The Future of Islam

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Now this law was not, like the Koran, brought down full-fledged from heaven. At first it was little more than a confirmation of the common custom of Arabia, supplemented indeed and corrected by revelation, but based upon existing rules of right and wrong. When, however, Islam emerged from Arabia in the first decade of her existence, and embracing a foreign civilization found herself face to face with new conditions of life, mere custom ceased to be a sufficient guide; and, the voice of direct revelation having ceased, the faithful were thrown upon their reason to direct them how they were to act. Revelation continued, nevertheless, to be the groundwork of their reasoning, and the teaching of their great leader the justification of each new development of law as the cases requiring it arose. The Koran was cited wherever it was possible to find a citation, and where these failed tradition was called in. The companions of the Prophet were in the first instance consulted, and their recollections of his sayings and doings quoted freely; while afterwards, when these too were gone, the companions of the companions took their place, and became in their turn cited.

Thus by a subtle process of comparison and reasoning, worked out through many generations, the Mohammedan law as we see it was gradually built up, until in the third century of Islam it was embodied by order of the Caliph into a written code. The Fakh ed Din and the Fakh esh Sheriat of Abu Hanifeh, the doctor intrusted with this duty, was a first attempt to put into reasoned form the floating tradition of the faithful, and to make a digest of existing legal practice. He and his contemporaries examined into and put in order the accumulated wealth of authority on which the law rested, and, taking this and rejecting that saying of the Fathers of Islam, founded on them a school of teaching which has ever since been the basis of Mohammedan jurisprudence.

Abu Hanifeh's code, however, does not appear to have been intended, at the time it was drawn up, to be the absolute and final expression of all lawful practice for the faithful. It included a vast amount of tradition of which either no use was made by its compiler, or which stood in such contradiction with itself that a contrary interpretation of it to his could with equal logic be deduced. Abu Hanifeh quoted and argued rather than determined; and as long as the Arabian mind continued to be supreme in Islam the process of reasoning development continued.

The Hanefite code was supplemented by later doctors, Malek, Esh Shafy, and Ibn Hanbal, and even by others whose teaching has been since repudiated, all in the avowed intention of suiting the law still further to the progressive needs of the faithful, and all following the received process of selecting and interpreting and reasoning from tradition. These codes were, for the then existing conditions of life, admirable; and even now, wherever those conditions have remained unaltered, are amply sufficient for the purposes of good government and the regulation of social conduct. They would, nevertheless, have been but halting places in the march of Mohammedan legislation, had the destinies of Islam remained permanently in the hands of its first founders.

Unfortunately, about the eleventh century of our era, a new and unfortunate influence began to make itself felt in the counsels of the Arabian Ulema, which little by little gaining ground, succeeded at last in stopping the flow of intellectual progress at the fountain head. The Tartar, who then first makes his appearance in Mohammedan politics, though strong in arms, was slow to understand. He had no habit of thought, and, having embraced Islam, he saw no necessity for further argument concerning it. The language of the Koran and the traditions was a science sealed to him; and the reasoning intelligence of the Arab whose dominion he had invaded was a constant reproof to him. He dared not venture his barbarian dignity in the war of wit which occupied the schools; and so fortified his unintelligence behind a rampart of dogmatic faith. Impotent to develop law himself, he clutched blindly at that which he found written to his hand. The code of Abu Hanifeh seemed to him a perfect thing, and he made it the resting place of his legal reason. Then, as he gradually possessed himself of all authority, he declared further learning profane, and virtually closed the schools. His military triumphs in the sixteenth century sealed the intellectual fate of Islam, and from that day to our own no light of discussion has illumined Moslem thought, in any of the old centres of her intelligence. Reason, the eye of her faith in early times, has been fast shut—by many, it has been argued, blind.

It is only in the present generation, and in the face of those dangers and misfortunes to which Islam finds herself exposed, that recourse has once more been had to intellectual methods; and it is precisely in those regions of Islam where Arab thought is strongest that we now find the surest symptoms of returning mental life. Modern Arabia, wherever she has come in contact with what we call the civilization of the world, has shown herself ready and able to look it in the face; and she is now setting herself seriously to solve the problem of her own position and that of her creed towards it.

In North Africa, indeed, civilization for the moment presents itself to her only as an enemy; but where her intelligence has remained unclouded by the sense of political wrong she has proved herself capable, not only of understanding the better thought of Europe, but of sympathizing with it as akin to her own. Thus at Cairo, now that the influence of Constantinople has been partially removed, we find the Arabian Ulema rapidly assimilating to their own the higher principles of our European thought, and engrafting on their lax moral practice some of the better features of our morality. It is at no sacrifice of imagined dignity, as with the Turks, that Egypt is seeking a legal means for universal religious toleration, or from any pressure but that of their own intelligence that her chief people are beginning to reform their domestic life, and even, in some instances, to adopt the practice of monogamy. The truth would seem to be that the same process is being effected to-day in their minds as was formerly the case with their ancestors. In the eighth century, the Arabs, brought into contact with Greek philosophy, assimilated it by a natural process of their reasoning into the body of their own beliefs; and now in the nineteenth they are assimilating a foreign morality into their own system of morals.

Not only in Egypt,—in Oman and Peninsular Arabia, generally there is a real feeling of cordiality between the Mohammedan and his Christian "guest." The abolition of slavery in Zanzibar was a concession to European opinion at least as much as to European force; and a moral sympathy is acknowledged between a Moslem and a Christian State which has its base in a common sense of right and justice. I have good reason to believe that, were the people of Yemen to effect their deliverance from Constantinople, the same humane feeling would be found to exist among them; and I know that it exists in Nejd; while even in Hejaz, which is commonly looked upon as the hot-bed of religious intolerance, I found all that was truly Arabian in the population as truly liberal. Under the late Grand Sherif, Abd el Hamid's reputed victim, these ideas were rapidly gaining ground; and had it not been for his untimely end, I have high authority for stating that the Mohammedan Holy Land would now be open to European intercourse, and slavery, or at least the slave trade, be there abolished.

There is, therefore, some reason to hope that, were Arabian thought once more supreme in Islam, its tendency would be in the direction of a wider and more liberal reading of the law, and that in time a true reconciliation might be effected with Christendom, perhaps with Christianity. The great difficulty which, as things now stand, besets reform is this: the Sheriat, or written code of law, still stands in orthodox Islam as an unimpeachable authority. The law in itself is an excellent law, and as such commends itself to the loyalty of honest and God-fearing men; but on certain points it is irreconcilable with the modern needs of Islam, and it cannot legally be altered.

When it was framed it was not suspected that Mohammedans would ever be subjects of a Christian power, or that the Mohammedan State would ever need to accommodate itself to Christian demands in its internal policy. It contemplated, too, mainly a state of war, and it accepted slavery and concubinage as war's natural concomitants. It did not understand that some day Islam would have to live at peace with its neighbours, if it would live at all, or that the general moral sense of the world would be brought to bear upon it with such force that the higher instincts of Moslems themselves should feel the necessity of restricting its old and rather barbarous licence as to marriage and divorce. Yet these things have come to pass, or are rapidly coming; and the best thinkers in Islam now admit that changes in the direction indicated must sooner or later be made. Only they insist that these should be legally effected, not forced on them by an overriding of the law.