Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory

by Duncan Black MacDonald

This brings us again to the great mystery of Muslim history. What was the truth of the Fatimid movement? Was the family of the Prophet the fosterer of science from the earliest times? What degree of contact had they 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 influence and authority into the spreading and extending of knowledge. This institution seems to have been a combination of free public library and university, 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 become 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 drawing 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 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 wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid movement; 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 devotees of science and truth—no other way of breaking 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.

IKHWAN AS-SAFA

Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fatimids is the association known as the Sincere Brethren (Ikhwan 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 Buwayhids in 334. It will be remembered how that Persian 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 spreading over the country from al-Basra and Baghdad, to reach all educated people and introduce among them gradually a complete change in their religious and scientific ideas. Their teaching was the same combination of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism with Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu‘tazilite 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” (Rasa’il ikhwan 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 Encyclopédie. The founders of the Fraternity, and authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most ten. We have no certain knowledge that the Fraternity ever took even its first step and spread to Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the development 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 edification 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 have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intellectual life, yet it carried with it in a still higher degree 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 connection with facts.

THE IKHWAN AND THE FATIMIDS

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 missionaries of the Isma‘ilians. They raised difficulties and suggested serious questionings; hinted at possible 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 remembered 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 fortresses there was the most absolute devotion to true learning that then existed. When the Mongols captured 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 Ikhwan as-safa was the real doctrine of the Fatimids, the Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses; certainly, wherever we can test them there is the most singular agreement. It is a mechanical and æsthetic pantheism, 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 Badakhshan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Hani, who died in 362, similarly accepted al-Mu‘izz as his spiritual chief and guide.

IBN KARRAM

Another eclectic sect, but on a very different principle, 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 invader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi, 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 himself, 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 Punishment of the Grave,” which spread widely in Khurasan. 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 embraced 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 comparison with men—all opposed to the principle bila 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 bi-rabbikum) and they, brought forth from Adam’s loins for the purpose, made answer, “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 commentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a metaphor 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 comparison.” 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 fundamental 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.

WOMEN SAINTS

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 hermits, 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 living 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 meetings between such mendicant friars and al-Hasan al-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 Rabi‘a, an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme other-worldliness, who died in 135. Many other women 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 venerated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders are still worked and prayer is always answered. She was a descendant 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 descendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving service and religious enthusiasm with which women are dowered.