A Reader on Classical Islam by Peters F. E.; Peters F. E. E.; Peters F. E

Author:Peters, F. E.; Peters, F. E. E.; Peters, F. E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Quran, the Prophet, and the Law

However the historian might view it, the Quran presented itself as a divine revelation with a direct and explicit connection to those earlier and authentic revelations given to the Jews and the Christians, the Tawra and Injil, as Muhammad called them, and like those earlier Scriptures—there seems to have been some uncertainty about the contents of the Gospels—the Quran was intended to spell out what islam, “submission to the will of God,” signified in terms of concrete human acts. Some small part of the Quranic injunctions is devoted to what might broadly be called ceremonial or liturgical acts: prayer, fasting, and the like. But where specific acts are prescribed or forbidden, most of them have to do with questions of personal status such as the treatment of heirs, women, slaves, and orphans; with the reformation of morals, criminal procedures, and the observance of binding contracts. Muhammad could address these issues as they arose in his small community of believers. We may suppose that there were at least some other prescriptions rendered by him that are not recorded in the Quran and, what is virtually certain, that Muhammad acted as sole judge and arbitrator for the community of Muslims.

There is implicit in all that Muhammad did and preached the notion that there is such a thing as an Islamic “way” (shari‘a), which resembled the Jewish and the Christian “ways” in that it came from God, but which stood in sharp opposition to both the religious paganism and degenerate tribal custom of the contemporary Arabs of the “Era of Ignorance.” But the Islamic “way” was no more explicit and formal than the random precepts of the Quran that defined it, and at Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E., God’s revelation was ended and the Quran had become forever a closed Book. At that very moment, however, the Muslim community, which was endowed with only the most rudimentary religious and secular institutions, was poised at the beginning of an immense military and political expansion that would carry it within a short time from Spain to the Indus.

We possess only the vaguest idea of how the Muslims conducted their legal affairs in the first century after the death of the Prophet. The Caliph was recognized as the chief judge (qadi) of the community, as Muhammad had been, and he delegated this judicial power to others in the provinces of the new Islamic empire. But how the qadis rendered their judgments to other Muslims—Muslim justice applied only to Muslims; Jews and Christians continued under their own juridical traditions—we can only surmise, though it was probably on the basis of local custom, caliphal instruction, their own understanding of the Quran and perhaps an embryonic sense of an Islamic “tradition.”

There were those who found such pragmatic and even secular arrangements in God’s own community unsettling, and out of that dissatisfaction, which was reinforced by political, financial, and tribal disenchantment with the current dynasty of Muslim rulers, there arose in certain traditionist

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