The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009.
The following post covers the next part of his lecture, on the “third wave” or expansion of Islam which is the development of various schools of Islamic jurisprudence which coalesced into what we now know today as sharia or Islamic law.
5. The Second Singularity—Qur’an + Sunnah
The culling of weak hadith was is usually looked upon as a commendable enterprise by early Muslim scholars. And yet if you were living in a town where you had had 20 or 30 crucial hadith that now someone from somewhere else in the big city said were all untrue, your Islam was now seriously undermined. Let’s say you were taught based on hadith that you should fast during Ramadan and during Reja and now some somebody says “all those hadith that say you should fast during Reja are fraudulent; you only have to fast during Ramadan. ” But you like to fast during Reja and now that’s considered wrong. The discarding of weak hadith strengthens the notion of a single coherent pattern of behavior for the Muslim community but it savages the localisms that had become commonplace within the Muslim geographical territory during the period of inflation. So what happens is that the hadith spread and then they contract as they come together in a new singularity that consists of the Qur’an plus the sunnah. The sunnah is represented by six collections of hadith for Sunnis and four collections for Shiites, and everything that Islam can be after that time is an expression of this combination of Qur’an and sunnah. This notion of sunnah being important to the concept of being a Muslim isn’t there in the very first phase when you just have the Qur’an. Now after the second singularity the sunnah has become a key element and everyone is going to talk in some way or other about how their expression of Islam is reflective not just of the Qur’an but of the sunnah.
6. The Second Big Bang—Fiqh or Islamic Jurisprudence
There is something of a temporal overlap, but by and large what happens is a second expansion of inflation, and it has to do with the issue of law. What is the law for Islam? Mohammad is a settler of disputes during his lifetime; the caliphs who succeed him immediately after his death resolve disputes. They appoint governors, and these governors resolve disputes. There is no way to talk about the earliest period of Islam as a period of Islamic law. The Qur’an itself contains a limited number of verses that give specific legal commands or prohibitions, and even those are debatable. For example, the Qur’an clearly says that you may not consume khamr, or grape wine, lest you go to your prayers in an intoxicated fashion. All right, no grape wine, but what about vodka? What about Red Bull? What about anything else? Is it only khamr that is prohibited, or is it all alcoholic beverages? Well then, you can disagree on that, if you are trying to think of a legal principle. Then you can say, well, you’re not supposed to go to your prayers intoxicated. What does “intoxicated” mean? Is having a lot of coffee get you so juiced up that you can’t think about God apart from your prayers? Some people would say “yes”; coffee for a period of time in the 14th and 15th century is very suspicious and some people outlaw it on the grounds that it is covered by the verses on grape wine. There are many different qualifications; virtually every verse of the Qur’an is scanned for legal import and the same thing for the hadith. Here the issue of contradictions among hadith becomes even more acute because there are implications that might not a difference in most cases but could have legal ramifications. And so you have people who devised different ideas about how to derive law from the Qur’an and the sunnah, or for some people, just from the Qur’an. Some people would discard the sunnah as an alternative.
These different interpretations about how you would create a legal system come into being because the size of the Muslim community grows. There is a reason why this is not an immediate concern, but rather one that comes farther down the road, after the hadith have already gone through their period of inflation. As the size of the community becomes greater, the number of the disputes, either within the community or between members of the community and others, increases and the need for some sort of systematic legal basis grows. You end up with a whole bunch with what are called schools of law. The word “school” is an unfortunate one; the word in Arabic is math-hab, which refers to a point of departure. It basically consists of a group of people who follow either an eponymous or real leader who has said, “here are the principles we should use for extracting law from the Qur’an and/or from the sunnah.” And these principles are called usuul or roots (usl being the word for root) of fiqh. The word fiqh means “jurisprudence.” You have 20 or more schools of jurisprudence and they spread in the 800s, 900s, and 1000s. In the 900s, you begin to have a large proportion of those people, who are noted for their scholarship in religion and their leadership in religious affairs, called faqiih. They are specialists in jurisprudence. That is not true of the 800s because law comes in later than the inflation period of the hadith. But once everyone gets their teeth into the question of law, you then have disagreements as to what school of law is true.
7. The Second Big Crunch—the four present-day Sunni schools of fiqh
These disagreements result in fights, and these fights are not simply matters of professors throwing erasers at one other like you have here (laughter). Rather they are fights that at their worst consist of taking catapults, setting them up in the courtyard of your mosque, and bombarding the neighboring mosque that belongs to a different school of law. The city that Prof. Bulliet has spent much of his career studying in Northeastern Iran, the city of Nishapur, actually destroyed itself through internecine fighting between law schools. The two law schools that were fighting to the death in Nishapur in the early 1100s were the Hanafi and the Shafi’i law schools. The names aren’t important, except that they are considered the two law schools that are closest together. It’s very difficult for Sunnis today to realize that what are now more or less insignificant differences between law schools—north Africans are Malikis, Indonesians are Shafi’is, and so on—were at one time things that you killed over. These were sources of intense ideological rivalry. So what happened was that where the hadith in their inflation period began to contribute to the dissolution of Islam, as different communities have their own Islams, with the spread of the law schools, they began to fight over which was right. By you end up with by the end of the 1100s is was a cooling out of this process. There was a sort of last-man-standing decision was made that within Sunni Islam there are four law schools and they all respect one another (sort of) and they will all quit fighting each other.
The sunnah had been resolved by having six books of hadith, and the ithila (?) al-mathahib or controversy of the law schools was resolved by saying that you have four co-equal law schools. This was symbolized in the late 1100s by a caliph establishing a school of higher learning in which there was one professional chair for each of the four law schools. That became a pattern that was not widely followed but it symbolized that the four law schools should get along. But in the process you had other law schools which were discarded and which disappear. Some of them, the dhahari ? school of Islam for example, you look back upon and say, “boy, that was an interesting interpretation of Islam,” but it’s now gone. It disappeared just like the weak hadith disappeared. Now these things never totally disappear. All Muslims agree that hadith in the six collections are the true words of Mohammad, but there are certain sayings of Mohammad which are recognized but are not contained within these six books. For example, “seek knowledge (even) unto China” is a wonderful thought about a kind of inquiry, which is a very familiar quote—it doesn’t show up among the six books, it’s a weak hadith, but it sounded so good that you really didn’t want to get rid of it. So this reduction never completely succeeds.
8. The Third Singularity—Qur’an + sunnah + sharia
In the second singularity, you have the Qur’an + sunnah; the third singularity has Qur’an + sunnah + sharia or Islamic law. It becomes commonplace, and you hear it very often today, that the sharia is the core expression of Islam, that you don’t have Islam without the sharia, and that the law is an intrinsic and inseparable portion of what Islam is. But that was not always the case, but whereas all possible Islams could have been contained within the Qur’an, it was then within the Qur’an and the sunnah, and now it is within the Qur’an and the sunnah and the sharia.
The next blog post covers the fourth wave of Islamic expansion, that of the mystic tradition of the Sufi brotherhoods.
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