THE CANON AND CIVIL CODES
These three principles, then, of catholic unity and its ability to make and abrogate laws, of the liberty of diversity in that unity, and of blind subjection to the past within that diversity, these three principles must be our hope and fear for the Muslim peoples. What that future will be none can tell. The grasp of the dead hand of Islam is close, but its grip at many points has been forced to relax. Very early, as has already been pointed out, the canon law had to give way to the will of the sovereign, and ground once lost it has never regained. Now, in every Muslim country, except perhaps the Wahhabite state in central Arabia, there are two codes of law administered by two separate courts. The one judges by this canon law and has cognizance of what we may call private and family affairs, marriage, divorce, inheritance. Its judges, at whose head in Turkey stands the Shaykh al-Islam, a dignity first created by the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II in 1453, after the capture of Constantinople, also give advice to those who consult them on such personal matters as details of the ritual law, the law of oaths and vows, etc. The other court knows no law except the custom of the country (urf,ada) and the will of theruler, expressed often in what are calledQanuns, statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, besides the codices of canon law, there is an accepted and authoritative corpus of suchQanuns. It is based on theCode Napoléonand administered by courts under the Minister of Justice. This is the nearest approach in Islam to the development by statute, which comes last in Sir Henry Maine’s analysis of the growth of law. The court guided by theseQanunsdecides all matters of public and criminal law, all affairs between man and man. Such is the legal situation throughout the whole Muslim world, from Sulu to the Atlantic and from Africa to China. The canon lawyers, on their side, have never admitted this to be anything but flat usurpation. There have not failed some even who branded as heretics and unbelievers those who took any part in such courts of the world and the devil. They look back to the good old days of the rightly guided Khalifas, when there was but one law in Islam, and forward to the days of the Mahdi when that law will be restored. There, between a dead past and a hopeless future, we may leave them. The real future is not theirs. Law is greater than lawyers, and it works in the end for justice and life.
DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS
Finally, it may be well to notice an important and necessary modification which holds as to the above statement that a Muslim may choose any one of the four schools and may then follow its rules. As might be expected, geographical influences weigh overwhelmingly in this choice. Certain countries are Hanifite or Shafi‘ite; in each, adherents of the othersects are rare. This geographical position may be given roughly as follows: central Asia, northern India, and the Turks everywhere are Hanifite. Lower Egypt, Syria, southern India and the Malay Archipelago are Shafi‘ite. Upper Egypt and North Africa west of Egypt are Malikite. Practically, only the Wahhabites in central Arabia are Hanbalites. Further, the position holds in Islam that the country, as a whole, follows the legal creed of its ruler, just as it follows his religion. It is not onlycuius regio eius religio, butcuius religio eius lex. Again and again, a revolution in the state has driven one legal school from power and installed another. Yet the situation occurs sometimes that a sovereign finds his people divided into two parties, each following a different rite, and he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis belonging to both, and enforcing the decisions of these Qadis. Thus, at Zanzibar, at present, there are eight Ibadite judges and two Shafi‘ite, all appointed by the Sultan and backed by his authority. On the other hand, the Turkish government, ever since it felt itself strong enough, has thrown the full weight of its influence on the Hanifite side. In almost all countries under its rule it appoints Hanifite judges only; valid legal decisions can be pronounced only according to that rite. The private needs of non-Hanifites are met by the appointment of salariedMuftis—givers offatwas, or legal opinions—of the other rites.
IBADITES
In the above sketch there have been of necessity two considerable omissions. The one is of Shi‘ite and the other of Ibadite law. Neither seems of sufficient importance to call for separate treatment.The legal system of the Shi‘ites is derived from that of the so-called Sunnites and differs in details only. We have seen already (p. 38) that the Shi‘ites still have Mujtahids who are not bound to the words of a master, but can give decisions on their own responsibility. These seem to have in their hands the teaching power which strictly belongs only to the Hidden Imam. They thus represent the principle of authority which is the governing conception of the Shi‘a. The Sunnites, on the other hand, have reached the point of recognizing that it is the People of Muhammad as a whole which rules through its agreement. In another point the Shi‘ite conception of authority affects their legal system. They utterly reject the idea of co-ordinate schools of law; to the doctrine of the varying (ikhtilaf) as it is called, and the liberty of diversity which lies in it, they oppose the authority of the Imam. There can be only one truth and there can be no trifling with it even in details. Among the Shi‘ites of the Zaydite sect this was affected also by their philosophical studies and a philosophical doctrine of the unity of truth; but to the Imamites it is an authoritative necessity and not one of thought. Thus on two important points the Shi‘ites lack the possibility of freedom and development which is to be found with the Sunnites. Of the jurisprudence of the Ibadites we know comparatively little. A full examination of Ibaditefiqhwould be of the highest interest, as the separation of its line of descent goes far back behind the formation of any of the orthodox systems and it must have been codified to a greater or less extent by Abd Allah ibn Ibad himself.Its basis appears to be threefold, Qur’an, prophetic usage, agreement—naturally that of the Ibadite community. There is no mention of analogy, and traditions seem to have been used sparingly and critically. Qur’an bore the principal emphasis. See above, (p. 26) for the Ibadite position on the form of the state and on the nature of its headship.
The three principles in the development; first religious questionings; Murji’ites, Kharijites, Qadarites; influence of Christianity; the Umayyads and Abbasids; the Mu‘tazilites; the Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the Qur’an.
The three principles in the development; first religious questionings; Murji’ites, Kharijites, Qadarites; influence of Christianity; the Umayyads and Abbasids; the Mu‘tazilites; the Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the Qur’an.
THE THREE PRINCIPLES
Before entering upon a consideration of the development of the theology of Islam, it will be well to mark clearly the three principles which run continuously through that development, which conditioned it for evil and for good and which are still working in it. In dealing with jurisprudence and with the theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly how false is the current idea that Islam has ceased to grow and has no hope of future development. The organism of Islam, like every other organism, has periods of rest when it appears to have reached acul de sacand to have outlived its life. But after these periods come others of renewed quickening and its vital energy pours itself forth againalter et idem. In the state, we saw how the old realms passed into decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take their places. The despotism by the grace of God offormal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of insurrection and revolution, and the People of Muhammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from time to time, its unquenchable vitality.
In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than through the masses; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take biographical form wherever our knowledge renders that possible.
But whether we have men or naked movements, the begetters of which are names to us or less, three threads are woven distinctly through the web of Muslim religious thought. There is tradition (naql); there is reason (aql); and there is the unveiling of the mystic (kashf). They were in the tissue of Muhammad’s brain and they have been in his church since he died. Now one would be most prominent, now another, according to the thinker of the time; but all were present to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi; reason has become a scholastic handmaid of theology except among the modern Indian Mu‘tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no more accept as Muslims than a Trinitarian of the Westminster confession would give the name of Christian to a Unitarian of the left wing; the inner light of the mystic has assumed many forms, running from plainest pantheism to mere devout ecstasy. But in the church of Muhammad they are all working still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zealots, persecutions and counter-persecutions, has attained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity.Two of the principles we have met already in the students ofhadithand of speculative law. The Hanbalites maintained in theology their devotion to tradition; they fought for centuries all independent thinking which sought to rise above what the fathers had told; they fought even scholastic theology of the strictest type and would be content with nothing but the rehearsal of the old dogmas in the old forms; they fought, too, the mystical life in all its phases. On the other hand, Abu Hanifa was tinged with rationalism and speculation in theology as in law, and his followers have walked in his path. Even the mystical light has been touched in our view of the theory of the state. It has flourished most among the Shi‘ites, who are driven to seek and to find an inner meaning under the plain word of the Qur’an, and whose devotion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission has kept alive the thought of a continuous speaking of God to mankind and of an exalting of mankind into the presence of God. It is for the student, then, to watch and hold fast these three guiding threads.
The development of Muslim theology, like that of jurisprudence, could not begin till after the death of Muhammad. So long as he lived and received infallible revelations in solution of all questions of faith or usage that might come up, it is obvious that no system of theology could be formed or even thought of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even show him setting his face against all discussions of dogma and repeating again and again, in answer to metaphysical and theological questions, the crudeanthropomorphisms of the Qur’an. But these questions and answers are probably forgeries of the later traditional school, shadows of future warfare thrown back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, in the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad’s death, the Muslims were too much occupied with the propagation of their faith to think what that faith exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning spirit in this direction was aroused comparatively late and remained for some time on what might be called a private basis. Individual men had their individual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and when they did were vague and hard to define in their positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names, dates, influences and doctrines are all seen through a haze, and nothing more than an approximation to an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed down of the early questionings and disputings of certainahl-al-ahwa, “people of wandering desires,” a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty and sceptical Arabs; of how they compared Scripture with Scripture and got up theological debates, splitting points and defining issues, to great scandal and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded pious. These were not yet heretics; they were the first investigators and systematizers.
MURJI’ITES
Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their existence can be tolerably conditioned through the historical facts and philosophical necessities of the time. The one is that of the Murji’ites, and the otherof the Qadarites. A Murji’ite is literally “one who defers or postpones,” in this case postpones judgment until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judgment. They arose as a sect during and out of the civil war between the Shi‘ites, the Kharijites and the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Muslims, and most of them claimed that they were the only true Muslims and that the others were unbelievers. This was especially the attitude of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites toward the Umayyads; to them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed and slaughtered the true saints of God. The Murji’ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which they could still support the Umayyads without homologating all their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they held, werede factothe rulers of the Muslim state; fealty had been sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God and the apostleship of the Prophet. Thus, they were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism (shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or condemnation of any sins they might have committed. Sins less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in revolt against them and in breaking the oath of fealty.
Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji’ites, and it was the origin also of the theory of the accomplished fact in the state, of which we have had to take account several times. Thus, between the fanaticalvenerators of the canon law, to whom all the Khalifas, after the first four, were an abomination, and the purely worldly lawyers of the court party, there came a group of pious theologians who taught that the good of the Muslim community required obedience to the ruler of the time, even though his personal unworthiness were plain. As a consequence, success can legitimate anything in the Muslim state.
But with the passing away of the situation which gave rise to Murji’ism, it itself changed from politics to theology. As a political party it had opposed the political puritanism of the Kharijites; it now came to oppose the uncompromising spirit in which these damned all who differed from them even in details and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God over their opponents. It is true that this came natural to Islam. The earlier Muslims seem in general to have been oppressed by a singularly gloomy fatalism. To use modern theological language, they labored under a terrible consciousness of sin. They viewed the world as an evil temptress, seducing men from heavenly things. Their lives were hedged about with sins, great and little, and each deserved the eternal wrath of God. The recollection of their latter end they kept ever before them and the terrors that it would bring, for they felt that no amount of faith in God and His Prophet could save them in the judgment to come. The roots of this run far back. Before the time of Muhammad and at his time there were among the Arab tribes, scattered here and there, many men who felt a profound dissatisfaction with heathenism, its doctrines and religious rites. Theconception of God and the burden of life pressed heavily upon them. They saw men pass away and descend into the grave, and they asked whither they had gone and what had become of them. The thought of this fleeting, transitory life and of the ocean of darkness and mystery that lies around it, drove them away to seek truth in solitude and the deserts. They were calledHanifs—the word is of very doubtful derivation—and Muhammad himself, in the early part of his career, reckoned himself one of them. But we have evidence from heathen Arab poetry that theseHanifswere regarded as much the same as Christian monks, and that the termhanifwas used as a synonym forrahib, monk.
THE WRATH OF GOD IN ISLAM
And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from these solitary hermits, scattered here and there throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry we feel how strong was the impression made on the Arab mind by the gaunt, weird men with their endless watchings and night prayers. Again and again there is allusion to the lamp of the hermit shining through the darkness, and we have pictures of the caravan or of the solitary traveller on the night journey cheered and guided by its glimmer. These Christian hermits and the long deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten tribes—judged and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold—that lie throughout the Syrian waste and along the caravan routes were the two things that most stirred the imagination of Muhammad and went to form his faith. To Muhammad, and to the Semite always, thewhole of life was but a long procession from the great deep to the great deep again. Where are the kings and rulers of the earth? Where are the peoples that were mighty in their day? The hand of God smote them and they are not. There is naught real in the world but God. From Him we are, and unto Him we return. There is nothing for man but to fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes sport of them that trust it.
Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end. To this the later Murji’ites opposed a doctrine of Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they declared, saved, and Faith alone. If the sinner believed in God and His Prophet he would not remain in the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held that the sinner who died unrepentant would remain therein eternally, even though he had confessed Islam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they considered, could not be a believer in the true sense. This is still the Ibadite position, and from it developed one of the most important controversies of Islam as to the precise nature of faith. Some extreme Murji’ites held that faith (iman) was a confession in the heart, private intercourse with God, as opposed to Islam, public confession with the lips. Thus, one could be a believer (mu’min), and outwardly confess Judaism or Christianity; to be a professed Muslim was not necessary. This is like the doctrine of the Imamites, calledtaqiya, that it is allowable in time of stress to dissemble one’s religious views; and it is worth noticing that Jahm ibn Safwan (killed, 131?),one of these extreme Murji’ites, was a Persian proselyte in rebellion against the Arab rule, and of the loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians were no more Muslims than the Anabaptists of Munster had a claim to be Christians. The other wing of the Murji’ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who held that faith (iman) is acknowledgment with the tongue as well as the heart and that works are a necessary supplement. This is little different from the orthodox position which grew up, that persuasion, confession, and works made up faith. When Murji’ism dropped out of existence as a sect it left as its contribution to Islam a distinction between great and little sins (kabiras,saghiras), and the position that even great sins, if not involving polytheism (shirk), would not exclude the believer forever from the Garden.
QADARITES
The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin in a philosophical necessity of the human mind. A perception of the contradiction between man’s consciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, and the absolute rule and predestination of God, on the other, is the usual beginning of the thinking life, both in individuals and in races. It was so in Islam. In theology as in law, Muhammad had been an opportunist pure and simple. On the one hand, his Allah is the absolute Semitic despot who guides aright and leads astray, who seals up the hearts of men and opens them again, who is mighty over all. On the other hand, men are exhorted to repentance, and punishment is threatened against them if they remain hardened in their unbelief. All these phases of a wandering and intensely subjectivemind, which lived only in the perception of the moment, appear in the Qur’an. Muhammad was a poet rather than a theologian; just as he was a prophet rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the Muslims paused in their career of conquest and began to think at all, they thought of this. Naturally, so long as they were fighting in the Path of God, it was the conception of God’s absolute sovereignty which most appealed to them; by it their fates were fixed, and they charged without fear the ranks of the unbelievers. In these earliest times, the fatalistic passages bore most stress and the others were explained away. This helped, at least, to bring it about that the party which in time came to profess the freedom of man’s will, began and ended as an heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never lose sight of the fact that the eventual victory in Islam of the absolute doctrine of God’s eternal decree was the victory of the more fundamental of Muhammad’s conflicting conceptions. The other had been much more a campaigning expedient.
This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have been conditioning, derived its name from their position that a man possessedqadar, or power, over his actions. One of the first of them was a certain Ma‘bad al-Juhani, who paid for his heresy with his life inA.H.80. Historians tell that he with Ata ibn Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to the celebrated ascetic, al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110), and said, “O Abu Sa‘id, those kings shed the blood of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say that their works are by the decree of God.” Tothis al-Hasan replied, “The enemies of God lie.” The story is only important as showing how the times and their changes were widening men’s thoughts. Very soon, now, we come from these drifting tendencies to a formal sect with a formal secession and a fixed name. The Murji’ites and the Qadarites melt from the scene, some of their tenets pass into orthodox Islam; some into the new sect.
ORIGIN OF MU’TAZILITES
The story of its founding again connects with the outstanding figure of al-Hasan al-Basri. He seems to have been the chief centre of the religious life and movements of his time; his pupils appear and his influence shows itself in all the later schools. Someone came to him as he sat among his pupils and asked what his view was between the conflicting Murji’ites and Wa‘idites, the first holding that the committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an unbeliever, was to be accepted as a Muslim and his case left in the hands of God; the other laying more stress upon the threats (wa‘id) in the Book of God and teaching that the committer of a great sin could not be a believer, that he had,ipso facto, abandoned the true faith, must go into the Fire and abide there. Before the master could reply, one of his pupils—some say Amr ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 144), others, Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131)—broke in with the assertion of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither a believer nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle which sat round the master, went to another part of the mosque and began to develop his view to those who gathered round him. The name believer(mu’min), he taught, was a term of praise, and an evil-doer was not worthy of praise, and could not have that name applied to him. But he was not an unbeliever, either, for he assented to the faith. If he, then, died unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire—for there are only two divisions in the next world, heaven and hell—but his torments would be mitigated on account of his faith. The position to which orthodox Islam eventually came was that a believer could commit a great sin. If he did so, and died unrepentant, he went to hell; but after a time would be permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell became for believers a sort of purgatory. On this secession, al-Hasan only said “I‘tazala anna”—He has seceded from us. So the new party was called the Mu‘tazila, the Secession. That, at least, is the story, which may be taken for what it is worth. The fixed facts are the rise at the beginning of the second century after the Hijra of a tolerably definite school of dissenters from the traditional ideas, and their application of reason to the dogmas of the Qur’an.
We have noted already the influence of Christianity on Muhammad through the hermits of the desert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and that asceticism grew and developed into quietism and thence into mysticism. The last step was still in the future, but already at this time there were wandering monks who imitated their Christian brethren in the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were thence called Sufis, fromsuf, wool. It was not long before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of thethree great threads was definitely woven into the fabric of Muslim thought. But that was not the limit of Christian influence. Those anchorites in their caves and huts had little training in the theology of the schools; the dogmas of their faith were of a practical simplicity. But in the development of the Murji’ites and Qadarites it is impossible to mistake the workings of the dialectic refinements of Greek theology as developed in the Byzantine and Syrian schools. It is worth notice, too, that, while the political heresies of the Shi‘ites and Kharijites held sway mostly in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, these more religious heresies seem to have arisen in Syria first and especially at Damascus, the seat of the Umayyads.
INFLUENCE OF JOHN OF DAMASCUS
The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was in many ways a return to pre-Muslim times and to an easy enjoyment of worldly things; it was a rejection of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and name. The fear of the wrath of God had small part with the most of them; sometimes it appeared in the form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Further, as Muslim governments always have done, they sought aid in their task of governing from their non-Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius, the father of Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer under them and that after his death, this John of Damascus himself, the last great doctor of the Greek Church and the man under whose hands its theology assumed final form, became wazir and held that post until he withdrew from the world and turned to the contemplative life. In his writings and in those ofhis pupil, Theodoras Abucara (d.A.D.826), there are polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form of discussions between Christians and Muslims. These represent, there can be little doubt, a characteristic of the time. The close agreement of Murji’ite and Qadarite ideas with those formulated and defended by John of Damascus and by the Greek Church generally can only be so explained. The Murji’ite rejection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the Qadarite doctrine of free-will and responsibility, are to be explained in the same way as we have already explained the presence of sentences in the Muslimfiqhwhich seem to be taken bodily from the Roman codes. In this case, also, we are not to think of the Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek fathers, but as picking up ideas from them in practical intercourse and controversy. The very form of the tract of John of Damascus is significant, “When the Saracen says to you such and such, then you will reply....” This, as a whole, is a subject which calls for investigation, but so far it is clear that the influence of Greek theology on Islam can hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding fact of the enormous emphasis laid by both on the doctrine of the nature of God and His attributes is enough. It may even be conjectured that the harsher views developed by western Muslims, and especially by the theologians of Spain, were due, on the other hand, to Augustinian and Roman influence. It is, to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholastictheology, in the exact sense, but gave almost all its energy to canon law.
INFLUENCES AT BAGHDAD
But there were other influences to come. With the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abbasids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to the basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story of the founding of Baghdad there, in 145, we have already heard. We have seen, too, that the victory of the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the Arabs by the Persians.Græcia captaand the rest came true here; the battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand were avenged; Persian ideas and Persian religion began slowly to work on the faith of Muhammad. At the court of the earliest Abbasids it was fashionable to affect a little free thought. People were becoming enlightened and played with philosophy and science. Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Manichæism, the old heathenism of Harran, Judaism, Christianity—all were in the air and making themselves felt. So long as the adherents and teachers of these took them in a purely academic way, were good subjects and made no trouble, the earlier Abbasids encouraged their efforts, gathered in the scientific harvest, paid well for translations, instruments, and investigations, and generally posed as patrons of progress.
But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn tightly. The victory of the Abbasids had raised high hopes among the Persian nationalists. They had thought that they were rallying to the overthrow of the Arabs, and found, when all was done, that they had got only another Arab dynasty. So revoltshad begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously enough, they were of a marked religious character. They were an expression of religious sects, Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, Manichæan, and parties with prophetic leaders of their own; all are swept together by Muslim writers asZindiqs, probably literally, “initiates,” originally Manichæans, thereafter, practically non-Muslims concealing their unbelief. For when not in open revolt they must needs profess Islam. In 167, we find al-Mahdi, who was also, it is true, much more strict than his father, al-Mansur, appointing a grand inquisitor to deal with such heretics. Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself with crushing actual rebellion; and Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, and heathen of Harran were tolerated so long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek science and philosophy.
That they did willingly, and so, through three intermediaries, science came to the Arabs. There was a heathen Syrian source with its centre at Harran, of which we know comparatively little. There was a Christian Syrian source working from the multitudinous monasteries scattered over the country. There was a Persian source by which natural science, and medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the fifth centuryA.D.an academy of medicine and philosophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzistan. One of the directors of this institution was summoned, in 148, to prescribe for al-Mansur, and from that time on it furnished court physicians to the Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocrates reached the Muslim peoples.
GOLDEN AGE OF MUSLIM SCIENCE
The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate was the golden age of Muslim science, the period of growth and development for the People of Muhammad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease with the close of that period, but the Khalifate ceased to aid in carrying the torch. Thereafter, learning was protected and fostered by individual rulers here and there, and individual investigators and scholars still went on their own quiet paths. But free intellectual life among the people was checked, and such learning as still generally flourished fell more and more between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal methods and systems, its subtle deductions and endless ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew away attention from the facts of nature. The oriental brain studied itself and its own workings to the point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to the certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy and orthodoxy proved alike sterile.
We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu‘tazilites. These served themselves heirs upon the Qadarites and denied that God predestined the actions of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and external vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God’sqadar, but it was unthinkable that man should be punished for actions not in his control. The freedom of the will is ana prioricertainty, and man possessesqadarover his own actions. This was the position of Wasil ibn Ata, of whom we have already heard. But to it he added a second doctrine, the origin of which is obscure, although suggestive of discussions with Greek theologians. The Qur’an describes God aswilling, knowing, decreeing, etc.—strictly as the Willing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One, etc.—and the orthodox hold that such expressions could only mean that God possesses as Qualities (sifat) Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc. To this Wasil raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities would be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the Mu‘tazilites always called themselves the People of Unity and Justice (Ahl-at-tawhid wal‘adl); the Unity being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in that they opposed God’sqadarover men and held that He must do for the creature that which was best for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there can be no necessity upon God, even to do justice; He is absolutely free, and what He does man must accept. It flatly opposes the position held by the Mu‘tazilites in general, that good and evil can be perceived and distinguished by the intellect (aql). Good and evil have their nature by God’s will, and man can learn to know them only by God’s teachings and commands. Thus, except through revelation, there can be neither theology nor ethics.
ABU HUDHAYL
The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl Muhammad al-Allaf (d.circa226), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil. At his hands the doctrine of God’s qualities assumed a more definite form. Wasil had reduced God to a vague unity, a kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl taught that the qualities were notinHis essence, and thus separable from it, thinkable apart from it, but that theywereHis essence. Thus, God was omnipotent by His omnipotence, but itwasHis essence and not inHis essence. He was omniscient by His omniscience and itwasHis essence. Further, he held that these qualities must be either negations or relations. Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that would mean that there was in God the complexity of subject and predicate, being and quality; and God is absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians regard as a close approximation to the Christian Trinity; for them, the persons of the Trinity have always been personified qualities, and such seems really to have been the view of John of Damascus. Further, God’s Will, according to Abu Hudhayl, as expressed in His Creative Word, did not necessarily exist in a subject (fi mahall,in subiecto). When God said, “Be!” creatively, there was no subject. Again, he endeavored—and in this he was followed by most of the Mu‘tazilites—to cut down the number of God’s attributes. His will, he said, was a form of His knowledge; He knew that there was good in an action, and that knowledge was His will.
His position on theqadarquestion was peculiar. With regard to this world, he was a Qadarite; but in the next world, both in heaven and in hell, he thought that all changes were by divine necessity. Otherwise, that is, if men were free, there would be obligation to observe a law (taklif); but there is no such obligation in the other world. Thus, whatever happened there happened by God’s decree. Further, he taught that, eventually, nothing would happen there; that there would be no changes, but only an endless stillness in which those in heaven had all its joys and those in hell all its pains. This is a closeapproximation to the view of Jahm ibn Safwan, who held that after the judgment both heaven and hell would pass away and God remain alone as He was in the beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl seems to have been led by two considerations, both significant for the drift of the Mu‘tazilites. First, there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic touched with utilitarianism. Thus, from their position that man could come by the light of his reason to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew the conclusion that it was man’s duty so to attain, and that God would damn eternally every man who did not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out strikingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at present, were serving no useful purpose because they had no inhabitants; therefore, at present, they did not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hudhayl. What has a beginning must have an end. So he explained the end as the ceasing of all changes. Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from Greek philosophy. The Qur’an teaches that the world has been created in time; Aristotle, that it is from eternity and to eternity. The creation, Abu Hudhayl applied to changes; before that, the worldwas, but in eternal rest. Hereafter, all changes will cease; rest will again enter and endure to all eternity. We shall see how largely this doctrine was advanced and developed by his successors.
But there were further complications in the doctrine of man’s actions and into some of these we must enter, on account of their later importance. Not everything that comes from the action of a man is byhis action. God has a creative part in it, apparently as regards the effects. Especially, knowledge in the mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but from God. The idea seems to be that the teacher may teach, but that the being taught in the pupil is a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished motions in the mind, which he held were not altogether due to the man, and external motions which were. There is given, too, to a man at the time of his performing an action an ability to perform the action, which is a special accident in him apart from any mere soundness of health or limb.
In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God’s working through man. Another of his positions had a similar basis and was a curious combination of historical criticism and mysticism, a combination which we shall find later in al-Ghazzali, a much greater man. The evidence of tradition for things dealing with the Unseen World (al-ghayb) he rejected. Twenty witnesses might hand on the tradition in question, but it was not to be received unless among them there was one, at least, of the People of Paradise. At all times, he taught, there were in the world these Friends of God (awliya Allah, sing.wali), who were protected against all greater sins and could not lie. It is the word of these that is the basis for belief, and the tradition is merely a statement of what they have said. This shows clearly how far the doctrine of the ecstatic life and of knowledge gained through direct intercourse between the believer and God had already advanced.
But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of daringand absolutely free-minded speculators. They were applying to the ideas of the Qur’an the keen solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they obtained were of the most fantastically original character. Thrown into the wide sea and utter freedom of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the bursting point and, more than even a German metaphysician, they had lost touch of the ground of ordinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate truth, wielding as their weapons definitions and syllogisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad in the Qur’an gave scope enough of strange ideas from which to start, or which had to be explained away. Their belief in the powers of the science of logic was unfailing, and, armed with Aristotle’s “Analytics,” they felt sure that certainty was within their reach. It was at the court and under the protection of al-Ma’mun that they especially flourished, and some account of the leading spirits among them will be necessary before we describe how they reached their utmost pride of power and how they fell.
AN-NAZZAM
An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later historians of having made use, to a high degree, of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He was one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they; he read the books of the philosophers and mingled their teachings with the doctrines of the Mu‘tazilites. He taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do nothing to a creature, either in this world or in the next, that was not for the creature’s good and in accordance with strict justice. It was not only thatGodwouldnot do it; He had not the power to do anything evil. Evidently the personality of God was fast vanishing behind an absolute law of right. To this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine that God could do anything; He could forgive whom He willed, and punish whom He willed. Further, he taught that God’s willing a thing meant only that He did it in accordance with His knowledge; and when He willed the action of a creature that meant only that He commanded it. This is evidently to evade phrases in the Qur’an. Man, again, he taught, was spirit (ruh), and the body (badan) was only an instrument. But this spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the body like the essential oil in a rose, or butter in milk. In a universe determined by strict law, man alone was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the air, and by his action the stone went up; but when the force of his throw was exhausted it came again under law and fell. If he had only asked himself how it came to fall, strange things might have happened. But he, and all his fellows, were only playing with words like counters. Further, he taught that God had created all created things at once, but that He kept them in concealment until it was time for them to enter on the stage of visible being and do their part. All things that ever will exist are thus existing now, but, in a sense,in retentis. This seems to be another attempt to solve the problem of creation in time, and it had important consequences. Further, the Qur’an was no miracle (mu‘jiz) to him. The only miraculous elements in it are the narratives about the Unseen World, and past things and thingsto come, and the fact that God deprived the Arabs of the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a high Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad. We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd as they are. The Muslim writers on theological history have classified him rightly as more of a physicist than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness for playing with metaphysical paradoxes which often goes with it.
BISHR; MA‘MAR
Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu‘tamir. His principal contribution was the doctrine oftawlidandtawallud, begetting and deriving. It is the transmission of a single action through a series of objects; the agent meant to affect the first object only; the effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What relation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a complex of causes acting together and across one another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is worth giving at this point. God creates in the man the will to move his hand; He creates the movement of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All is by God’s direct creation at the time. Further, could God punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of the faith? Bishr’s reply on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid saying frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His answer on the second was thatGod could have made a different and much better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He was not bound to make a better world—in this Bishr separates from the other Mu‘tazilites—He was only bound to give man free-will and, then, either revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.
With Ma‘mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was a union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the divine nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma‘mar was evidently on the road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on the existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God’s Will. Nor could He be described asqadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (jisms) only were created by God, and by “substances” he seems to mean matter as a whole; all changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from its nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms; or of free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no part in these things. He has given the material and has nothing to do with the coming and going ofseparate bodies; such are simple changes, forms of existence, and proceed from the matter itself. Man is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man and his body is but a cover. This true man can only know and will; the body perceives and does.
The last of this group whose views we need consider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very dubious morals; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun ar-Rashid, but highly favored by al-Ma’mun, in whose Khalifate he died,A.H.213. He held that actions produced throughtawalludhad no agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be produced bytawalludthrough speculation, and is, therefore, an action without an agent, and required even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magians will be turned into dust in the next world and will not enter either Paradise or Hell; the same will be the fate of cattle and children. That any one of the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is excusable. That all knowledge isa priori. That the only action which men possess is will; everything besides that is a production without a producer. That the world is the act of God by His nature,i.e., it is an act which His nature compels Him to produce; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with Him. It may be doubted how far Thumama was a professional theologian and how far he was a free-thinking, easy-living man of letters.
In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of Aristotle can be clearly traced. With Aristotle had come to them the idea of the world as law, an eternal construction subsisting and developing on fixed principles.This conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly at strife with Muhammad’s conception of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence, the crudities and devices by which they strove to make good their footing on strange ground and keep a right to the name of Muslim, while changing the essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind.