Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory

by Duncan Black MacDonald

MAHMUD OF GHAZNA

But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi‘ite authority in Baghdad gave all the miscellaneous heretics a chance for life, it was different in the growing dominions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic monarch had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the Karramites, the most literal-minded of all the Muslim 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 suzerain, urged him on is very probable; it is also possible 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 Ispahan 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 erroneous in some respects, they were not to be considered 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 Kashshaf, was revised 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 itself, in its original, unmodified form, has been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn Rushd, the Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is combating the arguments of the 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, perhaps, 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. Practically, 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 absolutely unhistorical and highly misleading.

We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological consequences of the preceding theology.

AL-BERUNI; IBN SINA

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 who developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power, scattered from Persia to Syria. These were otherwise 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 hidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta‘limites or claimers of a ta‘lim, a secret teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the “Sincere 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-Beruni (d. 440) even at the court 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 was certainly the first scientific student of India and Indica 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 weakness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who went his own way without treading on the religious toes of other people.

His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopædist of his age, and his scientific work, and especially that in medicine, went further than anything else to put the Muslim East and mediæval 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 was 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 (wasiya) 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 significant 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 bon 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, went 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 speak out clearly. His last words were almost those of Rabelais, “I go to meet the great Perhaps.” Anecdotage connects his name with that of al-Ghazzali. 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.

ABU-L-ALA AL-MA‘ARRI

A very different man was Abu-l-Ala 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 sæva indignatio on hypocrisy and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But Abu-l-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suffering 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.