is islam easy to understadn or not - jis article

7/25/2019 Is Islam Easy to Understadn or Not - JIS Article

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IS ISLAM EASY TO UNDERSTAND OR NOT?:

SALAFIS, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF

INTERPRETATION AND THE NEEDFOR THE ULEMA

JO N AT HA N A. C. B RO W NUniversity of Johannesburg

INTRODUCTION

Addressing its audience in the north Indian lingua franca of Urdu, theeighteenth-century Ahl-e Hadis manifesto Taqwiyat al-;m:n explainsthat, to comprehend the Quran and Hadith does not require muchlearning, for the Prophet was sent to show the straight path to theunwise.1 In India and Pakistan, this short treatise has been widely readin a variety of circles since it was penned almost two hundred years ago.First distributed in cheap printings and now available online, it remainsone of the most accessible religious texts to lay Muslims in South Asia.2

Written by the famous Indian Muslim scholar Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d(d. 1831), it condemns as heretical activities such as the visitation ofsaints graves. It also challenges directly the station of the ulema, themajority of whom had long defended such practices.

Today, in response to controversial fatwas or the misguided actionsof extremist groups, Muslim ulema and laity alike often blame

insufficiently educated pseudo-scholars for twisting the true teachingsof the Qur8:n and the Prophet. Violence and backwardness, it is held, arethe predictable results of calls like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l, which declare thatthe interpretive tradition of the ulema can be dispensed with and Islamsscriptures interpreted directly. Mainstream Sunni ulema often level this

1 Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d,Taqwiyat al-;m:n(Riyadh: Daftar bar:-yi dav6at vatav6iyat, 2006), 37.

2 Barbara D. Metcalf, TheTaqwiyyat al-iman(Support of the Faith) by Shah

Isma6il al-Shahid in (Metcalf (ed.) Islam in South Asia: In Practice (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2009), 2023.

The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic

Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

Published online 10 December 2014

Journal of Islamic Studies 26:2 (2015) pp. 117144 doi:10.1093/jis/etu081

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accusation at the various stripes of the Salafi3 movement, which Sh:hIsm:6;ls Taqwiyat al-;m:n has done so much to bolster in South Asia.

Yet Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d hailed from the most illustrious family ofDelhi ulema; he was the grandson of no less a figure than the great Sh:h

Wal; All:h (d. 1762). Though his writings are remarkably streamlinedmanifestos, they still often pause to explain the intended meaning(maqB


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interpretive authority and education. On one side of the debate standsthe historical mainstream of Sunni thought, which has claimed that legaland theological interpretation must be channelled within and controlledby institutions of regimented scholarship. On the other side stands the

influential, if minority, strain of Salafism within the Sunni camp, whichargues against the empowerment of institutions and traditions notdirectly rooted in the Qur8:n and the Prophets precedent.

The juxtaposition of the empowerment of the Muslim laity with theinterpretive monopoly of the ulema forms part of the perennial tensionbetween the iconoclastic egalitarianism of Islam on the one hand and therealistic need for expertise in religious affairs and some constraint ontheir interpretation on the other. As we shall see, challenges mountedby Salafi ulema to the interpretive monopoly of their own class have not

been substantively consistent. Nor could they ever be, as they representan irresolvable tension between scriptural egalitarianism and theassertion of interpretive control. This tension has long characterizedthe Islamic discourse tradition, but it has risen to particular saliencein debates between Salafis and mainstream Sunni scholarship.Democratizing calls like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l have served as an importantrhetorical tool in these debates, employed by Salafis in their efforts tochallenge established ritual and legal practices by pushing back againstthe scholarly authority structure that underpins them.

MODERN ANTICLERICALISM IN ISLAMAND ULEMA RESPONSES

Descriptions of Islam often note the lack of a formal Muslim clergy. Theydistinguish the egalitarian ethos of Islam, in which each believer standsequal before God, from other faith traditions in which a clergy serves asan official intermediary between man and God. Even the most cursory

works on Islam, however, duly note the importance of the ulema.Although not ordained in any systematically official capacity, the ulemahave served crucial roles as the guardians of the scriptural sources of theQur8:n and Aad;th, the mandarins of their interpretation, and thedefiners of Islamic law and dogma.

The pre-modern ulema were certainly not monolithic, either acrossgeographical and temporal expanses or even in any one locale at any onetime. Yet the total dominance of Arabic/Islamic religious education, withits ubiquitous madrasas, mosques, Sufi lodges and waqf endowments,

provided an infrastructure that created and maintained a coherentulema class. Jurists might suffer or express angst over the influence of

I S I S L A M E A S Y T O U N D E R ST A N D O R N O T ? 119

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popular preachers in twelfth-century Baghdad or antinomian dervishesin fifteenth-century Cairo, but the construct of the ulema was a stableone, and the classs right and responsibility to interpret Islam for theummaundisputed until the modern period.5

Since the turn of the nineteenth century, the establishment of secularschool systems in the Muslim world, modelled along novel Europeanlines, created a parallel and ultimately hegemonic mould of education.New universities or the reformed curricula of older ones turned out anew person: the lay Muslim intellectual. This figure occupied a spaceoutside of the ranks of the traditionally trained ulema. When lay Muslimintellectuals began addressing topics of religion and law at both thenormative and historical level, they often consciously positioned them-selves against the clerical class.

In an important sense, the engagement of lay Muslim intellectuals withIslamic issues posed an inherent challenge to the ulema. It hinged on theclaim that Islams true message is accessible to Muslims who have notpassed through the ulemas reverend process of religious education. Layintellectuals could still hold deeply committed and conservative visionsof Islam and Muslim society, as in the cases of Sayyid Qu3b and theMuslim Brotherhood of Egypt in the mid to late twentieth century. Butoften even such conservative and activist graduates of the countrysmedical or technical faculties had no patience for the establishment

ulema, whom they viewed (when charitable) as too scholastic or (whenless charitable) as minions of a decadent state. For Islamists of thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries, Islam was blessedly simple,common sense and ripe for personal and social implementation withno need for the ulema.6 These critiques can be found in prescient formin the scathing essays of the Syrian scholar and political activist 6Abdal-RaAm:n al-Kaw:kib; (d. 1902). For him the establishment ulema(al-6ulam:8 al-rasmiyy;n) were a prime cause of the ummas modernweakness, both because of their complicity in a failed socio-political

system and because of the priest-like barrier they had placed betweenMuslims and the guidance of the Qur8:n and Sunna, just like Catholicsprohibited consulting the Gospel and Jews the Torah.7

5 See Jonathan A. C. Brown, Scholars and Charlatans on the Baghdad-Khurasan Circuit from the Ninth to the Eleventh Centuries in Paul M. Cobb(ed.), The Lineaments of Islam(Leiden: Brill, 2012), 8596.

6 See Abdullah Al-Arian, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism inSadats Egypt(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

7 From al-Kaw:kib;s Umm al-qur: and Fab:8i6 al-istibd:d respectively;

MuAammad 6Am:ra, ed., 6Abd al-RaAm:n al-Kaw:kib;: al-A6m:l al-k:mila(Cairo: D:r al-Shur


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In recent decades, however, the ire of many Muslim lay intellectualshas fallen on the ulema more for their perceived backwardness andobscurantism than their political position. Lay thinkers often offerthemselves as the alternative voices of a novel, more liberal interpret-

ation of Islam. Muqtedar Khan, an American Muslim and professorat the University of Delaware, has advocated this democratization ofinterpretation as superior to the traditional approach taken by classic-ally trained ulema. Liberal Muslim lay intellectuals have receivedaccolades in the Western press, as their interpretations of Islamic lawon issues ranging from the Aij:b to jih:d tend to concur with Westerngender and political norms. The role of information technology indisrupting the traditional ulema hierarchy is similarly greeted as apositive development.8

In response to the rise of the lay Muslim intellectual, the ulema haveemphasized their own indispensability.9 They have received supportfrom more traditionally-minded lay intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan andpopular preachers like Moez Masoud and Mustafa Hosni in Egypt. Thelatter two stress their role as preachers, not scholars, and all of thememphasize that what knowledge they possess was acquired at the feetof shaykhs. They very explicitly cede primacy in interpreting Islams

8 See, for example, Emily Wax, The Mufti In the Chat Room: Islamic LegalAdvisers Are Just a Click Away from Ancient Customs, The Washington Post,31 July 1999 (C01); Asra Nomani, Wafa Sultan, Time Magazine World, 30April 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187385,00.html (last accessed 10 October 2011); Distinctions tab at https://www.irshadmanji.com/About-Irshad (last accessed 5 July 2012); The OnlineUmmah, Economist, 18 August 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/21560541 (last accessed 24 August 2012); Tarek El-Ariss, The Making of anExpert: The Case of Irshad Manji, Muslim World, 97/1 (2007): 93110.Interestingly, the late Syrian6:limMuAammad Sa6;d Rama@:n al-B


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teachings to those whom they and their audiences consider truescholars.10

The ulemas most compelling argument for their continued indispens-ability, however, has been the need for guardians to propagate Islams

true teachings and to prevent those vilest of sins in the liberal mind,namely barbaric benightedness and religious extremism. Mainstreamulema have found no better proof of this need than that school ofthought that has been the bete noire of traditionalist Sunni ulema and layintellectuals alike in recent decades, namely the Salafi movement.

SALAFISM AS THE FRUITS OFANTICLERICALISM

In Egypt in 2007, 6Izzat 6A3iyya, the head of the Department ofAad;thstudies at Cairos vaunted al-Azhar University, issued a response to alaymans question concerning how a man and woman who share aworkplace might do so comfortably and in such a way that the womandid not have to wear her headscarf. 6A3iyyas fatw: proposed that theman drink the womans breast milk and thus become her milk-child,a relationship that in Islam is tantamount to a blood relationship. Thewoman would no longer have to wear her headscarf, as the two could no

longer potentially marry. On its face, 6A3iyyas scriptural evidence wasstrong. He had drawn on a Aad;th, found in some of the most respectedAad;th collections of Sunni Islam, in which the Prophet allowed a grownman to suckle from a grown woman so that he might become part of herfamily.11 Not surprisingly, outrage in Egypt and many Western countriescame quickly and furiously.6A3iyya tried to explain the evidence for andreasoning in his fatw:, then withdrew it, but he was quickly sacked.12

10 See Ramadans Biography, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?

article11(last accessed 22 July 2012); Yasmin Moll, Sincerity, Storytelling andIslamic Televangelism in Egypt in Pradip Ninan Thomas and Philip Lee (eds.)Global and Local Televangelism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23.Moez Masoud explained (interview, Cairo, July 2011) that he prefers thecharacterization of d:6iya (one who calls to Islam) to televangelist, the mediacomponent being incidental.

11 4aA;A Muslim: Kit:b al-Ri@:6, b:b ri@:6 al-kab;r. Zaynab bt. Ab; SalamasAad;th in Muslims subchapter notes that 628isha explained that this was a one-time license for the household involved.

12 A prominent Saudi cleric,6Abd al-MuAsin al-6Ubayk:n, later issued the same

fatw:, although he explained that this would be done by drinking it from a cup,not directly from her breast; posted on al-Qa@:y: al-Su6


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Many Egyptian ulema honed in immediately on the cause of such anoutrageous ruling: the Salafi strain in Sunni Islam, to which they claimed6A3iyya subscribed, and which they explained encouraged direct inter-pretation of Islams revealed sources and rejected the obligation of

Muslim scholars to adhere firmly to one of the four madhhabs. Salafischolars, critics accused, based their rulings on literal and uncontextua-lized readings of Aad;ths, the absurd meanings of which would neverhave been recognized as legitimate by properly trained Sunni scholars.13

In the eyes of critics of Salafism, the suckling fatw:was merely the latestexample of the Salafi corruption of Islamic teachings, a corruption thathad yielded the extremist violence of the Wahhabi movement and laterJihadis such as Osama bin Laden on the one hand and medieval stupiditylike the breast feeding fatw: on the other.14 Opponents of Salafism

argued that this is what happens when Muslims venture outside theulema and the scholarly traditions of the established schools of law.Certainly,6A3iyya had relied on an authenticatedAad;th in his ruling, butulema in Egypt and worldwide responded that the interpretive trainingembedded in the madhhabs would have identified such misleadingevidence as an exception that the Prophet had made for one man, onetime. Mainstream Sunni ulema pointed to 6A3iyyas fatw:as an exampleof a Muslim consulting the Qur8:n and Aad;th directly without proper

http://www.news-sa.com/snews/1518------------------qq-----.html (last accessed14 September 2011). See this same site for a lecture given by a prominentEgyptian SalafiAad;th scholar Ab


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training and thus reaching an erroneous conclusion. Just as those nottrained in medicine should not conduct surgery, so not every Muslim canor should derive legal or theological rulings. This was the task of aqualified scholarly class alone.15

To substantiate their accusations, ulema critics of Salafism could pointto the writings of Salafi scholars themselves. They often echo Sh:h Ism:6;lal-Shah;ds claim that to comprehend the Qur8:n and Aad;ths does notrequire much learning, for the Prophet was sent to show the straight pathto the unwise.

IJTIH2D AND TAQLID:PRIMORDIAL SIMPLICITY VERSUS

INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINT

The tension between the drive to institutionalize an interpretive classand the primordial simplicity of Islam is ancient. Historically, it seemstied closely to the recurring debate between the formation of scholarlyinstitutions such as themadhhaband Sufi brotherhoods on the one handand the iconoclastic, proto-Salafi opposition to elaborating institutionalauthority apart from the Qur8:n and Sunna on the other. Its most clearmanifestation has been the enduring debate amongst Muslim scholars

over who can or must engage in taql;d(literally imitation, defined astaking the opinion of another without knowing his proof but, in effect,the adherence to one of the four established Sunni schools of law[madhhabs]), and whether or who can engage in ijtih:d(the derivationof legal or theological rulings directly from the Qur8:n and Sunna).

Already in late Umayyad and early 6Abbasid times Muslim scholarswere describing themselves as the elect (kh:BBa) whose duty it was toguide the Muslim masses (6:mma), often defined as those who do notpractice6ilm.16 The great SunniAad;thcompilations of the ninth century

regularly included a Aad;th warning that Gods manner of deprivingcommunities of6ilmwould be to deprive them of ulema, leaving them to

15 Y


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follow the ignorant.17 Early leading Sunni scholars interpreted theAad;thSeeking knowledge is a requirement for every Muslim as meaning thatno one could undertake an action without seeking out a scholar todetermine its ruling under the Shar;6a.18

The specialization and technicalization of the ulema increased with theSunni embrace of speculative theology (kal:m) and gnostic Sufism(ma6rifaor6irf:n) in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Proposing his ownmap of Islams intellectual history, the influential tenth-century Sufi Ab

is islam easy to understadn or not - jis article

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