Islamic Philosophy and Theology, V: The Umayyad-era General Religious Movement

The "General Religious Movement"

As I'd mentioned earlier, Watt points out the difficulty of precisely analyzing the components of the early Muslim mainstream, while acknowledging that this does not mean there was no such thing. Indeed, he notes that from the earliest times groups of pious Muslims (invariably men) would get together in mosques to discuss "legal matters, ascetic and mystical practices, the interpretation of the Qur'ān and occasionally theological doctrine." (p. 20) It's easy to imagine the first schools of jurisprudence arising out of these discussions.

Watt notes that most of these pious Muslims, although not necessarily politically active, often held particular religious or theological beliefs which naturally, in a society where "politics was closely linked with piety" (p. 20), had political consequences. These mosques formed fora where Khārijites and Shī`ites and Ibn al-Zubayrites and Umayyad apologists who could tolerate one another—in other words, a moderate cross-section of the major Muslim political / theological positions—could all come together to discuss a variety of issues. It was this moderate mainstream that in later times comes to be called the Sunnite position, although such a title is not used at this point in Muslim history.

These discussions led to the rise of two very important phenomena. First, the idea of the ḥadīth. Watt presents three different positions on the reasons for, and the method of, collecting the ḥadīth. The traditional picture offered by Muslim scholars is that the Companions of the Prophet handed down these anecdotes, which were passed down from generation to generation along with an isnād, a chain of transmission without which the anecdote was considered unreliable. The modern skeptical position is known as the Goldziher-Schacht view, according to which the ḥadīth were handed down through most of the Umayyad period without any isnād, and that most of the chains of transmission were a later fabrication. A more recent, more moderate position has been put forward by Fuad Sezgin, which argues that not only were early Muslim scholars aware of the many problems associated with certifying a ḥadīth's isnād, but that they had also developed a complex system of trying to determine its validity. However, modern scholarship tends towards the position that "it would appear that a complete isnād was not de rigueur until about the year 800" (p. 20), that is, only into the `Abbāsid period.

The second important phenomenon growing out of the mosque-as-forum was the political / theological idea of irjā' ("postponement"), a belief that the only way to heal the deep rifts that had appeared within the Muslim community at this point was to accept the picking Abū Bakr and `Umar as the first two caliphs, and to "postpone" judgement on the righteousness of the first fitna ("civil war" or "schism") among `Uthmān, `Alī, and al Zubayr. This belief was a calculated way for moderate Muslims to distance themselves from both the anti-Umayyad Khārijite position and the pro-`Alī Shī`ite position, without forcing them to either blindly support or oppose the Umayyads. This political meaning of irjā' is sometimes conflated with a different theological idea, that the fate of the grave sinner is "postponed" to be decided by God and not by the community; in this sense, this is an anti-Azraqite position, but is similar in some ways to the Wāqifite position taken by the moderate urban Khārijites. Whatever the meaning of the word irjā', it's clear that it is not a complete theological position and that one could be (as Watt claims some heresiographers wrote) a member of a variety of sects while still believing in irjā'. Opponents of postponement lumped all "postponers" into one group, the so-called Murji'ites.

But the second meaning of irjā' introduces a new complication into Islamic thinking. The extreme Khārijite position has the advantage of offering a clear, if extremely restrictive, definition of a Muslim: one who joins their tribe and does not commit any sin. As the idea of irjā' caught on though, it became more and more important to come up with a good working positive definition of who a Muslim is; in other words, a way to identify a Muslim by what s/he thinks and does, not by what s/he does not. To answer this arose the concept of īmān, loosely translated as "faith" but in this context referring to something very specific. The "postponers" all agreed on three intellectual components of īmān (although there were probably a number of additional beliefs and practices that many would have wanted): ma`rifa (the knowledge of God and his Messenger), taṣdīq (the belief that this knowledge was true), and iqrār (the confession of this belief with the tongue). All three components are encapsulated in the shahāda. The most prominent supporter of a purely intellectual understanding of īmān was Abū Ḥanīfa, after whom the Ḥanafi school of jurisprudence was named. Although the general idea of irjā' and the major components of īmān—in other words, that `Uthmān was the third caliph and was unjustly murdered, that `Alī was the fourth caliph, that the fate of the grave sinner can only be determined by God, and that Muslim identity is determined by īmān—were all accepted by the Islamic mainstream, Abū Ḥanīfa's purely intellectual definition of īmān was expanded by other Sunnite theological schools to include elements of practice. As a consequence, modern scholars like Reza Aslan can now argue (link to iTunes) that the Islamic mainstream today is more of an orthopraxy than an orthodoxy, since it is in fact actual engagement in particular practices that determines whether someone is a "good" Muslim or not (and of course, the final decision is in God's hands and nobody else's).