i''i- IlI.^'MilUMlll iiii ii 1 1 i 1 i ' : 1 1 1 1 1 ; I i , I ! I ; ; 1 U i m. m ii ill U II 'I'l.' Iniitil!!:' p ■ iiiiiiii 1 lililtilil llliil niiiiuiiii 111! ■ :\ Division "^T^ Section , i\ V ^ Zbc Semitic Scries DEVELOPMENT OF MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY By DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D. SERIES OF HAND-BOOKS IN SEMITICS EDITED BY JAMES ALEXANDER CRAIG PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND HELLENISTIC GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Recent scientific research has stimulated an increasing in- terest in Semitic studies among scholars, students, and the serious reading public generally. It has provided us with a picture of a hitherto unknown civilization, and a history of one of the great branches of the human family. The object of the present Series is to state its results in popularly scientific form. Each work is complete in itself, and the Series, taken as a whole, neglects no phase of the general subject. Each contributor is a specialist in the subject as- signed him, and has been chosen from the body of eminent Semitic scholars in Europe and in this country. This Series will be composed of the following volumes : I. Hebrews. History and Government. By Professor J. F. McCurdy, University of Toronto, Canada. II. Hebrews. Ethics and Religion. By Professor Archi- bald Duff, Airedale College, Bradford, England. \Now Ready. III. Hebrews. The Social Life. By the Rev. Edward Day, Springfield, Mass. \_Now Ready. IV. Babylonians and Assyrians, with introductory chap- ter on the Sumerians. History to the Fall of Baby- lon. By Dr. Hugo Winckler, University of Berlin. [/« Press. V. Babylonians and Assyria ns. Religion. By Professor J. A. Craig, University of Michigan. VI. Babylonwcns and Assyrians. Life and Customs. By Professor A. H. Sayce, University of Oxford, Etigland, \_Now Ready, VII. Babylonians and Assyrians. Excavations and Ac- count of Decipherment of Inscriptions. VIII. Syria and Palestine. Early History. By Professor Lewis Bayles Paton, Hartfordf Theological Seminary. \_Now Ready. IX. Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory. By Professor D. B. Macdonald, Hartford Theological Seminary. \^Now Ready. The following volumes are to be included in the Series, and others may be added : X. Phcenicia. History and Government^ including Colonies, Trade, and Religion. XI. Arabia, Discoveries in., and History and Religion until Muhammad. XII. Arabic Literature and Science since Muhammad. XIII. The Influence of Semitic Art and Mythology on Western Nations. Xlbe Semttfc Series DEVELOPMENT OF Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory BY t ^ DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A, B.D. SOMETIME SCHOLAR AND FELLOW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW ; PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN HARTFORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1903 Copyright, 1903, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published, March, 1903 TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANV NEW YORK MEMORI^ MATRIS SACRVM PREFACE It is with very great diffidence that I send out this book. Of the lack and need of some text-book of the kind there can be little doubt. From the ed- ucated man who wishes to read with intelligence his " Arabian Nights " to the student of history or of law or of theology who wishes to know how it has gone in such matters with the great Muslim world, there is demand enough and to spare. Still graver is the difficulty for the growing body of young men who are taking up the study of Arabic. In English or German or French there is no book to which a teacher may send ^his pupils for brief guidance on the development of these institutions ; on the devel- opment of law there are only scattered and fragmen- tary papers, and on the development of theology there is practically nothing. But of the difficulty of supplying this need there can be even less doubt. Goldziher could do it fully and completely ; no other Arabist alive could approach the task other than with trepidation. The following pages therefore form a kind of forlorn attempt, a rushing in on the part of one who is sure he is not an angel and is in grave doubt on the question of folly, but who also sees a gap and no great alacrity on the part of his betters toward filling it. One thing, however, I would pre- vii VlU PREFACE raise with emphasis. All the results given here have been reached or verified from the Arabic sources. These sources are seldom stated either in the text or in the bibliography, as the book is intended to be useful to non-Arabists, but, throughout, they lie be- hind it and are its basis. By this it is not meant that the results of this book are claimed as original. Every Arabist will recognize at once from whose wells I have drawn and who have been my mas- ters. Among these I would do homage in the first in- stance to Goldziher ; what Arabist is not deep in his debt? With Goldziher's influence through books I would join the kindred influence of the living voice of my teacher Sachau. To him I render thanks and reverence now for his kindly sympathy and guid- ance. Others in whose debt I am are Noldeke, Snouck Hurgronje, von Kremer, Lane — many more. Those who are left of these will know their own in my pages and will be merciful to my attempts to tread in their steps and to develop their results. What is my own, too, they will know ; into questions of priority I have no desire to enter. Foot-notes which might have given to each scholar his due have been left unwritten. For the readers of this book such references in so vast a subject would be use- less. Such references, too, would have in the end to be made to Arabic sources. More direct help I have to acknowledge on several sides. To the atmosphere and scholarly ideals of Hartford Seminary I am indebted for the possibility of writing such a book as this, so far from the ordi- nary theological ruts. Among my colleagues Professor PREFACE iX Gillett has especially aided me with criticism and suggestions on the terminology of scholastic theol- ogy. Dr. Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia, illumined for me the Idrisid movement in North Africa. One complete sentence on p. 85 I have conveyed from a kindly notice in The Nation of my inaugural lecture on the development of Muslim Jurisprudence. Fi- nally, and above all, I am indebted to my wife for much patient labor in copying and for keen and lu- minous criticism in planning and correcting. With thanks to her this preface may fitly close. Duncan B. Macdonald. Hartford, December, 1902. *^* As it has proved impracticable to give in the body of the book a full transliteration of names and technical terms, the learner is referred for such exact forms to the chronological table and the index. In these hamza and ayn, the long vowels and the emphatic consonants are uniformly represented, the last by italic. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 3 PART I CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I From Death of Muhammad to Rise of Abbasids 7 CHAPTER II To Rise of Ayyubids .... .34 CHAPTER III To Present Situation ...... 50 PART II DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE CHAPTER I To Close of Umayyad Period . . . .65 CHAPTER II To Present Situation 91 xi Xll CONTENTS PAKT III DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY CHAPTER I PAGE To Close of Umayyad Period . , » o 119 CHAPTER II To Foundation of Fatimid Khalipate . . ^ 153 CHAPTER III To Triumph of Ash'arites in East . . . 186 ^ CHAPTER IV Al-Ghazzali 215^ CHAPTER V To Ibn Sab'tn and End op Muwahhids . . .243 CHAPTER VI To Present Situation 266 APPENDICES I. Illustrative Documents in Translation . 291 II. Selected Bibliography ..... 358 III. Chronological Table ..... 368 INDEX .... o ..... 373 ERRATA Page 30, line 5, for al-Mukanna read al-Miiqanua. 86, 1. 19, for first Khalifa read second Khalifa. 201, 1. 26, for tasalsal read tasals^tl. 237, for Mansell read Mansel. 267, 1. 30, for Haqqari read Hakkari. 299, 1. 10, for MusJiriqs read Muslwihs, 300, 1. 4, for kalimatan ash-shahada read kalima- ta-sh-shahada. 325, 1. 23, for wilidaniya read loalidmiiya, 339, 1. 11, for ilitiyaz read ilitiyaj. DEVELOPMENT OF MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE, AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY INTRODUCTION In human progress unity and complexity are the two correlatives forming together the great paradox. Life is manifold, but it is also one. So it is seldom possible, and still more seldom advisable, to divide a civilization into departments and to attempt to trace their separate developments ; life nowhere can be cut in two with a hatchet. And this is emphatically true of the civilization of Islam. Its intellectual unity, for good and for evil, is its outstanding qual- ity. It may have solved the problem of faith and science, as some hold ; it may have crushed all thought which is not of faith, as many others hold. However that may be, its life and thought are a unity. So, also, with its institutions. It might be possible to trace the developments of the European states out of the dying Roman Empire, even to watch the pat- rimony of the Church grow and again vanish, and yet take but little if any account of the Catholic theology. It might be possible to deal adequately with the growth of that system of theology and yet never touch either the Roman or the civil law, even to leave out of our view the canon law itself. In Europe the State may rule the Church, or the Church may rule the State ; or they may stand side by side in somewhat dubious amity, supposedly taking no 3 4 INTRODUCTION account each of the other. But in Muslim countries, Church and State are one indissolubly, and until the very essence of Islam passes away, that unity cannot be relaxed. The law of the land, too, is, in theory, the law of the Church. In the earlier days at least, canon and civil law were one. Thus we can never say in Islam, "he is a great lawyer ; he, a great theologian ; he, a great statesman." One man may be all three, almost he must be all three, if he is to be any one. The statesman may not practice theol- ogy or law, but his training, in great part, will be that of a theologian and a legist. The theologian- legist may not be a man of action, but he will be a court of ultimate appeal on the theory of the state. He will pass upon treaties ; decide disputed succes- sions ; assign to each his due rank and title. He will tell the Commander of the Faithful himself what he may do and what, by law, lies beyond his reach. It was, then, under the pressure of necessity only that the following sketch of the development of Mus- lim thought was divided into three parts. By no possible arrangement did it seem feasible to treat the whole at once. Intolerable confusions and unin- telligible complications would, to all appearance, be the result. As the most concrete and simple side, the development of the state is taken first. Second, on account of the shortness of the course which it ran, comes the development of the legal ideas and schools. Third comes the long and thrice compli- cated thread of theological thought. It is for the student to hold firmly in mind that this division is purely mechanical and for convenience only ; that it INTRODUCTION 5 corresponds to little or notliing in the real nature of the case. This will undoubtedly become clear to him as he proceeds. He will meet with the same names in all three divisions ; he will meet with the same technicalities and the same scholastic system. A treatise on canon law is certainly different from one on theology, but each touches the other at in- numerable points ; their authors may easily be the same ; each will be in great part unintelligible with- out the other. He must then labor to merge these three sections again into one another. His principal helps in this, along with diligent parallel reading, will be the chronological table and the index. In the table he will watch the succession of men and events grouped from all the three sections ; from the index he will trace the activities of each man in these different spheres. The index, too, will give him the technical terms and he will observe their recurrence in historical, legal, and theological theory. Further, it will serve him as a vocabulary when he comes to read technical texts. But, again, another warning is necessary. The sketch given here is incomplete, not only in details but in the ground that it covers. Important phases of Muslim law, theology, and state theory are of neces- sity passed over entirely. Thus Babism is not touched at all and the Shi'ite theology and law hardly at all. The Ibadite systems have the merest mention and Turkish and Persian mysticism are equally neglect- ed. For such weighty organizations the Darwish Fraternities are most inadequately dealt with, and Muslim missionary enterprise might well be treated 6 INTRODUCTION at length. Guidance on these and other points the student will seek in the bibliography. It, too, makes no pretence to completeness and consists of selected titles only. But it will serve at least as an introduc- tion and clew to an exceedingly wide field. And it may be well to state here, in so many words, that no work can be done in this field without a reading knowledge of French and German, and no satis- factory work without some knowledge of Arabic. And, again, this sketch is incomplete because the development of Islam is not yet over. If, as some say, the faith of Muhammad is a cul-de-sac, it is cer- tainly a very long one ; off it many courts and doors open ; down it many peoples are still wandering. It is a faith, too, which brings us into touching dis- tance with the great controversies of our own day. We see in it, as in a somewhat distorted mirror, the history of our own past. But we do not yet see its end, even as the end of Christianity is not yet in sight. It is for the student, then, to remember that Islam is a present reality and the Muslim faith a living organism, a knowledge of whose laws may be of life or death for us who are in another camp. For there can be little doubt that the three antagonistic and militant civilizations of the world are those of Christendom, Islam, and China. When these are unified, or come to a mutual understanding, then, and only then, will the cause of civilization be secure. To aid some little to the understanding of Islam among us is the object of this book. PART I Constitutional a)e\jcIopmmt CHAPTEE I The death of Muhammad and the problem of the succession ; the parties ; families of Hashimids, Umayyads and Abbasids ; election of Abu Bakr ; nomination of Umar ; his constitution ; election of Uthman; Umayyads in power; murder of Uth- man; origin of Shi'ites ; election of Ali ; civil war; Mu'a- wiya first Uraayyad ; origin of Kharijites ; their revolts ; Ibadites; development of Shi'ites; al-Husayn at Karbala; different Shi'ite constitutional theories ; doctrine of the hidden Imam ; revolts against Umayyads ; rise of Abbasids ; Umay- yads of Cordova. With the death of Muhammad at al-Madina in the year 11 of the Hijra (a.d. 632), the community of Islam stood face to face with three great questions. Of the existence of one they were conscious, at least in its immediate form ; the others lay still for their consciousness in the future. The necessity was upon them to choose a leader to take the place of the Prophet of God, and thus to fix for all time what was to be the nature of the Muslim state. Muhammad had appointed no Joshua ; unlike Moses he had died and given no guidance as to the man who should take up and carry on his work. If we can imagine the people of Israel left thus helpless on the other 7 8 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT side of the Jordan with the course of conquest that they must pursue opening before them, we shall have a tolerably exact idea of the situation in Islam when Muhammad dropped the reins. Certainly, the peo- ple of Islam had little conception of what was in- volved in the great precedent that they were about to establish, but, nevertheless, there lies here, in the first elective council which they called, the beginning of all the confusions, rivalries, and uncertainties that were to limit and finally to destroy the succession of the Commanders of the Faithful. Muhammad had ruled as an absolute monarch — a Prophet of God in his own right. He had no son ; though had he left such issue it is not prob- able that it would have affected the direct result. Of Moses's son we hear nothing till long after- ward, and then under very suspicious circumstances. The old free spirit of the Arabs was too strong, and as in the Ignorance (al-jahiliya), as they called the pre-Muslim age, the tribes had chosen from time to time their chiefs, so it was now fixed that in Islam the leader was to be elected by the people. But wherever there is an election, there there are parties ; and this was no exception. Of such par- ties we may reckon roughly four. There were the Early Believers, who had suffered with Muhammad at Mecca, accompanied him to al-Madina and had fought at his side through all the Muslim campaigns. These were called Muhajirs, because they had made with him the Hijra or migration to al-Madina. Then there was the party of the citizens of al-Madina, who had invited him to come to them and had promised EARLY PARTIES 9 him allegiance. These were called Ansar or Helpers. Eventually we shall find these two factions growing together and forming the one party of the old orig- inal believers and Companions of Muhammad {sahibs, i.e., all those who came in contact with the Prophet as believers and who died in Islam), but at the first they stood apart and there was much jealousy be- tween them. Then, in the third place, there was the party of recent converts who had only embraced Islam at the latest moment when Mecca was capt- ured by Muhammad, and no other way of escape for them was open. They were the aristocratic party of Mecca and had fought the new faith to the last. Thus they were but indifferent believers and were regarded by the others with more than suspicion. Their principal family was descended from a certain Umayya, and was therefore called Umayyad. There will be much about this family in the sequel. Then, fourth, there was growing up a party that might be best described as legitimists ; their theory was that the leadership belonged to the leader, not because he was elected to it by the Muslim community, but be- cause it was his right. He was appointed to it by God as completely as Muhammad had been. This idea developed, it is true, somewhat later, but it de- veloped very rapidly. The times were such as to force it on. These, then, were the parties of which account must be taken, but before proceeding to individuals in these parties, it will be well to fix some genea- logical relationships, so as to be able to trace the family and tribal jealousies and intrigues that were 10 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT SO soon to transfer themselves from the little circle of Mecca and al-Madina and to fight themselves out on the broad field of Muslim history. For, in truth, in the development of no other state have little causes produced such great effects as here. For example, it may be said, broadly and yet truly, that the seclu- sion of Muslim women, with all its disastrous effects at the present day for a population of two hundred millions, runs back to the fact that A'isha, the four- teen-year-old wife of Muhammad, once lost a neck- lace under what the gossips of the time thought were suspicious circumstances. As to the point now in hand, it is quite certain that Muslim history for sev- eral hundred years was conditioned and motived by the quarrels of Meccan families. The accompanying genealogy will give the necessary starting-point. The mythical ancestor is Quraysh ; hence " the Qur- aysh," or " Quraysh " as a name for the tribe. With- in the tribe, the two most important families are those of Hashim and Umayya ; their rivalries for the succession of the Prophet fill the first century and a half of Muslim history, and the immediately pre- Islamic history of Mecca is similarly filled with a contest between them as to the guardianship of the Ka'ba and the care of the pilgrims to that sanctuary. Whether this earlier history is real, or a reflection from the later Muslim times, we need not here con- sider. The next important division is that between the families of al- Abbas and Abu Talib, the uncles of the Prophet. From the one were descended the Abbasids, as whose heir-at-law the Saltan of the Ottoman Empire now claims the Khalifate, and from GENEALOGICAL CHART 11 (» Cj ^ r-H H «a "1 P4 t— t t>> t^ ^ O >H t« 5^ O ^3 H • 02 00 A HH • rH ;h ffi 4-^ -4-» H .2 o r/) • ^H H WH o J b:1 t/3 0; W C3 O <1 •1— 1 C3 P5 T3 O o r^ \H 'S >> H a r^ »— 1 < m tU o OJ l-( Q o» 1-4 o X! o • M ^ ^ -t! E^ IBS ^ Cj H t^-i G -M eS cS CS n Hak halif ^M eS n . ■M CO rj 'T3 ^ CO I— ' T3 ^ O I *J 53 ^i CO '— I o -d CO "S • CO •TS CO o o ^-1 - «s CO I M I— I a; +^ I I— I CO a 1:^ ^3 i> 1-:= p -i a i-H CO 1 cf 'S ,d CO 1— ( 03 'O Xl .±4 CO • r-l JO d I ;-, -M d ►- -J C is s d T3 p ■73 <5l -^ _: cs --I I — s. i>- d • -^ CO -1 d = eS in »^ a 12 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT •n eg w a Q a 1— 1 iKi 1-1 ja 03 eS -d o cof^ o eq cq CO 'T3 1— 1 n3 as rQ (M f: O S3 •- (M *7 a , re -a 'rt N eS re -a o»- re ~a p— 1 rs* e3 l-H a si c3 re S • fH d ^ ^ ^ O o N -d re *- -re a j: o l-H O 13 lA eS c3 eS re M '2 o >o Tli d » re a us re re - _ 05 1 re CS re N % W5 •TS •■-( 00 t^ t- TJ • »— 1 H- ( »o , h- (H TJ I— t t-H o -a o a re a ■^ re 1=1 Ph en C «*H O o OQ 0 re ABU BAKR I UMAR 13 J the other the different conflicting lines of Shi'ites, whose intricacies we shall soon have to face. To return : in this first elective council the choice fell upon Abu Bakr. He was a man distinguished by his piety and his affection for and close intimacy with Muhammad. He was the father of Muhammad's favorite wife, A'isha, and was some two years young- er than his son-in-law. He was, also, one of the earliest believers and it is evident that this, with his advanced age, always respected in Arabia, went far to secure his election. Yet his election did not pass off without a struggle in which the elements that later came to absolute schism and revolution are plainly visible. The scene, as it can be put together from Arabic historians, is curiously suggestive of the methods of modern politics. As soon as it was as- sured that the Prophet, the hand which had held together all those clashing interests, was really dead, a convention was called of the leaders of the people. There the strife ran so high between the Ansar, the Muhajirs and the Muslim aristocrats of the house of Umayya, that they almost came to blows. Suddenly in the tumult, Umar, a man of character and decision, " rushed the convention " by solemnly giving to Abu Bakr the hand-grasp of fealty. The accomplished fact was recognized — as it has always been in Islam — and on the next day the general mass of the people swore allegiance to the first Khalifa, literally Succes- sor, of Muhammad. On his death, in a.h. 13 (a.d. 634), there followed Umar. His election passed off quietly. He had been nominated by Abu Bakr and nothing remained 14 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT but for the people to confirm that nomination. There thus entered a second principle — or rather precedent — beside that of simple election. A cer- tain right was recognized in the Khalifa to nomi- nate his successor, provided he chose one suitable and eligible in other respects. Unlike Cromwell in a similar case, Abu Bakr did not nominate one of his own sons, but the man who had been his right hand and who, he knew, could best build up the state. His foresight was proved by the event, and Umar proved the second founder of Islam by his genius as a ruler and organizer and his self-devotion as a man. Through his generals, Damascus and Jerusalem were taken, Persia crushed in the great battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand, and Egypt con- quered. He was also the organizer of the Muslim state, and it Avill be advisable to describe part of his system, both for its own sake and in order to point the contrast with that of his successors. He saw clearly what were the conditions under which the Muslims must work, and devised a plan, evidently based on Persian methods of government, which, for the time at least, was perfect in its way. The elements in the problem were simple. There was the flood of Arabs pouring out of Arabia and bearing everything down in their course. These must be retained as a conquering instrument if Islam were to exist. Thus they must be prevented from settling down on the rich lands they had seized, — from be- coming agriculturists, merchants, and so on, and so losing their identity among other peoples. The whole Arab stock must be preserved as a warrior CONSTITUTION OF UMAR 16 caste to fight the battles of God. This was secured by a regulation that no new lands should be held by a Muslim. When a country was conquered, the land was left to its previous possessors with the duty of paying a high rent to the Muslim state and, besides, of furnishing fodder and food, clothing and every- thing necessary to the Muslim camp that guarded them. These camps, or rather camp-cities, were scat- tered over the conquered countries and were practi- cally settlements of Muslims m partibus infidelium. The duty of these Muslims was to be soldiers only. They were fed and clothed by the state, and the money paid into the public treasury, consisting of plunder or rents of conquered lands (kharaj), or the head-tax on all non-Muslims (jizya), was regularly divided among them and the other believers. If a non-Muslim embraced Islam, then he no longer paid the head-tax, but the land which he had previously held was divided among his former co-religionists, and they became responsible to the state. He, on the other hand, received his share of the public mon- eys as regularly distributed. Within Arabia itself, no non-Muslim was permitted to live. It was pre- served, if we may use the expression, as a breeding- ground for defenders of the faith and as a sacred soil not to be polluted by the foot of an unbeliever. It will readily be seen what the results of such a system must have been. The entire Muslim people was re- tained as a gigantic fighting machine, and the con- quered peoples were machines again to furnish it with what was needed. The system was communistic, but in favor of one special caste. The others — the 16 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT conquered peoples — were crushed to the ground be- neath their burdens. Yet they could not sell their land and leave the country ; there was no one to buy it. The Muslims would not, and their fellow-co- religionists could not, for with it went the land-tax. Such was, in its essence, the constitution of Umar, forever famous in Muslim tradition. It stood for a short time, and could not have stood for a long time ; but the cause of its overthrow was political and not social-economic. With the next Khalifa and the changes which came with him, it went, in great part, to the ground. The choice of Umar to the Khalifate had evidently been dictated by a consideration of his position as one of the earliest believers and as son-in- law of the Prophet. The party of Early Believers had thus succeeded twice in electing their candidate. But with the death of Umar in a.h. 23 (a.d. 644) the Meccan aristocratic party of the family of Umayya that had so long struggled against Muhammad and had only accepted Islam when their cause was hope- lessly lost, had at last a chance. Umar left no direc- tions as to his successor. He seems to have felt no certainty as to the man best fitted to take up the burden, and when his son sought to urge him to name a Khalifa, he is reported to have said, " If I appoint a Khalifa, Abu Bakr appointed a Khalifa ; and if I leave the people without guidance, so did the Apostle of God." But there is also a story that after a vain attempt to persuade one of the Companions to permit himself to be nominated, he appointed an elective council of six to make the choice after his death under stringent conditions, which went all to wreck UTHMAN 17 throagh the pressure of circumstances. The Umay- yads succeeded in carrying the election of Uthman, one of their family, an old man and also a son-in-law of Muhammad, who by rare luck for them was an Early Believer. After his election it was soon evident that he was going to rule as an Umayyad and not as a Muslim. For generations back in Mecca, as has already been said, there had been, according to tradi- tion, a continual struggle for pre-eminence between the families of Umayya and of Hashim. In the vic- tory of Muhammad and the election of the first two Khalifas, the house of Hashim had conquered, but it had been the constant labor of the conquerors to re- move all tribal and family distinctions and frictions and to bring the whole body of the Arabs to regard one another as brother Muslims. Now, with a Kha- lifa of the house of Umayya, all that was swept away, and it was evident that Uthman — a pious, weak man, in the hands of his energetic kinsfolk — was drifting to a point where the state would not exist for the Mus- lims but for the Umayyads. His evil spirit was his cousin Marwan ibn al-Hakam, whom he had ap- pointed as his secretary and who eventually became fourth Umayyad Khalifa. The father of this man, al-Hakam ibn al-As, accepted Islam at the last mo- ment when Mecca was captured, and, thereafter, was banished by Muhammad for treachery. Not till the reign of Uthman was he permitted to return, and his son, born after the Hijra, was the most active assert- or of Umayyad claims. Under steady family press- ure, Uthman removed the governors of provinces who had suffered with Muhammad and fought in the 18 CONSTITUTIOIsrAL DEVELOPMENT Path of God {sahil Allah), and put in tlieir places nis own relations, late embracers of tlie faith. He broke through the Constitution of Umar and gifted away great tracts of state lands. The feeling spread abroad that in the eyes of tlie Khalifa an Umayyad could do no wrong, and the Umayyads themselves were not backward in affording examples. To the Muhajirs and Ansar they were godless heathen, and probably the Muhajirs and Ansar were right. Finally, the indignation could no longer be restrained. Insurrec- tions broke out in the camp -cities of al-Kufa and al- Basra, and in those of Egypt and at last in al-Madina itself. There, in a.h. 35 (a.d. 655), Uthman fell under the daggers of conspirators led by a Muham- mad, a son of Abu Bakr, but a religious fanatic strangely different from his father, and the train was laid for a long civil war. In the confusion that fol- lowed the deed the chance of the legitimist party had come, and Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was chosen. Fortunately this is is not a history of Islam, but of Muslim political institutions, and it is, therefore, un- necessary to go into the manifold and contradictory stories told of the events of this time. These have evidently been carefully redacted in the interests of later orthodoxy, and to protect the character of men whose descendants later came to power. The Alids built up in favor of Ali a highly ingenious but flatly fictitious narrative, embracing the whole early his- tory and exhibiting him as the true Khalifa kept from his rights by one after the other of the first three, and suffering it all with angelic patience. This SHI'ITES AND SUKNITES 19 varies from the extreme Slii'ite position, wliicli damns all the three at a sweep as usurpers, through a more moderate one which contents itself with cursing Umar and Utliman, to a rejection of Uthman only, and even, at the other extreme, satisfies itself with anath- ematizing the later Umayyads. At this point the Shi'ites join hands with the body of orthodox be- lievers, who are all sectaries of Ali to a certain de- gree. Yet this tendency has been counteracted to some extent by a strongly catholic and irenic spirit which manifests itself in Islam. After a controversy is over and the figures in it have faded into the past, Islam casts a still deeper veil over the controversy itself and glorifies the actors on both sides into fathers and doctors of the Church. An attempt is made to forget that they had fought one another so bitterly, and to hold to the fact only that they were brother Muslims. The Shi'ites well so-called, for SM'a means sect, have never accepted this ; but it is the usage of orthodox, commonly called Sunnite, Is- lam. A concrete expression of any result reached by the body of the believers then often takes the form of a tradition assigned to Muhammad. In this case, it is a saying of his that ten men, specified by name and prominent leaders in these early squabbles, were certain of Paradise. It has further become an article in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet are not to be mentioned save with praise ; and one school of theologians, in their zeal for the historic Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Yazid, the slayer of al-Husa^^n (p. 28 below), and reckoned as the worst of all the Umayyads, because he had been 20 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT a Khalifa in full and regular standing. This catholic recognition of the unity of Islam we shall meet again and again. Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details and to adjust the rights and wrongs of this story, we return to the fixed fact of the election of Ali and the accession to power of the legitimist party. This legitimist party, or parties, had been gradually de- veloping, and their peculiar and mutually discordant views deserve attention. These views all glorified Ali, the full cousin of Muhammad and husband of bis daughter Fatima, but upon very different grounds. There could not but exist the feeling that a descend- ant of the Prophet should be his successor, and the children of Ali, al-Hasan and al-Husayn were his only grandchildren and only surviving male descend- ants. This, of course, reflected a dignity upon Ali, their father, and gave him a claim to the Khalifate. Again, Ali himself seems to have made a great and hardly comprehensible impression upon his contem- poraries. The proverb ran with the people, "There is no sword save Dhu-l-faqar, and no youth save Ali." He was not, perhaps, so great a general as one or two others of his time, but he stood alone as a warrior in single combat ; he was a poet and an orator, but no statesman. As one of the earliest of the Early Believers, it might be expected that the Muhajirs would support him, and so they did; but the matter went much farther, and he seems to have excited a feeling of personal attachment and devo- tion different from that rendered to the preceding Khalifas. Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat ALI ; CIVIL WAE 21 as to his claim. The idea of election was thrown aside, and his adherents proclaimed his right by the will and appointment of God to the successorship of the Prophet. As God had appointed Muhammad as Prophet, so He had appointed Ali as his helper in life and his successor in death. This was preached in Egypt as early as the year 32. Tt will easily be seen that with such a following, uniting so many elements, his election could be brought about. Thus it was ; but an evil suspicion rested upon him. Men thought, and probably right- ly, that he could have saved the aged Uthman if he had willed, and they even went the length of accus- ing him of being art and j^art in the murder itself. The ground was hollow beneath his feet. Further, there were two other old Companions of the Prophet, Talha and az-Zubayr, who thought they had a still better claim to the Khalifate ; and they were joined by A'isha, the favorite wife of Muhammad, now, as a finished intrigante, the evil genius of Islam. Ali had reaped all the advantage of the conspiracy and murder, and it Avas easy to raise against him the cry of revenge for Uthman. Then the civil war began. In the struggle with Talha and az-Zubayr, Ali was victorious. Both fell at the battle of the Camel (a.h. 36), so called from the presence of A'isha mounted on a camel like a chieftainess of the old days. But a new element was to enter. The gov- ernorship of Syria had been held for a long time by Mu'awiya, an Umayyad, and there the Umayyad in- fluence was supreme. There, too, had grown up a spirit of religious indifference, combined with a pres- 22 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT ervation of all tlie forms of the faith. Mu'awiya was a statesman by nature, and had moulded his province into an almost independent kingdom. The Syrian army was devoted to him, and could be de- pended upon to have no other interests than his. From the beginning of All's reign, he had been bid- ing his time ; had not given his allegiance, but had waited for the hour to strike for revenge for Uthman and power for himself. The time came and Mu'awi- ya won. "We here pass over lightly a long and con- tradictory story. It is enough to note how the irony of history wrought itself out, and a son of the Abu Sufyan who had done so much to persecute and op- pose Muhammad in his early and dark days and had been the last to acknowledge his mission, became his successor and the ruler of his people. But with Ali ends the revered series of the four "Khalifas who followed a right course" {al-kJmlafa ar-rasMdun\ reverenced now by all orthodox Muslims, and there begins the division of Islam into sects, religious and political — it comes to the same thing. The Umayyads themselves clearly recognized that with their accession to power a change had come in the nature of theMuslim state. Mu'awiya said open- ly that he was the first king in Islam, though he re- tained and used officially the title of Khalifa and Commander of the Faithful. Yet such a change could not be complete nor could it carry with it the whole people — that is clear of itself. For more than one hundred years the house of Umayya held its own. Syria was solid with it and it was supported by many statesmen and soldiers; but outside of KHARIJITES 23 Syria and north Arabia it could count on no part of tlie po23ulatiou. An anti-Khalifa, Abd Allah, son of the az-Zubayr of whom we have already heard, long held the sacred cities against them. Only in a.h. 75 (a.d. 692) was he killed after Mecca had been stormed and taken by their armies. Southern Arabia and Mesopotamia, with its camp-cities al-Kufa and al- Basra, Persia and Egypt, were, from time to time, more or less in revolt. These risings went in one or other of two directions. There were two great anti- Umayyad sects. At one time in Mu'awiya's contest with Ali, he trapped Ali into the fatal step of arbitrat- ing his claim to the Khalifate. It was fatal, for by it Ali alienated some of his own party and gained less than nothing on the other side. Part of Ali's army seceded in protest and rebellion, because he — the duly elected Khalifa — submitted his claim to any shadow of doubt. On the other hand, they could not accept Mu'awiya, for him they regarded as un- duly elected and a mere usurper. Thus they drifted and split into innumerable sub-sects. They were called Kharijites — goers out — because they went out from among the other Muslims, refused to regard them as Muslims and held themselves apart. For centuries they continued a thorn in the side of all established authority. Their principles were abso- lutely democratic. Their idea of the Khalifate was the old one of the time of Abu Bakr and Umar. The Khalifa was to be elected by the whole Muslim community and could be deposed again at need. He need be of no special family or tribe ; he might be a slave, provided he was a good Muslim ruler. 24 CONSTITUTIOlSrAL DEVELOPMENT Some admitted that a woman might he Khahfa, and others denied the need of any KhaUfa at all ; the Muslim congregation could rule itself. Their re- ligious views were of a similarly unyielding and an- tique cast, but with that we have nothing now to do. It cannot be doubted that these men were the true representatives of the old Islam. They claimed for themselves the heirship to Abu Bakr and Umar, and their claim was just. Islam had been secularized ; worldly ambition, fratricidal strife, luxury, and sin had destroyed the old bond of brotherhood. So they drew themselves apart and went their own way, a w^ay which their descendants still follow in Uman, in east Africa, and in Algeria. To them the orthodox Muslims — meaning by that the general body of Mus- lims — were antipathetic more than even Christians or Jews. These were " people of a book " {aid hitah), i.e., followers of a revealed religion, and kindly treatment of them was commanded in the Qur'an. They had never embraced Islam, and were to be judged and treated on their own merits. The non- Kharijite Muslims, on the other hand, were rene- gades {mtirtadds) and were to be killed at sight. It is easy to understand to what such a view as this led. Numberless revolts, assassinations, plunderings marked their history. Crushed to the ground again and again, again and again they recovered. They were Arabs of the desert ; and the desert was alwaj^s there as a refuge. It is probable, but as yet un- proved, that mingled with the political reasons for their existence as a sect went tribal jealousies and frictions ; of such there have ever been enough and IBADITES 25 to spare in Arabia. Naturally, under varying con- ditions, their views and attitudes varied. In the wild mountains of Khuzistan, one of their centres and strongholds, the primitive barbarism of their faith had full sway. It drew its legitimate conse- quence, lived out its life, and vanished from the scene. The more moderate section of the Kharijites centred round al-Basra. Their leader there was Abd Allah ibn Ibad, and from about the year 60 on the schism between his followers and the more abso- lute of these " come-outers " can be traced. It is characteristic of the latter that they aided for a time Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr when he was besieged in Mecca by the Umayyads, but deserted him finally be- cause he refused to join the names of Talha and his own father, az-Zubayr, with those of Uthman and Ali in a general commiuation. The Kharijites were all good at cursing, and the later history of this sec- tion of them shows a process of disintegration by successive secessions, each departing in protest and cursing those left behind as heathen and unbelievers. Characteristic, too, for the difference between the two sections, were their respective attitudes toward the children of their opponents. The more absolute party held that the children of unbelievers were to be killed with their parents; the followers of Abd Allah ibn Ibad, that they were to be allowed to grow up and then given their choice. Again, there was a difference of opinion as to the standing of those who held with the Kharijites but remained at home and did not actually fight in the Path of God. These the one party rejected and the other accepted. Again, 26 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT were the non-Kliarijites Muslims to the extent that the Kharijites might live amongst them and mix with them ? This the severely logical party denied, but Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed. From this it will be abundantly clear that the only party with a possible future w^as that of Ibn Ibad. His sect survives to the present day under the name of Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, accord- ing to their traditions, their first Imam, or president, was elected about a.h. 134. He was of a family which had reigned there before Islam, and from the time of his election on, the Ibadites have succeeded in holding Uman against the rest of the Muslim world. Naturally, the election of the Imam by the community has turned into the rule of a series of dynasties ; but the theory of election has always held fast. They were sailors, merchants, and colonizers already by the tenth century a.d., and carried their state with its theology and law to Zanzibar and the coast of East Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite fugitives passed into North Africa, and there they still maintain the simplicity of their republican ideal and their primitive theological and legal views. Their home is in the Mzab in the south of Algeria, and, though as traders and capitalists they may travel far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling in marriage with other Muslims is forbidden them. At the opposite extreme from these in political matters stands the sect that is called the Shi'a. It, as we have seen, is the name given to the party that glorifies Ali and his descendants and regards the Kha- lifate as belonging to them by right divine. How SHI'ITES 27 early this feeling arose we have already seen, but the extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the innumerable differing views that developed, the maze of conspiracies, tortuous and underground in their methods, some in good faith and some in bad, to which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi'a the most difficult side of a knowledge of the Muslim East. Yet some attempt at it must be made. If there was ever a romance in history, it is the story of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt ; if there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in history, it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins and the Druses ; if there was ever the persistence of an idea, it is in the present Shi'ite government in Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the whole world of Islam still looks to appear and bring in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth. All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and his children on the part of their followers twelve centuries ago. In A..H. 40 (a.d. 660) Ali fell by the dagger of a Kharijite. These being at the opposite pole from the Shi'ites, are the only Muslim sect that curses and abhors Ali, his family and all their works. Orthodox Islam reveres Ali and accepts his Khalifate ; his fam- ily it also reverences, but rejects their pretensions. The instinct of Islam is to respect the accomplished fact, and so even the Umayyads, one and all, stand in the list of the successors of the Prophet, much as Alexander YI and his immediate predecessors do in that of the Popes. To Ali succeeded his son, al-Hasan, but his name 28 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT does not stand on the roll of the Khalifa te as usually reckoned. It shows some Shi 'it e tinge when the historian says, " In the Khalifate of al-Hasan," and, thereafter, proceeds with, "In the days of Mu'awiya," the Umayyad Khalifa who followed him. Mu'awiya had received the allegiance of the Syrian Muslims and when he advanced on al-Kufa, where al- Hasan was, al-Hasan met him and gave over into his hands all his supposed rights. That was in a.h. 41 ; in A.H. 49 he was dead by poison. Twelve years later al-Husayn, his brother, and many of his house fell at Karbala in battle against hopeless odds. It is this last tragedy that has left the deepest mark of all on the Muslim imagination. Yearly when the fatal day, the day of Ashura, the tenth of the month Mu- harram, comes round, the story is rehearsed again at Karbala and throughout, indeed, all the Shi'ite world in what is a veritable Passion Play. No Muslim, especially no Persian, can read of the death of al- Husayn, or see it acted before his eyes, without quiv- ering and invoking the curse of God upon all those who had aught to do with it or gained aught by it. That curse has clung fast through all the centuries to the name of Yazid, the Umayyad Khalifa of the time, and only the stiffest theologians of the traditional school have labored to save his memory through the merits of the historical Khalifate. But even after this tragedy it was not out with the blood of Muham- mad. Many descendants were left and their party lived on in strange, half underground fashion, as sects do in the East, occasionally coming to the surface and bursting out in wild and, for long, useless rebellion. SHI'ITE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORIES 29 In these revolts the Shi'a was worthy of its name, and split into many separate divisions, according to the individuals of the house of Ali to whom alle- giance was rendered and who were regarded as leaders, titular or real. These subdivisions differed, also, in the principle governing the choice of a leader and in the attitude of the people toward him. Shi'ism, from being a political question, became theological. The position of the Shi'ite was and is that there must be a law (nass) regulating the choice of the Imam, or leader of the Muslim community ; that that law is one of the most important dogmas of the faith and cannot have been left by the Prophet to develop itself under the pressure of circumstances ; that there is such an Imam clearly pointed out and that it is the duty of the Muslim to seek him out and follow him. Thus there was a party who regarded the leadership as belonging to Ali himself, and then to any of his descendants by any of his wives. These attached themselves especially to his son Muhammad, known from his mother as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, who died in 81, and to his descendants and successors. It was in this sect that the most characteristic Shi'ite views first developed. This Muhammad seems to have been the first concerning whom it was taught, after his death, that he was being preserved by God alive in retirement and would come forth at his ap- pointed time to bring in the rule of righteousness upon the earth. In some of the innumerable sub- sects the doctrine of the deity, even, of Ali was early held, in others a doctrine of metempsychosis, gen- erally among men and especially from one Imam to 30 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT liis successor; others, again, advanced the duty of seeking the rightful Imam and rendering allegiance to him till it covered the whole field of faith and morals — no more was required of the believer. To one of these sects, al-Mukanna, "the Veiled Proj^het of Khorasan," adhered before he started on his own account. We have seen already that so early as 32 the doc- trine had been preached in Egypt that Ali was the God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here we have its legitimate development, which was all the quicker as it had, or assumed, a theological basis, and did not simply urge the claims to leadership of the family of the Prophet after the fashion in which in- heritance runs among earthly kings. That was the position at first of the other and far more important Shi'ite wing. It regarded the leadership as being in the blood of Muhammad and therefore limited to the children of Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Again, the attitude toward the person of the leader varied, as we have already seen. One party held that the leadership was by the right of the appointment of God, but that the leader himself was simply a man as other men. These would add to " the two words " {al-halimatani) of the creed, " There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Apostle of God," a third clause, " and Ali is the rej)resentative of God." Others regarded him as an incarnation of divinity ; a continuing divine revelation in human form. His soul passed, when he died, to his next successor. He was, therefore, infallible and sinless, and was to be treated with absolute, blind obedience. THE HIDDEN IMAM 31 Here there is a mingling of the most strangely varied ideas. In Persia the people had been too long ac- customed to looking upon their rulers as divine for them to be capable of taking up any other position. A story is told of the governor of a Persian province who wrote to the Khalifa of his time that he was not able to prevent his people from giving him the style and treatment of a god; they did not understand any other kind of ruler; it was as much as his authority was worth to attempt to make them desist. From this attitude, combined with the idea of the transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi'ite doctrine was derived. But though the party of Ali might regard the descendants of Ali as semi-divine, yet their conspir- acies and revolts were uniformly unsuccessful, and it became a very dangerous thing to head one. The party was willing to get up a rising at any time, but the leader was apt to hang back. In fact, one of the most cmious features of the whole movement was the uselessness of the family of Ali and the extent to which they were utilized by others. They have been, in a sense, the cat's-paws of history. Gradually they themselves drew back into retirement and vanished from the stage, and, with their vanishing, a new doctrine arose. It was that of the hidden Imam. We have already seen the case of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of these concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on another line of descent, vanished in the same way in the latter part of the second century of the Hijra, and another about a.h. 260. Their respective followers 32 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT held that they were being kept in concealment by God and Avould be brought back at the appointed time to rule over the world and bring in a kind of Muslim millennium. This is the oriental version of the story of Arthur in Avalon and of Frederick Barbarossa in Kyffhaiiser. But that has led us far away and we must go back to the fall of the Umayyads and the again disap- pointed hopes of the Alids. By the time of the last Khalifa of the Umayyad house, Marwan II, a.h. 127- 132 (a.d. 744-750), the whole empire was more or less in rebellion, partly Sbi'ite and partly Kharijite. The Shi'ites themselves had, as usual, no man strong enough to act as leader ; that part was taken by as- Saffah, a descendant of al- Abbas, an uncle of Muham- mad. The rebellion was ostensibly to bring again into power the family of the Prophet, but under that the Abbasids understood the family of Hashim, while the Alids took it in the more exact sense of them- selves. They were made a cat's-paw, the Abbasid dynasty was founded, and they were thrown over. Thus, the Khalifate remained persistently in the hands of those who, up to the last, had been hostile to the Prophet. This al- Abbas had embraced the faith only when Mecca was taken by the Muslims. Later historians, jealous for the good name of the ancestor of the longest line of all the Successors, have labored to build up a legend that al-Abbas stayed in Mecca only because he could there be more useful in the cause of his nephew. This is one of the per- versions of early history of which the Muslim chron- icles are full. UMAYYADS OF SPAIN 33 But the story of the Umayyacls is not yet out. From the ruin that overwhelmed them, one escaped and fled to North Africa. There, he vainly tried to draw together a power. At last, seeing in Spain some better prospect of success, he crossed thither, and by courage, statesmanship, and patience, carved out a new Umayyad empire that lasted for 300 years. One of his descendants in a.h. 317 (a.d. 929) took the title of Khalifa and claimed the homage due to the Commander of the Faithful. There is a story that al-Mansur, the second Abbasid, once asked his court- iers, "Who is the Falcon of Quraysh?" They named one after another of the great men of the tribe, beginning, naturally, with his majesty himself, but to no purpose. "No," he said, "the Falcon of Quraysh is Abd ar-Kahman, the Umayyad, who found his way over deserts and seas, flung himself alone into a strange country, and there, without any helper but himself, built up a realm. There has been none like him of the blood of Quraysh." CHAPTEE II Shi'ite revolts against Abbasids ; Idrisids ; Zaydites ; Imamites ; the Twelvers ; constitutional theory of modern Persia ; origin of Fatimids ; Maymun the oculist ; plan of the conspiracy ; the Seveners ; the Qarmatians ; Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi and found- ing of Fatimid dynasty in North Africa ; their spread to Egypt and to Syria; al-Hakim Bi'amrillah ; the Druses; the Assas- sins ; Saladin and the Ayyubids. It is not in place here to deal with all the number- less little Shi'ite revolts against the Abbasids which now followed. Those only are of interest to us which had more or less permanent effect on the Muslim state and states. Earliest among such comes the revolt which founded the dynasty of the Idrisids. About the middle of the second century the Abba- sids were hard pressed. The heavens themselves seemed to mingle in the conflict. The early years of their rule had been marked by great showers of shooting stars, and the end of the age was reckoned near by both parties. Messianic hope was alive, and a Mahdi, a Guided of God, was looked for. This had long been the attitude of the Alids, and the Abbasids began to feel a necessity to gain for their de facto rule the sanction of theocratic hopes. In 143 Halley's comet was visible for twenty days, and in 147 there were again showers of shooting stars. On the part of the Abbasids, homage was solemnly rendered to the eldest son of al-Mansur, the Khalifa 84 IDRISIDS 35 of the time, as successor of his father, under the title al-Mahdi, and several sayings were forged and as- cribed to the Prophet which told who and what manner of man the Mahdi would be, in terms which clearly pointed to this heir-apparent. The Alids, on their side, were urged on to fresh revolts. These ris- ings were still political in character and hardly at all theological ; they expressed the claims to sovereignty of the house of the Prophet. On the suppression of one of them at al-Madina in 169, Idris ibn Abd Allah, a grandson of al-Hasan, escaped to North Africa — that refuge of the politically disaffected — and there at the far-off Volubilis of the Romans, in the modern Morocco, founded a state. It lasted till 375, and planted firmly the authority of the family of Mu- hammad in the western half of North Africa. Other Alid states rose in its place, and in 961 the dynasty of the Sharif s of Morocco was established by a Mu- hammad, a descendant of a Muhammad, brother of the same Abd Allah, grandson of al-Hasan. This family still rules in Morocco and claims the title of Khalifa of the Prophet and Commander of the Faith- ful. Strictly, they are Shi'ites, but their sectarianism sits lightly upon them ; it is political only and they have no touch of the violent religious antagonism to the Sunnite Muslims that is to be found in Persian Shi'ism. As adherents of the legal school of Malik ibn Anas, their Sunna is the same as that of ortho- dox Islam. The Sahih of al-Bukhari (see below, p. 79 ) is held in especially high reverence, and one division of the Moorish army alwaj^s carries a copy of it as a talisman. They are really a bit of the sec- 36 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT outl century of tlie Hijra crystallized aud surviving into our time. Another Sbi'ite line wliicli lasts more or less down to the present day, is that of the Zaydites of al- Yaman. They Avere so called from their adherence to Zayd, a grandson of al-Husayn, and their sect spread in north Persia and south Arabia. The north Persian branch is of little historic importance for our purpose. For some sixty-four years, from 250 on, it held Tabaristan, struck coins and exercised all sover- eign rights ; then it fell before the Samanids. The other branch has had a much longer history. It was founded about 280, at Sa'da in al-Yaman and there, and later at San'a, Zaydite Imams have ruled off aud on till our day. The Turkish hold upon south Arabia has always been of the slightest. Sometimes they have been absolutely expelled from the country, and their control has never extended beyond the limits of their garrisoned posts. The position of these Zaydites was much less extreme than that of the other Shi'ites. They were strictly Fatimites, that is, they held that any descendant of Fatima could be Imam. Further, circumstances might justify the passing over, for a time, of such a legitimate Imam and the election as leader of someone who had no equally good claim. Thus, they reverenced Abu Bakr and Umar and regarded their Khalifate as just, even though Ali was there with a better claim. The election of these two Khalifas had been to the ad- vantage of the Muslim state. Some of them even accepted the Khalifate of IJthman and only de- nounced his evil deeds. Further, they regarded it as IMAMITES 37 possible that there might be two Imams at the same time, especially when they were in countries widely apart. This, apparently, sprang from the sect be- ing divided between north Persia and south Ara- bia. Theologically, or philosophically — it is hard to hold the two apart in Islam — the Zaydites were accused of rationalism. Their founder, Zayd, the grandson of al-Husayn, had studied under the great Mu'tazilite, Wasil ibn Ata, of whom much more hereafter. But if the Zaydites were lax both in their theology and in their theory of the state, that cannot be said of another division of the Shi'ites, called the Imam- ites on account of the stress which they laid on the doctrine of the person of the Imam. For them the Imam of the time was explicitly and personally in- dicated, Ali by Muhammad and each of the others in turn by his predecessor. But it was hard to rec- oncile with this a pj^iori position that an Imam must have been indicated, the fact that there was no agree- ment as to the Imam who had been indicated. Down all possible lines of descent the sacred succession was traced until, of the seventy-two sects that the Prophet had foretold for his people, seventy, at least, were occupied by the Imamites alone. Further, the num- ber of Hidden Imams was constantly running up ; with every generation, Alids found it convenient to withdraw into retirement and have reports given out of their own deaths. Then two sects would come into existence — one which stopped at the Alid in question, and said that he was being kept in con- cealment by God to be brought back at His pleas- 38 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT ure ; and another which passed the Imamship on to the next generation. Out of this chaos two sects, ad- hering to two series of Imams, stand clear through their historical importance. The one is that of the Twelvers {Ithna'ashariya) ; theirs is the official creed of modern Persia. About A.H. 260 a certain Mu- hammad ibn al-Hasan, twelfth in descent from Ali, vanished in the way just described. The sect which looked for his return increased and flourished until, at length, with the conquest of Persia in A.H. 907 (a.d. 1502) by the Safawids — a family of Alid descent which joined arms to sainthood — Persia became Shi'ite, and the series of the Shahs of Persia was begun. The position of the Shah is therefore essen- tially different from that of the Khalifa of the Sun- nites. The Khalifa is the successor of Muhammad, with a dignity and authority which inheres in him- self; he is both king and pontiff; the Shah is a mere locu7n tenens^ and reigns only until God is pleased to restore to men the true Imam. That Imam is still in existence, though hidden from hu- man eyes. The Shah, therefore, has strictly no legal authority ; he is only a guardian of the public order. True legal authority lies, rather, with the learned doctors of religion and law. As a consequence of this, the Shi'ites still have MujtaUds, divines and legists who have a right to form opinions of their own, can expound the original sources at first hand, and can claim the unquestioning assent of their dis- ciples. Such men have not existed among the Sun- nites since the middle of the third century of the Hijra ; from that time on all Sunnites have been FATIMIDS 39 compelled to swear to the words of some master or other, long dead. This division of the Shi'ites is the only one that exists in great numbers down to the present day. The second of the two mentioned above came to power earlier, ran a shorter course, and has now van- ished from the stage, leaving nothing but an histor- ical mystery and two or three fossilized, half -secret sects — strange survivals which, like the survivals of geology, tell us what were the living and dominant forces in the older world. It will be worth while to enter upon some detail in reciting its history, both for its own romantic interest and as an example of the methods of Shi'ite propaganda. Its success shows how the Abbasid empire was gradually under- mined and brought to its fall. It itself was the most magnificent conspiracy, or rather fraud, in all his- tory. To understand its possibility and its results, we must hold in mind the nature of the Persian race and the condition of that race at this time. Herodo- tus was told by his Persian friends that one of the three things Persian youth was taught was to tell the truth. That may have been the case in the time of Herodotus, but certainly this teaching has had no effect whatever on an innate tendency in the oppo- site direction ; and it is just possible that Herodo- tus's friends, in giving him that information, were giving also an example of this tendency. Travellers have been told curious things before now, but cer- tainly none more curious than this. As we know the Persian in history, he is a born liar. He is, there- fore, a born conspirator. He has great quickness of 40 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT mind, adaptability, and, apart from religious emo- tion, no conscience. In the third century of the Hijra (the nintli a.d.), the Persians were either de- voted Shi'ites or simple unbelievers. The one class would do anything for the descendants of Ali ; the other, anything for themselves. This second class, further, would by preference combine doing some- thing for themselves with doing something against Islam and the Arabs, the conquerors of their coun- try. So much by way of premise. In the early part of this third century, there lived at Jerusalem a Persian oculist named Maymun. He was a man of high education, professional and other- wise ; had no beliefs to speak of, and understood the times. He had a son, Abd Allah, and trained him carefully for a career. Abd Allah, however — known as Abd Allah ibn Maymun — though he had thought of starting as a prophet himself, saw that the time was not ripe, and planned a larger and more magnif- icent scheme. This was to be no ordinary conspir- acy to burst after a few years or months, but one requiring generations to develop. It was to bring universal dominion to his descendants, and overthrow Islam and the Arab rule. It succeeded in great part, very nearly absolutely. His plan was to unite all classes and parties in a conspiracy under one head, promising to each indi- vidual the things which he considered most desir- able. For the Shi'ites, it was to be a Shi'ite conspir- acy ; for the Kharijites, it took a Kharijite tinge ; for Persian nationalists, it was anti-Arab ; for free- thinkers, it was frankly nihilistic. Abd Allah him- A UNIQUE CONSPIRACY 41 self seems to Lave been a sceptic of the most refined stamp. The working of this plan was achieved by a system of grades like those in freemasonry. His emissaries went out, settled each in a village and gradually won the confidence of its inhabitants, A marked characteristic of the time was unrest and general hostility to the government. Thus, there was an excellent field for work. To the enormous majority of those involved in it the conspiracy was Shi'ite only, and it has been regarded as such by many of its historians ; but it is now tolerably plain how simply nihilistic were its ultimate principles. The first object of the missionary was to excite re- ligious doubt in the mind of his subject, by pointing out curious difficulties and subtle questions in theol- ogy. At the same time he hinted that there were those who conld answer these questions. If his sub- ject proved tractable and desired to learn further, an oath of secrecy and absolute obedience and a fee were demanded — all quite after the modern fashion. Then he was led up through several grades, gradu- ally shaking his faith in orthodox Islam and its teachers and bringing him to believe in the idea of an Imam, or guide in religious things, till the fourth grade was reached. There the theological system was developed, and Islam, for the first time, abso- lutely deserted. We have dealt already with the doctrine of the Hidden Imam and with the present- day creed of Persia, that the twelfth in descent from Ali is in hiding and will return when his time comes. But down the same line of descent seven Imams had been reckoned to a certain vanished Isma'il, and this 42 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT Isma'il was adopted by Abd Allah ibn Maymun as his Imam and as titular head of his conspiracy. Hence, his followers are called Isma'ilians and Sev- eners {SabHya). The story which is told of the split between the Seveners and the Twelvers, which were to be, is characteristic of the whole movement and of the wider divergence of the Seveners from ordinary Islam and its laws. The sixth Imam was Ja'far as- Sadiq (d. a.h. 148) ; he appointed his son Isma'il as his successor. But Isma'il was found drunk on one occasion, and his father in wrath passed the Imamship on to his brother, Musa al-Qazam, who is accord- ingly reckoned as seventh Imam by the Twelvers. One party, however, refused to recognize this trans- fer. Isma'il's drunkenness, they held, was a proof of his greater spirituality of mind ; he did not follow the face-value (zahr) of the law, but its hidden meaning ihatn). This is an example of a tendency, strong in Shi'ism, to find a higher spiritual meaning lying within the external or verbal form of the law ; and in proportion as a sect exalted Ali, so it diverged from literal acceptance of the Qur'an. The most extreme Shi'ites, who tended to deify their Imam, were known on that account as Batinites or Innerites. On this more hereafter. But to return to the Seveners : in the fourth grade a further refinement was added. Everything went in sevens, the Prophets as well as the Imams. The Prophets had been Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Isma'il, or rather his son Muhammad, for Isma'il himself had died in his father's lifetime. Each of these Prophets had had a THE SYSTEM OF SEVENS 43 helper. The helper of Adam had been Seth ; of Noah, Shem ; and the helper of Muhammad, the son of Isma'il, was Abd Allah ibn Maymun himself. Be- tween each pair of Prophets there came six Imams — it must be remembered that the world was never left without an Imam — but these Imams had had no rev- elation to make ; were only guides to already re- vealed truth. Thus, we have a series of seven times seven Imams, the first, and thereafter each seventh, having the superior dignity of Prophet. The last of the forty -nine Imams, this Muhammad ibn Isma'il, is the greatest and last of the Prophets, and Abd Allah ibn Maymun has to prepare the way for him and to aid him generally. It is at this point that the ad- herent of this system ceases to be a Muslim. The idea of a series of Prophets is genuinely Islamic, but Muhammad, in Muslim theology, is the last of the Prophets and the greatest, and after him there will come no more. Such, then, was the system that those who passed the fourth degree learned and accepted. The great majority did not pass beyond ; but those who were judged worthy were admitted to three further degrees. In these degrees, their respect for religious teaching of every kind, doctrinal, moral, ritual, was gradually undermined ; the Prophets and their works were de- preciated and philosophy and philosophers put in their place. The end was to lead the very few who were admitted to the inmost secrets of the conspiracy to the same position as its founder. It is clear what a tremendous weapon, or rather machine, was thus created. Each man was given the amount of light he 44 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT could bear and which was suited to his prejudices, aud he was made to believe that the end of the whole work would be the attaining of what he regarded as most desirable. The missionaries were all things to all men, in the broadest sense, and could work w\ith a Kharijite fanatic, who longed for the days of Umar ; a Bedawi Arab, whose only idea was plunder ; a Persian driven to wild cries and tears by the thought of the fate of Ali, the well-beloved, and of his sons ; a peasant, who did not care for any family or religion but only wished to live in peace and be let alone by the tax-gatherers ; a Syrian mystic, who did not know very well what he thought, but lived in a world of dreams ; or a materialist, whose desire was to clear all religions out of the way and give humanity a chance. All was fish that came to their net. So the long seed-planting went on. Abd Allah ibn Maymun had to flee to Salamiya in Syria, died there and went to his own place — if he got his deserts, no desirable one — and Ahmad, his son or grandson, took up the work in his stead. With him the movement tends to the surface, and we begin to touch hard facts and dates. In southern Mesopotamia — what is called the Arab Iraq — we find a sect appearing, nicknamed Qar- matians, from one of their leaders. In a.h. 277 (a.d. 890-1) they were sufficiently numerous and knew their strength enough to hold a fortress and thus enter upon open rebellion. They were peasants, we must remember, Nabateans and no Arabs, only Muslims by compulsion, and thus what we have here is really a Jacquerie, or Peasants' AVar. But a dis- turbance of any kind suited the Isma'ilians. From UBAYD ALLAH AL-MAHDI 45 there the rising spread into Bahrayn and on to south Arabia, varying in its character with the character of the people. But there was another still more important devel- opment in progress. A missionary had gone to North Africa and there worked with success among the Berber tribes about Constantine, in what is now Algeria. These have ahvays been ready for any change. He gave himself out as forerunner of the Mahdi, promised them the good of both worlds, and called them to arms. The actual rising was in a.h. 269 (a.d. 902). Then there appeared among them Sa'id, the son of Ahmad, the son of Abd Allah, the son of Maymun the oculist; but it was not under that name. He was now Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi him- self, a descendant of Ali and of Muhammad ibn Isma'il, for whom his ancestors were supposed to have worked and built up this conspiracy. In a.h 296 (A.D. 909) he was saluted as Commander of the Faithful, with the title of al-Mahdi. So far the con- spiracy had succeeded. This Fatimid dynasty, so they called themselves from Fatima, their alleged ancestress, the daughter of Muhammad, conquered Egypt and Syria half a century later and held them till A.H. 567 (A.D. 1171). When in a.h. 317 the Umay- yads of Cordova also claimed the Khalifate and used the title, there were three Commanders of the Faith- ful at one time in the Muslim world. Yet it should be noticed that the constitutional position of these Umayyads was essentially different from that of the Fatimids. To the Fatimids, the Abbasids were usurp- ers. The Umayyads of Cordova, on the other hand,' 46 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT held, like the Zajdites and some jurisconsults of the highest rank, that, when Muslim countries were so far apart that the authority of the ruler of the one could not make itself felt in the other, it was lawful to have two Imams, each a true Successor of the Prophet. The good of the people of Muhammad demanded it. Still, the unity of the Khalifate is the more regular doctrine. But only half of the work was done. Islam stood as firmly as ever and the conspiracy had only pro- duced a schism in the faith and had not destroyed it. Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on the one hand, of ruling a people who were in great bulk fanatical Muslims and did not understand any jesting with their religion, and, on the other hand, of being head of a conspiracy to destroy that very religion. The Syrians and Arabs had appar- ently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and North Africans, and Ubayd Allah found himself between the devil and the deep sea. The Qarma- tians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans, stormed the holy city Mecca, and, most terrible of all, carried off the sacred black stone. When an enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they de- clined — they had orders not to send it back. Every- one understood that the orders were from Africa. So Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address them in a public letter, exhorting them to be better Muslims. The writing and reading of this letter must have been accompanied by mirth, at any rate no attention was paid to it by the Qarmatians. It was not till the time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that they were AL-HAKIM 47 permitted to do business witli that stone. Then they sent it back with the explanatory or apolo- getic remark that they had carried it off tinder orders and now sent it back under orders. Mean- while the Fatimid dynasty was running its course in Egypt but without turning the people of Egypt from Islam. Yet it produced one strange personality and two sects, stranger even than the sect to which it itself owed its origin. The personality is that of al- Hakim Bi'amrillah, who still remains one of the great- est mysteries that are to be met with in history. In many ways he reminds us curiously of the madness of the Julian house ; and, in truth, such a secret movement as that of which he was a part, carried on through generations from father to son, could not but leave a trace on the brain. We must remember that the Khalifa of the time was not always of neces- sity the head of the conspiracy, or even fully initi- ated into it. In the latter part of the Fatimid rule we find distinct traces of such a power behind the throne, consisting, as we may imagine, of descendants and pupils of those who had been fully initiated from the first and had passed through all the grades. In the case of al-Hakim, it is possible, even, to trace, to a certain extent, the development of his in- itiation. During the first part of his reign he wns fanatically Muslim and Shi'ite. He persecuted alternately the Christians and the Jews, and then the orthodox and the Shi'ites. In the latter part, there was a change. He had, apparently, reached a point of philosophical indifference, for the persecu- tions of Christians and Jews ceased, and those who *s 48 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT had been forced to embrace Islam were permitted to relapse. This last was without parallel, till in 1844 Lord Stratford de Eedcliffe wrung from the Porte the concession that a Muslim who apostatized to Christianity should not be put to death. But, mingled with this indifference, there appeared a strange but regular development of Shi'ite doctrine. Some of his followers began to proclaim openly that the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident that he himself accepted and believed this. But the Egyptian populace would have none of it, and the too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the Lebanon and there preached to the native moun- tain tribes. The results of their labors are the Druses of to-day, who worship al- Hakim still and expect his return to introduce the end of all things. Finally, al-Hakim vanished on the night of February 12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery unread to this day. "Whether he was murdered, and if so why, or van- ished of free-will, and if so again why, we have no means of telling. Our guess will depend upon our reading of his character. So much is certain, that he was a ruler of the autocratic type, who introduced many reforms, most of which the people of his time could not in the least understand and therefore mis- represented as the mere whims of a tyrant, and many of which, from our ignorance, are still obscure to us. If we can imagine such a man of strong personality and desire for the good of his people but with a touch of madness in the brain, cast thus in the midst between his orthodox subjects and a wholly unbelieving inner government, we shall perhaps THE ASSASSINS 49 have the clew to the strange stories told of him. Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to which Ave shall refer, is the sect known as the As- sassins, whose Grand Master was a name of terror to the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain. It, too, was founded, and apparently for a purpose of personal vengeance, by a Persian who began as a Shi'ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt, studied under the Fatimids — they had established at Cairo a great school of science — and returned to Persia as their agent to carry on their propaganda. His methods were the same as theirs, with a differ- ence. That was the reduction of assassination to a fine art. From his eagle's nest of Alamut — such is the meaning of the name — and later from Masyaf in the Lebanon and other mountain fortresses, he and his successors spread terror through Persia and Syria and were only finally stamped out by the Mon- gol flood under Hulagu in the middle of the seventh century of the Hijra (the 13tli a.d.). Of the sect there are still scattered remnants in Syria and India, and as late as 1866 an English judge at Bombay had to decide a case of disputed succession according to the law of the Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid dynasty itself fell before the Kurd, Salah ad-Din, the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was again or- thodox. CHAPTER III The problem of the Abbasids ; the House of Barmak ; the crum- bling of the empire ; the Pra3torians of Baghdad ; the Buway- hids ; the situation of the Khalifa under them ; the Saljuqs ; the possibilities of development under them ; the Mongols and the Abbasid end ; the Egyptian Abbasids ; the Ottoman Sultans, their heirs ; theory of the Khalifate ; the modern situation ; the signs of sovereignty for Muslims ; five grounds of the claim of the Ottoman Sultan ; the consequences for the Sultan ; other Muslim constitutions ; the Shi^tes ; the Ibadites ; the Wahha- bites ; the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. We must now return to tlie Abbasids, whose em- pire we left crumbling away. It was a slirewd stroke of policy on the part of its founder to put the new capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Per- sia, Syria and Arabia. For the only hope of perma- nence to the empire lay in welding these into a unity. For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous rulers, and, especially, during fifty years of guidance by the House of Barmak — Persians who flung in their lot with the Abbasids and were their stay till the madness of Harun ar-Bashid cast them down — this seemed to be succeeding ; but, just as the em- pire of Charlemagne melted under his sons, so did the empire of al-Mansur and al-Ma'mun. The Bed- awi tribes fell back into the desert and to the free chaos of the old pre-Islamic life. As the great phil- osophical historian, Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the Arabs by their nature are incapable of founding an 50 CRUMBLING OF THE EMPIRE 61 empire except wlien united by religious enthusiasm, and are of all peoples least capable of governing an empire when founded. After the first Abbasids, it is a fatal error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab or to speak of the Muslim civilization as Arabian. The conquered peoples overcame their conquerors. Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in native independent dynasties flung off the Arab yoke. These dynasties were mostly Shi'ite ; Shi'ism, in great part, is the revolt of the Aryan against Semit- ic monotheism. The process in all this was gradual but certain. Governors of provinces revolted and became semi-independent. Sometimes they acknowl- edged a shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, b}^ hav- ing his name on their coins and in the Friday prayers ; sometimes they did not. At other times they were, or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted, they revolted absolutely. With them, it was a ques- tion of conscience. At last, not even in his own City of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa mas- ter. As in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of mercenaries assumed control and their leader was de facto ruler. Later, from a.h. 320 to 447 (a.d. 932- 1055), the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward and puppet of the Shi'ite Buwayhids. Baghdad it- self they held from 334. But still, a curious spiritu- al value — we cannot call it authority — was left to the shadowy successors of Muhammad. Muslim j)rinces even in far-off India did not feel quite safe upon their thrones unless they had been solemnly in- vested by the Khalifa and given their fitting titlec Those very rulers in whose power the Khalifa's life 52 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT lay sought sanction from liim for tlieir rule. At one time there seemed to be some hope that the fatal unity of theocratical Islam wo uld be broken and that a dualism with promise of development through con- flict — such as the rivalry between Pope and Emperor which kept Europe alive and prevented both State and Church from falling into decrepit decay — might grow up ; that the Khalifa might become a purely spiritual ruler with functions of his own, ruling with mutucxl subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction be- side a temporal Sultan. The Buwayhids were Shi'- ites and merely tolerated, for state reasons, the im- pieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (a.d. 1055), Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, entered Baghdad, was proclaimed Sultan of the Muslims and freed the Khalifa from the Shi'ite yoke. By 470, all western Asia, from the borders of Afghanistan to those of Egypt and the Greek Empire, were Saljuq. With the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as Pope, there was a chance that the Muslim State might enter on a stage of healthy growth through conflict. But that was not to be. Neither State nor Church rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was finall}^ and forever cut off by the Mongol flood. When the next great Sultanate— that of the Ottoman Turks — arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of the Khalifate as well. This is what might have been in Islam, built on actual history in Europe. The situation that did arise in Islam ma}^ become more clear to us if we can imagine that in Europe the vast plans of Gregory YII. had been carried out and the Pope had become the temporal as well as the spiritual SOVEEEIGNTT OF KHALIFATE 53 head of the Christian world. Such a situation would have been similar to that in the world of Islam at its earliest time during some few years under the dynasty of the Umayyads, when the one temporal and spirit- ual sovereign ruled from Samarqand to Spain. Then we can imagine how the vast fabric of such an impe- rial system broke down by its own weight. Under conflicting claims of legitimac}^ an anti-Pope arose and the great schism began. Thereafter the process of disintegration was still more rapid. Provinces rose in insurrection and dropped away from each rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the sovereigns over them professed themselves to be the lieutenants of the supreme Pontiff and sought investiture from him. Last, the States of the Church itseK — all that was left to it — came under the rule of some one of these princes and the Pope was, to all intents, a pris- oner in his own palace. Yet the sovereignty of the Khalifa was not simj^ly a legal fiction, any more than that of the Pope would have been in the parallel just sketched. The Muslim princes thought it well to seek spiritual recognition from him, just as Napoleon I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius VII. But a wave was soon to break in and sweep away all these forms. It came with the Mongols under Hulagu, who passed from the destruction of the As- sassins to the destruction of Baghdad and the Kha- lifate. In a.h. 656 (a.d. 1258), the city was taken and the end of the Abbasids had come. An uncle of the reigning Khalifa escaped and fled to Egypt, where the Mamluk Sultan received him and gave him a 54 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT spiritual court and ecclesiastical recognition. He found it good to have a Khalifa of his own to use in any question of legitimacy. The name had yet so much value. Finally, in 1517, the Mamluk rule went down before the Ottoman Turks, and the story told by them is that the last Abbasid, when he died in 1538, gave over his rights to their Sultan, Sulay- man the Great. Since then, the Ottoman Sultan of Constantinople has claimed to be the Khalifa of Muhammad and the spiritual head of the Muslim world. Such were the fates of the Commanders of the Faithful. We have traced them through a long and devious course, full of confusions and complications. Leaving aside the legitimist party, the whole may be summed in a word. The theoretical position was that the Imam, or leader, must be elected by the Muslim community, and that position has never, the- oretically, been abandoned. Each new Ottoman sovereign is solemnly elected by the Ulama, or canon lawyers and divines of Constantinople. His tem- poral sovereignty comes by blood ; in bestowing this spiritual sovereignty the Ulama act as representatives of the People of Muhammad. Thus the theoretical position was liable to much modification in practice. The Muslim community resolves itself into the people of the capital ; still further, into the body-guard of the dead Khalifa ; and, finally, as now, into the pe- culiar custodians of the Faith. Among the Ibadites the position from the first seems to have been that only those learned in the law should act as electors. Along with this, the doctrine developed that it was CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION OF TO-DAY 55 the duty of the people to recognize imfait accomiM and to do homage to a successful usurj^er — until another more successful should appear. They had learned that it was better to have a bad ruler than no ruler at all. This was the end of the democracy of Islam. Finally, it may be well to give some account of the constitutional question as it exists at the present day. The greatest of the Sultans of Islam is undoubtedly the Emperor of India. Under his rule are far more Muslims than fall to any other. But the theory of the Muslim State never contemplated the possibility of Muslims living under the rule of an unbeliever. For them, the world is divided into two parts, the one is Dar al-lslam, abode of Islam ; and the other is Dar al-liarh, abode of war. In the end, Dar al- harb must disappear into Dar al-Islam and the whole world be Muslim. These names indicate with suf- ficient clearness what the Muslim attitude is toward non-Muslims. It is still a moot point among canon lawyers, however, whether Jihad, or holy war, may be made, unprovoked, upon any Dar al-Jiarh. One thing is certain, there must be a reasonable prospect of success to justify any such movement ; the lives of Muslims must not be thrown away. Further, the necessity of the case — in India, especially — has brought up the doctrine that any country in which the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its injunctions — even some of them — followed, must be regarded as Dar al -Islam and that Jihad within its borders is forbidden. We may doubt, however, if this doctrine would hold back the Indian Muslims to 56 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT any extent if a good opportunity for a Jihad really presented itself. The Blii'ites, it may be remarked, cannot enter upon a Jihad at all until the Hidden Imam returns and leads their armies. Again the two signs of sovereignty for Muslims are that the name of the sovereign should be on the coinage and that he should be prayed for in the Friday sermon (khutba). In India, the custom seems to be to pray for " the ruler of the age " without name ; then each worshipper can apply it as he chooses. But there has crept in a custom in a few mosques of pra}-- ing for the Ottoman Sultan as the Khalifa ; the Eng- lish government busies itself little with these things until compelled, and the custom will doubtless spread. The Ottoman Sultan is certainly next greatest to the Emperor of India and would seem, as a Muslim ruling Muslims, to have an unassailable position. But in his case also difficult and ambiguous constitutional questions can be raised. He has claimed the Khali- fate, as we have seen, since 1538, but the claim is a shaky one and brings awkward responsibilities. As stated at the present day, it has five grounds. First, de facto right; the Ottoman Sultan won his title by the sword and holds it by the sword. Second, elec- tion ; this form has been already described. Third, nomination by the last Abbasid Khalifa of Egjq^t ; so Abu Bakr nominated Umar to succeed him, and precedent is everything in Islam. Fourth, possession and guardianship of the two Harams, or Sacred Cit- ies, Mecca and al-Madina. Fifth, possession of some relics of the Prophet saved from the sack of Baglidad and delivered to Sultan Salim, on his conquest of THEORIES OF THE KHALIFATE 67 Egypt, by the last Abbasid. But these all shatter agaiust the fixed fact that absolutely accepted tradi- tions from the Prophet assert that the Khalifa must be of the family of Quraysh ; so long as there are two left of that tribe, one must be Khalifa and the other his helper. Still, here, as everywhere, the principal of Ijma, Agreement of the Muslim peo- ple, (see p. 105) comes in and must be reckoned with. These very traditions are probably an expres- sion in concrete form of popular agreement. The Khalifate itself is confessedly based upon agreement. The canon lawyers state the case thus : The Imamites and Isma'ilians hold that the appointment of a leader is incumbent upon God. There is only the difference that the Imamites say that a leader is necessary in order to maintain the laws unimpaired, while the Isma'ilians regard him as essential in order to give instruction about God. The Kharijites, on the other hand, recognize no fundamental need of an Imam ; he is only allowable. Some of them held that he should be appointed in time of public trouble to do away with the trouble, thus a kind of dictator ; others, in time of peace, because only then can the people agree. The Mu'tazilites and the Zaydites held that it was for man to appoint, but that the necessity was based on reason ; men needed such a leader. Yet some Mu'tazilites taught that the basis was partly reason and partly obedience to tradition. On the other hand, the Sunnites hold that the appointment of an Imam is incumbent upon men and that the basis is obedience to the tradition of the Agreement of the Muslim world from the earliest times. The 68 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT community of Islam may have disputed over tlie in- dividual to be appointed, but tliey never doubted that the maintenance of the faith in its purity re- quired a leader, and that it was, therefore, incumbent on men to appoint one. The basis is Ijma, Agree- ment, not Scripture or tradition from Muhammad or analogy based on these two. It will be seen from this that the de facto ground to the claim of the Ottoman Sultan is the best. The Muslim community must have a leader ; this is the greatest Muslim ruling Muslims ; he claims the lead- ership and holds it. If the English rule were to be- come Muslim, the Muslims would rally to it. The ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomina- tion to little more, except for antiquarians ; the possession of the Prophetic relics is a sentiment that would have weight with the crowd only; no canon lawyer w^ould seriously urge it. The guardianship of the two Harams is precarious. A Turkish reverse in Syria would withdraw every Turkish soldier from Arabia and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of the blood of the Prophet, would proclaim a Khalifa from among themselves. At present, only the Turk- ish garrison holds them in check. But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely cannot become a constitutional monarch in our sense. He rules under law — divine law — and the people can depose him if he breaks it ; but he cannot set up beside himself a constitutional assembly and give it rights against himself. He is the successor of Mu- hammad and must rule, within limitations, as an ab- solute monarch. So impossible is the modern Khali- PAN-ISLAMISM 59 fate, and so gigantic are its responsibilities. The millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and all Muslims of central Asia ; the Muslims of India who are not Shi'ite also look to him. So, too, in Africa and wherever in the world the People of Muhammad have gone, their eyes turn to the Bosphorus and the Great Sultan. This is what has been called the modern Pan-Islamic movement ; it is a modern fact. The position of the other Muslim sects we have already seen. Of Shi'ite rulers, there are the Imam- ites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south Arabia and fugitive in Africa ; strange secret bodies of Isma- 'ilians — Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins — still holding their own in mountain recesses, forgotten by the world ; oldest of all, the Sharif s of Morocco, who are Sunnites and antedate all theological differences, hold- ing only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar, Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other, there are some fossilized descendants of every sect that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and death. Insurrections and heresies have their own uses. It only remains to make mention of two modern movements which have deeply affected the Islam of to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed above, strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim world into closer touch with the science and thought of the Christian world, ralljang all the Muslim peo- ples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as their sj^iritual head and holding fast by the kernel of 60 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT Islam. It is a reform movement whose treud is for- ward. The other two, to which we now come, are reform movements also, but their trend is backward. They look to the good old days of early Islam and try to restore them. The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Slave of the Boun- tiful), its founder, a native of Najd in central Arabia, who died in 1787. His aim w^as to bring Islam back to its primitive parity and to do away with all the usages and beliefs which had arisen to cloud its absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation in Islam have never led to anything but the founding of new dynasties. They may begin with a saintly reformer, but in the first or the second generation there is sure to come the conquering disciple ; relig- ion and rule go together, and he who meddles with the one must next grasp at the other. The third stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect, the vitality of which is again directed into religious channels. The Wahhabites were no exception. Their rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Bed Sea, touched al-Yaman and Hadramawt and included some districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early in the nineteenth century ; but now, after many dy- nastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites proper has almost ceased, although the Turks have not gained any new footing in Najd. There, a native Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turk- ish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha'il. But the zeal of the Wahhabites gave an impulse to BROTHERHOOD OF AS-SANUSI 61 reform in the general body of Muslims wliicli is not yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India, their views have been widely spread by missionaries, and at one time there was grave fear of a Wahhabite insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the Muslim Church as a whole. Politically it has failed, but the spirit of reform remains and has undoubt- edly influenced the second reform movement to which we now come. That is the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, founded in 1837 by Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi in order to re- form and spread the faith. The tendency to organ- ize has always been strong among Orientals, and in Islam itself there have risen, as we have seen, from the earliest times, secret societies for conspiracy and insurrection. But apart from these dubious organi- zations, religious feeling has also expressed itself in brotherhoods closely corresponding to the monastic orders of Europe, except that they were, and are, self-governing and under no relations but those of sentiment to the head of the Muslim Faith. Rather, these orders of darwishes have been inclined toward heresies of a mystical and pantheistic type more than toward the development and support of the severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This is a side of Muhammadanism with which we shall have to deal in some detail hereafter. In the mean- time, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi is one of the orders of darwashes, but distinguished from all its predecessors in its severely reforming and puritanic character. It has taken up 62 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the same problem in a rather different way. Its princi- ples are of the strictest monotheism ; all usages and ideas that do not accord with their views of the exact letter of the Qur'an are prohibited. The present head of the Brotherhood, the son of the founder, who him- self died in 1859, claims to be the Mahdi and has es- tablished a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the eastern Sahara, between Egypt and Tripolis. The mother house of the order is there, and from it missionaries have gone out and established other houses through- out all north Africa and Morocco and far into the interior. The Head himself has of late retreated farther into the desert. There is also an important centre at Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis are initiated into the order in great numbers. From Mecca these brethren return to their homes all over the Muslim world, and the order is said to be especially popular in the Malay Archipelago. So there has sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications, an imperium in imperio. All the brethren in all the de- grees — for, just as in the monastic orders of Europe, there are active members and lay members — reverence and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inacces- sible oasis in the African desert. There he works toward the end, and there can be little doubt what that end will be. Sooner or later Europe — in the first instance, England in Egypt and France in Algeria — will have to face the bursting of this storm. For this Mahdi is different from him of Khartum and the southern Sudan in that he knows how to rule and wait ; for years he has gathered arms and munitions, THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE 63 and trained men for the great Jihad. When his plans are ready and his time is come, a new chapter will be opened in the history of Islam, a chapter which will cast into forgetfulness even the recent volcanic out- burst in China. It will then be for the Ottoman Sultan of the time to show what he and his Khalifate are worth. He will have to decide whether he will throw in his lot with a Mahdi of the old Islam and the dream of a Muslim millennium, or boldly turn to new things and carry the Successorship and the People of Muhammad to join the civilized world. PART II CHAPTEK I The scope of jurisprudence among Muslims ; the earliest elements in it, Arab custom, Jewish law, personality of Muhammad ; his attitude toward law ; elements after death of Muhammad ; Qur'an, Usage of the Prophet, common law of al-Madina; conception of Simna before Muhammad and after; traditions and their transmission ; traditions in book form ; influence of Umayyads ; forgery of traditions ; the 3fuivatta of IVIalik ibn Anas; the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal; the musaiuiafs ; al-Bukhari; Muslim; Ibn Maja; at-Tirmidhi ; an-Xasa'i ; al- Baghawi ; the problem of the Muslim lawyers ; their sources ; Koman law ; the influence of the doctrine of the Responsa pru- dentium ; Opinion in Islam ; the Law of Nature or Equity in Islam ; istihsan ; istislah ; Analogy ; the patriarchal period in Islam ; the Umayyad period ; the growth of the canon law. In tracing tlie development of Muslim jurispru- dence few of the difficulties are encountered wliicli surrounded Sir Henry Maine wlien lie first examined the origins and history of European law. We do not need to push our researches back to the primitive famil}^, nor to work our way through periods of cen- turies guided by the merest fragments of documents and hints of usage. Our subject was born in the light of history ; it ran its course in a couple of hun- dred years and has left at every important point 65 G6 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE autlioritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its whither. Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently great. Shortly, they are two. The mass of material is overpowering ; the strangeness of the ideas involved is perplexing. The wealth of material will become plain, to some extent at least, as the history is traced ; but for the strangeness of the contents, of the ar- rangement and the atmosphere of these codes some preparation must be given from the outset. How, indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows no distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal law ; which prescribes and describes the use of the toothpick and decides when a wedding invitation may be declined, which enters into the minutest and most unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of religious retreat ? Is it by some subtle connection of thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter on bankruptcy and composition ? One thing, at least, is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most abso- lute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of all things, human and divine. It tells what we must render to Caesar and what to God, what to ourselves, and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything that a man shall believe of things in heaven and in earth and beneath the earth — and this is no flat rhet- oric — Muslim law prescribes everything that a man shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in SCOPE OF MUSLIM LAW 67 terms of duty. Nothing can escape the narrow meshes of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam never ate a watermelon because he could not find that the usage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a canonical method of doing so. It will, therefore, be well for the student to work through the sketch of a code of Muslim law which is inserted in Appendix I. One has been chosen which belongs to the school of ash-Shafi'i because of its gen- eral accessibility. It should be remembered that what is given is the merest table of contents. The standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to eight hundred and eleven closely printed quarto pages. Even a mere reading of this table of contents, however, will show in how different a sphere of thought from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must return to the beginning of things, to the egg from which this tremendous system was hatched. The mother-city of Islam was the little town of Yathrib, called Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the Hijra or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of the Christian era. Here the first Muslim state was founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim juris- prudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were the result of the inter-working of the same highly complicated causes. The ferments in the case may be classified and described as follows : First, in the town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on its little stage — little, but so momentous for the future — there were two parties, often at war, oftener at peace. There was a genuine Arab element and 68 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE there was a large settlement of Jews. To tlie Arabs any conception of law was utterly foreign. An Arab tribe has no constitution ; its system is one of in- dividualism ; the siDgle man is a sovereign and no writ can lie against him ; the tribe can cast him forth from its midst ; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So stands the case now in the desert, and so it was then. Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, always a somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of the slightest. Further, the avenging of a broken oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath ; if he did not care to right his client, no one else would interfere. There was customary law, undoubtedly, but it was protected by no sanction and enforced by no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, well; if not, neither had anything to fear but the anger of his opponent. That law of custom we shall find again appearing in the system of Islam, but there it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God working through the authority of the state. The Jew- ish element was in a different case. They may have been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish proselytes — many Arab tribes, we know, had gone over bodily to Judaism — but their lives were ruled and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense ac- cretion by legal fiction and by usage ; the Koman codes had left their mark and the customary law of the desert as well. All this was working in the life of the town when Muhammad and his little band of fugitives from Mecca entered it. Being Meccans, MUHAMMAD AS A LEGISLATOR 69 they must have brought with them the more devel- oped legal ideas of that trading centre; but these were of comparatively little account in the scale. The new and dominating element was the personality of Muhammad himself. His contribution was legisla- tion pure and simple, the only legislation that has ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later, he ruled his community as an absolute monarch, as a prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and judged the people. He had no need of a code, for his own will was enough. He followed the custom- ary laAV of the town, as it has been described above, when it suited him, and when he judged that it was best. If not, he left it and there was a revelation. So the legislative part of the Qur'an grew out of such scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of the squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al- Madina. The system was one of pure opportunism ; but of what body of legislation can that not be said ? Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were backed by a revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the other, to have made a few attempts to deal system- atically with certain standing and constantly recur- ring problems — such, for example, as the conflicting claims of heirs in an estate, and the whole compli- cated question of divorce— but in general, the position holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand to mouth. He did not draw up any twelve tables or ten commandments, or code, or digest ; he was there and the people could come and ask him questions when they chose, and that was enough. The concep- tion of a rounded and complete system which will 70 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE meet any case and to which all cases must be ad- justed by legal fiction or equity, the conception which we owe to the genius and experience of the Roman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From time to time he got into difficulties. A revelation proved too wide or too narrow, or left out some im- portant possibility. Then there came another to supplement or correct, or even to set the first quite aside — Muhammad had no scruples about progressive revelation as applied to himself. Thus, through these interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat con- tradictions have come into the Qur'an and have proved the delight of generations of Muslim jurisconsults. Such, then, was the state of things legal in al- Madina during the ten years of Muhammad's rule there until his death in a.d. 632. Of law there was, strictly speaking, none. In his decisions, Muham- mad could follow certainly the customary law of the town ; but to do so there was no necessity upon him other than prudence, for his authority was absolute. Yet even with such authority and such freedom, his task was a hard one. The Jews, the native Arabs of al-Madina, and his fellow fugitives from Mecca lived in more or less of friction. He had to see to it that his decisions did not bring that friction to the point of throwing the whole community into a flame. The Jews, it is true, were soon eliminated, but the influ- ence of their law lasted in the customary law of the town long after they themselves had become insig- nificant. Still, with all this, the suitor before Mu- hammad had no certainty on what basis his claims would be judged ; whether it would be the old law of qur'an; usage of muiiammad 71 the town, or a roiigli equity based on Muhammad's own ideas, or a special revelation ad hoc. So far, then, we may be said to have the three elements — common law, equity, legislation. Legal fiction we shall meet later; Muhammad had no need of it. But with the death of Muhammad in a.d. 632 the situation was completely changed. We can now speak of Muslim law ; legislation plays no longer any part ; the process of collecting, arranging, correlating, and developing has begun. Consider the situation as it must have presented itself to one of the immediate successors of Muhammad, as he sat in his place and judged the people. When a case came up for deci- sion, there were several sources from which a law in point might be drawn. First among them was the Qur'an. It had been collected from the fragmentary state in which Muhammad had left it by Abu Bakr, his first Khalifa, some two years after his death. Again, some ten years later, it was revised and given forth in a final public recension by Uthman, the third Khalifa. This was the absolute word of God — thoughts and language — and stood and, in theory, still stands first of all sources for theology and law. If it contained a law clearly applying to the case in hand, there was no more to be said ; divine legisla- tion had settled the matter. If not, recourse was next had to the decisions of the Prophet. Had a similar one come before him, and how had he ruled? If the memories of the Companions of the Prophet, the Sahibs, could adduce nothing similar from one of his decisions, then the judge had to look further for an authority. But the decisions of Muhammad had N. 72 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE been many, the memories of his Companions were capacious, and possessed further, as we must recog- nize with regret, a constructive power that helped the early judges of Islam out of many close corners. But if tradition even — true or false— finally failed, then the judge fell back on the common law of al-Madina, that customary law already mentioned. When that, too, failed, the last recourse was had to the common- sense of the judge — roughly, what we would call equity. At the beginning, therefore, of Muslim law, it had the following sources — legislation, the usage of Muhammad, the usage of al-Madina, equity. Naturally, as time went on and the figure of the founder drew back and became more obscure and more venerated, equity fell gradually into dis- use ; a closer search was made for decisions of that founder which could in any way be pressed into ser- vice; a method of analogy, closely allied to legal fiction, was built up to assist in this, and the devel- opment of Muslim jurisprudence as a system and a science was fairly begun. Further, in later times, the decisions of the first four Khalifas and the agree- ment {ijmn) of the immediate Companions of Mu- hammad came to assume an importance only second to that of Muhammad himself. Later still, as a re- sult of this, the opinion grew up that a general agree- ment of the jurisconsults of any particular time was to be regarded as a legitimate source of law. But we must return to consider our subject more broadly and in another field. The fact has already been brought out that the sphere of law is much wider in Islam than it has ever LEGAL CLASSES OF ACTIONS 73 been witli us. By it all the minutest acts of a Mus- lim are guarded. Europe, also, passed tlirougli a stage similar to this in its sumptuary laws ; and the tendency toward inquisitorial legislation still exists in America, but not even the most medi?evally mind- ed American Western State has ventured to put upon its statute-book regulations as to the use of the tooth- pick and the wash-cloth. Thus, the Muslim concep- tion of law is so wide as to reach essential difference. A Mushm is told by his code not only what is re- quired under penalty, but also what is either recom- mended or disliked though without reward or penalty being involved. He may certainly consult his law- yer, to learn how near the wind he can sail without unpleasant consequences; but he may also consult him as his spiritual director with regard to the rela- tive praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of classes of actions of which our law takes no cognizance. In consequence, actions are divided by Muslim canon lawyers (faqihs) into five classes. First, necessary {fard or wajih); a duty the omission of which is punished, the doing rewarded. Secondly, recom mended {manduh or mustahahh) ; the doing is warded, but the omission is not punished. Thirdly, permitted {jciiz or muhali) ; legally indifferent. Fourthly, disliked {inahncli) ; disapproved by the law, but not under penalty. Fifthly, forbidden {ha- ram) ; an action punishable by laAV. All this being so, it will be easily understood that the record of the manners and customs of the Prophet, of the little de- tails of his life and conversation, came to assume a high importance. Much of that was too petty ever re- 74 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE to reacli expression iu the great digests of law ; not even the most zealous fixer of life by rule and line would condemn his fellow- religionist because he pre- ferred to carry a different kind of walking-stick from that approved by the Prophet, or found it fitting to arrange his hair in a different way. But still, all pious Muslims paid attention to such things, and fenced their lives about with the strictest Prophetic precedent. In consequence of this, there early arose in Islam a class of students who made it their busi- ness to investigate and hand down the minutest de- tails as to the habits of Muhammad. This was a separate thing from the study of law, although fated to be eventually connected with it. Even in the time of the Jahiliya — the period before Islam, vari- ously explained as the ignorance or as the rudeness, uncivilizedness — it had been a fixed trait of the Arab mind to hold closely to old paths. An inherent con- servatism canonized the sunna — custom, usage — of the ancients ; any stepping aside from it was a hid'a — innovation — and had to win its way by its merits, in the teeth of strong prejudice. With the coming of Muhammad and the preaching of Islam, this an- cestral sunna had in great part to yield. But the temper of the Arab mind remained firm, and the sunna of Muhammad took its place. Pious Muslims did not say, " Such was the usage of our fathers, and it is mine ; " but, " I follow the usage of the Prophet of God." Then, just as the old sunna of the heathen times had expressed itself through the stories of great Avarriors, of their battles and loves ; through anecdotes of wise men, and their keen and SUNNA ; HADITH 75 eloquent words ; so it was with the sunna of the one man, Muhammad. What he said, and what he did ; what he refrained from doing ; what he gave quasi- approval to by silence ; all was passed on in rapidly increasing, pregnant little narratives. First, his im- mediate Companions would note, either by commit- ting to memory or to a written record, his utterances and table-talk generally. We have evidence of sev- eral such Boswells, who fixed his words as they fell. Later, probably, would come notes of his doings and his customs, and of all the little and great happen- ings of the town. Above all, a record was being gathered of all the cases judged by him, and of his decisions ; of all the answers which he gave to for- mal questions on religious life and faith. All this was jotted down by the Companions on sahifas — odd sheets — just as they had done in the Ignorance with the proverbs of the wise and their dark sayings. The records of sayings were called haditJis ; the rest, as a Avhole, sunna — custom, for its details was used the plural, sunan — customs. At first, each man had his own collection in memory or in writing. Then, after the death of the Prophet and when his first Companions were dropping off, these collections were passed on to others of the second generation. And so the chain ran on and in time a tradition came to consist formally of two things — the text or matter {main) so handed on, and the succession {is- nad) over whose lips it had passed. A said, " There narrated to me B, saying, ' There narrated to me C, saying,' " so far the isnad, until the last link came, and the main, the Prophet of God said. 76 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE "Some of mj injunctions abrogate others," or "The Jann were created of a smokeless flame," or what- ever it might be. What has just been said suggests that it was at first indifferent whether traditions were preserved orally or in writing. That is true of the first generation ; but it must be remembered at the same time, that the actual passing on was oral ; the writing merely aided the memory to hold that which was already learned. But with time, and certainly by the middle of the second century of the Hijra, two opposing tendencies in this respect had developed. Many continued to put their trust in the written word, and even came to pass traditions on without any oral communication. But for others there lay grave dangers in this. One was evidently real. The unhappy character of the Arabic script, especially when written without diacritical points, often made it hard, if not practically impossible, to understand such short, contextless texts as the traditions. A guide was necessary to show how the word should be read, and how understood. At the present time a European scholar will sometimes be helpless before even a fully vocalized text, and must take refuge in native commentaries or in that oral tradition, if it still exists and he has access to it, which supplies at least a third of the meaning of an Arabic book. Strengthening this came theological reasons. The words of the Prophet would be profaned if they were in a book. Or, again, they would be too much hon- ored and the Quran itself might be neglected. This last fear has been justified to a certain extent by the event. On these grounds, and many more, TRADITIONS IN LITERATURE 77 the writing and transmitting in writing of traditions came to be fiercely opposed ; and tlie opposition con- tinued, as a theological exercise, long after many books of traditions were in existence, and after the oral transmission had become the merest farce and had even frankly dropped out. It is to the formation of these books of traditions, or, as we might say, traditions in literature, that we must now turn. For long, the fragmentary sahifas and private collections made by separate scholars for their own use sufficed. Books dealing with law (fiqii) were written before there were any in that department of literature called haditli. The cause of this is tolerably plain. Law and treatises of law were a necessity for the public and thus were encour- aged by the state. The study of traditions, on the other hand, was less essential and of a more personal and private nature. Further, under the dynasty of the Umayyads, who reigned from a.h. 41 to a.h. 132, theological literature was little encouraged. They were simple heathen in all but name, and belonged, and recognized that they belonged, not to Islam but to the Jahiliya. For reasons of state, they encouraged and spread^also freely forged and encouraged others to forge — such traditions as were favorable to their plans and to their rule generally. This was neces- sary if they were to carry the body of the people with them. But they regarded themselves as kings and not as the heads of the MusHdi people. This same device has been used after them by all the contend- ing factions of Islam. Each party has sought sanc- tion for its views by representing them in traditions 78 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE from the Prophet, and the thing has gone so far that on almost every disputed point there are absolutely conflicting prophetic utterances in circulation. It has even been held, and with some justification, that the entire body of normative tradition at present in existence was forged for a purpose. With this attitude of the Umayyads we shall have to deal at greater length later. It is sufficient now to note that the first real appearance of hadith in literature was in the 3Iuivatta of Malik ibn Anas who died in a.h. 179. Yet even this appearance is not so much of hadith for its own sake, as of usages bearing upon law and of the law that can be drawn from these usages. The book is a corpus iuris not a corpus traditionwn. Its object was not so much to separate from the mass of traditions in circulation those which could be re- garded as sound of origin and to unite them in a formal collection, as to build up a system of law based partly on tradition. The previous works deal- ing with law proper had been of a speculative char- acter, had shown much subjective reliance on their own opinion on the part of the writers and had drawn little from the sacred usage of the Prophet and quoted few of his traditional sayings. Against that the book of Malik was a protest and formed a link between such law books pure and the collections of traditions pure with which we now come to deal. To Malik the matn, or text, of a tradition had been the only thing of importance. To the is7iad, or chain of authority running back to the Prophet, he had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was THE MUSNADS 79 a lawyer and gathered traditions, not for their own sake but to use them in law. To others, the tradition was the thing, and too much care could not be given to its details and its authenticity. And the care was really called for. With the course of time and the growing demand, the supply of traditions had also grown until there was no doubt in the mind of any- one that an enormous proportion were simple foi'ger- ies. To weed out the sound ones, attention had to be given to the isnad; the names upon it had to be examined ; the fact of their having been in inter- course to be determined ; the possibility of the case in general to be tested. Thus there w' ere formed real collections of supposedly sound traditions, which were called 3Iiisiiads, because each tradition was musnad — propped, supported — against the Compan- ions from w^hom it proceeded. In accordance with this also they were arranged according to the Com- panions. After the name of the Companion were given all the traditions leading back to him. One of the earliest and greatest of these books w^as the 3Iusnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died a.h. 241 ; of him more hereafter. This book has been printed recently at Cairo in six quarto volumes of 2,885 pages and is said to contain about thirty thousand traditions going back to seven hundred Companions. But another type of tradition-book was growing up, less mechanical in arrangement. It is the Mus- annaf, the arranged, classified — and in it the tradi- tions are arranged in chapters according to their sub- ject matter. The first Musannafio make a permanent mark w^as the Sahih — sound — of al-Bukhari, who 80 DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPEUDENCE died in A. H. 257. It is still extant and is the most respected of all the collections of traditions. The principle of arrangement in it is legal ; that is, the traditions are classified in these chapters so as to af- ford bases for a complete system of jurisprudence. Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent of speculative law and his book was thus a protest against a tendency which, as we shall see later, was strong in his time. Another point in which al-Bukhari made his influ- ence felt and with greater effect, was increased severity in the testing of traditions. He established very strict laws, though of a somewhat mechanical kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them. His book contains about seven thousand traditions, and he chose those, so at least runs the story, out of six hundred thousand which he found in circulation. The rest were rejected as failing to meet his tests. How far the forgery of traditions had gone may be seen from the example of Ibn Abi AAvja, who was exe- cuted in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he had him- self put into circulation four thousand that were false. Another and a similar Saliih is that of Muslim, who died in A.H. 261. He was not so markedly juristic as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the mass of existing tradition from illegitimate accre- tions than to construct a basis for a complete law code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on the science of tradition generally. In some shght details his principle of criticism differed from that of al- Bukhari. These tAVO collections, called the two Sahihs — as- Sahihan—SLTe technically jami's, i.e. they contain all THE SUNAN^ 81 the different classes of traditions, historical, ethical, dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by common agreement, the two most honored authorities in the Muslim world. A believer finds it hard, if not impossible, to reject a tradition that is found in both. But there are four other collections which are called Sunan — Usages — and which stand only second to the two Sahihs. These are by Ibn Maja (d. 303), Abu Da'ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279) and an-Nasa'i (d. 303). They deal almost entirely with legal traditions, those that tell what is permitted and what is forbidden, and do not convey information on religious and theological subjects. They are also much more lenient in their criticisms of dubious tra- ditions. To work exclusion with them, the rejection needed to be tolerably unanimous. This was re- quired by their stand-point and endeavor, which was to find a basis for all the minutest developments and details of jurisprudence, civil and religious. These six books, the two Sahihs and the four Sunans, came to be regarded in time as the principal and all-important sources for traditional science. This had already come about by the end of the fifth century, although even after that voices of uncer- tainty continued to make themselves heard. Ibn Maja seems to have been the last to secure firm foot- ing, but even he is included by al-Baghawi (d. 516) in his Blasahih as-sunna, an attempted epitome into one book of what was valuable in all. Still, long after that, Ibn Khaldun, the great historian (d. 808), speaks of five fundamental works ; and others speak of 82 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE seven, adding the MuivaUa of Malik to the six above. Others, again, especially in the West, extended the number of canonical works to ten, though with vary- ing members; but all these must be regarded as more or less local, temporary, and individual eccen- tricities. The position of the six stands tolerably firm. So much it has been necessary to interpolate and anticipate with regard to the students of tradition whose interest lay in gathering up and preserving, not in using and applying. From the earliest time, then, there existed these two classes in the bosom of Islam, students of tradition proper and of law proper. For long they did not clash ; but a collision was in- evitable sooner or later. Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not widened beyond the little market-town of al-Madina, that collision might have been long in coming. Its immediate causes' were from without, and are to be found in the wave of conquest that carried Islam, within the century, to Samarqand beyond the Oxus and to Tours in central France. Consider what that wave of conquest was and meant. Within fourteen years of the Hijra, Damascus was taken, and within seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the year 21, the Muslims held Persia ; in 41 they were at Herat, and in 56 they reached Samarqand. In the West, Egypt was taken in the year 20 ; but the way through northern Africa was long and hard. Car- thage did not fall till 74, but Spain was conquered with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in a.d. 732, the year of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was EISE OF SPECULATIVE JURISPRUDENCE 83 turned and the mercy of Tours was wrought by Charles the Hammer; but the Muslims still held Narbonne and raided in Burgundy and the Dauphine. The Avealth that flowed into Arabia from these expe- ditions was enormous ; money and slaves and hixu- ries of every kind went far to transform the old life of hardness and simplicity. Great estates grew up : fortunes were made and lost ; the intricacies of the Syrian and Persian civilizations overcame their con- querors. All this meant new legal conditions and problems. The system that had sufficed to guard the right to a few sheep or camels had to be transformed before it would suffice to adjust the rights and claims of a tribe of millionnaires. But it must not be thought that these expeditions were only campaigns of plunder. With the Muslim armies everywhere went law and justice, such as it was. Jurists accom- panied each army and were settled in the great camp cities which were built to hold the conquered lands. Al-Basra and al-Kufa and Fustat, the parent of Cairo, owe their origin to this, and it was in these new seats of militant Islam that speculative juris j)rudence arose and moulded the Muslim system. The early lawyers had much to do and much to learn, and it is to their credit that they recognized both necessities. Muslim law is no product of the desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have said ; but rather of the labor of these men, strug- gling with a gigantic problem. They might have taken their task much more easily than they did ; they might have lived as Muhammad had done, from hand to mouth, and have concealed their own sloth 84 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE by force and free invention of authorities. But they recognized their responsibility to God and man and the necessity of building up a stable and complete means of rendering justice. These armies of Mus- lims, we must remember, were not like the hordes of Attila or Chingis Khan, destroyers only. The lands they conquered were put to hard tribute, but it was under a reign of law. They recognized frankly that it was for them that this mighty empire existed ; but they recognized also that it could continue to exist only with order and duty imposed upon all. They saw, too, how deficient was their own knowledge and learned willingly of the people among whom they had come. And here, a second time, Roman law — the parent-law of the world — made itself felt. There were schools of that law in Syria at Ciesarea and Bey- rout, but we need not imagine that the Muslim jurists studied there. Bather, it was the practical school of the courts as they actually existed -which they at- tended. These courts were permitted to continue in existence till Islam had learned from them all that was needed. We can still recognize certain princi- ples that were so carried over. That the duty of proof lies upon the plaintiff, and the right of defend- ing himself with an oath upon the defendant ; the doctrine of invariable custom and that of the differ- ent kinds of legal presumption. These, as expressed in Arabic, are almost verbal renderings of the preg- nant utterances of Latin law. But most important of all was a liberty suggested by that system to the Muslim jurisconsults. This was through the part played in the older school by the RESPONSA PRUDENTIUM ; OPINION 86 Eesponsa Prudenfmm, answers by prominent lawyers to questions put to them by their clients, in Avhich the older law of the Twelve Tables was expounded, ex- panded, and often practically set aside by their com- ments. Sir Henry Maine thus states the situation : "The authors of the new jurisprudence, during the whole progress of its formation, professed the most sedulous respect for the letter of the code. They were merely explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its full meaning ; but then, in the result, by placing texts together, by adjusting the law to states of fact which" actually presented themselves, and by speculating on its possible application to others which might occur, by introducing principles of interpretation derived from the exegesis of other written documents which fell under their observation, they educed a vast vari- ety of canons which had never been dreamt of by the compilers of the Twelve Tables, and which were in truth rarely or never to be found there." All this precisely applies to the development of law in Islam. The part of the Twelve Tables was taken by the statute law of the Quran and the case law derived from the Usage of Muhammad ; that of the Eoman lurisprudentes by those speculative jurists who worked mostly outside of al-Madina in the camp cities of Mesopotamia and Syria — the very name for lawyer in Arabic, faqih, plural fuqalia, is a translation of pru- dens, prudentes ; and that of the Eesponsa, the an- swers, by the " Opinion " which they claimed as a legitimate legal method and source. Further, the validity of a general agreement of jurisconsults "re- minds us of the rescript of Hadrian, which ordains 86 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE that, if the opinions of the licensed prudentes all agreed, such common opinion had the force of stat- ute; but if they disagreed, the judge might follow which he chose." The Arabic term, ra'y^ here ren- dered Opinion, has passed through marked vicissi- tudes of usage. In old Arabic, before it, in the view of some, began to keep bad company, it meant an opin- ion that was thoughtful, weighed and reasonable, as opposed to a hasty dictate of ill-regulated passion. In that sense it is used in a tradition — probably forged — handed down from Muhammad. He was sending a judge to take charge of legal affairs in al-Yaman, and asked him on what he would base his legal decisions. " On the Qur'an," he replied. " But if that contains nothing to the purpose?" "Then upon your usage." "But if that also fails you?'* "Then I will follow my own opinion." And the Prophet approved his purpose. A similar tradition goes back to Umar, the first Khalifa, and it, too, is probably a later forgery, written to defend this source of law. But, with the revolt against the use of Opin- ion, to which we shall soon come, the term itself fell into grave disrepute and came to signify an unfounded conclusion. In its extremest development it went beyond the Responsa^ which professed always to be in exact accord with the letter of the older law, and attained to be Equity in the strict sense ; that is, the rejection of the letter of the law for a view supposed to be more in accordance with the spirit of justice itself. Thus, Equity, in the English sense, is the law administered by the Court of Chancery and claims, in the words again of Sir Henry Maine, to EQUITli:; LEGAL FICTION 87 " override the older jurisprudence of the country on the strength of an intrinsic ethical superiority." In Roman law, as introduced by the edict of the Prsetor, it was the law of Nature, "the part of law 'which natural reason appoints for all mankind.' " This is represented in Islam under two forms, covered by two technical terms. The one is that the legist, in spite of the fact that the analogy of the fixed code clearly points to one course, " considers it better " (istihsan) to follow a different one ; and the other is that, under the same conditions, he chooses a free course " for the sake of general benefit to the com- munity " {isiislali). Further scope of Equity Muslim law never reached, and the legitimacy of these two developments was, as we shall see, bitterly contested. The freedom of opinion, with its possibility of a sys- tem of Equity, had eventually to be given up, and all that was left in its place was a permissibility of an- alogical deduction (qiyas), the nearest thing to which in Western law is Legal Fiction. In a word, the possibility of development by Equity was lost, and Legal Fiction entered in its place. But this antici- pates, and we must return to the strictly historical movement. During the first thirty years after the death of Muhammad — the period covered by the reigns of the four theocratic rulers whom Islam still calls "the Four Just, or Rightly Guided Khalifas " (al-Khulafa ar-rashidun) — the two twin studies of tradition (hadith) and of law (fiqh) were fostered and encour- aged by the state. The centre of that state was still in al-Madina, on ground sacred with the memories of 88 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE the Prophet, amid the scenes where he had himself been lord and judge, and under the conditions in which his life as ruler had been cast. All the sources, except that of divine revelation, which had been open to him, were open to his successors and they made full use of all. Eound that mother-hearth of Islam was still gathered the great body of the im- mediate Companions of Muhammad, and they formed a deliberative or consulting council to aid the Khalifa in his task. The gathering of tradition and the de- veloping of law were vital functions ; they were the basis of the public life of the state. This patriarchal period in Muslim history is the golden age of Islam. It ended with the death of Ali, in the year 40 of the Hijra, and the succession of Mu'awiya in the follow- ing year. " For thirty years," runs a tradition from the Prophet, **my People will tread in my Path (sunna) ; then will come kings and princes." And so it was ; Mu'awiya was the first of the Umay- yad dynasty and with him and them Islam, in all but the name, was at an end. He and they were Arab kings of the old type that had reigned before Muham- mad at al-Hira and Ghassan, whose will had been their law. The capital of the new kingdom was Damascus ; al-Madina became a place of refuge, a Cave of Adul- 1am, for the old Muslim party. There they might spin theories of state and of law, and lament the good old days ; so long as there was no rebellion, the Umayyads cared little for those things or for the men who dreamt them. Once, the Umayyads were driven to capture and sack the holy city, a horror in Islam to this day. After that there was peace, the peace GROWTH OF CANON LAW 89 of the accomplished fact. This is the genuinely Arab period in the history of Islam. It is a period full of color and light and life ; of love and song, battle and feasting. Thought was free and conduct too. The great theologian of the Greek Church, John of Damascus, held high office at the Umayyad court, and al-Akhtal, a Christian at least in name, was their poet laureate. It is true that the stated services of religion were kept up and on every Friday the Khali- fa had to entertain the people by a display of elo- quence and wit in the weekly sermon. But the old world was dead and the days of its unity would never come again. So all knew, except the irreconcilable party, the last of the true Muslims who still haunted the sacred soil of al-Madina and labored in the old paths. They gathered the traditions of the Prophet ; they regulated their lives more and more strictly by his usage ; they gave ghostly council to the pious who sought their help ; they labored to build up elaborate systems of law. But it Avas all elaboration and hypothetical purely. There was in it no vitaliz- ing force from practical life. From this time on Muslim law has been more or less in the position held by the canon law of tlie Roman Church in a country that will not recognize it yet dares not utterly reject it. The Umayyads were statesmen and opportunists ; they lived, in legal things, as much from hand to mouth as Muhammad had done. He cut all knots with divine legislation ; they cut them with the edge of their will. Under them, as under him, a system of law was impossible. But at the same time, in quiet and in secret, this yO DEVELOPMENT OF JUKISPKUDENCE canou law of Islam was slowly growing up, slowly rounding into full perfection of detailed correlation. It was governing absolutely the private lives of all the good Muslims that were left, and even the godless Umayyads, as they had to preach on Fridays to the People of Muhammad, so they had to deal with it cautiously and respectfully. Of the names and lives of these obscure jurists little has reached us and it is needless to give that little here. Only with the final fall of the Umayyads, in the year of the Hijra 132, do we come into the light and see the different schools forming under clear and definite leaders. I CHAPTEK II The Abbasid rerolution ; the compromise ; the problem of the Ab- basids ; the two classes of canon lawyers and theologians ; the rise of legal schools ; Abu Hanif a ; his application of Legal Fiction ; istihsan : the Qadi Abu Yusuf ; Muhammad ibn al- Hasan ; Sufyan ath-Thawri ; al-Awza'i ; Malik ibn Anas ; the Usage of al-Madina ; istislah ; the doctrine of Agreement ; the beginning of controversy ; traditionalists or historical lawyers versus rationalists or philosophical lawyers; ash-Shafi'i, a mediator and systematizer ; the Agreement of the Muslim people a formal source ; " My People will never agree in an error;" the resultant four sources, Qur'an, Usage, Analogy, Agreement ; the traditionalist revolt ; Da'ud az-Zahiri and literalism ; Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; the four abiding schools ; the Agreement of Islam; the Disagreement of Islam; iurare in verba magistri ; the degrees of authority; the canon and the civil codes in Islam ; their respective spheres ; distribution of schools at present day ; Shi'ite law ; Ibadite law. That great revolution wliich brought the Abbasid dynasty to power seemed at first to the pious theo- logians and lawyers to be a return of the old days. They dreamt of entering again into their rights ; that the canon law would be the full law of the land. It was only slowly that their eyes were opened, and many gave up the vain contest and contented them- selves with compromise. This had been rare under the Umayyads ; the one or two canon lawyers Avho had thrown in their lot with them had been marked men. Az-Zuhri (d. 124), a man of the highest moral and theological reputation Avho played a very im- 91 92 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE portant part in the first codifying of traditions, was one of these, and the later pious historians have had hard work to smooth over his connection with the impious Umayyads. Probably — it may be well to say here — the stories against the Umayyads have been much heightened in color by their later tellers and also az-Zuhri, being a man of insight and states- manship, may have recognized that their rule was the best chance for peace in the country. Muslims have come generally to accept the position that unbelief on the part of the government, if the government is strong and just, is better than true belief and anarchy. This has found expression, as all such things do, in traditions put in the mouth of the Prophet. But while only a few canonists had taken the part of the Umayyads, far more accepted the favors of the Abbasids, took office under them and worked in their cause. The Abbasids, too, had need of such men. It was practically the religious sentiment of the people that had overthrown the Umayyads and raised them to power; and that religious sentiment, though it could never be fully satisfied, must yet be respected and, more important still, used. There is a striking parallel between the situation then, and that of Scot- land at the Kevolution Settlement of 1688. The power of the Stuarts— that is, of the worldly Umay- yads — had been overthrown. The oppressed Church of the Covenant — that is, the old Muslim party— had been freed. The state was to be settled upon a new basis. What was that basis to be ? The Covenant- ing party demanded the recognition of the Headship of Christ — that the Kirk should rule the state, or THE PROBLEM OF THE ABBASIDS 93 sliould be the state, and that all other religious views should be put under penalty. The old Muslim party looked for similar things. That religious life should be purified ; that the canon law should be again the law of the state ; that the constitution of Umar sliould berestored. How the Covenanters were disappointed, how much they got and how much they failed to get, needs no telling here. Exactly in the same way it befell the old Muslims. The theological reformation was sweeping and com- plete. The first Abbasids were pious, at least out- wardly; the state was put upon a pious footing. The canon law also was formally restored, but with large practical modifications. Canon lawyers were received into the service of the state, provided they were adaptable enough. Impossible men had no place under the Abbasids ; their officials must be pliable and dexterous, for a new modus vivendi was to be found. The rough and ready Umayyad cut- ting of the knot had failed ; the turn had now come for piety and dexterity in twisting law. The court lawyers learned to drive a coach and four through any of the old statutes, and found their fortunes in their brains. So the issue was bridged. But a large party of malcontents was left, and from this time on in Islam the lawyers and the theologians have di- vided into two classes, the one admitting, as a mat- ter of expediency, the authority of the powers of the time and aiding them in their task as rulers ; the other, irreconcilable and unreconciled, denouncing the state as sunk in unbelief and deadly sin and its lawyers as traitors to the cause of religion. To pur- 94 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE sue our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by a handful of Covenanting congregations and in Amer- ica by the much more numerous and powerful lie- formed Presbyterian Church. It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the Umayyad pressure and the encouragement of legal studies — such as it was — by the Abbasids, definite and recognized schools of law began to form. What had so long been in process in secret became public, and its results crystallized under certain prominent teachers. We will now take up these schools in the order of the death dates of their founders ; we will establish their principles and trace their histories. We shall find the same conceptions recurring again and again which have already been brought out, Qur'an, tradition (hadith), agreement {ijma), opinion (ra'y), analogy (qiyas), local usage {urf), preference (istihsan)^ in the teeth of the written law — till at length, when the battle is over, the sources will have limited themselves to the four which have survived to the present day — Qur'an, tradition, agreement, analogy. And, similarly, of the six schools to be mentioned, four only will remain to the present time, but these of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believ- ers. The Abbasids came to power in the year of the Hijra 132, and in 150 died Abu Hanifa, the first student and teacher to leave behind him a systematic body of teaching and a missionary school of pupils. He was a Persian by race, and perhaps the most dis- tinguished example of the rule that Muslim scientists and thinkers miofht write in Arabic but were seldom ABU IIANIFA 95 of Arab blood. He does not seem to have held office as a judge or to have practised law at all. He was, rather, an academic student, a speculative or philo- sophical jurist we might call him. His system of law, therefore, was not based upon the exigencies of experience ; it did not arise from an attempt to meet actual cases. We might say of it, rather, but in a good sense, that it was a system of casuistry, an at- tempt to build up on scientific principles a set of rules which would answer every conceivable question of law. In the hands of some of his pupils, when applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casu- istry in a bad sense ; but no charge of perverting justice for his own advantage seems to have been brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief in- struments in constructing his system were opinion and analogy. He leaned little upon traditions of the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the Qur'anic texts and develop from them his details. But the doing of this compelled him to modify simple opinion — equivalent to equity as we have seen — and limit it to analogy of some written statute (nass). He could hardly forsake a plain res iudicata of Muham- mad, and follow his own otherwise unsupported views, but he might choose to do so if he could base it on analogy from the Qur'an. Thus, he came to use what was practically legal fiction. It is the application of an old law in some sense or way that was never dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which may, in fact, run directly counter to the purpose of the law. The fiction is that it is the original law that is being observed, while, as a matter of fact, there 96 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPPwUDENCE lias come iu its place an entirely different law. So Abu Hanifa would contend that he was following the divine legislation of the Qur'an, while his adversaries contended that he was only following his own opinion. But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from equity to legal fiction, on another he developed a new principle of even greater freedom. Reference has already been made to the changes which were of necessity involved in the new conditions of the countries conquered by the Muslims. Often the law of the desert not only failed to apply to town and agricultural life ; it was even directly mischievous. On account of this, a consideration of local conditions was early accepted as a principle, but in general terms. These were reduced to definiteness bv Abu Hanifa under the formula of "holding for better" (istihsan). He would say, "The analogy in the case points to such and such a rule, but under the circum- stances I hold it for better to rule thus and thus." This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently attacked by his opponents, as was his system in gen- eral. Yet that system by its philosophical perfection — due to its theoretical origin — and perfection in detail — due to generations of practical workers — has survived all attack and can now be said to be the leading one of the four existing schools. No legal writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he seem to have, himself, cast his system into a finished code. That was done by his immediate pupils, and especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in 182, and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189. The first was consulting lawyer and chief Qadi to the THE QADI ABU YUSUF 97 gi'eat Khalifa Hariiu ar-Rasliid, and, if stones cau be believed, proved himseK as complaisant of conscience as a conrt casuist need be. Innumerable are the tales afloat of his minute knowledge of legal subtleties and his fertility of device in applying them to meet the whims of his master, Harun. Some of them have found a resting place in that great mirror of mediaeval Muslim life, The Thousand and One Nights ; reference may be made to Night 296. Through his influence, the school of Abu Hanifa gained an official impor- tance which it never thereafter lost. He wrote for Harun a book which we have still, on the canon law as applied to the revenues of the state, a thorny and al- most impossible subject, for the canon laAv makes really no provision for the necessary funds of even a simple form of government and much less for such an array of palaces and officials as had grown up around the Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in ex- pression and by ability of the highest kind in recon- ciling the irreconcilable. But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily with the new ways. Many found that only in ascet- icism, in renunciation of the world and engaging in pious exercises was there any chance of their main- taining the old standards in a state that Avas for them based on oppression and robbery. One of these was Sufj^an ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high re- pute, who narrowly missed founding a separate school of law and who died in 161. There has come down to us a correspondence between him and Harun, which, though it cannot possibly be genuine, throws much light on the disappointment of the sincerely 98 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE religious section. Harnn writes on liis accession to the Klialifate (170), complaining that Sufyan had not visited him, in spite of their bond of brotherhood, and offering him wealth from the public treasury, Sufyan replied, denouncing such use of public funds and all the other uses of them by Harun — many enough — except those precisely laid down in the codes. On the basis of these, Harun would have had to work for his own living. There are also other denunciations for crimes in the ruler which he pun- ished in others. Harun is said to have kept the letter and wept over it at intervals, but no change of life on his part is recorded. Apparently, with the accession of the Abbasids ascetic and mystical Islam made a great development. It became plain to the pious that no man could inherit both this world and the next. While Abu Hanifa was developing his system in Mesopotamia, al-Awza'i was working similarly in Syria. He was born at Baalbec, lived at Damascus, and at Beyrout where he died in 157. Of him and his teaching we know comparatively little. But so far it is clear that he was not a speculative jurist of the same type as Abu Hanifa, but paid especial at- tention to traditions. At one time his school was followed by the Muslims of Syria and the entire West to Morocco and Spain. But its day was a short one. The school of Abu Hanifa, championed by Abu Yusuf with his tremendous influence as chief Qadi of the Abbasid empire, pushed it aside, and at the present day it has no place except in history. For us, its interest is that of another witness to the early MALIK IBN ANAS 99 rise and spread of systems of jurisprudence outside of Arabia. In A.H. 179, tliree years before the death of Abu Yusuf and twenty-nine after that of Abu Hanifa, there died at al-Madina the founder and head of an independent school of a very different type. This was MaHk ibn Anas, under whose hands what we may call, for distinction, the historical school of al-Ma- dina took form. Al-Madina, it will be remembered, was the mother-city of Muslim law. It was the special home of the traditions of the Prophet and the scene of his legislative and judicial life. Its pre- Islamic customary law had been sanctioned, in a sense, by his use. It had been the capital of the state in its purest days. From the height of all these privileges its traditionists and lawyers looked down upon the outsiders and parvenus who had begun to intermeddle in sacred things. But it must not be thought that this school was of a rigid traditionism. The case was quite the reverse, and in many respects it is hard to make a distinction between it and that of Abu Hanifa. Its first source was, of necessity, the Qur'an. Then came the u.sage of the Prophet. This merged into the usage of the Suc- cessors of the Prophet and the unwritten custom of the town. It will be seen that here the historical weight of the place came to bear. No other place, no other community, could furnish that later tradition with anything like the same authority. Further, Malik ibn Anas was a practical jurist, a working judge. He was occupied in meeting real cases from day to day. When he sat in public and judged the people, or 100 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE witli liis pupils around liim and expounded and de- veloped the law, he could look back upon a line of canon lawyers who had sat in his place and done as he was doing. In that lies the great difference. He was in practical touch with actual life ; that was one point ; and, secondly, he was in the direct line of the apostolic succession, and in the precise en- vironment of the Prophet. So when he went beyond Qur'an, prophetic usage, agreement, and gave out decisions on simple opinion, the feeling of the com- munity justified him. It was a different thing for Malik ibn Anas, sitting there in state in al-Madina, to use his judgment, than for some quick-brained vagabond of a Persian or Syrian proselyte, some pauvre diahle with neither kith nor kin in the coun- try, to lay down principles of law. So the pride of the city of the Prophet distinguished between him and Abu Hanifa. But though the speculative element in the school of Malik, apart from its local and historical environ- ment, which gave it unifying weight, was essentially the same as in the school of Abu Hanifa, yet it is true that at al-Madina it played a less important part. Malik used tradition more copiously and took refuge in oj)inion less frequently. Without opinion, he could not have built his system ; but for him it was not so much a primary principle as a means of escape. Yet one principle of great freedom he did derive from it and lay down with clearness ; it is the conception of the public advantage (istislah). When a rule would work general injury it is to be set aside even in the teeth of a valid analogy. This, THE DOCTRINE OF AGREEMENT 101 it will be seen, is nearly the same as the preference of Abu Hanifa. The technical term istislak, chosen by Malik to express his idea, was probably intended to distinguish it from that of Abu Hanifa, and also to suggest in the public advantage (^maslaha) a more valid basis than the mere preference of the legist. Another conception which Malik and his school developed into greater exactitude and force was that of the agreement {ijma). It will be remembered that from the death of Muhammad all the surviving Com- panions resident in al-Madina formed a kind of con- sultive council to aid the Khalifa with their store of tradition and experience. Their agreement on any point was final ; it was the voice of the Church. This doctrine of the infallibility of the body of the be- lievers developed in Islam until at its widest it was practically the same as the canon of catholic truth formulated by Vincent of Lerins, Quod tibique, quod semper, quod ah omnibus. But Malik, according to the usual view, had no intention of granting any such deciding power to the outside world. The world for him was al-Madina and the agreement of al- Madina established catholic verity. Yet there are narratives which suggest that he approved the agree- ment and local usage of al-Madina for al-Madina be- cause they suited al-Madina. Other places might also have their local usages which suited them better. In the next school we shall find the principle of agreement put upon a broader basis and granted greater weight. Finally, Malik is the first founder of a system from whom a law book, the 3Iuiuatta mentioned above, has come down to us. It is not ' 102 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE in the exact sense, a manual or code ; rather a col- lection of materials for a code with remarks by the collector. He gives the traditions which seem to him of juristic importance — about seventeen hundred in all — arranged according to subject, and follows up each section, when necessary, with remarks upon the usage of al-Madina, and upon his own view of the matter. When he cannot find either tradition or usage, he evidently feels himseK of sufficient author- ity to follow his own opinion, and lay down on that basis a binding rule. This, however, as we have seen, is very different from allowing other people, outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same thing. The school founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles is one of the surviving four. As that of Abu Hanifa spread eastward, so that of Malik spread westward, and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip which it has especially gained in western North Africa may be due to the influence of the Idrisids whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when Malik was in the height of his reputation there, and also to hatred of the Abbasids who championed the school of Abu Hanifa. But now we pass from simple development to development through conflict. O^en conflict, so far as there had been any, had covered points of detail ; for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu Hanifa, on the one hand, and by Malik, on the other. One of the chiefest of the pupils of Abu Hanifa, the Muhammad ibn al-Hasan already mentioned, spent three years in study with Malik at al-Madina and found no difficulty in thus combining his schools. HISTORICAL V. PHILOSOPHICAL LAWYERS 103 The conflict of the future was to be different and to touch the very basis of things. The muttering of the coming storm had been heard for long, but it was now to burst. Exact dates we cannot give, but the reaction must have been progressing in the latter part of the life of Malik ibn Anas. The distinction drawn above between traditionists and lawyers will be remembered, and the promise of future collision which always has come between his- torical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side points to the absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies of a system based upon tradition and developing by usage ; the other says that we are not wise enough to rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a necessity ; those retort an inability. Add to this a belief on the part of the traditionists that they were defending a divine institution and the situation is complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right said that law should be based on Qur'an and tradition only ; the extreme left, that it was better to leave untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a system of rules by logic and the necessities of the case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed the conflict to which we now come. In that conflict three names stand out : ash-Shafi'i who died in 204, Ahmad ibn Hanbal who died in 241 and Da'ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi'i, struck the mediating note and the other two diverged further and further from the via media thus shown toward a blank traditionism. 104 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE Ash-Shafi'i is without question one of the greatest figures in the history of law. Perhaps he had not the originality and keenness of Abu Hanifa ; but he had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and full grasp of means and ends that enabled him to say what proved to be the last word in the matter. After him came attempts to tear down ; but they failed. The fabric of the Muslim canon law stood firm. There is a tradition from the Prophet that he promised that with the end of every century would come a restorer of the faith of his people. At the end of the first century was the pious Khalifa, Umar ibn Abd al- Aziz, who by some accident strayed in among the Umayyads. At the end of the second came ash- Shafi'i. His work was to mediate and systematize and bore especially on the sources from which rules of law might be drawn. His position on the positive side may be stated as one of great reverence for tradition. "If you ever find a tradition from the Prophet saying one thing," he is reported to have said, " and a decision from me saying another thing, follow the tradition." An absolutely authentic — ac- cording to Muslim rules of evidence — and clear tra- dition from the Prophet he regarded as of equally divine authority with a passage in the Qur'an. Both were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form ; the Qur'an was verbally inspired; such traditions were inspired as to their content. And if such a tradition contradicted a Qur'anic passage and came after it in time, then the written law of the Qur'an w^as abrogated by the oral law of the tradition. But this involved grave difiiculties. The speculative ju- AGREEMENT AS A SOURCE 105 rists had defended their position from the beginning by pointing to the many contradictory traditions which were afloat, and asking how the house of tradi- tion could stand when so divided against itself. A means of reconciling traditions had to be found, and to this ash-Shafi'i gave himself. We need not go over his methods here ; they were the same that have always been used in such emergencies. The worship of the letter led to the straining of the letter, and to exjDlaining away of the letter. But there lay a rock in his course more dangerous than any mere contradiction in differing traditions. Usages had grown up and taken fast hold which were in the teeth of all traditions. These usages were in the individual life, in the constitution of the state, and in the rules and decisions of the law courts. The pious theologian and lawyer might rage against them as he chose ; they were there, firmly rooted, immovable. They were not arbitrary changes, but had come about in the process of time through the revolutions of circumstances and varying conditions. Ash-Shafi'i showed his greatness by recognizing the inevitable and providing a remedy. This lay in an extension of the principle of agreement and the erection of it into a formal source. Whatever the community of Islam has agreed upon at any time, is of God. We have met this principle before, but never couched in so ab- solute and catholic a form. The agreement of the immediate Companions of Muhammad had weight with his first Successors. The agreement of these first Companions and of the first generation after them, had determining weight in the early church. 106 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE The agreement of al-Madina had weight with Malik ibn Anas. The agreement of many divines and le- gists always had weight of a kind. Among lawyers, a principle, to the contrary of which the memory of man ran not, had been determining. But this was wider, and from this time on the unity of Islam was assured. The evident voice of the People of Muham- mad was to be the voice of God. Yet this principle, if full of hope and value for the future, involved the canonists of the time in no small difficulties. Was it conceivable that the agreement could override the usage of the Prophet ? Evidently not. There must, then, they argued, once have existed some tradition to the same effect as the agreement, although it had now been lost. Some such lost authority must be presupposed. This can remind us of nothing so much as of the theory of the inerrant but lost original of the Scriptures. And it had the fate of that theory. The weight of necessity forced aside any such trifling and the position was frankly admitted that the agree- ment of the community was a safer and more certain basis than traditions from the Prophet. Traditions were alleged to that effect. '' My People will never agree in an error," declared Muhammad, or, at least, the later church made him so declare. But ash-Shafi'i found that even the addition of agreement to Qur'an and Prophetic usage did not give him basis enough for his system. Opinion he utterly rejected ; the preference of Abu Hanifa and the conception of the common welfare of Malik ibn Anas were alike to him. It is true also that both had been practically saved undei agreement. But ANALOGY ; THE FOUR SOURCES 107 he held fast by analogy, whether based on the Qur'an or on the usage of the Prophet. It was an essential instrument for his purpose. As was said, " The laws of the Qur'an and of the usage are limited ; the pos- sible cases are unhmited ; that which is unlimited can never be contained in that which is limited." But in ash-Shafi'i's use of analogy there is a distinction to be observed. In seeking to establish a parallelism between a case that has arisen and a rule in the Qur'an or usage, which is similar in some points but not precisely parallel, are we to look to external points of resemblance, or may we go further and seek to determine the reason (ilia) lying behind the rule and from that draw our analogy ? The point seems simple enough and the early speculative jurists sought the reason. For that they were promptly attacked by the traditionists. Such a method was an attempt to look into the mysteries of God, they were told ; man has no business to inquire after reasons, all he has to do is to obey. The point thus raised was fought over for centuries and schools are classified according to their attitude toward it. The position of ash-Shafi'i seems to have been that the reason for a command was to be considered in drawing an anal- ogy, but that there must be some clear guide, in the text itself, pointing to the reason. He thus left him- self free to consider the causes of the divine com- mands and yet produced the appearance of avoiding any irreverence or impiety in doing so. Such then are the four sources or bases {ctsls) of jurisprudence as accepted and defined by ash-Shafi'i — • Qur'an, prophetic usage, analogy, agreement. The 108 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE last has come to bear more and more weight. Every Shafi'ite law book begins each section with words to this effect, " The basis of this rule, before the agree- ment {qahla-l-ijma), is " Qur'an or usage as the case may be. The agreement must put its stamp on every rule to make it valid. Further, all the now existing schools have practically accepted ash-Shafi'i's classification of the sources and many have contended that a lawyer, no matter what his school, who does not use all these four sources, cannot be permitted to act as a judge. Ash-Shafi'i has accomplished his own definition of a true jurist, " Not he is a jurist who gathers statements and prefers one of them, but he who establishes a new principle from which a hundred branches may spring." But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied with this compromise. They objected to analogy and they objected to agreement ; nothing but the pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them. And their numbers were undoubtedly large. The common people always heard traditions gladly, and it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the professional lawyers. How much simpler, it struck the average mind, it would be to follow some clear and unambiguous saying of the Prophet ; then one could feel secure. This desire of the plain man to take traditions and interpret them strictl}^ and liter- ally was met by the school of Da'ud az-Zahiri, David the literalist. He was born three or four j^ears be- fore the death of ash-Shafi'i, which occurred in 204. He was trained as a Shafi'ite and that, too, of the nar- rower, more traditional type; but it was not tradi- da'ud az-zahiri 109 tional enough for him. So he had to cut himself loose and form a school of his own. He rejected utterly analogy ; he limited agreement, as a source, to the agreement of the immediate Companions of Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by the Wahhabites alone among moderns ; he limited him- self to Qur'an and prophetic usage. In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi'i had evidently exercised a very great personal influence upon his followers. All looked up to him and were prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a tendency for a scholar to take a thing upon the word of his master. " Ash-Shafi'i taught so ; I am a Shafi'ite and I hold so." This, too, Da'ud utterly re- jected. The scholar must examine the proofs for him- self and form his own opinion. But he had another peculiarity, and one which gained him the name of literalist. Everything, Qur'an and tradition, must be taken in the most exact sense, however absurd it might be. Of course, to have gone an inch beyond the very first meaniiig of the words would have been to stray in the direction of analogy. Yet, as fate would have it, to analogy, more or less, he had in the end to come. The inexorable law that the lim- ited cannot bound the unlimited was proved again. "Analogy is like carrion," confessed a very much earlier traditionist, " when there is nothing else you eat it." Da'ud tried to make his meal more palata- ble by a change in name. He called it a proof {dalil) instead of a source (a-s?) ; but what difference of idea he involved in that it is hard to determine. This brought him to the doctrine of cause, already 110 DEVELOPMENT OP JURISPRUDENCE mentioned. Were we at liberty to seek the cause of a divine word or action and lead our " proof " from that ? If the cause was directly stated, then Da'ud held that we must regard it as having been the cause in this case ; but we were not at liberty, he added, to look for it, or on it, as cause in any other case. It is evident that here we have to do with an im- possible man and school, and so the Muslim world found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to per- mit a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same grounds that objection to circumstantial evidence will throw out a man now as juror. If they had been using modern language, they would have said that it was because he was a hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite school lasted for centuries and drew long conse- quences, historical and theological, for which there is no space here. It never held rank as an acknowl- edged school of Muslim law. We now come to the last of the four schools, and it, strange as its origin was, need not detain us long. The Zahirite reaction had failed through its very ex- tremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted Shafi'ite to head the last attack upon the school of his master. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was a theologian of the first rank; he made no claim to be a constructive lawyer. His Musnad has already been dealt with. It is an immense collection of some thirty thousand traditions, but these are not even arranged for le- gal purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox faith in the rationalist persecution under the Khalifa al-Ma'mun, and his sufferings gained him the posi- tion of a saint. But he never dreamed of forming a PRINCIPLES OF UNITY AND VARIETY 111 school, least of all in opposition to his master, ash- Shafi'i. He died in 241, and after his death his disciples drew together and the foui'th school was founded. It was simply reactionary and did not make progress in any way. It minimized agreement and analogy and tended toward literal interpretation. As might be expected from its origin, its history has been one of violence, of persecution and counter- persecution, of insurrection and riot. Again and again the streets of Baghdad ran blood from its excesses. It has now the smallest following of the four surviving schools. There is no need to pursue this history further. With ash-Shafi'i the great development of Muslim ju- risprudence closes. Legislation, equity, legal fiction have done their parts ; the hope for the future lay, and lies, in the principle of the agreement. The common- sense of the Muslim community, working through that expression of catholicity, has set aside in the past even the undoubted letter of the Qur'an, and in the future will still further break the grasp of that dead hand. It is the principle of unity in Islam. But there is a principle of variety as well. The four schools of law whose origin has been traced are all equally valid and their decisions equally sacred in Muslim eyes. The believer may belong to any one of these which he chooses ; he must belong to one ; and when he has chosen his school, he accepts it and its rules to the uttermost. Yet he does not cast out as heretics the followers of the other schools. In every chapter their codes differ more or less ; but each school bears with the others ; sometimes, it may be, 112 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE with a superior tone, but still bears. This liberty of variety in unity is again undoubtedly due to the agreement. It has expressed itself, as it often does, in apocryphal traditions from the Prophet, the last rag of respect left to the traditionist school. Thus we are told that the Prophet said, " The disagree- ment of My People is a Mercy from God." This supplements and completes the other equally apocry- phal but equally important tradition : " My People will never agree upon an error." But there is a third principle at work which we cannot view with the same favor. As said above, every Muslim must attach himself to a legal school, and may choose any one of these four. But once he has chosen his school he is absolutely bound by the decisions and rules of that school. This is the principle against which the Zahirites protested, but their protest, the only bit of sense they ever showed, was in vain. The result of its working throughout cen- turies has been that now no one — except from a spirit of historical curiosity — ever dreams of going back from the text -books of the present day to the works of the older masters. Further, such an attempt to get be- hind the later commentaries would not be permitted. We have comment upon comment upon comment, abstract of this and expansion of that ; but each hangs by his predecessor and dares not go another step backward. The great masters of the four schools settled the broad principles ; they were authorities of the first degree {mujtahidim nuUlaq), second to Mu- hammad in virtue of his inspiration only. Second, came the masters who had authority within the sep- THE CANON AND CIVIL CODES 113 arate schools {mtijtahldun fi-l-madhahib) to determine the questions that arose there. Third, masters of still lesser rank for minor points {inujtahidim hil- faiwa. And so the chain runs on. The possibility of a new legal school arising or of any considerable change among these existing schools is flatly denied. Every legist now has his place and degree of liberty fixed, and he must be content. These three principles, then, of catholic unity and its ability to make and abrogate laws, of the liberty of diversity in that nnity, 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. Yery 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 admin- istered 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, in- heritance. 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 cus- tom of the country {iirf, ado) and the will of the 114 DEVELOPMENT OF JUIIISPRUDENCE ruler, expressed often in what are called Qanuns, statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, be- sides the codices of canon law, there is an accepted and authoritative corpus of such Qanuns. It is based on the Code Napoleon and 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 these Qanuns decides 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. 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 over- whelmingly in this choice. Certain countries are Hanifite or Shafi'ite ; in each, adherents of the other DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS 115 sects 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 Wahha- bites 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 only cuius regio eius reUgio, but cuius religio eius lex. Again and again, a revolu- tion in the state has driven one legal school from power and installed another. Yet the situation oc- curs sometimes that a sovereign finds his people di- vided into two parties, each following a different rite, and he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis be- longing 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 othei hand, the Turkish government, ever since it felt itself strong enough, has thrown the full weight of its in- fluence 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 salaried Muftis — givers of fahvcis, or legal opinions — of the other rites. 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. 116 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE The legal system of tlie Slii'ites is derived from that of the so-called Sunuites aud 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 responsi- bility. These seem to have in their hands the teach- ing power which strictly belongs only to the Hidden Imam. They thus represent the principle of author- ity 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 Muham- mad 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 {ihhtilaf) 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 Slii'ites of the Zaydite sect this was affected also by their philosophical studies and a philosophical doc- trine 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 Slii'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 Ibadite fiqli would be of the high- est 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. IBADITES 117 Its basis appears to be three-fold, Qur'an, prophetic usage, agreement — naturally that of the Ibadite com- munity. There is no mention of analogy, and tradi- tions seem to have been used sparingly and criticall}^ 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. PART III CHAPTEE I The three principles in the development ; first religious question- ings ; Murji'ites, Kliarijites, Qadarites ; influence of Christi- anity ; the Umayyads and Abbasids ; the Mu'tazilites ; the Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the Qur'an. Befoee entering upon a consideration of tlie devel- opment of the theology of Islam, it will be well to mark clearly the three principles which run continu- ously 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 a cul de sac and to have outlived its life. But after these periods come others of renewed quickening and its vital energy pours itself forth again alter et idem. In the state, we saw hoAV the old realms passed into decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take their places. The despotism by the grace of God of 119 120 THEOLOGY formal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of insurrection and revolution, and the People of Mu- hammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from time to time, its nnquenchable vitality. In theology the spirit breathes through single chosen men more than through the masses ; and, in consequence, our treatment of it will take biographi- cal form wherever our knowledge renders that pos- sible. 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 Mus- lim religious thought. There is tradition {naqi) ; there is reason {aql) ; and there is the unveiling of the mys- tic (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, ac- cording to the thinker of the time ; but all were pres- ent to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brother- hood of as-Sanusi ; reason has become a scholastic hand-maid 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 work- ing still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zeal- ots, persecutions and counter-jjersecutions, has at- tained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity. THE THREE PRINCIPLES 121 Two of tlie principles we have met already in the students of Jiadifh and of speculative law. The Han- balites maintained in theology their devotion to tradi- tion ; they fought for centuries all independent think- ing 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 follow- ers 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 devo- tion 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 infal- lible 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 crude 122 THEOLOGY anthropomorpliisms of tlie Qur'an. But these ques- tions 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 in- dividual 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. Yague stories are handed down of the early questionings and disputings of certain alil-al-ahioa, " people of wandering desires," a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty and sceptical Arabs ; of how they compared Script- ure 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. 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 other MURJl'lTES 123 of 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 Judg- ment. 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 Mus- lims, and most of them claimed that they were the only true Muslims and that the others were un- believers. 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 Mur- ji'ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which they could still support the Umayyads without homo- logating all their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they held, were de facto the 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 condemna- tion 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 ac- complished fact in the state, of which we have had to take account several times. Thus, between the fa- 124 THEOLOGY naticdl venerators of tlie 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 i^ious 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 un- der 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 lat- ter 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. The THE WRATH OF GOD LY ISLAM 125 conception 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 called Hanifs — 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 these Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Christian monks, and that the term haiiifwsiS used as a syn- onym for rahib, monk. 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, the 126 THEOLOGY wliole 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 be- lieved 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 Is- lam 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 devel- oped one of the most important controversies of Is- lam 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 {miimin), and outwardly confess Judaism or Christianity ; to be a professed Muslim w^as not necessary. This is like the doctrine of the Imamites, called taqiya, that it is allowable in time of stress to dissemble one's religious views ; and it is worth noticing that Jahm ibn Saf wan (killed, 131 ?), QADARITES 127 one of these extreme Murji'ites, was a Persian pros- elyte in rebellion against the Arab rule, and of the loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians were no more Muslims than the Anabaptists of Mun- ster had a claim to be Christians. The other wing of the Murji'ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who held that faith {iinan) is acknowledgment with the tongue as well as the heart and that works are a neces-^ sary 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 {kahiras, saghiras), and the position that even great sins, if not involving polytheism (shirk), would not exclude the believer forever from the Garden. The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin i in a philosophical necessity of the human mind. A | perception of the contradiction between man's con- sciousness 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 think- ing 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 subjective 128 THEOLOGY mind, wliicli lived only in the perception of the mo- ment, appear in the Qur'an. Muhammad was a poet rather than a theologian ; just as he was a proph- et rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the Muslims paused in their career of conquest and be- gan 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 ex- plained 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 Is- lam of the absolute doctrine of God's eternal decree was the victory of the more fundamental of Muham- mad'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 posi- tion that a man possessed qadar , 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 in a.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." To ORIGIN OF MU'TAZILITES 129 this 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. 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 in- fluence shows itself in all the later schools. Some- one came to him as he sat among his papils 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 {ivaHd) 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 \/ 130 THEOLOGY (mii'mm), lie 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 miti- gated 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 be- came 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 Christian- ity on Muhammad through the hermits of the des- ert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and that asceticism grew and developed into quietism and thence into mysticism. The last step w^as still in the future, but already at this time there were wandering monks who imitated their Christian breth- ren in the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were thence called Sufis, from suf, wool. It was not long before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of the INFLUENCE OF JOHN OF DAMASCUS 131 three 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 theol- ogy of the schools ; the dogmas of their faith were of a practical simplicity. But in the development of the Muiji'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. 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 rejec- tion 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 Avorld and turned to the contemplative life. In his writings and in those of 132 THEOLOGY his pupil, Theodorus Abucara (d. a.d. 826), there are polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form of dis- cussions 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 gen- erally can only be so explained. The Murji'ite re- jection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the Qadarite doctrine of freewill and responsibility, are to be explained in the same way as we have already explained the presence of sentences in the Muslim Jiqh which seem to be taken bodily from the Eoman codes. In this case, also, Ave are not to think of the Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek fathers, but as picking up ideas from them in practi- cal 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 doc- trine 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 Koman influence. It is, to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholas- INFLUENCES AT BAGHDAD 133 tic theology, in the exact sense, but gave almost all its energy to canon law. But there were other influences to come. With the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abba- sids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to the basin of the Euj^hrates 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. Grcecia capta and the rest came true here ; the battles of al-Qadisiya and Naha- wand were avenged ; Persian ideas and Persian re- ligion began slowly to work on the faith of Muham- mad. At the court of the earliest Abbasids it was fashionable to affect a little free thought. People were becoming enlightened and played with philoso- phy and science. Greek philosophy, Zoroastrian- ism, Manichseism, the old heathenism of Harran, Judaism, Christianity — all were in the air and mak- ing 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, in- struments, 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 revolts 134 THEOLOGY had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously enough, they were of a marked religious character. They were an expression of religious sects, Buddh- istic, Zoroastrian, Manichasan, and parties with pro- phetic leaders of their own ; all are swept together by Muslim writers as Zindiqs, probably literally, " initiates," originally Manich?eans, thereafter, prac- tically 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 here- tics. 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 j^hilosophy. That they did willingly, and so, through three in- termediaries, 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 multitudi- nous monasteries scattered over the country. There was a Persian source by which natural science, and medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the fifth century a.d. an academy of medicine and phi- losophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzi- stan. 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 Hippocra- tes reached the Muslim peoples. GOLDEN AGE OF MUSLIM SCIENCE 135 The first liiindred years of the Abbasid Khalifate was the golden age of Muslim science, the period of growth and development for the People of Muham- mad 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 learn- ing as still generally flourished fell more and more between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal methods and systems, its subtle deductions and end- less ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew aAvay attention from the facts of nature. The ori- ental 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'tazi- lites. These served themselves heirs upon the Qad- arites and denied that God predestined the actions \ of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and exter- nal vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God's qcfdaVy but it was unthinkable that man should be punished for actions not in his control. The freedom of the will is an a priori certainty, and man possesses qadar over 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 as 136 THEOLOGY willing, knowing, decreeing, etc. — strictly as the Will- ing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One, etc. — and the orthodox hold that such expressions could only mean that God possesses as Qualities (si/at) Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc. To this AVasil 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-tatvhid tuaVadl) ; the Unity being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in that they opposed God's qadm- over 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. The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl Muhammad al-AUaf (d. circa 226), a disciple of the second generation from Wasil. At his hands the doctrine of God's qualities assumed a more definite iform. Wasil had reduced God to a vague unity, a kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl taught that the qualities were not in His essence, and thus sepa- t rable from it, thinkable apart from it, but that they loere His essence. Thus, God was omnipotent by His omnipotence, but it loas His essence and not in \ o ABU HUDHAYL 137 His essence. He was omniscient by His omnis- cience and it ivas His 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 {Ji mahall, in suhiecto). 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 the qadar question 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 (takUf) ; 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 close 138 THEOLOGY approximation to the view of Jahm ibn Saf wan, 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 posi- tion 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 strik- ingly 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 Hud- hayl. 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 world luas, 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 doc- trine of man's actions and into some of these we must enter, on account of their later importance. Not rvory thing that comes from the action of a man is by ( U r .V" ABU IIUDHAYL 139 his 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 sound- ness 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 his- torical 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-ghayh) he rejected. Twenty wit- nesses 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 {aicliya Allah, sing, ivali), 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 tra- dition 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 inter- course between the believer and God had already ad- vanced. But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of dar- 140 THEOLOGY ing and 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 char- acter. 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 meta- physician, they had lost touch of the ground of or- dinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate truth, wielding as their weapons definitions and syl- logisms. 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 un- failing, 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 (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 ac- cordance with strict justice. It was not only that AN-NAZZAM 141 God loould not 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 (hadan) 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 hap- pened. But he, and all his fellows, were only play- ing 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 crea- tion 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 things 142 THEOLOGY to 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 his- tory have classified him rightly as more of a physicist than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and that fondness for playing with metaphysical para- doxes which often goes with it. Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu'tamir. His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid and taivalhid, begetting and deriving. It is the trans- mission 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 re- lation 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 tliat God could not do. His answer on the second was that BiSHR ; MA 'mar 143 God coiilcl have made a different and much better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He Avas not bound to make a bet- ter 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 sal- vation 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 some- thing. 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 dual- ity in the divine nature, and that was equally impos- sible. 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 Avith His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God's Will. Nor could He be described as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evi- dently meant that our conce23tions 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 " sub- stances " 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 of 144 THEOLOGY separate 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 con- sider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very du- bious morals ; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun ar-Eashid, but highly favored by al-Ma'mun, in whose Khalifate he died, a.h. 213. He held that actions produced through taivallud had no agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be produced by taivallud through speculation, and is, therefore, an action without an agent, and required even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magi- ans 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 ex- cusable. That all knowledge is a 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 pro- duce ; 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 prin- THE VISION OF GOD 145 ciples. This conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly at strife with Muhammad's concep- tion 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 Para- dise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind. It remains now only to touch upon one or two points common to all the Mu'tazilites. First, the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on texts of the Qur'an and on tradition, that some be- lievers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the other world ; this was the highest delight held out to them. But the Mu'tazilites perceived that vision in- volved a directing of the eyes on the part of the seer and position on the part of the seen. God must, therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they were compelled to reject the agreement and the tra- ditions in question and to explain away the passages in the Qur'an. Similarly, in Qur'an vii. 52, we read that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne. This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and feet and eyes, the Mu'tazilites had to explain away in a more or less cumbrous fashion. With one other detail of this class we must deal at greater length. It was destined to be the vital point of the whole Mu'tazilite controversy and the test 146 THEOLOGY by wliich theologians were tried and liad their places assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the Mu'tazilites. There had grown up very early in the Muslim community an un- bounded reverence and awe in the presence of the Qur'an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant, the Prophet ; the words, with few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelli- gible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may have been brought forward later from the Qur'an it- self, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damas- cus, has again played a formative part. So, in cor- respondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncre- ated and eternal Word of God ; to the earthly mani- festation in Jesus corresponds the Qur'an, the Word of God which we read and recite. The one is not the same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh were removed from us and the spiritual world re- vealed. That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind of transfusion of ideas from THE WORD OF GUD 147 Cliristianity and not as a result of controversy or dialectic about the teachings of the Qur'an. We find the orthodox party yehemently opposing discussion on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological subjects. " Our fathers have told us ; it is the faith received from the Companions ; " was their argument from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas used to cut off all discussions with " Bila kayfa'' (Believe without asking how) ; and he held strongly that the Qur'an was uncreated. The same word halam which we have found applied to the Word of God — ■ both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifesta- tion in the Qur'an — was used by them most confusing- ly for "disputation;" "he disputed" was takallam and " one who disputed " Avas mutahalUm. All that was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see the origin of what became later the technical terms for scholastic theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all " talking about " the sacred mysteries. This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in the Qur'an and tradition and to draw consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which shows how far this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on the lafz (utterance) of the Qur'an ; was it created or uncreated ? He said readily that the Qur'an was un- created and was obstinately silent as to the utterance 148 THEOLOGY of it by men. At last, persistent questioning drove him to an outburst. " The Qur'an is the Word of God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created and inquisition {imtihan) is an innovation (Md'a).'' But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated. Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur'an in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of men and the writing of it by men's hands — all be- tween the boards, as they said — was uncreated. Others were coming to deny absolutely the existence of the eternal Logos and that this revealed Qur'an was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bu- khari, while holding tenaciously that the Qur'an was uncreated, refused to make any statement as to its utterance by men. There was nothing said about that in Qur'an or tradition. The second form of opposition was to any uphold- ing of their belief by arguments, except of the sim- plest and most apparent. That was an invasion by reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith {naql). When the pious were eventually driven to dialectic weapons, their arguments show that these were snatched up to defend already occupied positions. They ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur'an itself, the Qur'an is called " knowledge from God." It is, then, inseparable from God's quality of knowl- edge. But that is eternal and uncreated ; therefore, so too, the Qur'an. Again, God created everything by the word, " Be." But this word cannot have been created, otherwise a created word would be a creator. THE WORD OF GOD 149 Therefore, God's word is uncreated. Again, there stands in the Qur'an (vii, 52), "Are not the creation and the command His ? " The command here is evi- dently different from the creation, i.e., not created. Further, God's command creates ; therefore it cannot be created. But it is God's word in command. It will be noticed here how completely God's word is hypostatized. This appears still more strongly in the following argument. God said to Moses, (Qur. vii, 141), "I have chosen thee over mankind with my apostolate and my word." God, therefore, has a word. But, again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses Moses with this word {kallama-Uahu Musa tahlima^ evidently regarded as meaning that God's word ad- dressed Moses) and said, " Lo, I am thy Lord." This argument is supposed to put the opponent in a di- lemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being so addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and is, therefore, unbelief ; or he holds that the halam which so addresses Moses is a created thing. Then, a created thing asserts that it is Moses' Lord. There- fore, God's Jcalam with which He addresses the proph- ets, or which addresses the prophets, is eternal, un- created. But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, op- position to it was not slow in appearing, and that on different sides. Literary vanity, national pride, and philosophical scruples all made themselves felt. Even in Muhammad's lifetime, according to the legend of the poet Labid and the verses which he put up in challenge on the Ka'ba, the Qur'an had taken rank as inimitable poetry. At all points it was the Word of 150 THEOLOGY God and perfect in every detail. But, among the Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one thing on which each was more jealous and vain than another, it was skill in working with words. The superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they might endure, though often with a bad grace ; but Muhammad as a rival and unapproachable literary artist they could not away with. So we find satire of the weaknesses of the Qur'an appearing here and there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and balance it against other products of the Arab genius. The rival productions of Musaylima, the False Proph- et, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a treatise in defence of the metaphors of the Qur'an. Among the Persians this was still more the case. To them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also an Arab ; and while they accepted his mission, ac- cepting his books in a literary way was too much for them. As a prophet, he was a man ; as a literary artist, he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may have felt; so, certainly, others felt later. The poet Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a com- panion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubi- ous orthodoxy, used to amuse himself by comparing poems by himself and others with passages in the Qur'an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn al-Muqaffa (killed about 140), the translator of " Kahla and Dimna" and many other books into Arabic, and a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an im- itation of the Qur'an. mu'tazilite attitude 151 Added to all this came the influence of the Mu'tazi- lite theologians. They had a double ground for their opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine and perfect book limited them too much in their intellectual freedom. They were willing to respect and use the Qur'an, but not to accept its ijmssima verba. Regarded as the production of Muhammad under divine influence, it could have a human and a divine side, and things which needed to be dropped or changed in it could be ascribed to the human side. But that was not possible with a miraculous book come down from heaven. In a word, they were meeting the difliculty which has been met by Chris- tianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The least they could do was to deny that the Qur'an was uncreated. But they had a still more vital, if not more im- portant, philosophical base of objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God's qualities (si/at) and tried to limit them in every way. These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hy- postatized into separate persons like those in the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near that danger really lay in the case of God's kalam. In orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos. The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting as showing that the Qur'an, even then, was given as a probative miracle {mu^jiz) because it deprived all men of power {i^jaz) to imitate it. That is, its aesthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr 152 THEOLOGY ibn al Mu*tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of the Mu'tazilites, went still further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who held the eternity of the Qur'an ; they had taken unto themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men were quite capable of producing a work even finer than the Qur'an in point of style. But the force of this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality with which he denounced his opponents in general as unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like those in circulation with us about those who hold that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that upon this point of salvability the Mu'tazilites were even narrower than the orthodox. CHAPTEE II Al-Ma'mun and the triumph of the Mu'tazilites ; the Mihna and Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; al-Farabi ; the Fatimids and the Ikhwan as-Safa; the early mystics, ascetic and pantheistic; al-Hallaj. Such for long was the situation between the Mu'- tazilites and their orthodox opponents. From time to time the Mu'tazilites received more or less protec- tion and state favor ; at other times, they had to seek safety in hiding. Popular favor they seem never to have enjoyed. As the Umayyads grew weak, they became more stiff in their orthodoxy; but with the Abbasids, and especially with al-Mansur, thought was again free. As has been shown above, encouragement of science and research was part of the plan of that great man, and he easily saw that the intellectual hope of the future was with these theological and philosophical questioners. So their work went slowly on, with a break under Harun ar- Rashid, a magnificent but highly orthodox monarch, who imderstood no trifling with things of the faith. It is an interesting but useless question whether Islam could ever have been broadened and devel- oped to the point of enduring in its midst free spec- ulation and research. As the case stands in history, it has known periods of intellectual life, but only under the protection of isolated princes here and there. It has had Augustan ages ; it has never had 153 154 THEOLOGY great popular yearnings after wider knowledge. Its intellectual leaders have lived and studied and lect- ured at courts ; tliey have not gone down and taught the masses of the people. To that the democracy of Islam has never come. Hampered by scholastic snobbishness, it has never learned that the abiding victories of science are won in the village school. But most unfortunately for the Mu'tazilites and for Islam, a Khalifa arose who had a relish for theological discussions and a high opinion of his own infallibil- ity. This was al-Ma'mun. It did not matter that he ranged himself on the progressive side ; his fatal error was that he invoked the authority of the state in matters of the intellectual and religious life. Thus, by enabling the conservative party to pose as mar- tyrs, he brought the prejudices and passions of the populace still more against the new movement. He was that most dangerous of all beings, a doctrinaire despot. He had ideas and tried to make other peo- ple live up to them. Al-Mansur, though a bloody tyrant, had been a great statesman and had known how to bend people and things quietly to his will. He had sketched the firm outlines of a policy for the Abbasids, but had been cautious how he proclaimed his programme to the world. The w^orld would come to him in time, and he could afford to wait and work in the dark. He knew, above all, that no people would submit to be school-mastered into the way in which they should go. Al-Ma'mun, for all his genius, w^as at heart a school-master. He was an enlight- ened patron of an enlightened Islam. Those who preferred to dwell in the darkness of the obscurant, al-ma'mun 155 he first scolded and then punished. Discussions in theology and comparative religion were his hobby. That some such interchange of letters between Mus- lims and Christians as that which crystallized in the Epistle of al-Kindi took place at his court seems certain. Bishr al-Marisi, Avho had lived in hiding in ar-Eashid's time on account of his heretical views, disputed, in 209, before al-Ma'mun on the nature of the Qur'an. He founded at Baghdad an academy with library, laboratories, and observatory. All the weight of his influence was thrown on the side of the Mu'tazilites. It appeared as though he were deter- mined to pull his people up by force from their su- perstition and ignorance. At last, he took the final and fatal step. In 202 a decree appeared proclaiming the doctrine of the creation of the Qur'an as the only truth, and as bind- ing upon all Muslims. At the same time, as an evi- dent sop to the Persian nationalists and the Alids, Ali was proclaimed the best of creatures after Mu- hammad. The Alids, it should be remembered, had close points of contact with the Mu'tazilites. Such a theological decree as this was a new thing in Islam ; never before had the individual consciousness been threatened by a word from the throne. The Mu'tazi- lites through it practically became a state church under erastian control. But the system of Islam never granted to the Imam, or leader of the Muslim people, any position but that of a protector and rep- resentative. Its theology could only be formed, as we have seen in the case of its law, by the agree- ment of the whole community. The question then 156 THEOLOGY naturally was what effect such a new thing as this decree could have except to exasperate the orthodox and the masses. Practically, there was no other effect. Things went on as before. All that it meant was that one very prominent Muslim had stated his opinion and thrown in his lot with heretics. For six years this continued, and then a method was devised of bringing the will of the Khalifa home upon the people. In 217 a distinguished Mu'tazilite, Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was appointed chief qadi, and in 218 the decree was renewed. But this time it was accompanied by what we would call a test- act, and an inquisition {mihna) was instituted. The letter of directions for the conduct of this matter, written by al-Ma'mun to his lieutenant at Baghdad, is decisive as to the character of the man and the nature of the movement. It is full of railings against the common people who know not the law and are accursed. They are too stupid to understand phi- losophy or argument. It is the duty of the Khalifa to guide them and especially to show them the dis- tinction between God and His book. He who holds otherwise than the Khalifa is either too blind or too lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other thing. Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their views. If they hold that the Qur'an is uncreated, they have abandoned tawliid, the doctrine of God's Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim land. Also, the qadis must apply the same test to all the witnesses in cases before them. If these do not hold that the Qur'an is created, they cannot be legal witnesses. Other letters followed ; the Mihna AHMAD IBN HANBAL 157 was extended through the Abbasid empire and ap- plied to other doctrines, e.cj,^ that of free-will and of the vision of God. The Khalifa also commanded that the death penalty for unbelief {hufr) should be inflicted on those who refused to take the test. They were to be regarded as idolaters and polytheists. The death of al-Ma'mun in the same year relieved the pressure. It is true that the Mihna was contin- ued by his successor, al-Mu'tasim, and by his succes- sor, al-Wathiq, but without energy; it was more a handy political weapon than anything else. In 234, the second year of al-Mutawakkil, it was abolished and the Qur'an decreed uncreated. At the same time the Alids and all Persian nationalism came under a ban. Practically, the status quo ante was restored and Mu'tazilism was again left a struggling heresy. The Arab party and the pure faith of Muhammad had re-asserted themselves. In this long conflict, the most prominent figure was certainly that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He was the trust and strength of the orthodox ; that he stood fast through imprisonment and scourging defeated the plans of the Mu'tazilites. In dealing with the development of law, we have seen what his legal po- sition was. The same held in theology. Scholastic theology (halam) was his abomination. Those who disputed over doctrines he cast out. That their dog- matic position was the same as his made no differ- ence. For him, theological truth could not be reached by reasoning {aql) ; tradition (naql) from the fathers (as-salaf) was the only ground on which the dubious words of the Qur'an could be explained. So, in his 158 THEOLOGY long examinations before the officials of al-Ma*mnn and al-Mu'tasim, he contented himself with repeating either the words of the Qur'an which for him were proofs or such traditions as he accepted. Any ap- proach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected. When they argued before him, he kept silence. What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this incident? for it was nothing more. The Mu'tazilites dropped back into their former position, but under changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace was further from them than ever. Ahmad ibn Han- bal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the masses ; and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed the honor of the Word of God. For his persecutors there was nothing but hatred. And after he had passed away, the conflict was taken up with still fiercer bitterness by the school of law founded by his pupils. They continued to maintain his principles of Qur'an and tradition long after the Mu'tazilites themselves had practically vanished from the scene, and all that was left for them to contend against was the modified system of scholastic theology which is now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these re- actionary Hanbalites we shall have to deal later. The Mu'tazilites, on their side, having seen the shipwreck of their hopes and the growing storm of popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their scholastic studies. They became more and more the- ologians affecting a narrower circle, and less and less educators of the world at large. Their system be- came more metaphysical and their conclusions more unintelligible to the plain man. The fate which has SCHOOLS OF MU'TxVZILlTES 159 fallen on all continued efforts of tlie Muslim mind was coming upon them. Beggarly speculations and barren hypotheses, combats of words over names, sapped them of life and reality. "What the ill-fated friendship of al-Ma'mun had begun was carried on and out by the closed circle of Muslim thought. They separated into schools, one at al-Basra and an- other at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially developed was the old question. What is a thing {shay) ? They defined a thing, practically, as a con- cept that could be known and of which something could be said. Existence {loujud) did not matter. It was only a quality which could be there or not. With it, the thing was an entity (maiojud) ; without it, a non-entity {ma'dum), but still a thing with all equip- ment of substance {jatvhar) and accident {arad)^ genus and species. The bearing of this was especially upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God's adding a single quality, things entered the sphere of existence and ivere for us. Here, then, is evidently an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At al-Basra the relation of God to His qualities was es- pecially discussed, and there it came to be pretty nearly a family dispute between al-Jubba'i (d. 303) and his son Abu Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that God has qualities, existent, eternal, added to His es- sence ; thus. He knows, for example, by such a quality of knowledge. The students of Greek philosophy and the Shi'ites denied this and said that God knew by His essence. We have seen already Mu'tazilite views as to this point. Abu Hadhayl held that these quali- ties were God's essence and not in it. Thus, He knew 160 THEOLOGY by a quality of knowledge, but that quality tuas His essence. Al-Jubba'i contented himself with safe- guarding this statement. God knew in accordance with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a state {hal) which required that He should be a knower. The orthodox had said the first ; his son, Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know an essence and know it under different conditions. The conditions varied but the essence remained. These conditions are not thinkable by themselves, for we know them only in connection with the es- sence. These are states ; they are different from the essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba'i opposed to this a doctrine that these states were really subjective in the mind of the perceiver, either generalizations or relationships existing mentally but not externally. This controversy spun itself out at great length through centuries. It eventually re- solved .itself into the fundamental metaphysical in- quiry, What is a thing ? A powerful school came to a conclusion that would have delighted the soul of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Things are four, they said, entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As we have seen above, al-Jubba'i denied the reality of both states and relationships. Orthodox Islam has been of a divided opinion. But all this time, other movements had been in progress, some of which were to be of larger future importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In 255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a Mu'tazilite he Avas really a man of letters, free in life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned AL-JAIIIZ ; AL-KINDI 161 > in the writings of the philosophers and rather in- clined to the doctrines of the Tabi'iyun, deistic natu- ralists. His confession of faith was of the utmost simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God* had neither body nor form, could not be seen with the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not capable of philosophical reflection, but held that Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more should be required of him. Here we have evidently in part a reaction from the subtilties of controversy, and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough to give even the unsettled a chance to remain in the Muslim Church. Something of the same kind we shall find, later, in the case of Ibn Kushd. Finally, we have probably to see in his remark that the Quran was a body, turned at one time into a man and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on the great controversy of his time. Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers proper, the students of the wisdom of the Greeks. He represents the stand-point of the educated man of the time, and was no specialist in anything but a general scepticism. In the first generation of the philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense, stands conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philos- opher of the Arabs. The name belongs to him of right, for he is almost the only example of a student of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert. But he was hardly a philosopher in any independent sense. His role was translating, and during the 162 THEOLOGY reigns of al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim a mnltitude of translations and original works de oynni scibili came from his hands ; the names of 265 of these have come down to us. In the orthodox reaction under al-Mu- tawakkil he fared ill ; his library was confiscated but afterward restored. He died about 260, and with him dies the brief, golden century of eager acquisi- tion, and the scholastic period enters in philosophy as in theology. That the glory was departing from Baghdad and the Khalifate is shown by the second important name in philosophy. It is that of al-Farabi, who was born at Farab in Turkestan, lived and worked in the brill- iant circle which gathered round Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid, at his court at Aleppo. In music, in science, in philology, and in philosophy, he was alike master. Aristotle was his passion, and his Arabic contemporaries and successors united in calling him the second teacher, on account of his success in un- knotting the tangles of the Greek system. It was in truth a tangled system which came to him, and a tangled system which he left. The MusHm phi- losophers began, in their innocence, with the follow- ing positions : The Quran is truth and philosophy is truth ; but truth can only be one ; therefore, the Qur'an and philosophy must agree. Philosophy they accepted in whole-hearted faith, as it came to them from the Greeks through Egypt and Syria. They took it, not as a mass of more or less contradictory speculation, but as a form of truth. They, in fact, never lost a certain theological attitude. Under such conditions, then, Plato came to them; but it was PLATO ; PLOTINUS ; ARISTOTLE 163 mostly Plato as interpreted by Porpliyrius, that is, as neo-Platonism. Aristotle, too, came to tliem in the guise of the later Peripatetic schools. But iu Aristotle, especially, there entered a perfect knot of entanglement and confusion. During the reign of al-Mu'tasim, a Christian of Emessa in the Lebanon — the history in details is obscure — translated parts of the " Enneads " of Plotinus into Arabic and en- titled his work "The Theology of Aristotle." A more unlucky bit of literary mischief and one more far-reaching in its consequences has never been. The Muslims took it all as solemnly as they took the text of the Qur'an. These two great masters, Plato and Aristotle, they said, had expounded the truth, which is one. Therefore, there must be some way of bring- ing thepa into agreement. So generations of toilers labored valiantly with the welter of translations and pseudographs to get out of them and into them the one truth. The more pious added the third element of the Qur'an, and it must remain a marvel and a magnificent testimonial to their skill and patience that they got even so far as they did and that the whole movement did not end in simple lunacy. That al-Farabi should have been so incisive a writer, so wide a thinker and student; that Ibn Sina should have been so keen and clear a scientist and logician ; that Ibn Rushd should have known — really known — and commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that the human brain, after all, is a sane brain and has the power of unconsciously rejecting and throwing out nonsense and falsehood. But it is not wonderful that, dealing with such ma- 164 THEOLOGY terials and contradictions, tliey developed a tendency to mysticism. There were many things which they felt compelled to hold which could only be defended and rationalized in that cloudy air and slanting light. Especially, no one but a mystic could bring together the emanations of Plotinus, the ideas of Plato, the spheres of Aristotle and the seven- storied heaven of Muhammad. With this matter of mysticism we shall have to deal immediately. Of al-Farabi it is enough to say that he was one of the most patient of the laborers at that impossible problem.. It seems never to have occurred to him, or to any of the others, that the first and great imperative was to verify his refer- ences and sources. The oriental, like the mediseval scholastic, tests minutely the form of his syllogism, but takes little thought whether his premises state facts or not. With a scrupulous scepticism in deduc- tion, he combines a childlike acceptance on tradition or on the narrowest of inductions. But there are other and more ominous signs in al-Farabi of the scholastic decline. There appears first in him that tendency toward the writing of encyclopaedic compends, which always means super- ficiality and the commonplace. Al-Farabi himself could not be accused of either, but that he thus claimed all knowledge for his portion showed the risk of the premature circle and the small gain. An- other is mysticism. He is a neo-Platonist, more ex- actly a Plotinian ; although he himself would not have recognized this title. He held, as we have seen, that he was simply retelling the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. But he was also a devout Muslim. He AL-FARABI 165 seems to have taken in earnest all the bizarre details of Muslim cosmography and eschatology ; the Pen, the Tablet, the Throne, the Angels in all their ranks and functions mingle picturesquely with the system of Plotinus, his ev, his ^lrvxV' his vov<;, his receptive and active intellects. But to make tenable this posi- tion he had to take the great leap of the mystic. Unto us these things are impossible ; with God, i.e., on another plane of existence, they are the simplest realities. If the veil were taken from our eyes we would see them. This has always been the refuge of the devout Muslim who has tampered with science. We shall look for it more in detail when we come to al-Ghazzali, who has put it into classical form. Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and a clericalist. His conception of the model state is a strange compound of the republic of Plato and Shi- * ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of course, in the theocratic idea of the Muslim state ; but his city, which is to take in all mankind, a Holy Eoman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once, a community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later influence than that of the mother city of Islam, al- Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence is that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya, near Tunis. The Hamdanids were Shi'ites and Sayf ad-Dawla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed peace and protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas. This brings us again to the great mystery of Mus- lim history. "What was the truth of the Fatimid movement? Was the family of the Prophet the fosterer of science from the earliest times? What 166 THEOLOGY degree of contact had tliey with the Mu'tazilites ? With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law ? That they were themselves the actual beginners of everything — and everything has been claimed for them — we may put down to legend. But one thing does stand fast. Just as al-Ma'mun combined the establishment of a great university at Baghdad with a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo erected a great hall of science and threw all their in- fluence and authority into the spreading and extend- ing of knowledge. This institution seems to have been a combination of free public library and uni- versity, and was probably the gateway connecting between the inner circle of initiated Fatimid leaders and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already seen how unhappy were the external effects of the Shi'ite, and especially of the Fatimid, propaganda on the Muslim world. But from time to time we be- come aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and philosophical labor and investigation accompanying that propaganda, and striving after knowledge and truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which we can know only through its occasional outbursts. Some of these are given above ; others will follow. The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and dogmatic statements and explanations are not in place. It may be that it was only a natural draw- ing together on the part of all the different forces and movements that were under a ban and had to live in secrecy and stillness. It may be that the students of the new sciences passed over, simply through their studies and political despair — as has IKHWAN-AS-SAFA 167 often happened in our day — into different degrees of nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate searching for, and dependence on, some absolute guide, an infallible Imam. It may be that we have read wrongl}^ the whole history of the Eatimid move- ment ; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate it into self-rule ; that they saw — these unknown dev- otees of science and truth — no other way of break- ing down the barriers of Islam and setting free the spirits of men. A wild hypothesis ! But in face of the real mystery no hypothesis can seem wild. Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fati- mids is the association known as the Sincere Breth- ren {Ikliwan as-safa). It existed at al-Basra in the middle of the fourth century of the Hijra during the breathing space which the free intellectual life enjoyed after the capture of Baghdad by the Bmvay- hids in 334. It will be remembered how that Per- sian dynasty was Shi'ite by creed and how it, for the time, completely clipped the claws of the orthodox and Sunnite Abbasid Khalifas. The only thing, thereafter, which heretics and philosophers had to fear was the enmity of the populace, but that seems to have been great enough. The Hanbalite mob of Baghdad had grown to be a thing of terror. It was, then, an educational campaign on which this new philosophy had to enter. Their programme was by means of clubs, propagating themselves and spread- ing over the country from al-Basra and Baghdad, to 168 THEOLOGY reach all educated people and introduce among them gradually a complete change in their religious and scientific ideas. Their teaching was the same combi- nation of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism with Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu'taz- ilite theology, that we have already known. Only there was added to it a Pythagorean reverence for numbers, and everything, besides, was treated in an eminently superficial and popularized manner. Our knowledge of the Fraternity and its objects is based on its publication, "The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren " (BasaHl ikhivan as-safa) and upon scanty historical notices. The Epistles are fifty or fifty-one in number and cover the field of human knowledge as then conceived. They form, in fact, an Arabic En- cyclopedie. The founders of the Fraternity, and authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most ten. We have no certain knowledge that the Fra- ternity ever took even its first step and spread to Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the develop- ment did not pass. The division of members into four— learners, teachers, guides, and drawers near to God in supernatural vision— and the plan of regular meetings of each circle for study and mutual edifica- tion remained in its paper form. The society was half a secret one and lacked, apparently, vitality and energy. There was among its founders no man of weight and character. So it passed away and has left only these Epistles which have come down to us in numerous MSS., showing how eagerly they have been read and copied and how much influence they at least must have exercised. That influence must THE IKHWAN AND THE FATIMIDS 169 have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intel- lectual life, yet it carried with it in a still higher de- gree the defects we have already noticed in al-Farabi. To them must be added the most simple skimming of all real philosophical problems and a treatment of nature and natural science which had lost all con- nection with facts. It has been suggested, and the suggestion seems luminous and fertile, that this Fraternity was simply a part of the great Fatimid propaganda which, as we know, honey-combed the ground everywhere under the Sunnite Abbasids. Descriptions which have reached us of the methods followed by the leaders of the Fraternity agree exactly with those of the mis- sionaries of the Isma'ilians. They raised difficulties and suggested serious questionings ; hinted at possi- ble answers but did not give them ; referred to a source where all questions would be answered. Again, their catch-words and fixed phrases are the same as those afterward used by the Assassins, and we have traces of these Epistles forming a part of the sacred library of the Assassins. It is to be re- membered that the Assassins were not simply robber bands who struck terror by their methods. Both the western and the eastern branches were devoted to science, and it may be that in their mountain for- tresses there was the most absolute devotion to true learning that then existed. When the Mongols capt- ured Alamut, they found it rich in MSS. and in .instruments and apparatus of every kind. It is then possible that the elevated eclecticism of the Ihhivaii as-safa was the real doctrine of the Fatimids, the 170 THEOLOGY Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses ; certainly, wherever we can test them there is the most singu- lar agreement. It is a mechanical and sesthetic pan- theism, a glorification of Pythagoreanism, with its music and numbers ; idealistic to the last degree ; a worship and pursuit of a conception of a harmony and beauty in all the universe, to find which is to find and know the Creator Himself. It is thus far removed from materialism and atheism, but could easily be misrepresented as both. This, it is true, is a very different explanation from the one given in our first Part ; it can only be put along-side of that and left there. The one expresses the practical effect of the Isma'ilians in Islam; the other what may have been their ideal. However we judge them, we must always remember that somewhere in their teaching, at its best, there was a strange attraction for thinking and troubled men. Nasir ibn Khusraw, a Persian Faust, found peace at Cairo between 437 and 444 in recognizing the divine Imamship of al- Mustansir, and after a life of persecution died in that faith as a hermit in the mountains of Badakh- shan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Hani, who died in 362, similarly accepted al-Mu'izz as his spiritual chief and guide. Another eclectic sect, but on a very different prin- ciple, was that of the Karramites, founded by Abu Abd Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its teachings had the honor to be accepted and protected by no less a man than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna (388-421), Mahmud the Idol-breaker, the first in- vader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Pirdawsi, IBN KARRAM 171 Ibn Sina and many another. But that, to which we will return, belongs to a later date and, probably, to a modified form of Ibn Karram's teaching. For him- self, he was an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to the story, a man of no education. He lost himself in theological subtleties which he seems to have failed to understand. However, out of them all he put together a book which he called ' ' The Punish- ment of the Grave," which spread widely in Khura- san. It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest anthropomorphism. Thus, for him, God actually sat upon the throne, was in a place, had direction and so could move from one point to another. He had a body with flesh, blood, and limbs ; He could be em- braced by those who were purified to the requisite point. It was a literal acceptance of the material expressions of the Qur'an along with a consideration of how they could be so, and an explanation by com- parison with men — all opposed to the principle hila kayfa. So, apparently, we must understand the curious fact that he was also a Murji'ite and held faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue. All men, except professed apostates, are believers, he said, because of that primal covenant, taken by God with the seed of Adam, when He asked, " Am I not your Lord? " {Alastu hi-rahhikum) and they, brought forth from Adam's loins for the purpose, made an- swer, " Yea, verily, in this covenant we remain until we formally cast it off." This, of course, involved taking God's qualities in the most literal sense. So, if we are to see in the Mu'tazilites scholastic com- mentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to 172 THEOLOGY logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a meta- phor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its external meaning. He was part of the great stream of conservative reaction, in which we find also such a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of Ahmad's sense and reverence kept him by the safe proviso " without considering how and without com- parison." All Ahmad's later followers were not so wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram inclined to the Kharijites. Before we return to al-Jubba'i and the fate of the Mu'tazilites, it remains to trace more precisely the thread of mysticism, that kashf, revelation, which we have already mentioned several times. Its funda- mental fact is that it had two sides, an ascetic and a speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in result, and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic has been assigned, in good and in bad faith, as an adherent of both. It is to the form of mysticism which sprang from asceticism that we must first turn. Attention has been given above to the wandering monks and her- mits, the sa'ihs (wanderers) and rahibs who caught Muhammad's attention and respect. We have seen, too, how Muslim imitators began in their turn to wander through the land, clad in the coarse woollen robes which gave them the name of Sufis, and liv- ing upon the alms of the pious. How early these appeared in any number and as a fixed profession is uncertain, but we find stories in circulation of meet- ings between such mendicant friars and al-Hasan al- WOMEN SAINTS 173 Basri himself. Women, too, were among them, and it is possible that to their influence a development of devotional love-poetry was due. At least, many- verses of this kind are ascribed to a certain Babi'a, an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme other- worldliness, who died in 135. Many other wom- en had part in the contemplative life. Among them may be mentioned, to show its grasp and spread, A'isha, daughter of Ja'far as-Sadiq, who died in 145; Fatima of Naysabur, who died in 223, and the Lady Nafisa, a contemporary and rival in learning with ash-Shafi'i and the marvel of her time in piety and the ascetic life. Her grave is one of the most vener- ated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders are still worked and prayer is always answered. She was a descend- ant of al-Hasan, the martyred ex-Khalifa, and an example of how the fated family of the Prophet was an early school for women saints. Even in the Heathenism we have traces of female penitents and hermits, and the tragedy of Ali and his sons and de- scendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving ser- vice and religious enthusiasm with which women are dowered. All these stood and stand in Islam on exactly the same footing as men. The distinction in Eo- man Christendom that a woman cannot be a priest there falls away, for in Islam is neither priest nor layman. They lived either as solitaries or in conven- tual life exactly as did the men. They were called by the same terms in feminine form ; they were Sufi- yas beside the Sufis ; Zahidas (ascetics) beside the Zahids ; Waliyas (friends of God) beside the Walis ; 174 THEOLOGY Abidas (devotees) beside the Abids. They worked wonders {karainat, closely akin to the ')(aplaiJbaTa of 1 Cor. xii, 9) by the divine grace, and still, as we have seen, at their own graves such are granted through them to the faithful, and their intercession (sJiafa^a) is invoked. Their religious exercises were the same ; they held dhikrs and women darwishes 3^et dance to singing and music in order to bring on fits of ecstasy. To state the case generally, whatever is said hereafter of mysticism and its workings among men must be taken as applying to women also. To return : one of the earliest male devotees of whom we have distinct note is Ibrahim ibn Adham. He was a wanderer of royal blood, drifted from Balkh in Afghanistan to al-Basra and to Mecca. He died in 161. Contempt for the learning of lawyers and for external forms appears in him ; obedience to God, contemplation of death, death to the world formed his teaching. Another, Da'ud ibn Nusayr, who died in 165, was wont to say, " Flee men as thou fleest a lion. Fast from the world and let the breaking of thy fast be when thou diest." Another, al-Fudayl ibn lyad of Khurasan, who died in 187, was a robber converted by a heavenly voice ; he cast aside the world, and his utterances show that he lapsed into the passivity of quietism. Reference has already been made in the chapter on jurisprudence to the development of asceticism which came with the accession of the Abbasids. The disappointed hopes of the old believers found an out- let in the contemplative life. They withdrew from PASSAGE OF ASCETICISM TO ECSTASY 175 the world and would have nothing to do with its rul- ers ; their wealth and everything connected with them they regarded as unclean. Ahmad ibn Hanbal in his later life had to use all his obstinacy and in- genuity to keep free of the court and its contamina- tion. Another was this al-Fudayl. Stories — chrono- logically impossible — are told how he rebuked Harun ar-Rashid for his luxury and tyranny and denounced to his face his manner of life. With such an attitude to those round him he could have had little joy in his devotion. So it was said, "When al-Fudayl died, sadness was removed from the world." But soon the recoil came. Under the spur of such exercises and thoughts, the ecstatic oriental temperament began to revel in expressions borrowed from human love and earthly wine. Such we find by Ma'ruf of al-Karkh, a district of Baghdad, who died in 200, and whose tomb, saved by popular reverence, is one of the few ancient sites in modern Baghdad ; and by his greater disciple. Sari as-Saqati, who died in 257. To this last is ascribed, but dubi- ously, the first use of the word taiuJiid to signify the union of the soul with God. The figure that the heart is a mirror to image back God and that it is darkened by the things of the body appears in Abu Sulayman of Damascus, who died in 215. A more celebrated ascetic, who died in 227, Bishr al-Hafi (bare-foot), speaks of God directly as the Beloved {Jiahih). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi was a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and died in 243. The only thing in him to which Ahmad could take exception was that he made use of kalam in refuting the Mu'ta- 176 THEOLOGY zilites ; even this suspicion against him he is said to have abandoned. Sari and Bishr, too, were close friends of Ahmad's. Dhu-n-Nun, the Egyptian Sufi, who died in 245, is in more dubious repute. He is said to have been the first to formulate the doctrine of ecstatic states {lialsj maqamas) ; but if he went no further than this, his orthodoxy, in the broad sense, should be above suspicion. Islam has now come to accept these as right and fitting. Perhaps the great- est name in early Sufiism is that of al- Junayd (d. 297) ; on it no shadow of heresy has ever fallen. He was a master in theology and law, reverenced as one of the greatest of the early doctors. Questions of taivliid he is said to have discussed before his pupils with shut doors. But this was probably taioliid in the theological and not in the mystical sense — against the Mu'tazilites and not on the union of the soul with God. Yet he, too, knew the ecstatic life and fell fainting at verses which struck into his soul. Ash- Shibli (d. 334) was one of his disciples, but seems to have given himself more completely to the ascetic and contemplative life. In verses by him we find the vocabulary of the amorous intercourse with God fully developed. The last of this group to be mentioned here shall be Abu Talib al-Makki, who died in 386. It is his distinction to have furnished a text-book of Sufiism that is in use to this day. He wrote and spoke openly on taivhid, now in the Sufi sense, and got into trouble as a heretic, but his memory has been restored to orthodoxy by the general agreement of Islam. When, in 488, al-Ghazzali set himself to seek light in Sufiism, among the treatises he studied GROWTH OF FRATEENITIES 177 were the books of four of those mentioned above, Abu Talib, al-Muhasibi, al-Junaycl, and ash-Shibli. In the case of these and all the others already spoken of there was nothing but a very simple and natural de- velopment such as could easily be paralleled in Europe. The earliest Muslims were burdened, as we have seen, with the fear of the terrors of an avenging God. The world was evil and fleeting ; the only abiding good was in the other world ; so their religion became an ascetic other-worldliness. They fled into the wilder- ness from the wrath to come. Wandering, either solitary or in companies, was the special sign of the true Sufi. The young men gave themselves over to the guidance of the older men ; little circles of dis- ciples gathered round a venerated Shaykh ; fraterni- ties began to form. So we find it in the case of al-Jun- ayd, so in that of Sari as-Saqati. Next would come a monastery, rather a rest-house ; for only in the win- ter and for rest did they remain fixed in a place for any time. Of such a monastery there is a trace at Damascus in 150 and in Khurasan about 200. Then, just as in Europe, begging friars organized them- selves. In faith they were rather conservative than anything else ; touched with a religious passivism which easily developed into quietism. Their ecsta- sies went little beyond those, for instance, of Thomas a Kempis, though struck with a warmer oriental fer- vor. The points on which the doctors of Islam took exception to these earlier Sufis are strikingly differ- ent from what we would expect. They concern the practical life far more than theological speculation. 178 THEOLOGY As was natural in the case of professional devotees, a constantly prayerful attitude began to assume impor- tance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the five daily prayers, the salaivat. This development was in all probability aided by the existence in Syria of the Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted the duty of prayer above all other religious obliga- tions. These, also, abandoned property and obliga- tions and wandered as poor brethren over the country. They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic Greek monks who eventually led to the controversy concerning the uncreated light manifested at the transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine to the Eastern Church. Considering these points, it can hardly be doubted that there was some historical connection and relation here, not only Avith earlier but also with later Sufiism. There is a striking re- semblance between the Sufis seeking by patient intro- spection to see the actual light of God's presence in their hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting solitarily in their cells and seeking the divine light of Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels. But our immediate point is the matter of constant, free prayer. In the Qur'an (xxxiii, 41) the believers are exhorted to " remember (dhtJcr) God often ; '* this command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative de- preciation of the five canonical prayers. Their meet- ings for the purpose, much like our own prayer- meetings, still more like the " class-meetings " of the early Methodists, as opposed to stated public worship, were called dhikrs. These services were fiercely attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived TAWAKKUL 179 and are the darwish functions which tourists still go to see at Constantinople and Cairo. But the more private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each in his house repeating his Qur'anic litanies through the night, until to the passer-by it sounded like the humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-gut- ters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to have fallen before ridicule and accusations of heresy. Another point against the earlier Sufis was their abuse of the principle of taiuakkul, dependence upon God. They gave up their trades and professions ; they even gave up the asking for alms. Their ideal was to be absolutely at God's disposal, utterly cast upon His direct sustenance {rizq). No anxiety for their daily bread was permitted to them ; they must go through the world separated from it and its needs and looking up to God. Only one who can do this is properly an acknowledger of God's unity, a true Muiuahhid. To such, God would assuredly open the door of help ; they were at His gate ; and the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His help used to come. To this it may be imagined that the more sober, even among Sufis, made vehement objection. It fell under two heads. One was that of kash, the gaining of daily bread by labor. The examples of the hus- bandman who casts his seed into the ground and then depends upon God, of the merchant who travels with his wares in similar trust, were held up against the wandering but useless monk. As always, traditions w^ere forged on both sides. Said a man — apjoarently in a spirit of jDrophecy — one day to the Prophet, 180 THEOLOGY '' Sliall I let my camel run free and trust in God ? " Replied the Prophet, or someone for him with a good imitation of his humorous common-sense, " Tie up your camel and trust in God." The other head was the use of remedies in sickness. The whole contro- versy parallels strikingly the " mental science " and " Christian science " of the present day. Medicine, it was held, destroyed taioakkuL In the fourth century in Persia this insanity ran high and many books were written for it and against it. The author of one on the first side was consulted in an obstinate case of headache. " Put my book under your pillow," he said, "and trust in God." On both these points the usage of the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth of the Sufi position. They had notoriously earned their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had pos- sessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the most barbaric and multifarious remedies. So the agreement of Islam eventually righted itself, though the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained for centuries a thing of delight for theologians. In the end only the wildest fanatics held by absolute taivakkul. But all this time the second form of Sufiism had been slowly forcing its way. It was essentially spec- ulative and theological rather than ascetic and de- votional. When it gained the upper hand, zaldd (ascetic) was no longer a convertible term with Sufi. We pass over the boundary between Thomas a Kempis and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of this movement cannot be hard to find in the light of what has preceded. They lie partly in the neo- SPECULATIVE SUFIISM 181 Platouism wliicli is the foundation of the philosophy of Islam. Probably it did not come to the Sufis along the same channels by which it reached al- Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics and, perhaps, especially through the Pseudo-Dionys- ius the Areopagite, and his asserted teacher, Stephen bar Sudaili with his Syriac "Book of Hierotheos." "VYe need not here consider whether the Monophysite heresy is to be reckoned in as one of the results of the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying forms of it meant the frank deifying of a man and thus raised the possibility of the equal deifying of any other man and of all men. But there is no cer- tainty that these views had an influence in Islam. It is enough that from a.d. 533 we find the Pseudo- Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the ultra Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with the whole mystical movement in Christendom. Ac- cording to it, all is akin in nature to the Absolute, and all this life below is only a reflection of the glories of the upper sphere, where God is. Through the sacraments and a hierarchy of angels man is led back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to a knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the atonement fade out of view. The incarnation is but an example of how the divine and the human can join. All is an emanation or an emission of grace from God ; and the yearnings of man are back to his source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and travailing nature are striving to return to their origin. When this conception had seized the Oriental Church ; when it had passed into Islam and dominated its 182 THEOLOGY emotional and religious life ; when through the trans- lation of the Pseudo-Dionysius by Scotus Erigena in 850, it had begun the long contest of idealism in Europe, the dead school of Plotinus had won the field, and its influence ruled from the Oxus to the Atlantic. But the roots of Sufiism struck also in another direction. We have already seen an early tendency to regard Ali and, later, members of his house as in- incarnations of divinity. In the East, where God comes near to man, the conception of God in man is not difficult. The Semitic prophet through whom God speaks easily slips over into a divine being in whom God exists and may be worshipped. But if with one, why not with another? May it not be possible by purifying exercises to reach this unity ? If one is a Son of God, may not all become that if they but take the means? The half -understood pan- theism which always lurks behind oriental fervors claims its due. From his wild whirling dance, the darwish, stung to cataleptic ecstasy by the throbbing of the drums and the lilting chant, sinks back into the unconsciousness of the divine oneness. He has passed temporarily from this scene of multiplicity into the sea of God's unity and, at death, if he but persevere, he will reach that haven where he fain would be and will abide there forever. Here, we have not to do with calm philosophers rearing their sys- tems in labored speculations, but with men, often untaught, seeking the salvation of their souls ear- nestly and with tears. One of the earliest of the pantheistic school was PANTHEISTIC SCHOOL 183 Abu Yazid al-Bistami (cl. 261). He was of Persian parentage, and his father had been a follower of Za- rathustra. As an ascetic he was of the highest re- pute ; he was also an author of eminence on Sufiism (al-Ghazzali used his books) and he joined to his devout learning and self- mortification clear miracu- lous gifts. But equally clear was his pantheistic drift and his name has come down linked to the say- ing, " Beneath my cloak there is naught else than God." It is worth noticing that certain other of his sayings show that, even in his time, there were Sufi saints who boasted that they had reached such per- fection and such miraculous powers that the ordinary moral and ceremonial law no longer applied to them. The antinomianism which haunted the later Sufiism and darwishdom had already appeared. But the greatest name of all among these early pantheists was that of al-Hallaj (the cotton carder), a pupil of al-Junayd, who was put to death with great cruelty in 309. It is almost impossible to reach any certain conclusion as to his real views and aims. In spite of what seem to be utterances of the crassest pantheism, such as, "I am the Truth," there have not been wanting many in later Islam who have reverenced his memory as that of a saint and martyr. To Sufis and darwishes of his time and to this day he has been and is a patron saint. In his life and death he represents for them the spirit of revolt against dogmatic scholasticism and formalism. Further, even such a great doctor of the Muslim Church as al-Ghazzali defended him and, though lamenting some iu cautious phrases, upheld his orthodoxy. At his trial itself 184 THEOLOGY before the tlieologians of Baghdad, one of them re- fused to sign the fativa deckiring him an unbeliever ; he was not clear, he said, as to the case. And it is true that such records as we have of the time suggest that his condemnation was forced by the government as a matter of state policy. He was a Persian of Magian origin, and evidently an advanced mystic of the speculative type. He carried the theory to its legitimate conclusion, and proclaimed the result pub- licly. He dabbled in scholastic theology ; had evi- dent Mu'tazilite leanings; wrote on alchemy and things esoteric. But with this mystical enthusiasm there seem to have united in him other and more dangerous traits. The stories which have reached us show him of a character fond of excitement and change, surrounding himself with devoted adherents and striving by miracle-working of a commonplace kind to add to his following. His popularity among the people of Baghdad and their reverence for him rose to a perilous degree. He may have had plans of his own as a Persian nationalist; he may have had part in one of the Shi'ite conspiracies ; he may have been nothing but a rather weak-headed devotee, carried off his feet by a sudden tide of public excitement, the greatest trial and danger that a saint has to meet. But the times were not such then in Baghdad that the government could take any risks. Al-Muqtadir was Khalifa and in his weak hands the Khalifate was slipping to ruin. The Fatimids were supreme in North Africa ; the Qarmatians held Syria and Arabia, and were threatening Baghdad itself. In eight years they were to take Mecca. Persia was AL-HALLAJ 185 seething with false prophets and nationalists of every shade. Thirteen years later Ibn ash-Shalmaghani was put to death in Baghdad on similar grounds ; in his case, Shi'ite conspiracy against the state was still more clearly involved. We can only conclude in the words of Ibn Khallikan (d. 681), " The history of al- Hallaj is long to relate ; his fate is Avell known ; and God knoweth all secret things." With him Ave must leave, for the present, consideration of the Sufi devel- opment and return to the Mu'tazilites and to the people tiring of their dry subtilties. CHAPTER III The rise of orthodox Icalam; al-Ash'ari; decline of the Mu'tazil- ites ; passing of heresy into unbelief ; development of scho- lastic theology by Ash'arites ; rise of Zahirite kalam ; Ibn Hazm ; persecution of Ash'arites ; final assimilation of kalmn. As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at first refused to enter upon any discussion of sacred things. Malik ibn Anas used to say, " God's istuva (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known ; how it is done is unknown ; it must be believed ; questions about it are an innovation (bid^ay But such a position could not be held for any length of time. The world cannot be cut in two and half as- signed to faith and half to reason. So, as time went on, there arose on the orthodox side men who, little by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith that was in them. They thus came to use kalam in order to meet the kalam of the Mu'tazilites ; they became mutakalUins, and the scholastic theology of Islam was founded. It is the history of this transfer of method which we have now to consider. Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. It was at first a gradual, unconscious drift, and peo- ple did not recognize its existence. Afterward, when they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human mind to ascribe broad movements to single men as- serted itself and the whole was put under the name 186 RISE OF OKTHODOX KALAM 187 of al-Asli*ari. It is true that with him, in a sense, the change suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it had already been long in progress. As we have seen, al-Junayd discussed the unity of God, but it was be- hind closed doors. Ash-Shafi'i held that there should be a certain number of men trained thus to defend and purify the faith, but that it would be a great evil if their arguments should become known to the mass of the people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected, and rightly, of defending his faith with argument, and thereby in- curred Ahmad's displeasure. Another contemporary of Ahmad's, al-Karabisi (d. 345), incurred the same displeasure, and the list might easily be extended. But the most significant fact of all is that the move- ment came to the surface and showed itself openly at the same time in the most widely separated lands of Islam. In Mesopotamia there was al-Ash'ari, who died after 320 ; in Egypt there was at-Tahawi, who died in 331; in Samarqand there was al-Mataridi, who died in 333. Of these at-Tahawi is now little more than a name ; al-Mataridi's star has paled be- fore that of al-Ash'ari ; al-Ash'ari has come in popular view to be the solitary hero before whom the Mu'taz- ilite system went down. It will perhaps be sufficient if we take his life and experiences as our guide in this period of change ; the others must have followed very much in the same path. He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year in which al-Kindi died and Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished from the sight of men. He came into a world full of intellectual ferment ; Alids of different camps were 188 THEOLOGY active in their claim to be possessors of an infallible Imam ; Zaydites and Qarmatians were in revolt ; the decree of 234 that the Qur'an was uncreated had had little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu'tazilites ; in 261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu Yazid, died. Al-Ash'ari himself was of the best blood of the desert and of a highly orthodox family which had borne a distin- guished part in Muslim history. Through some ac- cident he came in early youth into the care of al- Jubba'i, the Mu'tazilite, who, according to one story, had married al-Ash'ari's mother ; was brought up by him and remained a stanch Mu'tazilite, writing and speaking on that side, till he was forty years old. Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted the pulpit of the mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, " He who knows me, knows me ; and he who knows me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of so and so. I have maintained the creation of the Qur'an and that God will not be seen in the world to come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu'tazilite and turn to opposition to them." It was a voice full of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of the Mu'tazilites had publicly passed and that, here- after, they would be met with their own weapons. What led to this change of mind is strictly unknown ; only legends have reached us. One, full of psycho- logical truth, runs that one Kamadan, the fasting month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger, the Prophet appeared to him three times in his sleej), and commanded him to turn from his vain halam and seek certainty in the traditions and the Qur'an. If RETURN OF AL-ASH'ARI 189 he would but give himself to that study, God would make clear the difficulties and enable him to solve all the puzzles. He did so, and his mind seemed to bo opened ; the old contradictions and absurdities had fled, and he cursed the Mu'tazilites and all their works. It can easily be seen that in some such way as this the blood of the race may have led him back to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert, whose word must be accepted as its own proof. The gossips of the time told strange tales of rich relatives and family pressure ; we can leave these aside. When he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met his old teacher, al-Jubba'i, in public discussions again and again till the old man withdrew. One of these discussions legend has handed down in varying forms. None of them may be exactly true, but they are sig- nificant of the change of attitude. He came to al- Jubba'i and said, " Suppose the case of three brothers ; one being God-fearing, another godless and a third dies as a child. What of them in the world to come ? " Al-Jubba'i replied, " The first will be rewarded in Paradise ; the second punished in Hell, and the third will be neither rewarded nor punished." Al-Ash'ari continued, "But if the third said, 'Lord, Thou mightest have granted me life, and then I would have been pious and entered Paradise like my brother,' what then ? " Al-Jubba'i replied, " God would say, *I knew that if thou wert granted life thou wouldst be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell.' " Then al-Ash'ari drew his noose, " But what if the second said, ' Lord, why didst Thou not make me die as a 190 THEOLOGY child? Then had I escaped Hell.'" Al-Jubba'i was silenced, and Al-Ash'ari went away in triumph. Three years after his pupil had left him the old man died. The tellers of this story regard it as disproving the Mu'tazilite doctrine of "the best" — al-aslah — namely, that God is constrained to do that which may be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He chooses. But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu'tazilites, which held that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms of human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash'ari's position, a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the tradition Qiadith) and usage {sunna) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early church {salaf). The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities {sifat aqliyd) of God, Life, Knowl- edge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech : but ex- plained away the Qur'anic anthropomorphisms of God's face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Bagh- dad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented him- SYSTEM OF AL-ASH'aR1 191 self with the position that the anthropomorphisms were to be taken, hila kayfa loala tashbih, without ask- ing how and without drawing any comparison. The first phrase is directed against the Mu'tazilites, who inquired persistently into the nature and possibility of such things in God ; the second, against the an- thropomorphists {mushahbihs, comparers ; mujassims, corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Kar- ramites, who said that these things in God were like the corresponding things in men. At all stages, how- ever, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument. The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash'arite. Both are in the Appendix of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On the vexed question, " What is a thing ? " he antici- pated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and theoretical, and those later ones also who did not fol- low him, regarded, as we have seen, existence {ivujud) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing {mawjtid). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of " existence " ; then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became exist- ent. But al-Ash'ari and his followers held that ex- istence was the " self " (ayn) of the entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the whole. Appendix of Creeds. On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took up a mediating po- 192 THEOLOGY sition. The old orthodox position was absolutely fatalistic ; the Mu'tazilites, following their principle of Justice, gave to man an initiative power. Al- Ash'ari struck a middle path. Man cannot create anything ; God is the only creator. Nor does man's power produce any effect on his actions at all. God creates in His creature power {qudra) and choice {ikhtiyar). Then He creates in him his action cor- responding to the power and choice thus created. So the action of the creature is created by God as to initiative and as to production ; but it is acquired by the creature. By acquisition {hash) is meant that it corresponds to the creature's power and choice, previously created in him, without his having had the slightest effect on the action. He was only the locus or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash'ari is supposed to have accounted for free-will and entailed responsibility upon men. It may be doubted whether the second point occupied him much. It was open to his God to do good or evil as He chose ; the Justice of the Mu'tazilites was left behind. He may have intended only to explain the consciousness of freedom, as some have done more recently. The closeness with which al-Ash'ari in this comes to the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz and to the Kantian conception of existence shows how high a rank he must take as an original thinker. His abandoning of the Mu'tazilites was due to no mere wave of sentiment but to a perception that their spec- ulations were on too narrow a basis and of a too bar- ren scholastic type. He died after 320 with a curse on them and their methods as his last words. AL-MATARIDI 193 A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi. The creed of an-Nasafi in the Appendix of Creeds, pp. 308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who was more than suspected of Mu'tazilite and Murji'ite leanings. Muslim theologians usually reckon up some thirteen points of difference between al-Mata- ridi and al-Ash'ari and admit that seven of these are not much more than combats of words. Those which occur in an-Nasafi's creed are marked with a star. We are now in a position to finish shortly with the Mu'tazilites. Their work, as a constructive force, is done. From this time on there is halam among the orthodox, and the term mutakallhn denotes nothing but a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or another. And so, like any other organ which has done its part and for the existence of which there is no longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped into the background. They had still, sometimes, to suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there were men who continued to call themselves Mu'tazil- ites ; but their heresies came to be heresies of the schools and not burning questions in the eyes of the masses. We need now draw attention to only a few incidents and figures in this dying movement. The Muslim historians lay much stress on the ortho- dox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381- 422, and narrate how he persecuted the Mu'tazilites, Shi'ites and other heretics and compelled them, under oath, to conform. But there are several difficulties in the way of this 194 THEOLOGY persecution, which make it probable that it was more nominal than otherwise. Al-Qaclir was bitterly or- thodox ; he had written a treatise on theology and compelled his unhappy courtiers to listen to a public reading of it every week. But he enjoyed, outside of his palace, next to no power. He was in the con- trol of the Shi'ite Buwayhids, who, as we have seen, ruled Baghdad and the Khalifate from 320 to 447. These dubious persecutions are said to have fallen in 408 and 420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain visited Baghdad about 390 and has left us a record of the state of religious things there. He found in session what may perhaps best be described as a Parliament of Eeligions. It seems to have been a free debate between Muslims of all sects, orthodox and heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews and Chris- tians — unbelievers of every kind. Each party had a spokesman, and at the beginning of the proceedings the rule was rehearsed that no one might appeal to the sacred books of his creed but might only adduce arguments founded upon reason. The pious Spanish Muslim went to two meetings but did not peril his soul by any further visits. In his narrative we rec- ognize the horror with which the orthodox of Spain viewed such proceedings — Spain, Muslim and Chris- tian, has always favored the straitest sect; but when such a thing Avas permitted in Baghdad, religious lib- erty there at least must have been tolerably broad. Possibly it was sittings of the IkJnuan as-safa upon which this scandalized Spaniard stumbkd. He him- self speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims. But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi'ite authority MAHMUD OF GHAZNA 195 in Baghdad gave all the miscellaneous heretics a chance for life, it was different in the growing domin- ions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic mon- arch had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the Karramites, the most literal-minded of all the Mus- lim sects. In consequence, all forms of Mu'tazilism and all kinds of mutakallims were an abomination to him, and it was a very real persecution which they met at his hands. That al-Qadir, his spiritual suze- rain, urged him on is very probable ; it is also possi- ble that respect for the growing power of Mahmud may have protected al-Qadir to some extent from the Buwayhids. In 420 Mahmud took from them Ispa- han and held there a grand inquisition on Shi'ites and heretics of all kinds. To proceed with the Mu'tazilites ; when we come to al-Ghazzali and his times we shall find that they have ceased to be a crying danger to the faith. Though their views might, that doctor held, be er- roneous in some respects, they were not to be con- sidered as damnable. Again, in 538, there died az- Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often called the last of the Mu'tazilites. He was not that by any means, but his heresies were either mild or were regarded mildly. A single point will show this, His commentary on the Qur'an, the KasJishaf, was re- vised and expurgated in the orthodox interest by al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in that form is now the most popular and respected of all expositions. The Kashshaf itseli, in its original, unmodified form, has been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn Rushd, the Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is 196 THEOLOGY combatiug the arguments of tlie mutakallims, makes little difference between the Mu'tazilites and the others. They are only, to him, another variety of scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea, per- haps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek in such matters. Since then, and into quite modern times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians called Mu'tazilites by themselves or others. Practi- cally, they have been scholastics of eccentric views. Finally, the use of this name for themselves by the present-day broad school Muslims of India is abso- lutely unhistorical and highly misleading. AVe turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological consequences of the preceding theology. Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy which has to be met so much as simple unbelief, more or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the earlier period are now dividing in two directions, one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and the other toward doubt in the largest sense, passing over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists. Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi and of the Ikhwan as-safa. The teachings of the latter pass on to the Isma'ilians w^ho developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power, scattered from Persia to Syria. These were other- wise called Assassins ; otherwise Batinites in the narrower sense — in the broader that term meant only those who found under the letter of the Qur'an a AL-BERUNI ; IBN SINA 197 bidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta'limites or claimers of a tcHiin^ a secret teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them w^e shall have much to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the "Sin- cere Brethren " was transmuted through ambition and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period, too, fall some well known names of dubious and more than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Benini (d. 440) even at the com't of Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep his footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He w^as certainly the first scientific student of India and In- dica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose attainments and results show that our so-called modern methods are as old as genius. On religion, he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weak- ness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who Avent his own w^ay without treading on the religious toes of other people. His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avi- cenna, w^as of a different nature, and his lines w^ere cast in different places. He was a wanderer through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buway- hids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his more easily. Endowed wdtli a gigantic memory and an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the ency- clopaedist of his age, and his scientific work, and especiall}^ that in medicine, went further than any- 198 THEOLOGY thing else to put the Muslim East and mediseval Europe in the strait waistcoat from which the first has not yet emerged and the second only shook itself free in the seventeenth century. He was a student of Aristotle and a mystic, as all Muslim students of Aristotle have been. How far his mysticism enabled him to square the Qur'an with his philosophy is not clear ; such men seldom said exactly what they meant and all that they thought. He w^as also a diligent student and reader of the Qur'an and faithful in his public religious duties. Yet the Muslim world asserts that he left behind him a testamentary tractate {loas- iya) defending dissimulation as to the religion of the country in which we might be ; that it was not wrong for the philosopher to go through religious rites which for him had no meaning. He, too, is signifi- cant for his time, and, if our interest were philosophy, would call for lengthened treatment. As it is, he marks for us the accomplished separation between students of theology and students of philosophy. An equally well known and by us much better loved name is that of Umar al-Khayyam, who died later, about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with Ibn Sina. He, too, was a hon vivant, but of a deeper, more melancholy strain. His wine meant more than friendly cups ; it was a way of escape from the world and its burden. His science, too, Avent deeper. He was not a gatherer and arranger of the wisdom of the past ; his reformed calendar is more perfect than that which we even now use. His faith is a riddle to us, as it was to his comrades. But it was because he had no certain truth to proclaim that Umar did not ABTJ-L-ALA AL-MA*AKRI 199 speak out clearly. His last words were almost those of Kabelais, "I go to meet the great Perhaps." Anecclotage connects his name with that of al-Ghaz- zali. Neither had escaped the pall of universal scepticism which must have descended upon their time. But al-Ghazzali, by God's grace, as he himself reverently says, was enabled to escape. Umar died under it. A very different man was Abu-1-xA.la al-Ma'arri, the blind poet and singer of intellectual freedom. In Arabic literature there is no other voice like his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters ; no philosopher nor theologian nor scientist, though at one time he seems to have come in contact with a circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same ; and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to keep his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own way, undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great thoughts and flung out a sceva indignatio on hypocrisy and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But Abu-1-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of priests and coui'tiers and their lies, his pity for suf- fering humanity and his confidence in the light of reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the town of his birth, Ma'arrat an-Nu'man, in northern Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered to live out his long life of eighty-six years. We can now return to the development of scholas- tic theology in the orthodox church at the hands of 200 THEOLOGY the followers of al-Asli'ari. They had to fight their way against many and most differing opponents. At the one extreme were the dwindling Mu'tazilites, passing slowly into comparatively innocuous heretics, and the growing party of unbelievers, philosophical and otherwise, open and secret. At the other ex- treme was the mob of Hanbalites, belonging to the only legal school which laid theological burdens on its adherents. The theologians, in this case, cer- tainly varied as to the weight of their own anathemas against all kalam, but were at one in that they carried the bulk of the multitude with them and could en- force their conclusions with the cudgels of rioters. In the midst were the rival orthodox {pace the Han- balites) developers of kalam, among whom the Ma- taridites probably held the most important place. Thus, the Ash'arite school was the nursling as well as the child of controversy. It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least in tradition, with the final form of that system, should be that of a controversialist. But this man, Abu Bakr al-Baqilani tlie Qadi, was more than a mere con- troversialist. It is his glory to have contributed most important elements to and put into fixed form what is, perhaps, the most fantastic and daring meta- physical scheme, and almost certainly the most thor- ough theological scheme, ever thought out. On the one hand, the Lucretian atoms raining down through the empty void, the self-developing monads of Leib- nitz, pre-established harmony and all, the Kantian "things in themselves" are lame and impotent in their consistency beside the parallel Ash'arite doc- ash'arite metaphysics 201 trines ; and, on the other, not even the rigors of Cal- vin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can com- pete with the unflinching exactitude of the Muslim conclusions. First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash'arites was that of Kant, to fix the relation of knowledge to the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani defined knowl- edge {ihn) as cognition {ina'rifa) of a thing as it is in itself. But in reaching that ''thing in itself" they were much more thorough than Kant. Only two of the Aristotelian categories survived their attack, sub- stance and quality. The others, quantity, place, time and the rest, were only relationships {i'tibars) exist- ing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and not things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could not exist in either of the two things which it brought together ; for example, in the cause or the effect. It must be in a third thing. But to bring this third thing and the first two together, other relationships would be needed and other things for these relation- ships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in an infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aris- totle the position that such an infinite series backward [tasalsal) is inadmissible. Relationships, then, had no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective nonentities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter was now impossible for them. All the categories had gone except substance and quality ; and among them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the pos- sibility of suffering the impress of form. A possibil- 202 THEOLOaY it J is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a sub- jectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the active form and all causes must also go. They, too, are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting char- acter of appearances drove them to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a quality planted in the nature of a thing ; that the idea *' nature " did not exist. Then this drove them further. Substances ex- ist only with qualities, i.e., accidents. These quali- ties may be positive or they may be negative ; the ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence, the substances them- selves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as quality is fleeting, has only a moment's duration. But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So atomists they became, and, as always, after their own fashion. Their atoms are not of sp ice only, but also of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental and physical, of the world in place and time, is a multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but has extension neither in space nor time. They have simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may be permitted, are equally unextended and have also absolute void — of time — between them. Just as space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in a succession of untouching moments and leaps across ash'arite theology 203 the void from one to the other with the jerk of the hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and can exist only iu connection with change. The mon- ads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature in themselves, no possibility of development along certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again are not, all change and action in the world are pro- duced by their entering into existence and dropping out again, not by any change in themselves. But this most simple view of the world left its holders in precisely the same difficulty, only in a far higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was com- pelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to bring his monads into orderly relations with one another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell back upon God and found in His will the ground of all things. We here pass from their ontology to their theology, and as they were thorough-going metaphysicians, so now they are thorough-going theologians. Being was all in the one case ; now it is God that is all. In truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism which destroys the possibility of a philosophy in order to drive men back to God and His revelations and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact of the universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his ecstasy, ^^ Iluiva-l-haqq,'' he does not mean, "He is the Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New Testament sense of " The Way, the Truth, and the Life," but simply, " He is the Fact " — the one Ke- ality. To return : from their ontology they derived an 204 THEOLOGY argument for the necessity of a God. That their monads came so and not otherwise must have a cause ; without it there could be no harmony or connec- tion between them. And this cause must be one wdth no cause behind it ; otherwise we would have the endless chain. This cause, then, they found in the absolutely free will of God, working without any matter beside it and unaffected by any laws or neces- sities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the motion and change of the world. These, in our sense, do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved, that really means that God has annihilated — or per- mitted to drop out of existence, by not continuing to uphold, as another view held — the atoms making up that thing in its original position, and has created them again and again along the line over which it moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and effect. A man writes with a pen and a piece of paper. God creates in his mind the will to write ; at the same moment he gives him the power to write and brings about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen and the appearance on the paper. No one of these is the cause of the other. God has brought about by creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite com- bination to produce these aopearances. Thus we see that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the presence, in the mind of the man, of this choice cre- ated there by God. This may not seem to us to be very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as anything else in their world. Further, it will be ob- served how completely this annihilates the machinery ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES 205 of tlie universe. Tliere is no such tiling as law, and the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordi- nary operations of nature are on the same level. The world and the things in it could have been quite different. The only limitation upon God is that He cannot produce a contradiction. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time. There is no such thing as a secondary cause ; when there is the appearance of such, it is only illusional. God is producing it as well as the ultimate appearance of effect. There is no nature belonging to things. Fire does not burn and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance a being burned when the fire touches it and a being cut when the knife approaches it. In this scheme there are certainly grave difficul- ties, philosophical and ethical. It establishes a rela- tionship between God and the atoms ; but we have already seen that relationships are subjective illu- sions. That, however, was in the case of the things of the world, perceived by the senses — contingent being, as they would put it. It does not hold of necessary being. God possesses a quality called Difference from originated things {al-mukhalafa lil- hawadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free cause ; and the existence of a free cause they were compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of nature and no certainty, or nexus, as to causes and effects; if there is no regular development in the life, mental, moral, and physical of a man — only a series of isolated moments ; how can there be any 206 THEOLOGY responsibility, any moral claim or duty ? This diffi- culty seems to have been recognized more clearly than the philosophical one. It was met formally by the assertion of a certain order and regularity in the will of God. He sees to it that a man's life is a unity, and, for details, that the will to eat and the action always coincide. But such an answer must have been felt to be inadequate and to involve grave moral dangers for the common mind. There- fore, as we have seen, the study of kalam was hedged about with difficulties and restrictions. Theologians recognized its trap-falls and doubts, even for them- selves, and lamented that they were compelled by their profession to study it. The public discussion of its questions was regarded as a breach of profes- sional etiquette. Theologians and philosophers alike strove to keep these deeper mysteries hidden from the multitude. The gap between the highly edu- cated and the great mass — that fundamental error and greatest danger in Muslim society — comes here again to view. Further, even among theologians, there was some difference in degree of insight, and books and phrases could be read by different men in very different waj^s. To one, they would suggest ordinary, Qur'anic doctrines ; another would see under and be- hind them a trail of metaphysical consequences bristling with blasphemous possibilities. Thus, Muslim science has been always of the school ; it has never learned the vitalizing and disinfecting value of the fresh air of the market-place. This applies to philosophers even more than to theologians. The crowning accusation which Ibn Rushd, the great SPEEAD OF ASH'ARISM 207 Aristotelian commentator, brought against al-Gliaz- zali was that lie discussed such subtilties in popular books. This, then, was the system which seems to have reached tolerably complete form at the hands of al- Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the comple- tion of the system there went by no means its uni- versal or even wide-spread acceptance in the Mus- lim world. That of al-Mataridi held its own for long, and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is used largely in the Turkish schools. In the fifth century it was considered remarkable that Abu Dharr (d. 434), a theologian of Herat, should be an Ash- 'arite rather than, apparently, a Mataridite. It was not till al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash'arite sys- tem came to the orthodox hegemony in the East, and it was only as the result of the work of Ibn Tumart, the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it con- quered the West. For long its path was darkened by suspicion and persecution. This came almost en- tirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu'tazilites had no force behind them, and while the views of deists and materialists were steadily making way in secret, their public efforts appeared only in very occasional dis- putes between theologians and philosophers. As we have seen, Muslim philosophy has always practised an economy of teaching. The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head toward the close of the reign of Tughril Beg, the first Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen, the Saljuqs had taken Merv o,nd Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril Beg had entered Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from 208 THEOLOGY the Shi'ite domination of the Buwayhids who had so long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a theologically unschooled Turk, should be captured by the simplicity and concreteness of the Hanbalite doctrines. Added to this political factor there was a theologi- cal movement at work which was deeply hostile to the Ash'arites as they had developed. An important point in the method of al-Ash'ari himself, and, after him, of his followers, was to put forth a creed, ex- pressed in the old-fashioned terms and containing the old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at all possible, and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpreta- tion which was, naturally, accessible to the professional student only. Accordingly what had at first seemed a weapon against the Mu'tazilites came to be viewed with more and more suspicion by the holders to the old, unquestioning orthodoxy. The dut}^ also of religious investigation and speculation {iiiazr) came to have more and more stress laid upon it. The hila hayfa dropped into the background. A Muslim must have a reason for the faith that was in him, they said ; other- wise, he was no true Muslim, was in fact an unbeliever. Of course, they limited carefully the extent to which he should go. For the ordinary man a series of very simple proofs would be prepared ; the student, on the other hand, when carefully led, could work his way through the system sketched above. All this, naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition. It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school of law ifiqli) developed into a school of kalam and applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its new IBN HAZM 209 victim. Tlie leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theo- logian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of his vituperative style coupled him, in popular prov- erb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant of the Umayyads in al-Iraq. " The sword of al-Hajjaj and the tongue of Ibn Hazm," they said. But for all his violence of language and real weight of char- acter and brain, he made little way for his views in his lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after his death before they came into any prominence. The theologians and lawyers around him in the West were devoted to the study of Jiqlt in the narrowest and most technical sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their predecessors and neglected the great original sources of the Qur'an and the traditions. The immediate study of tradi- tion {hadWi) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he abso- lutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred texts his own views. So the whole system of the canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, nat- urally, did not like it. Analogy {qiycis), their princi- pal instrument, he swept away. It had no place either in law or theology. Even on the principle of agreement {ijma) he threw a shadow of doubt. But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm's originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite j)rin- ciples when applied there should have led him to anthropomorphism (tajsim). The literal meaning of the Qur'an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But 210 THEOLOGY to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorpliism was an abomination only less than the speculative arguments with which the Ash'arites tried to avoid it. His own method was purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted in his dictionary until he found some other meaning for "hand" or "foot," or whatever the stumbling- block might be. But the most original point in his system is his doctrine of the names of God, and his basing of that doctrine upon God's qualities. The Ash'arites, he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave inconsistency in saying that God was different in nature, qualities, and actions from all created things, and yet that the human qualities could be predicated of God, and that men could reason about God's nature. He accepted the doctrine of God's dif- ference {mukhalafa) on highly logical, but, for us, rather startling grounds. The Qur'an applies to Him the words, " The Most Merciful of those that show mercy," but God, evidently, is not merciful. He tortures children with all manner of painful dis- eases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot be predicated of God. What then does the Qur'an mean by those words ? Simply that they — arliamu-r- raJiimin — are one of God's names, applied to Him by Himself and that we have no right to take them as descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to use them to throw light on God's nature. They form one of the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names {al-asma al- liusna) of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradi- tion. Similarly, we may call God the Living One IBN HAZM 211 {al hayy), because He has given us that as one of His names, not because of any reasoning on our part. Do we not say that His life is different from that of all other living beings ? These names then, are limited to ninety-nine and no more should be formed, however full of praise such might be for God, or however di- rectly based on His actions. He has called Himself al-Wahib, the Giver, and so we may use that term of Him. But He has not called Himself al-Wahhab the Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of Him, though it is one of praise. Of course, you may describe His action and say that He is the guider of His saints. But you must not make from that a name, and call Him simply the Guider. Further, if we regard these names as expressing qualities in God, we involve multiplicity in God's nature ; there is the quality and the thing qualified. Here we are back at the old Mu'tazilite difliculty and it is intelli- gible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with the Mu'- tazilites than with the Ash'arites. The one party were Muslims and sinned in ignorance — invincible igno- rance, a Boman Catholic would call it; the others were unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from the way. The Mu'tazilites had tried to limit the qualities as much as possible. At the best they had said that they ivere God's essence and not in His es- sence. Al-Ash'ari and his school had fairly revelled in qualities and had mapped out the nature of God with the detail — and daring — of a phrenological chart. Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the will of God only. God has willed that this should be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he concedes, 212 THEOLOGY is always saying wliat does not agree with the truth. But, still, God may pronounce that one lie is a sin, and one not. Muslim ethics, it is true, have never branded lying as sinful in itself. ^ For the Shi'ites and their doctrine of an infallible Imam, Ibn Hazm cannot find strong enough expres- sions of contempt. In Ibn Hazm's time, and he praises God for it, there were but few Ash'arites in the West. Theology generally did not find many students. So things went on till long after his death. To this fiery con- troversialist the worst blow of all would have been if he could have known that the men Avho were at last to bring his system, in part and for a time, into public acceptance and repute, were also to complete the conquest of Islam for the Ash'arite school. That was still far in the future, and we must return to the persecution. The accounts of the persecution which set in are singularly conflicting. Some assign it to Hanbalite influence ; others tell of a Mu'tazilite wazir of Tughril Beg, That the traditionalist party was the main force in it seems certain. In all probability, how- ever, all the other anti-Ash'arite sects, from the Mu'tazilites on, took their own parts. The Ash'arite party represented a via media and would be set upon with zest by all the extremes. They were solemnly cursed from the pulpits and, what added peculiar insult to it, the Kafidites, an extreme Kharijite sect, were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the greatest theologian of the time, fled to the Hijaz and gained the title of Imam of the two Harams TRIUMPH OF ASH'ARISM 213 {Imam al-Haramayn), by living for four years be- tween Mecca and al-Maclina. Al-Qusliayri, the author of a celebrated treatise on Sufiism, was thrown into prison. The Ash'arite doctors generally were scat- tered to the winds. Only with the death of Tughril Beg in 455 did the cloud pass. His successor, Alp- Arslan, and especially the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk, favored the Ash'arites. In 459 the latter founded the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad to be a defence of Ash'arite doctrines. This may fairly be regarded as the turning-point of the whole controversy. The Hanbalite mob of Baghdad still continued to make itself felt, but its excesses w^ere promptly suppressed. In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there by the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended Ash'arite lectures. It is needless to spend more time over the other theologians who were links in the chain between al- Ash'ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their views w^avered, this w^ay and that, only the rationalizing tendency became stronger and stronger. There was danger that the orthodox system w^ould fossilize and lose touch with life as that of the Mu'tazilites had done. It is true that Sufiism still held its ground. All theologians practically were touched by it in its simpler form ; and the cause of the higher Sufiism of ecstasy, wonders by saints {karamat) and commun- ion of the individual soul with God had been elo- quently and effectively urged by al-Qushayri (d. 465) in his Risala. But in spite of the labors of so many men of high ability, the religious outlook was grow- ing ever darker. Keen observers recognized that 214 THEOLOGY some change was bound to come. That it might be an inflowing of new life by a new al-Ash'ari was their prayer. It is more than dubious whether even the keenest mind of the time coukl have recognized what form the new life must take. They had not the perspective and could only feel a vague need. But from what has gone before it will be plain that Islam had again to assimilate to itself something from with- out or perish. Such had been its manner of progress up till now. New opinions had arisen ; had become heresies ; conflict had followed ; part of the new thought had been absorbed into the orthodox church ; part had been rejected ; through it all the life of the church had gone on in fuller and richer measure, being always, in spite of everything, the main stream ; the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out of sight. So it had been with Murji'ism ; so with Mu'tazilism. With the orthodox, tradition {naql) still stood fast, but reason {aql) had taken a place beside ifc. Kalam, in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become fairly a part of their system. What was to be the new ele- ment, and who was to be its champion ? CHAPTEE IV Al-Ghazzali, his life, times, and work; Sufiism formally accepted into Islam. With tlie time came the man. He was al-Gliazzali, the greatest, certainly the most sympathetic figui-e in the history of Islam, and the only teacher of the after generations ever put by a Muslim on a level with the four great Imams. The equal of Augustine in philo- sophical and theological importance, by his side the Aristotelian philosophers of Islam, Ibn Eushd and all the rest, seem beggarly compilers and scholiasts. Only al-Farabi, and that in virtue of his mysticism, approaches him. In his own person he took up the life of his time on all its sides and with it all its prob- lems. He lived through them all and drew his the- ology from his experience. Systems and classifica- tions, words and arguments about words, he swept away ; the facts of life as he had known them in his own soul he grasped. When his work was done the revelation of the mystic (hashf) was not only a full part but the basal part in the structure of Muslim theology. That basis, in spite, or rather on account of the work of the mutakallims had previously been lacking. Such a scepticism as their atomic system had practically amounted to, could disprove much but could prove little. If all the catagories but substance and quality are mere subjectivities, existing in the 215 216 THEOLOGY mind only, what can we know of things ? An ultra- rational basis had to be found and it was found in the ecstasy of the Sufis. But al-Ghazzali brought another element into fuller and more effective work- ing. With him passes away the old-fashioned kalam, a thing of shreds and patches, scraps of metaphysics and logic snatched up for a moment of need, without grasp of the full sweep of philosophy, and incapable, in the long run, of meeting it. Even its atomic sys- tem is a philosophy of amateurs, with all their fan- tastic one-sidedness, their vigor and rigor. But al- Ghazzali was no amateur. His knowledge and grasp of the problems and objects of philosophy were truer and more vital than in any other Muslim up to his time — perhai^s after it, too. Islam has not fully un- derstood him any more than Christendom fully under- stood Augustine, but until long after him the horizon of Muslims was wider and their air clearer for his work. Then came a new scholasticism, reigning to this day. So much by way of preface. We must now give some account of the life and experiences, the ideas and sensations, of this great leader and reformer. For his life and his work were one. Everything that he thought and wrote came with the weight and real- ity of personal experience. He recognized this con- nection himself, and has left us a book — the Mun- qidh min ad-dalal, " Eescuer from Error " — almost unique in Islam, which, in the form of an apology for the faith, is really an Apologia pro vita sua. This book is our main source for what follows. Al-Ghazzali was born at Tus in 450. He lost his EARLY CAREER ; RENUNCIATION 217 father when young and was educated and brought up by a trusted Sufi friend. He early turned to the study of theology and canon law, but, as he himself confesses, it was only because they promised wealth and reputation. Very early he broke away from taqlidy simple acceptance of religious truth on author- ity, and he began to investigate theological differ- ences before he was twenty. His studies were of the broadest, embracing canon law, theology, dialectic, science, philosophy, logic and the doctrines and prac- tices of the Sufis. It was a Sufi atmosphere in which he moved, but their religious fervors do not seem to have laid hold of him. Pride in his own intellectual powers, ambition and contempt for others of less abil- ity mastered him. The latter part of his life as a student was spent at Naysabur as pupil and assistant of the Imam al-Haramayn. Through the Imam he stood in the apostolic succession of Ash'arite teach- ers, being the fourth from al-Ash'ari himself. There he remained till the death of the Imam in 478, when he went out to seek his fortune and found it with the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk. By him al-Ghazzali was appointed, in 484, to teach in the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad. There he had the greatest success as a teacher and consulting lawyer, and his worldly hopes seemed safe. But suddenly he was struck down by a mysterious disease. His speech became hampered ; his appetite and digestion failed. His physicians gave him up ; his malady, they said, was mental and could only be mentally treated. His only hope lay in peace of mind. Then he suddenly quitted Baghdad, in 488, ostensibly on pilgrimage to Mecca. This 218 THEOLOGY flight, for it was so in effect, of al-Gliazzali was unin- telligible to the theologians of the time ; since that time it has marked the greatest epoch in the church of Islam after the retui'n of al-Ash'ari. That it should be unintelligible was natural. No cause could be seen on the surface, except some pos- sible political complications ; the cause in reality lay in al-Ghazzali's mind and conscience. He was wan- dering in the labyrinth of his time. From his youth he had been a sceptical, ambitious student, playing with religious influences yet unaffected by them. But the hollowness of his life was ever present with him and pressing upon him. Like some with us, he sought to be converted and could not bring it to pass. His religious beliefs gradually gave way and fell from him, piece by piece. At last, the strain became too great and at the court of Nizam al-Mulk he touched for two months the depths of absolute scepticism. He doubted the evidence of the senses ; he could see plainly that they often deceived. No eye could perceive the move- ment of a shadow, but still the shadow moved ; a gold piece would cover any star, but a star was a world larger than the earth. He doubted even the primary ideas of the mind. Is ten more than three ? Can a thing be and not be ? Perhaps ; he could not tell. His senses deceived him, why not his mind? May there not be something behind the mind and tran- scending it, which would show the falsity of its con- victions even as the mind showed the falsity of the in- formation given by the senses ? May not the dreams of the Sufis be true, and their revelations in ecstasy THE SEEKERS OF HIS TIME 219 the only real guides ? When we awake in death, may it not be into a true but different existence ? All this — perhaps. And so he wandered for two months. He saw clearly that no reasoning could help him here ; he had no ideas on which he could depend, from which he could begin. But the mercy of God is great; He sends His light to whom He wills, a light that flows in, and is given by no reasoning. By it al-Ghazzali was saved ; he regained the power to think, and the task which he now set before him was to use this power to guide himself to truth. When he looked around, he saw that those who gave themselves to the search for truth might be divided into four groups. There were the scholastic theolo- gians, who were much like the theologians of all times and faiths. Second, there were the Ta'limites, who held that to reach truth one must have an infallible living teacher, and that there was such a teacher. Third, there were the followers of philosophy, bas- ing on logical and rational proofs. Fourth, there were the Sufis, who held that they, the chosen of God, could reach knowledge of Him directly in ecstasy. With all these he had, of course, been acquainted to a greater or less degree ; but now he settled down to examine them one by one, and find which would lead him to a certainty to which he could hold, whatever might come. He felt that he could not go back to the unconscious faith of his childhood ; that nothing could restore. All his mental being must be made over before he could find rest. He began with scholastic theology, but found no help there. Grant the theologians their premises 220 THEOLOGY and they could argue ; deny them and there was no common ground on which to meet. Their science had been founded by al-Ash'ari to meet the Mu'ta- zilites ; it had done that victoriously, but could do no more. They could hold the faith against here- tics, expose their inconsistencies ; against the sceptic they availed nothing. It is true that they had at- tempted to go further back and meet the students of philosoj)hy on their own ground; to deal with substances and attributes and first principles gen- erally; but their efforts had been fruitless. They lacked the necessary knowledge of the subject, had no scientific basis, and were constrained eventually to fall back on authority. After study of them and their methods it became clear to al-Ghazzali that the remedy for his ailment was not in scholastic theology. Then he turned to philosophy. He had seen al- ready that the Aveakness of the theologians lay in their not having made a sufficient study of primary ideas and the laws of thought. Three years he gave up to this. He was at Baghdad at the time, teach- ing law and writing legal treatises, and probably the three years extended from the beginning of 48i to the beginning of 487. Two years he gave, without a teacher, to the study of the writings of the different schools of philosophy, and almost another to medi- tating and working over his results. He felt that he was the first Muslim doctor to do this with the requisite thoroughness. And it is noteworthy that at this stage he seems to have again felt himself to be a Muslim, and in an enemy's country when he was MATERIALISTS ; DEISTS ; THEISTS 221 studying philosophy. He speaks of the necessity of understanding what is to be refuted ; but this may be only a confusion between his attitude when writing after 500, and his attitude when investigating and seeking truth, fifteen years earlier. He divides the followers of philosophy in his time into three : Mate- rialists, Deists {Tahi'is, i.e. Naturalists), and Theists. The materialists reject a creator ; the world exists from all eternity ; the animal comes from the egg and the egg from the animal. The wonder of cre- ation compels the deists to admit a creator, but the creature is a machine, has a certain poise (i'tidal) in itself which keeps it running ; its thought is a part of its nature and ends with death. They thus re- ject a future life, though admitting God and His attributes. He deals at much greater length with the teach- ings of those whom he calls theists, but through all his statements of their views his tone is not that of a seeker but that of a partisan; he turns his own experiences into a warning to others, and makes of their record a little guide to apologetics. Aristotle he regards as the final master of the Greek school ; his doctrines are best represented for Arabic readers in the books of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi ; the works of their predecessors on this subject are a mass of confusion. Part of these doctrines must be stamped as unbelief, part as heresy, and part as theologically indifferent. He then divides the philo- sophical sciences into six, mathematics, logic, phys- ics, metaphysics, political economy, ethics ; and dis- cusses these in detail, showing what must be rejected, 222 THEOLOGY what is indifferent, what dangers arise from each to him who studies or to him who rejects without study. Throughout, he is very cautious to mark nothing as unbelief that is not really so ; to admit always those truths of mathematics, logic, and physics that cannot intellectually be rejected ; and only to warn against an attitude of intellectualism and a belief that math- ematicians, with their success in their own depart- ment, are to be followed in other departments, or that all subjects are susceptible of the exactness and certainty of a syllogism in logic. The damnable errors of the theists are almost entirely in their metaphysical views. Three of their propositions mark them as unbelievers. First, they reject the resurrection of the body and physical punishment hereafter ; the punishments of the next world will be spiritual only. That there will be spiritual pun- ishments, al-Ghazzali admits, but there will be phys- ical as well. Second, ^hey hold that God knows universals only, not particulars. Third, they hold that the world exists from all eternity and to all eternity. When they reject the attributes of God and hold that He knows by His essence and not by something added to His essence, they are only heretics and not unbelievers. In physics he accepts the constitution of the world as developed and ex- plained by them ; only all is to be regarded as en- tirely submitted to God, incapable of self-move- ment, a tool of which the Creator makes use. Finally, he considers that their system of ethics is derived from the Sufis. At all times there have been such saints, retired from the world — God has FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY 223 never left himself without a witness ; and from their ecstasies and revelations our knowledge of the hu- man heart, for good and for evil, is derived. Thus in philosophy he found little light. It did not correspond entirely to his needs, for reason can- not answer all questions nor unveil all the enigmas of life. He would probably have admitted that he had learned much in his philosophical studies — so at least we may gather from his tone ; he never speaks disrespectfully of philosophy and science in their sphere ; his continual exhortation is that he who would understand them and refute them must first study them ; that to do otherwise, to abuse what we do not know, brings only contempt on ourselves and on the cause which we champion. But with his temperament he could not found his religion on intel- lect. As a lawyer he could split hairs and define issues ; but once the religious instinct was aroused, nothing could satisfy him but what he eventually found. And so, two possibilities and two only were before him, though one was hardly a real possibility, if we consider his training and mental powers. He might fall back on authority. It could not be the authority of his childish faith, " Our fathers have told us," he himself confesses, could never again have weight with him. But it might be some claimer of authority in a new form, some infallible teacher with a doctrine which he could accept for the authority behind it. As the Church of Eome from time to time gathers into its fold men of keen intellect who seek rest in submission, and the world marvels, so it might have been with him. Or again, he might turn 224 THEOLOGY directly to God and to personal intercourse with Him ; he might seek to know Him and to be taught of Him without any intermediary, in a word to enter on the path of the mystic. He came next to examine the doctrine of the Ta'- limites. They, a somewhat outlying wing of the Fatimid propaganda, had come at this time into alarming prominence. In 483 Hasan ibn as-Sabbah had seized Alamut and entered on open rebellion. The sect of the Assassins was applying its principles. But the poison of their teaching was also spreading among the people. The principle of authority in re- ligion, that only by an infallible teacher could truth be reached and that such an infallible teacher existed if he could only be found, was in the air. For him- self, al-Ghazzali found the Ta'limites and their teach- ing eminently unsatisfactory : They had a lesson which they went over parrot-fashion, but beyond it they were in dense ignorance. The trained theolo- gian and scholar had no patience with their slack- ness and shallowness of thought. He labored long, as ash-Shahrastani later confesses that he, too, did, to penetrate their mystery and learn something from them ; but beyond the accustomed formulse there was nothing to be found. He even admitted their contention of the necessity of a living, infallible teacher, to see what would follow — but nothing fol- lowed. " You admit the necessity of an Imam," they would say. "It is your business noAV to seek him ; we have nothing to do with it." But though neither al-Ghazzali nor ash-Shahrastani, who died 43 (lunar) vears after him, could be satisfied with the Ta'lim- STUDY OF SUFIISM 225 ites, many others were. The conflict was hot, and al- Ghazzali himself wrote several books against them. The other possibility, the path of the mystic, now lay straight before him. In the Mimqidh he tells us how, when he had made an end of the Ta*- limites, he began to study the books of the Sufis, without any suggestion that he had had a previous acquaintance with them and their practices. But probably this means nothing more than it does when he speaks in a similar way of studying the scholastic theologians ; namely, that he now took up the study in earnest and with a new and definite purpose. He therefore read carefully the works of al-Harith al- Muhasibi, the fragments of al-Junayd, ash-Shibli, and Abu Yazid al-Bistami. He had also the benefit of oral teaching ; but it became plain to him that only through ecstasy and the complete transforma- tion of the moral being could he really understand Sufiism. He saw that it consisted in feelings more than in knowledge, that he must be initiated as a Sufi himself ; live their life and practise their exer- cises, to attain his goal. On the way upon which he had gone up to this time, he had gained three fixed points of faith. He now believed firmly in God, in prophecy, and in the last judgment. He had also gained the be- lief that only by detaching himself from this world, its life, enjoyments, honors, and turning to God could he be saved in the world to come. He looked on his present life, his writing and his teachiug, and saw of how little value it was in the face of the great fact of heaven and hell. All he did now was for 226 THEOLOGY the salve of vainglory and had in it no consecration to the service of God. He felt on the ed^e of an abyss. The world held him back ; his fears urged him away. He was in the throes of a conversion wrought by ter- ror ; his religion, now and always, in common with all Islam, was other-worldly. So he remained in conflict with himself for six months from the middle of 488. Finally, his health broke down under the strain. In his feebleness and overthrow he took refuge with God, as a man at the end of his resources. God heard him and enabled him to make the needed sac- rifices. He abandoned all and wandered forth from Baghdad as a Sufi. He had put his brilliant pres- ent and brilliant future absolutely behind him ; had given up everything for the peace of his soul. This date, the end of 488, was the great era in his life ; but it marked an era, too, in the history of Islam. Since al-Ash'ari went back to the faith of his fathers in 300, and cursed the Mu'tazilites and all their works, there had been no such epoch as this flight of al-Gliazzali. It meant that the reign of mere scho- lasticism was over ; that another element was to work openly in the future Church of Islam, the ele- ment of the mystical life in God, of the attainment of truth by the soul in direct vision. He went to Syria and gave himself up for two yearr to the religious exercises of the Sufis. Then he went on pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem ; then to the tomb of Abraham at Hebron ; finally to Mecca and al-Madina. With this religious duty his life of strict retirement ended. It is evident that he now felt tbat he was again within the fold of Islam. In spite of bis former reso- ON THE PATH OF THE SUFIS 227 lution to retire from the world, he was drawn back. The prayers of his children and his own aspirations broke in upon hira, and though he resolved again and again to return to the contemplative life, and did often actually do so, yet events, family affairs, and the anxieties of Hfe, kept continually disturbing him. This went on, he tells us, for almost ten years, and in that time there were revealed to him things that could not be reckoned and the discussion of which could not be exhausted. He learned that the Sufis were on the true and only path to the knowledge of God ; that neither intelligence nor wisdom nor science could change or improve their doctrine or their ethics. The light in which they walk is es- sentially the same as the light of prophecy ; Muham- mad was a Sufi when on his way to be a prophet. There is none other light to light any man in this world. A complete purifying of the heart from all but God is their Path ; a seeking to plunge the heart completely in the thought of God, is its be- ginning, and its end is complete passing away in God. This last is only its end in relation to what can be entered upon and grasped by a voluntary ef- fort ; in truth, it is only the first step in the Path, the vestibule to the contemplative life. Kevelations {mukasliafas, un veilings) came to the disciples from the very beginning ; while awake they see angels and souls of prophets, hear their voices and gain from them guidance. Then their State {Jial, a Sufi technicality for a state of ecstasy) passes from the beholding of forms to stages where language fails and 228 THEOLOGY any attempt to express what is experienced must involve some error. They reach a nearness to God which some have fancied to be a hulul, fusion of being, others an ittihad, identification, and others a luiisul, union; but these are all erroneous ways of indicat- ing the thing. Al-Ghazzali notes one of his books in which he has explained wherein the error lies. But the thing itself is the true basis of all faith and the beginning of prophecy ; the haramat of the saints lead to the miracles of the prophets. By this means the possibility and the existence of prophecy can be proved, and then the life itself of Muhammad proves that he was a prophet. Al-Ghazzali goes on to deal with the nature of prophecy, and how the life of Mu- hammad shows the truth of his mission ; but enough has been given to indicate his attitude and the stage at which he had himself arrived. During this ten years he had returned to his native country and to his children, but had not undertaken public duty as a teacher. Now that was forced upon him. The century was drawing to a close. Every- where there was evident a slackening of religious fervor and faith. A mere external compliance with the rules of Islam was observed, men even openly defended such a course. He adduces as an example of this the Wasiya of Ibn Sina. The students of philosophy went their way, and their conduct shook the minds of the people ; false Sufis abounded, who taught anti- nomianism ; the lives of many theologians excited scandal ; the Ta'limites were still spreading. A re- ligious leader to turn the current was absolutely needed, and his friends looked to al-Ghazzali to take THE TAHAFUT 229 up tliat duty ; some distinguished saints had dreams of his success ; God had promised a reformer every hundred years and the time was up. Finally, the Sultan laid a command upon him to go and teach in the academy at Naysabur, and he was forced to con- sent. His departure for Naysabur fell at the end of 499, exactly eleven years after his flight from Bagh- dad. But he did not teach there long. Before the end of his life we find him back at Tus, his native place, living in retirement among his disciples, in a Ma- drasa or academy for students and a Khanqah or monastery for Sufis. There he settled down to study and contemplation. We have already seen Avhat theological position he had reached. Philosophy had been tried and found want- ing. In a book of his called Tahafut, or "Destruction," he had smitten the philosophers hip and thigh ; he had turned, as in earlier times al-Ash'ari, their own weapons against them, and had shown that with their premises and methods no certainty could be reached. In that book he goes to the extreme of in- tellectual scepticism, and, seven hundred years be- fore Hume, he cuts the bond of causality with the edge of his dialectic and proclaims that we can know nothing of cause or effect, but simply that one thing follows another. He combats their proof of the eternity of the world, and exposes their assertion that God is its creator. He demonstrates that they can- not prove the existence of the creator or that that creator is one ; that they cannot prove that He is incorporeal, or that the world has any creator or cause at all; that they cannot prove the nature of 230 THEOLOGY God or that the human soul is a spiritual essence. "When he has finished there is no intellectual basis left for life ; he stands beside the Greek sceptics and beside Hume. We are thrown back on revelation, that given immediately by God to the individual soul or that given through prophets. All our real knowledge is derived from these sources. So it was natural that in the latter part of his life he should turn to the traditions of the Prophet. The science of tradition must certainly have formed part of his early studies, as of those of all Muslim theologians, but he had not specialized in it ; his bent had lain in quite other directions. His master, the Imam al-Hara- mayn, had been no student of tradition ; among his many works is not one dealing with that subject. Now he saw that the truth and the knowledge of the truth lay there, and he gave himself, with all the energy of his nature, to the new pursuit. The end of his wanderings came at Tus, in 505. There he died while seeking truth in the traditions of Muhammad, as al-Ash'ari, his predecessor, had done. The stamp of his personality is ineffaceably impressed on Islam. The people of his time reverenced him as a saint and wonder-worker. He himself never claimed to work karamat and always spoke modestly of the light which he had reached in ecstasy. After his death legends early began to gather round him, and the current biographies of him are untrustworthy to a degree. It says much for the solidity of his work that he did not pass into a misty figure of pop- ular superstition. But that work remained and re- mains among his disciples and in his books. We VOLITION AS A BASIS 231 must now attempt to estimate its bearing and scope. For him, as for the mntakallims in general, the fundamental thing iu the world and the starting-point of all speculation is will. The philosophers in their intellectualism might picture God as thought — • thought thinking itself and evolving all things thereby. Their source was Plotinus ; that of the Muslims was the terrific " Be ! " of creation. But how can we know this will of God if we are simply part of what it has produced ? In answering this, al-Ghazzali and his followers have diverged from the rest of Islam, but not into heresy. Their view is admitted to be a possible interpretation of Quranic passages, if not that commonly held. The soul of man, al-Ghazzali taught, is essentially different from the rest of the created things. We read in the Qur'an (xv, 29 ; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of His spirit (ruh). This is compared with the rays of the sun reaching a thing on the earth and warming it. In virtue of this, the soul of man is different from everything else in the world. It is a spiritual sub- stance {JaiuJiar ruhani), has no corporeality, and is not subject to dimension, position or locality. It is not in the body or outside of the body; to apply such categories to it is as absurd as to speak of the knowledge or ignorance of a stone. Though created, it is not shaped ; it belongs to the spiritual world and not to this world of sensible things. It contains some spark of the divine and it is restless till it rests again in that primal fire ; but, again, it is recorded in tradition that the Prophet said, " God Most High 232 THEOLOGY created Adam in His own form {sura)y Al-Ghazzali takes that to mean that there is a likeness between the spirit of man and God in essence, quality, and actions. Further, the spirit of man rules the body as God rules the world. Man's body is a microcosm beside the macrocosm of this world, and they cor- respond, part by part. Ts, then, God simply the anima mundi ? No, because He is the creator of all by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His will. Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From thought he can develop nothing ; from will can come the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Wilier, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin, and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. " He who knows his own soul, knows his Lord," said another tradition. This view of the nature of the soul is essential to the Sufi position and is probably borrowed from it. But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if the view be pushed any further. It tends (1) to destroy the important Muslim dogma of God's Difference {mukhalafa) from all created things, and (2) to main- tain that the souls of men are partakers of the divine nature and will return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali labored to safeguard both dangers, but they were there and showed themselves in time. Just as the Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophers reached the position that the universe with all its spheres was God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic position that God was the world. Before the atomic DIVINE ORIGIN OF SCIENCES 233 scholastics the same danger also lay. It is part of the irony of the history of Muslim theology that the very emphasis on the transcendental unity should lead thus to pantheism. Al-Ghazzali's endeavor was to strike the via media. The Hegelian Trinity might have appealed to him. To return, his views on science, as we have already seen, were the same as those of the contemporary students of natural jDhilosophy. Their teachings he accepted, and, so far, he can be compared to a theo- logian of the present day, who accepts evolution and explains it to suit himself. His world was framed on what is commonly called the Ptolemaic system. He was no flat-earth man like the present Ulama of Islam ; God had " spread out the earth like a carpet," but that did not hinder him from regarding it as a globe. Around it revolve the spheres of the seven planets and that of the fixed stars ; Alphonso the Wise had not yet added the crystalline sphere and the primum mobile. All that astronomers and mathe- maticians teach us of the laws under which these bodies move is to be accepted. Their theory of eclipses and of other phenomena of the heavens is true, whatever the ignorant and superstitious may clamor. Yet it is to be remembered that the most important facts and laws have been divinely revealed. As the weightiest truths of medicine are to be traced back to the teaching of the prophets, so there are con- junctions in the heavens which occur only once in a thousand years and which man can yet calculate be- cause God has taught him their laws. And all this structure of the heavens and the earth is the direct 234 THEOLOGY work of God, produced out of nothing by His will, guided by His will, ever dependent for existence on His will, and one day to pass away at His command. So al-Gliazzali joins science and revelation. Behind the order of nature lies the personal, omnipotent God who says, "Be! " and it is. The things of existence do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolu- tion, but are produced directly by Him. Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali's atti- tude toward the physical universe that deserves atten- tion, but which is very difficult to grasp or express. Perhaps it may be stated thus : Existence has three modes ; there is existence in the alam al-mulk^ in the alam al-jabarut, and in the alam al-malakut. The first is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses ; it exists by the power {qudra) of God, one part pro- ceeding from another in constant change. The alam al-malakut exists by God's eternal decree, without development, remaining in one state without addition or diminution. The ala7n al-jabarut comes between these two ; it seems externally to belong to the first, but in respect of the power of God which is from all eternity {al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the second. The soul {nafs) belongs to the alam al- malakut, is taken from it and returns to it. In sleep and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into contact with the world from which it is derived. This is what happens in dreams — " sleep is the brother of death," says al-Ghazzali ; and thus, too, the saints and the prophets attain divine knowledge. Some angels belong to the world of malakut ; some to that of Jaharut, apparently those who have shown them- THE THREE WORLDS 235 selves here as messengers of God. The things in the heavens, the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, etc., belong to the world of malakut. On the one hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and, on the other, these terms for them are not metaphors. Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the difficulty of Muslim eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects the right to allegorize — these things are real, actual ; but he relegates them to this world of malakut. Again, the Qur'an, Islam, and Friday (the day of pub- lic worship) are personalities in the world of malakut andjabarut. So, too, the world of miilk must appear as a personality at the bar of these other worlds at the last day. It will come as an ugly old woman, but Friday as a beautiful young bride. This personal Qur'an belongs to the world oijabarut, but Islam to that of malakut. But just as those three worlds are not thought of as separate in time, so they are not separate in space. They are not like the seven heavens and seven earths of Muslim literalists, which stand, story-fashion, one above the other. Eather they are, as expressed above, modes of existence, and might be compared to the speculations on another life in space of n dimensions, framed, from a very different starting-point and on a basis of pure physics, by Balfour Stewart and Tait in their " Unseen Universe." On another side they stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas, whether through neo-Platonism or more immediately. Sufiism at its best, and when stripped of the trap- pings of Muslim tradition and Qur'anic exegesis, has no reason to shrink from the investigation either of 236 THEOLOGY the physicist or of the metaphysician. And so it is not strange to find that all Muslim thinkers have been tinged with mysticism to a greater or less degree, though they may not all have embraced formal Sufiism and accepted its vocabulary and system. This is true of al-Farabi, who was avowedly a Sufi ; true also of Ibn Sina, who, though nominally an Aristotelian, was essentially a neo-Platonist, and ad- mitted the possibility of intercourse with superior beings and with the Active Intellect, of miracles and revelations ; true even of Ibn Bushd, who does not venture to deny the immediate knowledge of the Sufi saints, but only argues that experience of it is not sufficiently general to be made a basis for theological science. In ethics, as we have already seen, the position of al-Ghazzali is a simple one. All our laws and theories upon the subject, the analysis of the qualities of the mind, good and bad, the tracing of hidden defects to their causes — all these things we owe to the saints of God to whom God Himself has revealed them. Of these there have been many at all times and in all countries, and without them and their labors and the light which God has vouchsafed to them, we could never know ourselves. Here, as everywhere, comes out al-Ghazzali's fundamental position that the ulti- mate source of all knowledge is revelation from God. It may be major revelation, through accredited proph- ets who come forward as teachers, divinely sent and supported by miracles and by the evident truth of their message appealing to the human heart, or it may be minor revelation — subsidiary and explanatory AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 237 — througli the vast body of saints of different grades, to whom God has granted immediate knowledge of Himself. Where the saints leave off, the prophets begin; and, apart from such teaching, man, even in physical science, would be groping in the dark. This position becomes still more prominent in his philosophical system. His agnostic attitude toward the results of pure thought has been already sketched. It is essentially the same as that taken up by Mansell in his Bampton lectures on " The Limits of Eeligious Thought." Mansell, a pupil and continuator of Ham- ilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton's doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to the- ology, maintaining that we cannot know or think of the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative and finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no positive knowledge of the attributes of God. This, though disguised by the methods and language of scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali's attitude in the Taliafut. Mansell's opponents said that he was like a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing off his seat. Al-Ghazzali, for the support of his seat, went back to revelation, either major, in the books sent down to the prophets, or minor, in the personal revelations of God's saints. Further, it was not onlv in the Muslim schools that this attitude toward phi- losophy prevailed. Yehuda Halevi (d. a.d. 1145 ; al- Ghazzali, d. 1111) also maintains in his Kusari the insufficiency of philosophy in the highest questions of life, and bases religious truth on the incontrovert- ible historical facts of revelation. And Maimonides 238 THEOLOGY (d. A.D. 1204) in his Moreh NehucMm takes essentially the same position. Of his views on dogmatic theology little need be said. Among modern theologians he stands nearest to Ritschl. Like Ritschl, he rejects metaphysics and opposes the influence of any philosophical system on his theology. The basis must be religious phenom- ena, simply accepted and correlated. Like Bitschl, too, he was emphatically ethical in his attitude ; he lays stress on the value for us of a doctrine or a piece of knowledge. Our source of religious knowledge is revelation, and beyond a certain point we must not inquire as to the how and why of that knoAvledge. To do so would be to enter metaphysics and the danger-zone where we lose touch with vital realities and begin to use mere words. On one point he goes beyond Eitschl, and, on another, Ritschl goes beyond him. In his devotion to the facts of the religious consciousness Ritschl did not go so far as to become a mystic, indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious indignation ; al-Ghazzali did become a mystic. But, on the other hand, Ritschl refused absolutely to enter upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes — all that was mere metaphysics and heathenism ; al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself, and his only advance w^as to keep the doctrine on a strictly Qur'anic basis. So it stands written ; not, so man is compelled by the nature of things to think. His work and influence in Islam may be summed up briefly as follows : First, he led men back from scholastic labors upon theological dogmas to living contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the WOEK AND INFLUENCE 239 traditions. What happened in Europe when the yoke of mediaeval scholasticism was broken, what is happening with us now, happened in Islam under his leadership. He could be a scholastic with scholastics, but to state and develop theological doctrine on a Scriptural basis was emphatically his method. We should now call him a Biblical theologian. Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he reintroduced the element of fear. In the Munqidh and elsewhere he lays stress on the need of such a striking of terror into the minds of the people. His was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching ; no time for optimism either as to this world or the next. The horrors of hell must be kept before men ; he had felt them himself. We have seen how other- worldly was his own attitude, and how the fear of the Fire had been the supreme motive in his conver- sion ; and so he treated others. Third, it was by his influence that Sufiism at- tained a firm and assured position in the Church of Islam. Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical theology within the range of the ordinary mind. Before his time they had been surrounded, more or less, with mystery. The language used was strange ; its vocabulary and terms of art had to be specially learned. No mere reader of the Arabic of the street or the mosque or the school could understand at once a philosophical tractate. Greek ideas and ex- pressions, passing through a Syriac version into Arabic, had strained to the uttermost the resources of even that most flexible tongue. A long training had 240 THEOLOGY been thought necessary before the elaborate and formal method of argumentation could be followed. All this al-Ghazzali changed, or at least tried to change. His Tahafiit is not addressed to scholars only ; he seeks with it a wider circle of readers, and contends that the views, the arguments, and the falla- cies of the philosophers should be perfectly intelli- gible to the general public. Of these four phases of al-Ghazzali's work, the first and the third are undoubtedly the most impor- tant. He made his mark by leading Islam back to its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a place in its system to the emotional religious life. But it will have been noticed that in none of the four phases was he a pioneer. He was not a scholar who struck out a new path, but a man of intense personal- ity who entered on a path already blazed and made it the common highway. We have here his charac- ter. Other men may have been keener logicians, more learned theologians, more gifted saints ; but he, through his personal experiences, had attained so overpowering a sense of the divine realities that the force of his character — once combative and restless, now narroAved and intense — swept all before it, and the Church of Islam entered on a new era of its ex- istence. So much space it has been necessary to give to this great man. Islam has never outgrown him, has never fully understood him. In the renaissance of Islam which is now rising to view his time will come and the new life will proceed from a renewed study of his works. LATER ASH'ARITES 241 From tliis time on, the Asli'arites may be fairly regarded as the dominant school so far as the East is concerned. Saladin (d. 589) did much to aid in the establishment of this hegemony. He was a de- vout Muslim with the taste of an amateur for theolog- ical literature. Anecdotes tell how he had a special little catechism composed, and used himself to in- struct his children in it. He founded theological academies in Egypt at Alexandria and Cairo, the first there except the Fatimid Hall of Science. One of the few blots on his name is the execution of the pantheistic Sufi, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, at Aleppo in 587. Meanwhile, in the farther East, Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (d. 606) was writing his great commentary on the Qur'an, the Mafatih al-Ghayh, *' The Keys of the Unseen," and carrying on the work of al-Ghazzali. The title of his commentary itself shows the dash of mysticism in his teaching, and he was in correspondence with Ibn Arabi, the arch-Sufi of the time. He studied philosophy, too, commented on works of Ibn Sina, and fought the philosophers on their own ground as al-Ghazzali had done. Kalam and philosophy are now, in the eyes of the theolo- gians, a true philosophy and a false. Philosophy has taken the place of Mu'tazilism and the other heresies. The enemies of the faith are outside its pale, and the scholasticizing of philosophy goes on steadily. According to some, a new stage was marked by al-Baydawi (d. 685), who confused inextricably philosophy and kalam, but the newness can have been comparative only. A century later al-Iji (d. 756) writes a book, al-Maiuaqif, on kalam, half of which is 242 THEOLOGY given to metaphysics and the other half to dogmatics. At-Taftazani is another name worthy of mention. He died in 791, after a laborious life as a controver- sialist and commentator. When we reach Ibn Khal- dun (d. 808), the first philosophical historian and the greatest until the nineteenth century of our era, we find that kalam has fallen again from its high estate. It has become a scholastic discipline, useful only to repel the attacks of heretics and unbelievers ; and of heretics, says Ibn Khaldun, there are now none left. Eeason, he goes on, cannot grasp the nature of God ; cannot weigh His unity nor measure His qualities. God is unknowable and we must accept what we are told about Him by His prophets. Such was the re- sult of the destruction of philosophy in Islam. CHAPTEK V Islam in the West ; Ibn Tumart and the Muwahhid? ; philosophy in the West under Muwahhid protection ; Ibn Bajja; Ibn Tu- f ayl ; Ibn Rushd ; Ibn Arabi ; Ibn Sab'in. We have now anticipated one of the strangest and most characteristic figures and movements in the history of Islam. The preceding account, except as relates to Ibn Khaldun, has told of the triumphs of the Ash'arites in the East only. In the AVest the movement was slower, and to it we must now turn. The Maghrib — the Occident, as the Arabs called all North Africa beyond Egypt — had been slow from the first to take on the Muslim impress. The invading army had fought its way painfully through, but the Berber tribes remained only half subdued and one- tenth Islamized. Egypt was conquered in a.h. 20, and Samarqand had been reached in 56 ; but it was not till 74 that the Muslims were at Carthage. And even then and for long after there arose insurrection after insurrection, and the national spirit of the Ber- bers remained unbroken. Broadly, but correctly, Islam in North Africa for more than three centuries was a failure. The tribal constitutions of the Berbers were unaffected by the conception of the Khalifate and their primitive religious aspirations by the Faith of Muhammad. Not till the possibility came to them to construct Muslim states out of their own tribes 243 244 TnEOLOGY did their opposition begin to weaken. And then it was rather political Islam that had weakened. When the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 356 and moved the seat of their empire from al-Mahdiya to the newly founded Cairo, Islam assumed a new meaning for North Africa. The Fatimid empire there quickly melted away, and in its place arose several inde- pendent states, Berber in blood though claiming Arab descent and bearing Arab names. Islam no longer meant foreign oppression, and it began at last to make its way. Again, in the preceding period of insurrection the Berber leaders had frequently ap- peared in the guise and with the claim of prophets, men miraculously gifted and with a message from God. These wild tribesmen, with all their fanati- cism for their own tribal liberties, have always been peculiarly accessible to the genius which claims its mission from heaven. So they had taken up the Fatimid cause and worshipped Ubayd Allah the Mahdi. And so they continued thereafter, and still continue to be swayed by saints, darwishes, and prophets of all degrees of insanity and cunning. The latest case in point is that of the Shaykh as- Sanusi, with whom we have already dealt. As time went on, there came a change in these prophet-led risings and saint-founded states. They gradually slipped over from being frankly anti-Muhammadan, if also close imitations of Muhammad's life and methods, to being equally frankly Muslim. The the- ology of Islam easily afforded them the necessary point of connection. All that the prophet of the day need do was to claim the position of the Mahdi, that IBN TUMAET 245 Guided One, who according to the traditions of Mu- hammad was to come before the last day, when the earth shall be filled with violence, and to fill it again with righteousness. It was easy for each new Mahdi to select from the vast and contradictory mass of tra- ditions in Muslim eschatology those which best fitted his person and his time. To the story and the doc- trine of one of these we now come. At the beginning of the sixth century a certain Berber student of theology, Ibn Tumart by name, travelled in the East in search of knowledge. An early and persistent western tradition asserts that he was a favorite pupil of al-Ghazzali's, and was marked out by him as showing the signs of a future founder of empire. This may be taken for what it is worth. What is certain is that Ibn Tumart went back to the Maghrib and there brought about the triumph of a doctrine which was derived, if modified, from that of the Ash'arites. Previously all kalam had been under a cloud in the West. Theological studies had been closely limited to fiqli, or canon law, and that of the narrowed school of Malik ibn Anas. Even the Qur'an and the collections of traditions had come to be neg- lected in favor of systematized law-books. The revolt of Ibn Hazm against this had apparently ac- complished little. It had been too one-sided and negative, and had lacked the weight of personality behind it. Ibn Hazm had assailed the views of others with a wealth of vituperative language. But he had been a controversialist only. There is a stor}^ tolerably well authenticated, that the books of al-Ghazzali were solemnly condemned by the Qadis 246 THEOLOGY of Cordova, and burnt in public. Yet, against that is to be set that all the Spanish theologians did not approve of this violence. Ibn Tumart started in life as a reformer of the cor- ruptions of his day, and seems to have slipped from that into the belief that he had been appointed by God as the great reformer for all time. As happens with reformers, from exhortation it came to force ; from preaching at the abuses of the government to rebellion against the government. That government, the Murabit, went down before Ibn Tumart and his successors, and the pontifical rule of the Muwahhids, the asserters of God's tmuMd or unity, rose in its place. The doctrine which he preached bears evi- dent marks of the influence of al-Ghazzali and of Ibn Hazm. Taivliid, for him, meant a complete spirit- ualizing of the conception of God. Opposed to taiv- hid, he set tajsim, the assigning to God of a jism or body having bulk. Thus, when the theologians of the West took the anthropomorphic passages of the Qur'an literally, he applied to them the method of ta'ioil, or interpretation, which he had learned in the East, and explained away these stumbling-blocks. Ibn Hazm, it will be remembered, resorted to grammatical and lexicographical devices to attain the same end, and had regarded tahvil with abhorrence. To Ibn Tumart, then, this tajsim was flat unbelief and, as Mahdi, it was his duty to oppose it by force of arms, to lead a jihad against its maintainers. Further, with Ibn Hazm, he agreed in rejecting taqlid. There was only one truth, and it was man's duty to find it for him- self by going to the original sources. A ZAHIRITE IMAMITE 247 This is the genuine Zahirite doctrine which utterly rejects all comity with the four other legal rites ; but Ibn Tumart, as Mahcli, added another element. It is based on a very simple Imamite philosophy of his- tory. There has always been an Imam in the world, a divinely appointed leader, guarded by isma, protec- tion against error. The first four Khalifas were of such divine appointment ; thereafter came usurpers and oppressors. Theirs was the reign of wickedness and lies in the earth. Now he, the Mahdi, was come of the blood of the Prophet and bearing plainly all the necessary, accrediting signs to overcome these tyrants and anti-Christs. He thus was an Imamite, but stood quite apart from the welter of conflicting Shi'ite sects — the Seveners, Twelvers, Zaydites and the rest — as far as do the present Sharifs of Morocco with their Alid-Sunnite position. The Mahdi, it is to be remembered, is awaited by Sunnites as by Shi'ites, and is guarded against error as much as an Imam, since he partakes of the general isma which in divine things belongs to prophets. Such a leader, then, could claim from the people absolute obedience and credence. His word must be for them the source of truth. There was, therefore, no longer any need of analogy (qiyas) as a source, and we accord- ingly find that Ibn Tumart rejected it in all but legal matters and there surrounded it with restrictions. Analogical argument in things theological was for- bidden. But where he absolutely parted company from the Ash'arites was with regard to the qualities of God. In that, too, he followed the view of Ibn 248 THEOLOGY Hazm sketched above. We must take the Qiir'anic expressions as names and not as indicating attributes to us. It is true that his creed shows signs of a phil- osophical width lacking in Ibn Hazm. Like the Mu'tazilites, e.g. Abu Hudhayl, he defines largely by negations. God is not this ; is not affected by that. It is even phrased so as to be capable of a pantheistic explanation, and we find that Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on it. But it may be doubted whether Ibn Tumart was himself a pantheist. All phases of Islam, as we have seen, ran toward that ; and here there is only a little indiscretion in the wording. But it may easily have been that he had besides, like the Fatimids, a secret teaching or exposition of those simpler declarations which were intended for the mass of the people. Among his successors dis- tinct traces of such a thing appear ; both Aristotelian philosophers and advanced Sufis are connected with the Muwahhid movement. That, however, belongs to the sequel. The success of Ibn Tumart, if halting at first, was eventually complete. As a simple lawyer who felt called upon to protest — as, indeed, are all good Mus- lims in virtue of a tradition from Muhammad — against the abuses of the time, he accomplished com- paratively little. As Mahdi, he and his supporter and successor, Abd al-Mu'min, swept the country. For his movement was not merel}^ Imamite and Mus- lim, but an expression as well of Berber nationalism. Here was a man, sprung from their midst, of their own stock and tongue, who, as Prophet of God, called them to arms. They obeyed his call, worshijoped SYNCRETISM OF IBN TUMART 249 liim and fought for liim. He translated the Quran for them into Berber ; the call to prayers was given in Berber ; functionaries of the church had to know Berber; his own theological writings circulated in Berber as well as in Arabic. As Persia took Islam and moulded it to suit herself, so now did the Berber tribes. And a strange jumble they made of it. With them, the Zahirite system of canon law, rejected by all other Muslim peoples, enjoyed its one brief period of power and glory. Shi'ite legends and supersti- tions mingled with philosophical free thought. The book of mystery, al-Jafr, written by Ali, and contain- ing the history of the world to the end of time, w^as said to have passed from the custody of al-Ghazzali at his death to the hands of the Mahdi and was by him committed to his successors. If only in view of the syncretism practised by both, it was fitting that al-Ghazzali and Ibn Tumart should be brought closely together. Yet it is hard to explain the persistence with which the great Ash'arite is made the teacher and guide of the semi-Zahirite. There must have been something, now obscure to us, in their respective systems which suggested to contemporaries such in- timate connection. The rule of the Muwahhids lasted until 667, nearly one hundred years, and involved in its circle of influ- ence many weighty personalities. With some of these we will now deal shortly. It has been told above how narrow in general were the intellectual interests of the West. Canon law% poetry, history, geography were eagerly pursued, but little of original value was produced. Originality 250 THEOLOGY and the breaking of ground in new fields were under a ban. Subtiltj of thought and hixury of life took their place. Above all, and naturally, this applied to philosophy. And so it comes that the first phil- osophic name in the Muslim West is that of Abu Bakr ibn Bajja, for mediaeval Europe Avenpaoe, who died comparatively young in 533. For him, as for all, and still more in the West than in the East, the problem of the philosopher was how to gain and maintain a tenable position in a world composed mostly of the philosophically ignorant and the relig- iously fanatical. This problem had two sides, internal and external. The inner and the nobler one was how such a mind could in its loneliness rise to its highest level and purify itself to the point of knowing things as they really are and so reach that eternal life in which the individual spirit loses itself in the Active Intellect {vovaman, 354 Damascus, 14, 83, 88, 131, 175, 177 D«r al-^arb, 55 Dar al-Islam, 55 Dsxuri, 308 Darwishes, 5, 61, 179, 183, 183, 303, 344, 366, 368 Da'wd az-Zahivi, 103, 108-110 'Da'ud ibn Nusayr, 174 Dauphine', Le, 83 Dawr, 333 Dhikrs, 174, 178, 179 Dhuhwl, 340 Dh7^-l-faqar, 30 376 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS Dhw-1-Kifl, 346 DhM-n-Nwn, 176 Dh?^-n-N^^rayll, 313 Din, 293, 297, 298, 305, 307 Diya, 355 Diyana, 293 Druses, 27, 48, 59, 170 Eckart, the mystic, 180 Edict of the Prtetor, 87 Egypt, Egyptians, 14, 21, 23, 30, 45-49, 53, 62, 82, 187, 244, 277, 287 Emessa, 163 Erigena, Scotus, 182 Euchites, 178 Euclid, 134 Euphrates, 133 Fakhr ad-Din ax-Razi, 241 Fakhr ad- Din ibn 'Asakir, 273 Fana, 338 Faqih, f uqaha, 73, 85, 270 Faqirs, 268 Al-Farabt, 162-164, 165, 167, 169, 181, 196, 215, 221, 236, 250 Faragh, 317 Fard, 73 F&rida, 354 Al-Farwq, 313 Faiana, 347 Fa^ima, daughter of MuAammad, 20, 30, 36, 346, 347 Fa^ima of Naysabwr, 173 Fai!imids, 27, 36, 45, 47, 49, 165- 167, 169, 173, 184, 197, 224, 241, 244, 251 Fatwa, 115, 184, 276, 277 Fay', 356 Bil-fi'l, 328 Fi ma^all ; see ma^all Fiqh, 77, 87, 116, 132, 208, 209, 245, 252, 261, 270, 279, 282; cf. faqih Firdawsi, 170 St. Francis of Assisi, 180 Frederick 11. , the Hohenstaufen, 263 Friday. 35, 51, 235, 298, 313 Al-Fudalt, 191, 315 Al-Fu(^ayl ibn 'lyad, 174, 175 Fuatat, 83 Galen, 134 Ghafala, 340 Al-Ghani, 327 Ghanima, 356 Ghasb, 354 Al-Ghayb, 139, 281, 314 Al-Ghazzali, 139, 165, 176, 183, 195, 199, 207, 215-241, 245-249, 253. 257, 260-264, 267, 270, 284-286, 300, 309 Ghiba, 349 Ghusl, 352 Gondeshapwr, 134 Greek monks, 178 Greek philosophy, science, etc., 133, 138, 140, 144, 159, 161, 162 JTabib, 175 ZTadd, 314, 355 .Skdith, 75, 77, 78, 87, 94, 121, 190, 209, 261, 270 l?adith, 320, 322, 328, 332 i/adith an-nafs, 273, 336, 350 ZTafiramawt, 60 Eaisids, 265 Ha'il, 60 ^ajar as-safih, 354 ITajj, 275, 278, 292, 353 Al-^ajjaj, 209, 298 Al-lTakim Bi'amriUah, 47, 48 Al-^akam ibn abi-l-'^s, 17 Hal, 160, 176, 227, 310, 319, 322, 337 ffal naf si, 319 Balal, 298 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 377 Al-^aUaj, 183-185, 398 Halley's comet, 34 Hamdanids, 162, 165 Hamilton, Sir William, 237 ^anbaUtes, 115, 121, 158, 167, 190, 191, 200, 207, 208, 212-214, 237, 273, 274, 278 ^anif, 125 5anifites, 115 i/aqiqa, 328, 329 -Haqq, 356 Hsxam, 73, 298, 311 Al-^araman, 56, 213 Al-J?arith al-MuAasibi, 175, 177, 187, 225 Harran, 133, 134 Harwn ar-Rashid, 50, 97, 98, 144, 153, 155, 175 JE?asad, 349 Al-^asan, 20, 27, 28, 35 Al-lTasan al-Basri, 128, 129, 130, 172, 173 iZasan ibn &s-Sahhah, 2^4t Hashim, 10, 17, 32, 313, 351 iZawala, 354 ITawrf, 249, 296, 306, 311, 349 ^ayah, 332 ^ayy, 337 Al-5ayy, 211 iZayy ibn Yaqzan, 253, 254 Hebron, 226 Hegel, 143, 233 Herat, 82, 207 Hesychasts, 178 Hiba, 354 Hidandi, 355 Hidden Imam, 31, 37, 41, 56, 116; cf. Imam, Imamites Hierotheos, 181 Al-5"ijaz, 212 Hippocrates, 134 Hwd, 346 irud?/th, 320, 338; cf. Aadith, muAdath ITukm, 292 Hwlag?^, 49, 53 ^uImI, 228 Hume, 229, 230 Al-^usayn, 20, 28 Huwa-1-Aaqq, 203 I'ara, 354 IhadiieB, 5, 26, 54, 115, 117, 126 Ibn'Abd al-Wahhab ; see Mu^am, mad ibn ' Abd al-Wahhab Ibn Abi 'Awja, 80 Ibn al-'Arabi, 316, 322, 323, 328 Ibn 'Arabi, 241, 261, 264, 271, 277, 280 Ibn ash-Shakaaghani, 185 Ibn Bajja, 250, 252, 255, 257 Ibn Hani, 170 Ibn ifazm, 209-212, 245-248, 261, 275, 280 Ibn Voad, 'Abd Allah, 25, 26, 116 Ibn Karram, 170, fF. Ibn Khaldwn, 50, 81, 242, f. Ibn Khallikan, 185 Ibn Maja, 81 Ibn al-Muqaffa', 150 Ibn Rushd, 161, 163, 195, 206, 215, 236, 248, 252, 255, 256-261, 264- 286 IbnSab'in,'Abdal-^aqq, 263,264, 267, 277 Ibn Sina, 163, 171, 197, 221, 228, 236, 241, 250, 257 Ibn Taymiya, 270-278, 283-285 Ibn Tufayl, 252-256, 261 Ibn Twmart, 207, 245-248, 252, 275 Ibrahim ibn Adham, 174, 268 Al-i(Zafatu-l-'amm lil-khoss, 337 Al-irfafatu-1-bayaniya, 337 'Idda, 355 Idris, 346 Idris ibn 'Abd Allah, 35 Idrisids, 34, 102 lAa^a, 332 378 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WOKDS lAsan, 293 Ihtiyaj ila maAall, 339 Ihya, 338 Ihya of al-Ghazzali, 285, 300 I^ya al-mawat, 354 Ijara, 354 I'jaz, 151 Al-'/ji, 241, 269 IjmaS 57, 58, 72, 94, 101, 105, 209, 292, 328, 351 IjmaK, 316 Ikhtilaf, 116 Ikhtiyar, 192, 310, 339, 345 Ikhwan as-safa, 167, 169, 194, 196, 199 Iktisab, 280 ; cf . kasb Iktisabi, 309 Ila, 355 Ilhad, 314 Ilham, 281, 309 Hjam al-'awamm'an 'ilm al-kalam of al-Ghazzali, 260 'Ilia, 107, 319, 337 ; cf . ta'hl 'Ilm, 201, 294, 332 'Ilwan, the Shaykh, 268 Imam, 26, 29, 31, 36-38, 41-43, 46, 54, 57, 142, 155, 165, 167, 188, 197, 212, 224, 286, 292, 293, 297- 299, 311, 313, 318, 350 Imam al-^aramayn, 212, 213, 217, 230, 317 Imamites, 37, 57, 59, 116, 126, 142, 247 Iman, 126, 127, 292-296, 311, 312' 318, 350 Imata, 338 Imdadat, 330 ImtiAan, 148; cf. mi/^na India, 51, 55, 56, 59, 61 India, Emperor of, 55 Indian Mu'tazilism, 286 Injil, 304 In sha' Allah, 272 Iqrar, 312, 354 Irada, 330 Al-'Iraq, 209 'Iraq, Arab, 44 Ivda, 355 Irja, 292 ; cf. Murji'ites 'Isa ; see Jesus Islam, 7, 13-15, 19-27, 37, 40-48, 52-55, 58, 59, 68, 71-74, 118- 120, 124, 130, 136, 141, 142, 149, 151-154, 158-161, 167, 173, 176, 177, 180-183, 186, 190, 191, 206, 212-215, 218, 226, 228, 230, 231, 233, 235, 238-244, 248, 261, 262, 270, 278, 282-284, 292, 296, 312 'Isma, 247, 292, 314, 347 Isma'il, 41, 42, 43 Isma'iiians, 42, 44, 57, 59, 169, 170, 196 Isnad, 75, 78, 79 Ispahan, 195 Istawa, Istiwa, 186, 294, 301 IstidlaK, 308 Isti^'isan, 87, 94, 96 IstislaA, 87, 100, 101 Istiia'a, 310 Istiwa ; see Istawa I'tazala 'anna, 130 Ithna 'Ashariya, 38 I'tibar, 201, 341 I'tibar ikhtira'i, 343 I'tibar intiza'i, 343 I'tidal, 221 I'tikaf, 353 'Itq, 357 Itti;iad, 228, 277 Ja'ala, 354 Jabarites, 292, 344 Jabr, 291, 344 Jacob, 350 Jadliya, 259 Ja'far as-