’s practical guidelines to reform the present system of
legal education in the modern Muslim world especially in the
subcontinent, see his very valuable letter dated 4 June 1925 to
Sahibzadah Aftab Ahmad Khan (Letters of Iqbal, p. 155); also the last paragraph of his Presidential Address at the All-India Muslim Conference on 21 March 1932 (Speeches, Writings and Statements, p. 43).
For Shāfi‘ī’s ‘identification’ of Qiyās and Ijtihād, cf. M. Khadduri, Islamic Jurisprudence: Shāfi‘ī’s Risālah, p. 288 and J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, pp. 127-28.
Cf. Shaukānī, op. cit., p. 199; Āmidī, op. cit. IV, 42 ff; and Mahmasānī, op. cit., Urdu trans. M. A. Ridvī, p. 188.
Cf. Mohammedan Theories of Finance,
p. 125. This is the observation, in fact, of the Shāfi‘ī jurist Badr
al-Din Muhammad b. Bahādur b. ‘Abd Allah al-Zarkashī (d. 794/1392) of
eighth century and not of Sarkashī of tenth century of the Hijrah, as it
got printed in the previous editions of the present work (including
the one by Oxford University Press in 1934). ‘Sarkashī’ is a palpable
misprint for ‘al-Zarkashī; Aghnides in the above-cited work spells it
‘Zarkashi’ but places him in the tenth century of the Hijrah. None of
the Zarkashīs, however, given in the well-known biographical
dictionaries, say, ‘Umar Ridā Kihālah’s fifteen volume Mu‘jam al Mu’allifīn
(V. 181; IX, 121; X, 22, 205, 239 and XI, 273) is reported to have
belonged to tenth century– except, of course, Muhammad b. Ibrāhīm b.
Lulu’ al-Zarkashī mentioned in VIII, 214 who is said to be still living
after 882/1477 or as Al-Ziriklī puts it to have died sometime after
932/ 1526 (op. cit., V, 302); but this Zarkashī, though he may
be said to have made name as an historian of the Muwahhids and the
Hafasids, was no jurist.
It is to be noted that the passage on the future prospects of Ijtihād quoted by Allama Iqbal is only a more significant part of Zarkashī’ s somewhat longer statement which Aghnides gives as under:
If they [i.e. the people entertaining this belief] are thinking of their contemporaries, it is a fact that they have had contemporaries like Al-Qaffāl, Al-Ghazālī, al-Razī, al-Rāfi‘ī, and others, all of whom have been full mujtahids and if they mean by it that their contemporaries are not endowed and blessed by God with the same perfection, intellectual ability and power, or understanding, it is absurd and a sign of crass ignorance; finally, if they mean that the previous writers had more facilities, while the later writers had more difficulties, in their way; it is again nonsense, for it does not require much understanding to see that ijtihād for the later doctors (muta’akhirūn) is easier than for the earlier doctors. Indeed the commentaries on the Koran and the sunnah have been complied and multiplied to such an extent that the mujtahid of today has more material for interpretation than he needs.
This statement on ijtihād which Aghnides ascribes clearly to Zarkhashī, albeit of the tenth century of Hijrah, is in fact, as may be seen, translation of the following passage from Shaukānī’s Irshād al-Fuhūl:
قال قول هٰؤلآء القائلين بخلو العصر عن المجتهد ممّا يقضی منه العجب۔ فانهم ان قالو ذٰلک باعتبار معاصرين لهم فقد عاصر القفال والغزالی والرّازی والرّافعی من الائمة القائمين بعلوم الإجتهاد علی الوفاء الکمال جماعة منهم و من کان له إلمام بعلم التّاريخ والإطّلاع علٰی أحوال علمآء الإسلام فی کل عصرٍ لّا يخفی عليه مثل هٰذا بل قد جآء بعدهم من اهل العلم من جمع الله له من العلوم فوق ما اعتده أهل العلم فی الإجتهاد۔ و ان قالو ذٰلک لا بهٰذا الإعتبار إنّ الله عزّوجل رفع ما تفضّل به علٰی من قبل هٰؤلآء من هٰذه الأئمة من کمال الفهم و قوّة الإدراک والإستعداد للمعارف فهٰذه دعوی من أبطل الباطلات بل هی جهالة من الجهالات۔ و ان کان ذٰلک باعتبار تيسّر العلم لمن قبل هٰؤلاء المنکرين و صعوبته عليهم و علٰی اهل عصورهم فهٰذه ايضًا دعوٰی باطلة فانه لا يخفی علٰی من له أدنی فهم أن الإجتهاد قد يسّره الله للمتاخرين تيسيرًا لم يکن للسّابقين لانّ التفاسير للکتاب العزيز قد دوّنت و صارت فی الکثرة الی حدٍّ لا يمکن حصره والسنة المطهرة قد دوّنت و تکلّم الأمّة علی التّفسير و التّخريج و التّصحيح و التّرجيح بما هو زیادة علٰی ما يحتاج إليه المجتهد۔
From the study of the section of Irshād al-Fuhūl dealing with the ‘possibility of there being a period of time without a mujtahid, it becomes abundantly clear that the views embodies in the above passage are those of the Shāfi‘ījurist Badr al-Dīn Zarkashī of the eight century of Hijrah and not of Sarkashī, nor of Zarkashī of the tenth century. For an account of the life and works of Badr al-Dīn Zarkashī, Cf. Muhammad Abū’l-Fadl al-Rahīm’s ‘Introduction’ to Zarkashī’s well-known, Al-Burhān fi ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān.
It may be added that the Persian translator of the present work Mr. Ahmad Ārām considers ‘Sarkashī’ to be a misprint for ‘Sarakhsī’, i.e. the Hanafī jurist Shams al-A’immah Abū Bakr Muhammad b. Abī Sahl al-Sarakhi, the author of the well-known thirty-volume al-Mabsūt who dies in near about 483/1090; and referring to ‘many errors and flaws’ that have unfortunately crept into the Lahore edition of the present work, he is inclined to think that ‘tenth centruy’ is another misprint for ‘fifth century’ (Cf. Ihyā-i Fikr-i Dīnī dar Islām, pp. 202-03, note)
Ahmad Ārām admittedly takws his clue from a line in Madame Eva Meyero-vitch’s French translation: Reconstruire la pensee religious de I’Islam (p. 192) and perhaps also from the Urdu translation: Tashkīl-I Jadīd Il āhiyāt-I Islāmīyah (p 274) by the late Syed Nadhir Niyāzī who corrects the name (Sarakhsī) but not the date. This is, however, better than the Arabic translator who retains both the misprints without any commects (Cf. ‘Abbās Mahmūd, Tajdīd al-Tafkīr al-Dīnī fi’l Islām, p 206).
It is to be noted that the passage on the future prospects of Ijtihād quoted by Allama Iqbal is only a more significant part of Zarkashī’ s somewhat longer statement which Aghnides gives as under:
If they [i.e. the people entertaining this belief] are thinking of their contemporaries, it is a fact that they have had contemporaries like Al-Qaffāl, Al-Ghazālī, al-Razī, al-Rāfi‘ī, and others, all of whom have been full mujtahids and if they mean by it that their contemporaries are not endowed and blessed by God with the same perfection, intellectual ability and power, or understanding, it is absurd and a sign of crass ignorance; finally, if they mean that the previous writers had more facilities, while the later writers had more difficulties, in their way; it is again nonsense, for it does not require much understanding to see that ijtihād for the later doctors (muta’akhirūn) is easier than for the earlier doctors. Indeed the commentaries on the Koran and the sunnah have been complied and multiplied to such an extent that the mujtahid of today has more material for interpretation than he needs.
This statement on ijtihād which Aghnides ascribes clearly to Zarkhashī, albeit of the tenth century of Hijrah, is in fact, as may be seen, translation of the following passage from Shaukānī’s Irshād al-Fuhūl:
قال قول هٰؤلآء القائلين بخلو العصر عن المجتهد ممّا يقضی منه العجب۔ فانهم ان قالو ذٰلک باعتبار معاصرين لهم فقد عاصر القفال والغزالی والرّازی والرّافعی من الائمة القائمين بعلوم الإجتهاد علی الوفاء الکمال جماعة منهم و من کان له إلمام بعلم التّاريخ والإطّلاع علٰی أحوال علمآء الإسلام فی کل عصرٍ لّا يخفی عليه مثل هٰذا بل قد جآء بعدهم من اهل العلم من جمع الله له من العلوم فوق ما اعتده أهل العلم فی الإجتهاد۔ و ان قالو ذٰلک لا بهٰذا الإعتبار إنّ الله عزّوجل رفع ما تفضّل به علٰی من قبل هٰؤلآء من هٰذه الأئمة من کمال الفهم و قوّة الإدراک والإستعداد للمعارف فهٰذه دعوی من أبطل الباطلات بل هی جهالة من الجهالات۔ و ان کان ذٰلک باعتبار تيسّر العلم لمن قبل هٰؤلاء المنکرين و صعوبته عليهم و علٰی اهل عصورهم فهٰذه ايضًا دعوٰی باطلة فانه لا يخفی علٰی من له أدنی فهم أن الإجتهاد قد يسّره الله للمتاخرين تيسيرًا لم يکن للسّابقين لانّ التفاسير للکتاب العزيز قد دوّنت و صارت فی الکثرة الی حدٍّ لا يمکن حصره والسنة المطهرة قد دوّنت و تکلّم الأمّة علی التّفسير و التّخريج و التّصحيح و التّرجيح بما هو زیادة علٰی ما يحتاج إليه المجتهد۔
From the study of the section of Irshād al-Fuhūl dealing with the ‘possibility of there being a period of time without a mujtahid, it becomes abundantly clear that the views embodies in the above passage are those of the Shāfi‘ījurist Badr al-Dīn Zarkashī of the eight century of Hijrah and not of Sarkashī, nor of Zarkashī of the tenth century. For an account of the life and works of Badr al-Dīn Zarkashī, Cf. Muhammad Abū’l-Fadl al-Rahīm’s ‘Introduction’ to Zarkashī’s well-known, Al-Burhān fi ‘Ulūm al-Qur’ān.
It may be added that the Persian translator of the present work Mr. Ahmad Ārām considers ‘Sarkashī’ to be a misprint for ‘Sarakhsī’, i.e. the Hanafī jurist Shams al-A’immah Abū Bakr Muhammad b. Abī Sahl al-Sarakhi, the author of the well-known thirty-volume al-Mabsūt who dies in near about 483/1090; and referring to ‘many errors and flaws’ that have unfortunately crept into the Lahore edition of the present work, he is inclined to think that ‘tenth centruy’ is another misprint for ‘fifth century’ (Cf. Ihyā-i Fikr-i Dīnī dar Islām, pp. 202-03, note)
Ahmad Ārām admittedly takws his clue from a line in Madame Eva Meyero-vitch’s French translation: Reconstruire la pensee religious de I’Islam (p. 192) and perhaps also from the Urdu translation: Tashkīl-I Jadīd Il āhiyāt-I Islāmīyah (p 274) by the late Syed Nadhir Niyāzī who corrects the name (Sarakhsī) but not the date. This is, however, better than the Arabic translator who retains both the misprints without any commects (Cf. ‘Abbās Mahmūd, Tajdīd al-Tafkīr al-Dīnī fi’l Islām, p 206).
Cf. article ‘Turkey’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, XXII, 606-08. the French writer alluded to by Allama Iqbal is Andre Servier whose work L’Islam et la psychologie da Musulman translated under the intriguing title Islam and the Psyhology of Musulman
by A.S. Moss Blandell (London, 1924) aroused the curiosity of many. It
is in the last chapter of his work dealing with French foreign policy
that Servier makes some observations on Turkey such as the following:
This may profitably be compared with the following passage from
Allama’s famous ‘Statement on Islam and Nationalism in Reply to a
Statement of Maulana Husain Ahmed’: ‘This history of man is an infinite
process of mutual conflicts, sanguine battles and civil wars. In these
circumstances can we have among mankind a constitution, the social life
of which is based upon peace and security? The Quran’s answer is: yes,
provided man takes for his ideal the propagation of the Unity of God
in the thoughts and actions of mankind. The search for such an ideal
and its maintenance is no miracle of political manoeuvring: it is a
peculiar greatness of the Holy Prophet that the self-invented
distinctions and superiority complexes of the nations of the world are
destroyed and there comes into being a community which can be styled ummatan muslimata ’l-lak (a community submissive to Thee, 2: 128) and to whose thoughts and actions the divine dictate shuhadā’a ‘alā al-nās (a community that bears witness to the truth before all mankind, 2: 143) justly applies’ (Speeches, Writings and Statements of Iqbal, pp. 262-63).- ‘The Turks constitute an element of balance…they form a buffer State between Europe and the Asiatic ferment’ (p. 267) (Italics mine.)
- ‘Our interests, therefore, make it our duty to protect them, to maintain them as an element of equilibrium in the Musulman World’ (p. 268). (Italics mine.)
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