A History of the Muslim World Since 1260 by Vernon O Egger

Author:Vernon O Egger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351724746
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

A Search for First Principles

The Sunni reform movements had their inspiration in the Arabian Peninsula. By the eighteenth century, the madrasas of Zabid, San‘a, Mecca, and Medina were attracting increasing numbers of students from West Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and other regions where Islam had become firmly established by that time. As a result, the scholars who taught in the madrasas were becoming aware of how varied the practice of Islam was in different regions of the world. Once they had become conscious of how differently Muslims lived and worshiped abroad, they began to view the religious practices in their own localities with greater scrutiny. Previously, they had simply shrugged at religious practices in the peninsula that could not be supported by scripture. Now, in the context of the collapse of two of the great Muslim empires and the challenges facing the third, some of the scholars developed the conviction that Islam was in a state of crisis.

What makes their work so remarkable is the boldness and certitude with which they undertook their project. Within a culture that frequently associated religious innovation with heresy, they broke with almost a millennium of tradition regarding the methods for determining Islamic law. In the early tenth century, most Sunni religious scholars had agreed on the use of four sources for determining Islamic law: the Qur’an, hadith, analogy, and consensus. They first searched the Qur’an and hadith to try to find an answer to a problem. Then, if necessary, they used analogies with other cases of jurisprudence in order to arrive at a decision. Finally, when a ruling was supported by a consensus of religious scholars, it was considered to have become part of the Shari‘a.

Eighteenth-century reformers asserted that the use of analogy and consensus had degraded original Islamic principles by integrating non-Islamic practices, and they insisted that the only two acceptable guides for behavior were the Qur’an and hadith. This meant that scholars would have to abandon taqlid (uncritical acceptance of the decisions of previous jurists) and begin to exercise ijtihad. Regardless of just how closed the “gate of ijtihad” had ever been, the reformers were determined to shatter it.

The innovation of the reform-minded scholars in the Arabian madrasas was that they spent less time teaching the texts of jurisprudence—or they abandoned them altogether—and engaged in a close study of the Qur’an and hadith. To appreciate how radical their revision was, it is useful to look again at the typical educational path of a madrasa student. The two major divisions of formal education in the Muslim world were the kuttab and the madrasa. The kuttab was a primary school where young children learned to recite the Qur’an. The actual skills taught in a kuttab varied from region to region and from instructor to instructor. In many regions, memorization of long passages of the Qur’an was the sole objective, and some prodigies committed the entire book to memory after a few years. Since a mastery of classical Arabic was not the objective of the kuttab, students commonly did not understand the meaning of much that they had memorized.

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