CHAPTER XII. THE PRINCIPLES OF LAW IN ISLAM
Written Specially for the Present Work
By Dr. I. GOLDZIHER
Professor in the University of Vienna, etc.
In studying the lines along which Islam has developed we are confronted with a singular antithesis within the faith itself. It is the outcome of a revolutionary movement which arose to declare war against the past of the Arab nation and of all other nations which it subdued by the ruthless sword of Islam. Yet it had scarcely taken the first step in its career, before investing with little short of sacramental importance an idea so wholly alien to the spirit of subversion and revolution that it seems to us rather a palladium of the most rigid conservatism. This is the idea of the sunna.
Sunna means traditional usage, or custom hallowed by ancestral use, by practice transmitted through past generations. He who violates this custom trespasses against the Holy of holies, against something far above any article of a legal code drawn up with all the mature consideration and cool deliberation of the judicial mind; he had sinned against the pious reverence due to the days of old. This is the view which underlies the sanctity of the sunna. Translated into legal phraseology sunna might accordingly be denominated right by custom, but a better idea of its meaning may be gained by comparing it with the mores majorum or usus longævus of the Romans. For the determining factor in it is not its established character but the high esteem in which it has been held from remote antiquity.
All this (to return to the proposition from which we started) is little in accord with a system which originated with a prophet of revolution who could not say, as Jesus said of himself, that he was “not come to destroy but to fulfil”—at least, not as far as the traditional institutions of the Arabs were concerned. Mohammed does, indeed, represent himself as restoring what has been lost, as bringing back the golden age of religion to man, the rule of the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) which had been lost by corruption and wickedness, and obscured by gross heathenism on its own native soil (for according to Mohammed the Kaaba at Mecca is the temple of Abraham and Ishmael). But it is not this pretension which will enable us to grasp the significance of the idea of the sunna in Islam.