The Sunni Orthodoxy

While the revolution was exciting, I found the infallibility of the hereditary imams in Shia theology troubling. So when Qaradawi came to our campus, I shared my concerns with him. It was not a serious objection, he declared; only a problem that could be easily solved. ‘Look,’ he said in his characteristic Egyptian Arabic, ‘we (Sunnis) believe that when a person makes a good faith intellectual effort (ijtihad) to figure God’s intentions in the texts and in the world, he will get a reward right?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘there is a hadith that says that whoever gets the right answer in ijtihad will get two rewards, and whoever gets it wrong will get one reward.’ So don’t the Sunnis, Qaradawi asked, claim to have infallibility in ijtihad? I agreed. If you understand this, he told me, than you should understand that, in Shia teachings, the idea of infallibility is invested in the imamate or leadership of the community. The leadership, the imams, he explained, was protected from making catastrophic decisions in leading the community, hence the notion of infallibility.  It was a source of divine blessing, just as in Sunnism, where scholars are protected from punishment even if their intellectual effort turned out to be incorrect. Qaradawi’s persuasive logic dissolved my concerns. It assured me that the Sunni/Shia divide is not entirely insurmountable; like him, I was determined to work to foster mutual understanding.

Three decades later, Qaradawi’s popularity has skyrocketed, thanks to his al-Jazeera show, ‘Sharia and Life’. But he has withdrawn from Sunni-Shia ecumenism. His efforts at reconciliation, he complains, only give zealous Shias opportunity to convert Sunnis in countries like Egypt. In a self-rebuking gesture, a plaintiff Qaradawi admitted his error, made some years ago, in defending the predominantly Shia Lebanese party, Hizbullah, in defiance of the anti-Shia Saudi religious authorities. ‘The Saudi sheikhs were more mature and more visionary than me,’ he explained, ‘because they know the (Iranians and Hezbollah) as being liars’. His inflammatory rhetoric did not end there. He went on to identify political and theological ‘Shia expansion’ in countries like Libya, Tunisia, Sudan and in Yemen where, he alleged, Zaydi Shias were being radicalized. Of course, Iran and Hizbullah’s support for the Assad regime in the civil war against the mainly Sunni-led uprisings was the main trigger for Qaradawi’s anti-Shia turn.  Qaradawi’s critics, in turn, have gone on the offensive, crediting him with stoking sectarian fires in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.

Sunnism as a Political Theology

Just as political passions and civil wars ended Qaradawi’s goodwill towards the Shia, politics fragmented the early Muslim community at the very dawn of Islam. As a result of the civil war, the nascent Muslim community divided along ethnic, class and ideological lines - all of which became the ingredients for Islamdom’s political theology over time. Sunnism is a prism through which believers view the political events of early Islam. Theological justifications and arguments supporting the political passions of each side became part of a salvation narrative, what we call religion. At its core, the Sunni doctrine of salvation is tied to a political theology, which Muslim theologians identified as ‘sharia governance’, a goal many Sunnis aspire to achieve.  Several modern scholars question the tethering of one’s salvation to politics, but that is a different discussion.

The Sunni narrative is based on several teachings that are projected back to the Prophet and the early community. One particular teaching predicts the division of Islam into 73 sects after the Prophet’s demise, of which only one will be the ‘saved sect.’ Sunnism then weaves an elaborate narrative in order to justify the claim that it is ‘the saved sect.’ 

To laypersons, the polished sheen of doctrines and creeds supported by scriptural texts and proclamations are presented as teachings authorized by God and his Prophet. But in reality, there was a complex sedimentation and evolution of teachings, which took place over many centuries. Moreover, these teachings were a product of shifting political alliances, acculturation, growth and transformation, even though followers today telescope it all, as Aziz al-Azmeh put it, into a single corpus, miraculously ‘emanating from a book and the desert’. Doctrines are like snowballs: they accumulate layers of material from the diverse environments they roll in.  

Groups and creeds, which we today identify as Kharijite, Shiite, Mutazilite or Sunni, were narratives constructed in the fermentation of Muslim communities around the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries. Through a combination of political and ideological choices, they were after-the-fact justifications of what really happened in the early centuries, but they were also inflected with interests, desires, imagined pasts, and hoped-for futures. These early sectarian formations were messy, bloody and they only amplified the ambivalences evident in larger societal developments. 

Contemporary Muslim scholars are, of course, unwilling to critically explore Islam’s theological and political beginnings, fearing that such questioning would open a can of worms and unravel the standard narrative. Given the strong political backdrop to the rise of Sunnism, anxiety-prone religious authorities in the past and present always cemented their power in the elite consensus (ijma) of the learned scholars, which let them dodge difficult decisions, silence dissident voices and claim the moral high ground. 

When Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, took military action against his rebellious governor in Syria, Muawiya, who became the first Umayyid Caliph, the proverbial die was cast for division. For Sunnis, Ali was the fourth caliph, but according to Shia theology he was the first legitimate heir to the mantle of the Messenger’s authority (imam). In order to justify the bloodletting among the Prophet’s vaunted Companions and the political musical chairs that followed, his followers have, over the centuries, remembered different things or appropriated the Prophet Muhammad’s legacy in varying ways. Fallible human beings and communities with vested interests staged the various unfolding dramas of sects, sectarianism and mutually antagonistic theologies.

The wrath of the Kharijites, a marginal group in the larger picture of Islamdom, for instance, was directed at two elite figures from the tribe of the Quraysh, Ali and Muawiya, whom they deemed unfit for office because their internecine political quarrels led to bloodshed. The Kharijites brought into play a prophetic saying that said one should follow one’s leader, even if he was a slave with knitted hair. The colorful description was suggestive that a credible leader could even be someone of non-Arab stock or mixed racial heritage. 

Countering the Kharijite claims, other Muslims promoted the Prophet’s teaching that the political leaders or sovereigns ‘should be from the Quraysh tribe,’ a doctrine that became identifiable with the Sunnis. But over time, even this doctrine morphed in order to envisage a non-Arab sovereign ruler. The historian, Ahmad al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), went so far as to issue an apologetic to say that the office of kingship was so corrupt that it would be better for a Qurayshite to give it a pass. God saved the noble lineage of Quraysh, said Maqrizi, from being sullied by the degenerate state of kingship. 

Those Muslims who had ‘partisan,’ the literal translation of ‘shia’, political loyalties for Ali were at first called Alids. Lots of people sympathized with Ali as a victim and for being outfoxed by Umayyad political intrigue. In the aftermath of the civil war, Ali’s followers recalled the Prophet saying: ‘I am the city of learning and Ali is the door to it.’ Few could dispute the prophetic saying, ‘For whom I am his master, then surely Ali is his master too.’ But people differed over whether the Messenger of God was merely extolling Ali’s individual merit or whether he was doing something else: anointing his cousin to be his political and spiritual successor. 

With the advantage of hindsight, a political and theological trend tried to navigate the unhappy developments of the past with two things firmly in their sights. The first was the construction of the semblance of a ‘righteous community’ from the fragments of political division and rancor.  The second was the maintenance of the authority of the Prophet in the absence of his physical presence.  Over time, a group who claimed to be the ‘saved sect’ emerged, justifying its sanctity by claiming to adhere to the Prophet’s charisma via his exemplary teachings, the Sunna.  They called themselves the ‘people who adhered to the tradition (Sunnah) of the Prophet and strived for unity of the community’ - Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama`ah.

Sunnism styled itself as the party of toleration, compromise and opposition to extremes. It claimed to moderate the extremism of the Kharijites, who ejected people from the circle of faith if they committed a major sin.  And, it tried to restrain, if not forbid, criticism of the Companions made by the partisans of Ali, who claimed that some of the Companions had conspired to deny Ali his rightful place to succeed the Prophet. The Shia only identified with a select number of Companions and offered no excuses for those who failed to support him.

Apart from these polarities, every Sunni is also a proto-Shia. Why? Simply because demonstrating love for the Prophet’s family, and showing sympathy for Imam Husain, the Prophet’s martyred grandson, who strived for political justice in the face of Umayyad tyranny, is implicit in the Sunni creed. To show love for the Prophet meant one also had to show love for the Prophet’s family. But where Sunnism differs from its rivals is the almost unconditional love and reverence for all the Prophet’s Companions.

Sunnism justified the order of succession to leadership after the Prophet by reasoning that Abu Bakr was the Messenger’s close friend and father-in-law. As the elder statesman, they proposed, he deserved the investiture to political office by a body of elders of the community. The succession of Umar, Uthman and Ali varied slightly but followed the same principle. The Shia, though, claimed that some Companions had suppressed Ali’s claim to leadership. Sunni doctrine avoided calling believers who killed their fellow believers in war ‘unbelievers’, as the Kharijites did. But Sunnism admitted that causing the death of another through acts of hostility was a heinous sin. 

Sunnism effectively avoided apportioning guilt to any party involved in Islam’s earliest civil war.  Muhammad bin Idris al-Shafi`i (767-820), the founder a major school of law and an expert in vetting the documentary evidence of the prophetic tradition (hadith), popularized a statement of the Umayyad caliph, Umar bin Abd al-Aziz (682-720).  Commenting on the Companions’ spilling of each others’ blood, the caliph also known as Umar II, reportedly said: ‘God protected my hands from being stained with their (Companions’) blood, so I do not want to pollute my tongue with it’. Stoic silence was thus preferable to voicing critical opinion of any Companion. 

Authorizing the Doctrines

What is Sunnism beyond politics? Well, as a Sunni you really cannot escape the way politics frames the past and the views the present and future. Nevertheless, in a nutshell, another way of defining Sunnism is to say that it is a panoptic framework of juristic and theological authority, which requires compliance in order to instil in its adherents a distinct kind of Islamic identity. Jealously guarding this framework for thought and practice with its discrete historical memory is viewed as a primary obligation by those who monopolize religious authority in Sunnism, namely, the ulama, the religious scholars.

For instance, in today’s Muslim world, the Deoband school founded in colonial India at the end of the nineteenth century and their rival, the Barelwi school, both purport to be Sunni. Each school has an elaborate network of theological schools that produce the next generation of authorities and each madrasa becomes a node in a network of religious authorities. Deobandis and Barelwis express their Sunnism in common and variant expressions. But what is distinctive of their Sunnism, compared to expressions of Sunnism elsewhere, is a strong reverence, if not near-infallibility status, they exhibit for the Companions of the Prophet. In South Asian countries, as well as in communities settled elsewhere from this region, this unique Sunni manifestation is palpably felt. Allied to the Deoband school is the evangelical Tabligh movement, where the Companions are held out as the ultimate role models for pious imitation. In Pakistan, a militant Sunni group that promotes violent sectarian feuds calls itself the ‘Guard of the Companions’ -Sipah-i Sahaba. A Shia group called ‘The Guard of Muhammad’ - Sipah-i Muhammad - rivals them. If it were not for the horrors that these warring factions unleash, their pious self-designation as proponents of the charisma of the Companions against the charisma of the Prophet Muhammad would have been nothing short of parody. Throughout the world,  Sunni prayer leaders pray for the Companions and caution their audiences against criticizing them in standardized Arabic sermons. The Friday sermons explicitly state: to despise the Companions is to despise the Prophet.  

The status of the Companions is dramatically captured in the political analysis of one of the twentieth century’s most influential Sunni thinkers, Abul Ala Mawdudi, the founder of the Jamat-i Islami, a South Asia-based revivalist group. In the 1970s Mawdudi, known for his political writings, offered a critical appraisal of the conduct of some Companions and identified their culpability in the decline of politics in Muslim societies of the past. The response from the orthodox Sunni ulama groups was swift and vicious. Mawdudi was unsparingly targeted for borderline heresy. He was accused of having Shia leanings for criticizing the Companions - coded language to discredit and excluded him from Sunnism.

In most historical accounts, the Mutazilites, a group committed to Islamic mission in the eighth century that employed Stoic ideas, feature prominently as the catalysts for the emergence of a proto-Sunnism. It would be impossible to tell the early story of Sunnism without taking account of the theological encounters with the Mutazilites. The history of these theological interactions illustrates how doctrines and theological positions evolve in the mirror of rivalries and standoffs. Interestingly, I discovered that doctrines once firmly cherished by notable and prominent icons in the Sunni pantheon would later be identified as forbidden.  These radical changes in theological convictions result in inexplicable and insoluble problems for uncritical defenders of Sunnism. 

Let’s take the most controversial disagreement spawned by the Mutazilites. They advocated a notion of an ineffable God, that the divine was radically different from the Christian God that lurked in the backdrop of the prevailing Byzantine-inspired Syrian and Iraqi Christian cultures in which Muslims soon found themselves. In the Mutazilite view, Islam came to supplant the Christian idea of a complicated human-Divine God, as evident in the dual nature of Christ, simultaneously divine and human. To avoid such a Christian theological trap, the Mutazilites argued that only God’s essence was eternal.

If humans experienced God through the imaginary, in other words, through thinking and reflection, then such qualities of God were not eternal and ought not to be, the Mutazilites argued.  When humans identified God’s acts as Just, Merciful and All-Knowing than such qualities are indeed proximate but certainly not identical with God. The human mind imperfectly experienced the perfect and inexhaustible divine qualities because its apparatus was finite. For the Mutazilites, even to imagine these divine attributes as being co-eternal with God was sheer heresy. Hence, they obsessively showed antipathy to any effort to compromise the oneness of God.

Countering the Mutazilites was another Baghdad-based theologian, Abul Hasan al-Ashari (873/4-936). He was raised in the Mutazilite fold and became adept in its theology. But in the intellectually robust environment of Baghdad there was another group of scholars who also made their presence felt. They were known as the Hanbalis, followers of Ahmad bin Hanbal (780-855), who was a student of Shafi`i, and an expert on prophetic traditions or hadith literature. 

The Hanbalis were less enamored by theology and preferred a more literal understanding of God and fastened their teachings of faith to the prophetic traditions rather than Greek philosophy. Ashari, some say, switched loyalties to the Hanbalis after a dream in which the Prophet instructed him to defend his sunnah with the aid of the rational theological skills he had mastered.  Hence Ashari is memorialized as the founder of a Sunni school of theology, whereas, in actual fact, he was a defender of the Hanbali teachings but with a big gloss of theological rationalism. Ironically, the Hanbalis, in turn, viewed Ashari with a healthy dose of suspicion. And by the twelfth century the Hanbalis persecuted prominent Asharis in Baghdad forcing them to seek refuge elsewhere.  Over time, however, the pendulum swung back in favour of Asharism which became the strongest articulation of what passes as Sunnism. 

Yet, Ashari and his later followers had more robust battles with the Mutazilites. The stakes were high; and they argued bitterly. Ashari agreed with the Mutazilites that God’s essence was eternal. But what about the attributes linked to God’s essence such as God’s ability as the one who knew all things? All attributes, said the Mutazilites, were created, only the divine essence was eternal. No, said the Asharis. Attributes that were linked to God’s essence were just as eternal as God’s essence.  If you explain God’s attributes in such a fashion, replied the Mutazilites, then you are following Christians who made Jesus, the son, co-eternal with God. If the Qur’an emanated from God’s attribute of knowledge and is linked to God’s essence, then, the Mutazilites argued, the Qur’an was created.  Asharis viewed the Qur’an as uncreated.  While the (un)createdness of the Qur’an might, on the surface, appear to be nothing but theological hair-splitting, it became a wedge-issue to discredit the Mutazilites. Otherwise they might easily have passed as part of a relaxed framework of Sunnism. 

Politics and power only fuelled the debate to the long-term disadvantage of the Mutazilites.  Emergent Sunnism took the ‘uncreated’ Quran as an identity marker. It did not help that the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mamun (786-883), issued a decree adopting Mutazilism as a state creed and coerced theologians to subscribe to their teachings. A litmus test for theologians was not that they had to subscribe to declarations about divine justice or autonomy in human agency vis-à-vis the Divine, but whether they believed the Qur’an was created or uncreated.  

Of course, theologians found themselves on both sides of the divide, so that even the leading Hanafi scholar and chief judge, Ibn Abi Du’ad (776- 854), sided with the caliph Mamun and enforced his decree. One has to note that Ibn Abi Du’ad did not view himself less of a ‘Sunni,’ (even though it is doubtful such a term was in circulation at the time), than those whom he authorized to be tortured for disobeying a decree of the Caliph. One of the people persecuted was a lesser-known Baghdad-based scholar, Ahmad bin Hanbal (780-855) whose resistance to the decree catapulted him to heroic prominence.  

What was theologically at stake in the ‘created’ versus ‘uncreated’ Qur’an remains unclear. One is inclined to agree with the Yemeni scholar, Muhammad al-Shawkani (1760-1839) that too much was made of this doctrine with little effect. It was not as if the Mutazilite view enabled greater freedom in the interpretation of the Qur’an, as some modern scholars, in my view, wrongly assume. In the end it appeared to be an overblown matter of theological brinksmanship and became part of a power-play between an educated caliph and sections of the scholarly community. After successive Abbasid caliphs enforced the Mutazilite doctrine, it was the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (822-861) who abandoned the practice of his predecessors on the created Qur’an litmus test. By then, the anti-Mutazilite voices were gaining ground; it took another 150 years before the Mutazilites’ views were outlawed. 

Around 1017, the Caliph Qadir (947-1031) issued an edict preventing the Mutazilites from teaching their doctrines or discussing any doctrines that were at variance with what the Caliph deemed orthodox. It was a license to persecute those deemed divisive, banishing them and ordering that they be cursed from the pulpit. In 1041, the same Caliph issued a Confession of Faith, known as the Qadiri Creed, as a benchmark doctrine of an emergent Sunnism. Theologians subscribed to the creed to ‘know who is an unbeliever,’ a phrase that hardly hides the inclination to persecute opponents. ‘Man should also know,’ the Qadiri Creed stated, ‘the word of God is not created.’ Acknowledging the transmission of the Qur’an from God via the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, who in turn announced the revelation to his community, the Creed insisted that by mere human repetition ‘the word’ did not become created, it remained the ‘very word of God and the word of God is not created … ‘uncreated’ it remains whether repeated or retained in memory, written or heard.’ In a menacing tone, the Qadiri Creed warned that anyone who asserted that the Qur’an is in ‘any way “created” is an unbeliever whose blood is permissible to shed—should he refuse to repent of his error when called upon to do so’. 

In fact, Asharism fudged the issue by devising a fiction to deal with the two-natures of the Qur’an. There were both a ‘recited’ and an ‘uncreated’, version. The vocalized, written and memorized Qur’an was indeed ‘recited’ but the pronounced version was stalked by a hidden simulacrum of the eternal and ‘uncreated’ Qur’an as ‘psychic speech’ (kalam nafsi). The prism of the ‘created’ versus ‘uncreated’ Qur’an controversy offers us a good perspective through which to view how ‘Sunnism’ was actually a work-in-progress and only achieved some stability after several centuries. Prominent and iconic figures that were included in the Sunni pantheon did not subscribe to the ‘uncreated’ Qur’an view as categorically as later Sunnism propounded. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the mould was fluid, nuanced, diverse and tolerant of alternate perspectives. Two examples will suffice, although there are many more.

A leading jurist and theologian of his time, Husayn b. Ali al-Karabisi, (d. 862) glossed his view on the ‘created’ Qur’an as the ‘question of the utterance’.  He used to say the Qur’an was ‘uncreated’ but when it was vocalized as an utterance, then it was ‘created.’ He was a close friend of Ahmad bin Hanbal, but the two men parted ways over this controversy, since ibn Hanbal held the opposite view. If judged by the standards of the later Qadiri Creed, then clearly Karabisi held quite a radical view. But the real interesting thing is that later Sunnism never disqualified him as a reliable and orthodox scholar.

The more important figure was Muhammad bin Ismail al-Bukhari (810-870), the compiler of the most highly revered collection of prophetic reports in Sunni Islam, known as the Authentic Book of al-Bukhari or Sahih al-Bukhari. Bukhari too, like Karabisi, admitted that the Qur’an preserved in memory and in scrolls was ‘uncreated’ but it did not apply to the recitation of it.  He amassed reports implying that actions were created; acts like movement, vocalization and writing were ‘created.’ ‘My pronunciation of the Qur’an,’ he defiantly announced, ‘was created’. 

This view of Bukhari did not go unchallenged. It disturbed Muhammad b. Yahya al-Dhuhli (d. 872) who yelled heresy at anyone who believed the Qur'an to be ‘created’ and cut his ties with Bukhari and his associates. Some say Bukhari’s well-attended lectures drew Dhuhli’s ire and jealousy. His anger peaked when he threw down the proverbial gauntlet saying he would not live in the same city, Nisapur, if Bukhari remained there. Fearing for his life amidst political intrigue, demagoguery and mob violence, Bukhari beat a path to safety and departed! 

And long before all of these debates, Imam Abu Hanifa (699-767), the founder of the Hanafi law school, also held a position on the question of the Qur’an. Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (d 1951), an ardent twentieth century defender of Abu Hanifa wrote that the eminent scholar believed: 

Whatever emerges from God is uncreated, whatever emerges from creatures is created. By this he (Abu Hanifa) meant that the speech of God with respect to the fact that it emerges from God's attributes and that like all God’s attributes, it is eternal. Whatever is on the tongues of reciters, the memories of the memorizers [of the Qur'an], and on the scrolls as voices and mental images and imprints, these are created just as the nature of their possessors is created. The opinion of the people of learning and understanding stabilized on this view.

Very few people will have the courage to exclude Abu Hanifa from the circle of Sunnism for his view, despite the fact that later scholarly opinion on the nature of the Qur’an hardened and became a sensitive matter that was better left unspoken.

Further differences arose between the Mutazilites, who claimed that humans would not be able to see God in the hereafter, whereas the Asharis were convinced that they would. If the Mutazilites claimed that God was constrained to act in accordance with the Divine rule of justice and punish those who violated the moral law, then the Asharis polemically countered that God acts with divine omnipotence and no one can tell him how to act. God is not, in theory, bound by his own rules, the Asharis averred, and therefore, could do as he pleased. He could absolve sinners, if He so willed and let them into paradise and divert those destined for paradise to hellfire. In their view, divine will is not fathomable, let alone subject to prediction by fallible human minds. In other words, the Asharis refused to let the human imagination put God under any constraint, since the Divine was an absolutely sovereign God. The Mu`tazilites, of course, claimed that God had a covenant with humans and that justice was at the centre of that contract. 

An unrefined Ashari-Sunni version of a hyper omnipotent and omniscient God has, from time to time, invited charges that the Muslim God was capricious and acted on whim. In recent times, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI aired such views about the Muslim conception of God during his reign as pontiff at a lecture in Regensburg, Germany. The incident, as observers know, generated a storm of Muslim protests and objections.  Some Muslim theologians argue that when divine omnipotence and omniscience is put in dialectical play with human responsibility, capacity and agency, then such extreme notions of a whimsical God can be tempered. 

Asharism, over time, became the mainstay theological school of Sunnism, but only after drawing a good amount of material from the Mutazilite playbook. A slightly younger contemporary of Ashari who resided in Central Asia, was Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (873-944) who was more closely aligned with the Hanafi law school. He also promoted theological arguments in defence of the concept of God, prophecy and revelation that were adopted as part of a broader elaboration of the Sunni creed. In time, Sunnism progressively became narrower, doctrinaire and intolerant of difference. Perhaps, the fact that Shia theological schools adopted some Mutazilite doctrine on the Qur’an inspire a more hard-line Sunni position in order for it to look different from the Shia.  

The Hero of Sunnism

Most Muslims automatically think of Ashari and Asharism as the inspiration for an emergent Sunnism. But in my view the architecture of Sunnism was designed by Imam Shafi’i (767-820) in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and who is the real founder of Sunnism. Shafi`i was a student of Imam Malik (711-795), the founder of the Maliki School of Law, but disagreed with his teacher’s preference for regional and organic customary versions of the prophetic practice. Shafi`i was wedded to logic, system and method and was thus in search of the universal practice of the Prophet. He made an exhaustive study of the Sunna, the actions and practices of the Prophet, in order to document the emergence and evolution of the authentic reports. Posterity remembers him as the ‘Helper of the prophetic report’. He bound the Sunna to reports and documents and delinked it from its organic nexus to lived society. 

But Shafi`i’s real genius was his ability to intimately link the Qur’an to the Sunna. Through his meticulous and finely tuned arguments, Shafi`i crafted an unimpeachable interpretative bridge (hermeneutical link) between what he called the two forms of revelation with each performing a different function. The Qur’an was clearly revelation used for liturgical purposes, whereas the Sunna was a non-liturgical revelation. In this way Shafi`i made the authority of the Prophet a permanent feature of Sunni thought. He designated the hadith as the most authoritative repository of the Sunna, and the Sunna an indispensable dimension of divine revelation. 

Now Shafi’i's invention might come as a shock to the religiously literate contemporary Muslims. Most of them have grown up on a diet of do-it-yourself Islam. In this paradigm, the Qur’an is viewed as the incorruptible and most reliable source of teaching. In this hybrid modernist and revivalist framework, lip-service is paid to the Prophet as a great model, but little attention, if any, is given to the fine grained Sunna teachings. Most practicing modern Muslims are even agnostic about the veracity of hadith as a reliable source for the Sunna, which many view as an overwhelming supply of Arabian custom. But this attitude is not an orthodox Sunni practice of Islam. For this group of self-taught Muslims, Shafi`i’s idea of the Sunna having the status of revelation (wahi), as explained in his famous book The Epistle (al-Risala), would be a deal breaker. When these modern, observing Muslims hear sermons and teachings delivered at mosques or read fatwas issued by the ulama, their sensibility and common sense is often shaken and offence is taken. But what they are hearing is genuine Sunnism. And with a modicum of background knowledge, one will be able to detect Shafi`i’s fingerprints on these Sunni teachings. So when modern, religiously literate Muslims say they are ‘Sunni’ but are uncomfortable with the teachings of the mosque and the madrasa, they need to recognize they are really not truly Sunni, but something else. Perhaps they are cultural Sunnis, or in transition to something else, but not the thoroughbred version of Sunnism practiced by the ulama.

As the early architect of Sunni orthodoxy, Shafi`i was the one who identified two anthropocentric devices to extrapolate learning and authority from the revealed sources. The first was consensus, or ijma, mainly the aggregate opinions of the learned at a particular time. The second was the limited use of reason in the form of analogy. In the jurisprudential literature, consensus and analogy were identified as ‘sources’ whereas they should be described as tools of knowledge-making. By establishing the four ‘sources’ of Muslim moral law and practice, Shafi`i made a compelling case for an almost universal template of Sharia-based knowledge. But if Shafi`i forged the hadith-movement in a bid to seek unity in the midst of chaos by means of law then there was also a price to pay. The downside of Shafi`i’s method, as the late and celebrated scholar Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988) pointed out, was to sever the dynamic and organic link between the Sunna, ijtihad and ijma.  The Sunna was earlier organically linked and deciphered by independent scholarly work (ijtihad), which in turn informed all emerging decisions of consensus (ijma). Shafi`i reduced the Sunna to the hadith reports and gave priority to consensus and severed the priority of scholarly effort (ijtihad) it previously enjoyed. Muslim thought became backward-looking, observed Fazlur Rahman, for whatever had to be accomplished had already been accomplished in the past!  Shafi`i’s genius, he pointed out, turned out to be a double-edged sword. Shafi`i, said Fazlur Rahman, ‘provided a mechanism that gave stability to our medieval socio-religious fabric but at the cost, in the long run, of creativity and originality.’  Conceding that Islamic thought did assimilate new currents of spiritual and intellectual life, but this Islam, noted Fazlur Rahman, ‘did not do so as much as an active force, master of itself, but rather as a passive entity with whom these currents of life played.’

Yet with his masterstroke, Shafi`i unknowingly formed the template of the Sunni canon or its interpretative paradigm. While most would agree that Shafi`i is the father of the Sunni theory of moral knowledge (epistemology) and juridical method, he also laid the groundwork for a proto-Sunni theology.  If, by some accident, Sunnism’s entire theological treasure was lost, it would be a lesser tragedy because of Shafi`i. Why? Because Shafi`i subtly inserted a theological web, namely the moral law was modelled on the authority of God, the Prophet, followed by the authority of the Companions of the Prophet. Therefore, it is more correct to call his venture, a juristic theology, a set of moral formulations with subtle theological backing.  Furthermore, Shafi`i’ sundering method not only immunized the formal knowledge paradigm of the Sunni canon of moral law from all rival approaches, but he rhetorically blackmailed successive generations to surrender to his paradigm. Even Shafi’i’s greatest rivals, the Hanafi school of Iraq, which in its earlier incarnation flirted with elements of Mutazilism, had to grudgingly concede to the power of his method and reinvent itself along the model of Shafi’i. 

Scholarly Authority

But Shafi`i managed to do more. He sacralised a method and a canon with a compelling narrative. In doing so he also consecrated the authority of those who managed and worked that canon, the religious intelligentsia, the ulama.  It was the ulama who wielded the power to interpret the revealed sources. Thanks to Shafi`i the ulama generated a consensus based on their shared interests and their authority acquired a quasi-sacrosanct status. And when reason was used, it was always in a limited form, only by way of analogy.  In the Sunni, and for that matter the Shi`a imaginary, the authority of the ulama always lurked in the background. It intruded at the very moment that the believer imagined God and paid homage to the Prophet. Over the centuries the ulama skilfully embedded and naturalized their authority as the embodiment of the sacred. Of course, this authority of the ulama was deftly mystified with ample support from prophetic traditions in order to designate the learned in matters of religion as the true ‘heirs of the prophets’. In other words, the authority of the religious scholars was interwoven in the Muslim religious imagination.  To undo it was a Herculean task that would require unfastening Shafi`i’s carefully constructed intellectual architecture. 

So while there was no official church-like institution in Islam, the equivalent of such an institution was the canonical knowledge tradition of Sunnism. Throughout its history, Sunnism has exhibited an anxiety to preserve and police the ulama’s invented knowledge paradigm (epistemological apparatus) that regulated its moral law and theology (juristic moral theology). To reinvent or update the Sunni knowledge paradigm was a low priority; and, when it did occur, it was only in the dimly lit back alleys.  Usually it went unnoticed; but when it did get attention the result was distressingly controversial. 

It took a brave soul like Ibn Hazm (994-1064), the polymath from Muslim Spain, to challenge Sunnism’s established authority structures as an insider. Over centuries his status as an autodidact was frequently used to discredit his insights; but the predilection to cast him as a gadfly might now have subsided. For more than a century, Muslim reformers, from Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) to Muhammad Asad (1900-1992), have been strategically deploying some of his arguments in their reformist projects. 

Ibn Hazm’s method involved restricting the scope of God’s law to only the most obvious teachings derived from revelation. Only the consensus of the Companions of the Prophet counted as authority, in his view, not those manufactured by subsequent generations. He must have realized that Islam and Muslim communities would be hamstrung if later generations of Muslim were bound by the views and decision of those who had already reached their graves.  While he completely rejected analogy, he replaced it with formidable arguments of reason, by which he meant common sense reasoning.  By narrowing the scope of God’s law, Ibn Hazm left sufficient scope to commit himself to rationalism, individualism and to adopt an anti-clerical stance. Later on, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) continued in the tradition pioneered by Ibn Hazm, in what the late Moroccan thinker Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri (1936-2010) described as the Hazmi-Rushdi thread of emancipatory thinking.  But if anything, even Ibn Hazm was absorbed into a capacious Sunnism.

Contemporary Sunni ulama and their institutions jealously guard their sacralised paradigm and methodology against any molestation by individuals who were not from their ranks. Or, they tend to curb the intellectual daring of the more ambitious elements within their ranks. Anyone who thought differently on matters of the moral law and theology was quickly threatened by the ulama’s anathematizing (takfir) proclamations.  Sunni ulama have been preoccupied with defending the canonical tradition from what they called intrusive ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ influences. Anxieties in these rhetorical terms have multiple connotations. They range from colonial attempts to remake Islam to the attempts by Western educated Muslims who petitioned for the reform of the knowledge structures that upheld the meaning of Islam. The ulama’s response was equally diverse, ranging from a rejectionist front that was opposed to even the most minimal of change to various forms of accommodation and agreeable reform.  Despite the best efforts of reformers, like Jamaluddin Afghani (1938-1897), Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida (1965-1935)who were based in Egypt, to thinkers like Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) in colonial India, the recipe for intellectual reform remained elusive.  More recently learned tomes issued by institutions like the Islamic Fiqh Academy, established by the Organization of Islamic Conference, were dedicated to counter the opinions, scholarship and influence of contemporary scholars like Fatima Mernissi, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri, Khalil Abd al-Karim, Hasan Hanafi and Muhammad Arkoun. This brand of Sunni orthodoxy objects to the way these thinkers interrogate the ulama’s paradigm and fear that they would subvert it. So it was a matter of who has the power to interpret Sunnism, the vested interests of those who do the interpretation, and it still remains so.

There has been a long-standing debate within Islam, and in Sunni circles in particular, whether the desideratum to cultivate persons of knowledge, ulama, was really the search for cosmopolitan knowledge broadly conceived, or whether they were supposed to be functionaries like a priesthood, whose primary task was to preserve the institution and system of religiosity. It was romantic to think that the early scholars of Islam were all true seekers of learning and open to new ideas. The historical record shows that they were a mixed bag.  

Educational institutions played a pivotal role in the construction of Sunnism and the making of the authority of the ulama. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Saljuq rulers, through the offices of their invincible prime minister, Nizam al-Mulk (1080-1092), singlehandedly orchestrated the Nizamiyya learning institutions that stabilized the institutional framework for the perpetuation of religious learning. In North Africa too, the madrasas attached to mosques that later became known as mosque-universities, notably al-Azhar in Egypt, the Zaytuna in Tunis and the Qarawiyin mosque in Fez, all developed enviable reputations as centres of learning and authority for Sunnism over the centuries.

In the present-day, a vast network of madrasas and other cognate institutions of learning sustain the authority of the ulama as the champions of Sunnism.  Known by different names in every region, generic madrasa-type education produces thousands of ulama, mostly men but also women in growing numbers, who exercise enormous influence over local communities, entire regions and transnational networks. These institutions primarily reproduce the theological and moral memory of Islam, dating back centuries, and they equip students with the tools to understand and reproduce the Sunni tradition.  The epicentre of the contemporary privately funded madrasa-movement is Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. And madrasas are also growing in regions where South Asian Muslims have settled as far apart as the Caribbean, Canada, the USA, Great Britain and South Africa. 

Of course, the debate whether the ulama are receiving a robust, broad rnged and relevant education rage but the production cycle of Sunni religious authority continues unabated.  In parts of the Middle East and East Asia, large state-sponsored universities, such as the universities in Mecca and Medina, and private educational institutions undertake the task of training individuals programmed for the advancement of Sunni Islam. 

Politically, Sunnism is reputed to always side with power in the interest of stability, law and order. This was most effectively displayed by the great reluctance of the ulama of al-Azhar and the official mufti of Egypt to end their support for the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak during the 2011 revolution. Sunni political doctrine opposes rebellion against a government in power, irrespective of the quality of governance and the political justice meted out. Sunnism, by and large, prefers change through counselling and is opposed to the revolutionary overthrow of power. Since medieval writers argued that political legitimacy was vested in a leader who had the capacity to visibly marshal power to enforce order, modern Sunni authorities are predisposed to support military and autocratic regimes.  In 2013, after a brief and tumultuous democratic rule by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the religious authorities in that country followed the medieval political playbook and effortlessly threw their weight behind a restless military government that was itching to take back power even through illegal and unconstitutional means.  

Sunni religious authorities have yet to come to terms with the new political philosophies of modernity that regulate nation-states and democratic orders that replaced older political theologies.  Most continued to treat the nation-state with the unworkable and impractical assumptions of the political theology of a bygone Islamic empire. Furthermore, peaceful protests against authoritarian regimes in modern times are not identical to political rebellion in medieval times. While the latter aimed at undoing the political order, democratic politics is the expression of the will of the people and calls for more just and fair modes of governance.

The Sunni ulama are matched by the Sunni Islamic revivalist movements which are obsessed with political Islam, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamat-i Islami in Pakistan. Political Islam seeks to capture the state in order to give it a veneer of Islamic legitimacy by proclaiming to enforce the rule of God, the Sharia, not the secular laws of man. Unlike the ulama, political Islamists might be technologically savvy and possess elementary Islamic literacy but intellectually and culturally their deficits are self-evident.  They aspire to undertake social revolutions and hope to govern society on the thinnest of human imagination.  What political Islamists share in common with the ulama is an overweening self-confidence in their rapidly diminishing intellectual capital. Instead of displaying humility and admitting that they were writing cheques they could not cash, their inability to innovate repeatedly produced monstrous political experiments in places like the Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Shia Iran, at huge social costs for their societies where negative social conditions mortally reduced the possibilities for the full and dignified flourishing of human life and society.

Muslims in Sunni majority societies, with some exceptions, find themselves either in totalitarian secular military states, monarchical states or oppressive ‘Islamic’ states.  Restless populations are rebelling against these despotic orders with some success in places.  Exaggerated optimism for liberal Sunni political experiments in places like Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia needs to be tempered.  All of these experiments must be treated with large doses of caution and scepticism.  If these are pragmatic interventions that aspire to produce humane society conducive to intellectual and cultural flourishing then they deserve support.  But their self-confessed Islamic agendas require careful scrutiny.

Sunnism will have to revisit and possibly jettison chunks of its inherited theology, political and moral order to come to terms with the modern cosmology that Muslims now inhabit. It would have to be a Sunnism based on a humane Islamic order, with a formula for economic distribution, together with a revised Sharia that fosters equality and social justice. It must certainly be a Sunnism with strong intellectual legs, one with theological diversity and depth to promulgate moral care for human dignity, freedom and the environment. It would have to be a Sunnism that takes science, technology, economics, art and culture seriously as capital goods. Only then could it find a place for itself within a robust cultural and civilizational conversation. But revised Sunnism will require radical change.

Postscript

More than three decades ago, I was in need of Qaradawi’s sophistry to relieve my mind from the burden of making sense of the infallible leadership of Shiism. With improved religious literacy and the experience of multiple journeys from living in the heart of Sunni orthodoxy to efforts at intra-Muslim ecumenism and the starry-eyed pursuit of Islamic revival, I have learned a few lessons. It is not rocket science to unravel the mysteries of Sunnism or Shiism; all it requires is painstaking effort to unearth the complex history in order for its mystique and mesmerizing power to dissipate.  At the end we need to confront theological and ideological systems for what they are: human constructions and paradigms that were made at certain times and places to serve certain interests and ends. That is all they are. But what I have just said is the conceit of what a modern scholar does: history. As a modern Muslim, I have given myself the right, the capacity and duty to change.

But for many Muslims, much of what I discussed in this essay is not some relative history but a deeply etched memory framed in a lived narrative.  Orthodox Sunnis appropriate the Prophet and the Companions, not as historical figures, but as tokens of a memory without a past, which can be instantly recycled in a sermon, an essay, or a counselling session, brought into being as role models, myths, legends or heroes. As constellations of power, memory and tradition are mega categories of identity, like the terms Sunni and Shia are powerful artefacts that regulate our lives. As tradition, they own our minds, bodies and us.

But if we view them as constructs, as I do, they cannot own us entirely. Rather we encounter these narratives with a complex dialogic, where our past speaks to our present. Those who are devoted to Sunnism they can do several things. One might be to study it as a historical phenomenon and capture its robust historical narratives so that they know what they were. Others might wish to repurpose Sunnism as a tradition in order that it may serve the needs of those living in the present. As a living project, it will have to be capacious enough to accommodate the diversity of Sunni perspectives. Will it be large enough to accommodate both those who view Sunnism as an absolute memory and those who view it as fungible history? Or will the next stage of Islam beckon a parting of the ways between the Islam of the modern historian and the Islam of the partisans of memory? Is this not, some would ask, already the de facto situation? Perhaps. But it could also be a tradition where history and memory mingle in order to recalibrate the gaze toward the past and the future. Islam as lived tradition in its Sunni or Shia guise cannot survive without a common purpose but it also needs to be equally flexible to tolerate robust internal diversity. At the same time, such a tradition must cultivate unbounded cultural and intellectual innovation in order to remain relevant.

Citations 

The quotation about the 73 sects comes from Abu Ishaq Shatibi’s al-Iʿtiṣam. 2 vols (Dār al-Fikr, Cairo, 1331 AH, 2) pages 189-191. Telescoping doctrines comes from  Patricia Crone, God's Rule : Government and Islam  (Columbia University Press, New York, 2004); on p. 219 she discusses the political backdrop to the formation of Sunnism. The quotes about the leaders being from Quraysh and the Maqrizi quote about  Umar II’s comes from Abu Na`im al-Isfahani, Hilyat al-awliya, http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?flag=1&bk_no=131&ID=1679; 

The Qadiri Creed is found in Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, edited by S. Khuda Bukhsh and D. S. Margoliouth (Luzac, London, 1937) pages. 206-09; Bukhari’s views can be found in Christopher Melchert, ‘al-Bukhārī’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, volume 3,  Edited by Gudrun Krämer et al; available form Brill Online,  http://referenceworks.brillonline.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/al-bukhari-COM_24024; Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari’s defence of Abu Hanifa’s view on the Qur’an is found in vol. 19:363. 

Shaykh Qaradawi’s opposition to Shiism can be found at Arabnews http://www.arabnews.com/news/453739

For more on Sunnism, also see Mohammed Arkoun, ‘The Concept of Person in Islamic Tradition’ in The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought  (Saqi, London, 2002) 250-273; Marshall G. S. Hodgson,'Conservation and Courtliness in the Intellectual Traditions c. 1258-1503’ in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 2:437-500 (Chicago University Press, 1977).